An excerpt: “Jesus came to me when I needed guidance. He came to me at a time when my faith in man and religion was totally shaken. His words and His love became the guiding light to set me free from sin and hopelessness. I found myself knowing there is goodness and kindness and that it comes from within us - that it is only through His love that we will find peace and eternal life….After a long journey, I have finally found my God. I feel at home now. And as I continue my fight against the evil in Iran, I know in my heart that the Lord will guide me in that fight because He loves the people of Iran even more than I do. The Iranian people are desperate for their freedom, and Jesus says, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free (John 8:31-32).”

Publicly professing one's faith in Jesus Christ is a big step for anyone from Shia or Sunni Islam. This is no less true for Reza today. Please pray for him to be strong. Please pray for him to walk with Jesus every day. Please pray that the Lord would protect him and his family spiritually, emotionally and physically as Reza takes this important step in the life of all Christ followers. Pray, too, that many will be moved to read the New Testament and consider the claims of Jesus of Nazareth and come to realize that Jesus truly is the Messiah. Feel free to share Reza's article with family, friends and colleagues who would be encouraged by his story, and with those who may be searching for Jesus as well."

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I found the timing of this report to be very fitting for me as I had just met and had dinner with a missionary on furlough from a Middle Eastern country a few nights prior. According to this missionary, he lives in a closed country (it prevents Christian ministry by expatriates as missionaries) that is 99.9% Muslim. This missionary has made a lifetime commitment of bringing the Gospel to this lost nation and it inspired me, yet scared me. This missionary is the only American and the only Christian where he lives and I cannot imagine the loneliness he must deal with, but he truly finds his joy in the Lord and it was incredible to hear his stories. I also learned a lot about the strategy missionaries use in the Middle East and it is fascinating. There was a lot of talk about how the Gospel is contextualized in Muslim communities and the "C1 - C6" spectrum. Reading reports like Reza Kahlili's above gives me hope that the missionaries risking their lives for the Lord in the closed Middle East will see fruits from their labor.

In other news, last Saturday I led a team of volunteers from Frontline in beautifying M.C. Terrell Elementary School in SE as part of the DC Schools Project. And then on Sunday, I teamed up with some of the friends from Saturday and went over to Covenant House to hang out with some homeless teens - we played football and led them in a Bible study about the Prodigal Son. Just a great weekend all around.

My mom sent me this essay recently published in the Wall Street Journal written by the the U.K.'s chief rabbi. It highlights the importance of church and religion in society and I think Sacks brings up some brilliant points.

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Reversing the Decay of London Undone

Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild

By Jonathan Sacks

It was the same city but it might have been a different planet. At the end of April, the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration. Less than four months later, the world was watching London again as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops, setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the police.

Let us be clear. The numbers involved were relatively small. The lawkeepers vastly outnumbered the lawbreakers. People stepped in to rescue those attacked. Crowds appeared each morning to clear up the wreckage of the night before. Britain remains a decent, good and gracious society.

But the damage was real. Businesses were destroyed. People lost their homes. A 68-year-old man, attacked by a mob while trying to put out a fire, died. Three young men in Birmingham were killed in a hit-and-run attack. While it lasted, it was very frightening.

It took everyone by surprise. It should not have.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain's major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

This was the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years. The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average - and yes, there are exceptions - do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail.

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world's resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the "obsessional neurosis" of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

There are large parts of Britain, Europe and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you're worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is "Thou shalt not be found out."

Has this happened before, and is there a way back? The answer to both questions is in the affirmative. In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society - much of it driven by religion.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we would now say "civil") institutions. It did three things he saw as essential. It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active citizenship.

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?

C.S. Lewis and the Devil

Admirers of 'The Screwtape Letters' range from Monty Python's John Cleese to Focus on the Family.

By John A. Murray

While a Gallup poll earlier this summer showed that nine in 10 Americans still believe in God, a survey by the Barna Group released last week found that only 43% of Americans believe the devil to be a "living entity," as opposed to a symbol of evil.

Among the educated elite today, talking publicly about one's belief in the devil and his influence on the culture and the world would be social suicide. The same was no less true in 1947, when Oxford don C.S. Lewis addressed this subject in an interview with Time magazine.

"Lewis (like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, et al.) is one of a growing band of heretics among modern intellectuals: an intellectual who believes in God," Time reported. "It is not a mild and vague belief, for he accepts 'all the articles of the Christian faith' - which means that he also believes in sin and in the Devil."

The Time article went on to note: "Since 1941, when Lewis published a witty collection of infernal correspondence called 'The Screwtape Letters,' this middle-aged (49) bachelor professor who lives a mildly humdrum life ('I like monotony') has sold something over a million copies of his 15 books. He has made 29 radio broadcasts on religious subjects, each to an average of 600,000 listeners."

C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters" first appeared in the Guardian from May 2, 1941, to Nov. 28, 1941, before being published as a book in 1942. It became an immediate bestseller and has remained popular; 20th Century Fox hopes to make a movie based on "Screwtape" in the next few years.

Over the years, "The Screwtape Letters" has captured the imagination of a wide spectrum of admirers from Monty Python's John Cleese (who narrated a famous audio version) to Focus on the Family (which recently published a dramatic audio version of their own).

The collection of letters follows the correspondence of Uncle Screwtape ("Undersecretary for the Infernal Lowerarchy") to his nephew Wormwood - an inexperienced devil who has been assigned a "patient" to tempt on Earth. "The Enemy" in the story is not the devil, whom Screwtape affectionately calls "Our Father Below," but God. "Our Father's House" is not heaven, but hell. Thus, everything Screwtape portrays as good is actually evil, and vice versa.

Set at the start of World War II, an unnamed young Englishman serves as Wormwood's patient and the focus of the devils' schemes. As commentator Mark Edward DeForrest wrote, "It is the story of a simple life of faith, concerned with the commonplace difficulties of being a disciple of Jesus Christ in a world filled with small but spiritually deadly dangers."

When asked about "his belief in the Devil," Lewis addressed the question in a thought-provoking way in his preface to a revised edition of "Screwtape" in 1960: "Now, if by 'the Devil' you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No."

That is, Lewis did not believe in the false theology and caricatures of the devil that have developed over the centuries - whether through art, literature or even today's sports mascots (think Duke and Arizona State).

As Lewis explained, "There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. . . . The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God. . . . Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael."

In his original preface written from Magdalen College at Oxford on July 5, 1941, Lewis warned of what he called "the two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils." One error "is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them." Lewis concluded that the devils "are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."

Lewis noted the failures born from mankind's fallen nature. But he believed in the power of Jesus Christ to overcome sin, death and Satan, and the optimism of faith and hope.

"The Screwtape Letters" concludes by echoing the words of the First Epistle of John, as the patient dies in a bombing raid and goes to heaven - seeing not only angels but Christ himself. For as St. John declared, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. . . . The one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him."

Mr. Murray is headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.

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