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My name's Kanishka Raffel, I'm the Dean of Sydney and I exercise ministry here at St
Andrew's Cathedral. I was brought up as a Buddhist, my Mother's family were Singhalese
Buddhists, my Father's family also from Sri Lanka, but descended from the Europeans, they
were of Christian background. And so as a child my Mother kind of was responsible for
the religious upbringing of the children and we were raised in Buddhism. My name was actually
given to me by the chief monk of the London Buddhist Vihara, I was born in London, and
he picked the name and it is the name of a 6th Century king in Northern India around
Kashmir and he was responsible for a revival of Buddhism, Kanishka the Third actually.
So yes in my family there was disappointment about my conversion to Christ and even a sense
that somehow I had kind of failed my namesake. I became a Christian through God's grace,
but the immediate way that it happened was that I had a conversation with a friend. I
asked him about his Christian faith. He said he had lost control of his life to Jesus Christ.
I was a practicing Buddhist at the time and if Buddhism is anything it is a program, a
highly disciplined program of self-perfection, self-salvation. The Buddha was said to have
taken 500 lives to achieve enlightenment. So it's a project that is going to go on for
a very long time. And so at that particular time in my life when I was about 21 I was
more serious about my Buddhism than I ever had been previously and it was very much about
achieving mental, spiritual, physical control of my environment, relationships and especially
my inner life. So it was quite breathtaking to have a Christian friend who I respected
and admired, to have him say something like that, 'I've lost control of my life to Jesus.'
Anyway at the end of that conversation he offered me some reading material, which turned
out to be Mark's gospel and John's gospel, and I was particularly struck by the person
of Jesus. A couple of times in the gospel John says 'at this the people were divided.'
And the Lord allowed me to see that I was a person who was against Jesus and coming
to a recognition that that was true, I found myself asking myself 'why are you against
Jesus?' And in the end I couldn't think of any good reasons and so I did feel compelled
to Christ at that point. And that's how I became a Christian. What is it like to lose
control of your life to Jesus? The illusion is that we are ever in control of our lives.
So we're either going to serve the interests of Christ in the way of Christ, or we're going
to serve his enemies. And so as Bob Dylan said 'you've got to serve somebody', so serve
Jesus. And of course to be controlled by the spirit of Jesus is the very best thing for
a human being. It's the very best way to be a human being.
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