He says that the source of all our actions, good and evil, is our heart, and knowing this, he wanted to purify the hearts of people. Through His great apostle Paul, He says, "Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16). Your hearts, according to the will and desire of the Saviour, must be temples of the Holy Spirit, your hearts must be pure, full of love for God, full of hatred for all evil.

And such completely purified hearts can correct all social disasters. And under the best political and social system, under the best, most just laws, there are a large number of people with impure, evil hearts. They are afraid only of coercion, they are afraid of punishment, but they do not want to, do not want to obey good, just laws, they try to circumvent them, and the demons teach them how to circumvent even just laws.

And until human hearts are corrected, this will inevitably be repeated. Those who are perplexed as to why Christ did not care about social calamities, why He rejected political power, I will ask you to think about what I am saying. Do you not know that the Lord has always taught mercy, pity, compassion, love, do you not know that at the Last Judgment He will judge by one sign: whether they did works of mercy and love or not.

This is the only yardstick by which the All-Righteous Judge will be guided. And the Christians of apostolic times received the teaching of Christ in this way. They were full of sorrow for the misfortunes experienced by their needy brethren, full of sorrow for social inequality. And these ancient Christians took care with all their might so that there was no inequality, there was no poverty.

They sold their possessions and brought the proceeds to the feet of the apostles to be distributed among the needy. They were all of one soul and one heart, and there were no needy among them. Isn't this a cure for social injustice? Yes, of course, healing, the only radical, radical healing, for only when people are imbued with pity and mercy for their brothers in need, when all people are united by Divine love, only then will the calamities of social injustice and social inequality be cured.

Only then will the life of people be grace-filled, when in all their aspirations all people will be guided by the law of love, the law of truth. You know from the newspapers what the Americans are doing in unfortunate Korea, striving to acquire world power, imposing their own laws, ready to enforce them with atomic bombs. And do they not consider their own state system to be perfect and just, better than that of all other states?

If they commit such monstrous untruths everywhere, what shall we say of their social system? Let us say that he is wicked, unrighteous, unjust, that their hearts are full of malice and unrighteousness. It is precisely evil and untruth that Christ wanted to eradicate from human hearts. By His call to love and mercy, to compassion for the unfortunate, He wanted to heal social ailments.

You see, the opinion of some that Christ was indifferent to the unrighteousness of social relations is unjust. No one felt this unrighteousness with such great depth as Him, no one wanted to eradicate it so ardently. But He knew that there was only one way for this – the correction of the human heart. This is the task of our life – to correct our hearts and purify them, so that no unrighteousness comes out of them.

And only then will the holy truth reign in relations between people, when the hearts of all of them become sources of love, and not malice, selfishness and envy. In this great work of purifying our hearts, may the One Knowing of the heart help us. Amen. January 27, 1952 WEEK 34. ON THE ARMOR OF GOD (EPHESIANS 6:10-12) Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.

Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:10-12). Our battle is not against flesh and blood, that is, not against men, but against principalities, against powers.

Against what authorities, what authorities? Of course, the holy Apostle Paul speaks not of those authorities who govern the state, but of completely different principalities, as he himself immediately explains: "against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places," against the demons, against the angels of Satan, for they can truly be called the rulers of the darkness of this world.

All the darkness that you see in human life is the work of their hands, it is the work of that prince who dominates the air, of whom the Holy Apostle Paul speaks in another epistle. And who is this prince who dominates the air? It's Satan himself, it's the devil. He dominates a huge number of hearts. And it is against him, against his angels of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the heavenly places, that the Holy Spirit commands us.

Paul is strengthened by the Lord and by the power of His power. We ourselves are not able, not at all able to fight this terrible prince who dominates the air. If we were left to our own strength, we would fall from his malice. Only then can we fight if we are strengthened "by the Lord and by the power of His might." We must put on "the whole armor of God, that ... it was possible to stand against the wiles of the devil."

Only when we put on the whole armor of God, when we do not rely on our own strength, only then will we stand against his wiles. And what are these intrigues of his? This is all that he seeks to destroy us, to distract us from faith in God, to distract us from the path of salvation shown to us by the Lord Jesus Christ. He and his angels, the spirits of darkness, are busy only with destroying us.