Sermon Central
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Live What You Believe PRO
Contributed by Sermon Central on Apr 8, 2009 (message contributor)
LIVE WHAT YOU BELIEVE
After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, no person in all of East Germany was more despised than the former Communist dictator Erich Honniker. He had been stripped of all his offices. Even the Communist Party rejected him. Kicked out of his villa, the new government refused him and his wife new housing. The Honnikers were homeless and destitute.
Enter pastor Uwe Holmer, director of a Christian help center north of Berlin. Made aware of the Honnikers’ straits, Pastor Holmer felt it would be wrong to give them a room meant for even needier people. So the pastor and his family decided to take the former dictator into their own home!
Erich Honniker’s wife, Margot, had ruled the East German educational system for twenty-six years. Eight of Pastor Holmer’s ten children had been turned down for higher education due to Mrs. Honniker’s policies, which discriminated against Christians.
Now the Holmers were caring for their personal enemy—-the most hated man in Germany. This was so unnatural, so unconventional, so Christlike. By the grace of God, the Holmers loved their enemies, did them good, blessed them, and prayed for them. They turned the other cheek. They gave their enemies their coat (their own home). They did to the Honnikers what they would have wished the Honnikers would have done for them all those years before.
Now it would be a great story if...
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