Which life better reflects the character of a loving God?

Look at Muhammad’s revelations.

Many of them conveniently served his personal interests.

When he desired his adopted son’s wife, a revelation came allowing it.

When his wives complained, revelations came rebuking them.

When he wanted more than the four wife limit imposed on other men, a revelation came allowing him special privileges.

Does this sound like divine revelation or human desire cloaked in religious authority?

Look at the violence Muhammad commanded and participated in.

I am not talking about defensive warfare.

And I am talking about offensive jihad, raids on caravans, assassinations of poets who criticized him, executions of hundreds of men who had surrendered.

Compare this to Jesus who healed the ear of the man who came to arrest him, who prayed for those crucifying him, who taught his followers to love their enemies.

I know these comparisons are painful.

They were painful for me.

But truth matters more than comfort.

Fifth, read the Bible for yourself.

Do not rely on what Muslims say about it.

One, do not accept claims that it had been corrupted without examining the evidence.

Read the Gospels.

Read Jesus’s own words.

Read about his life, his teachings, his death, his resurrection.

Then ask yourself honestly, does this seem like truth or fabrication?

The Bible has been preserved with remarkable accuracy.

We have thousands of early manuscripts.

The variants are minor and do not affect any core teaching.

No serious historian doubts that we have the Bible essentially as it was written.

The the claim that Christians corrupted the Bible to hide prophecies about Muhammad makes no sense when you examine it.

If Christians were so intent on corruption, why did they keep passages that make them look bad?

Why keep stories of the disciples failures of Peter denying Jesus?

Why keep difficult teachings?

And when exactly did this supposed corruption happen?

Muslims claim it was before Muhammad’s time, but the Quran affirms the Torah and Gospel as they existed in the 7th century.

Bonned calls them God’s word.

So which is it?

Now let me address the common objections Muslims raise.

You say the trinity is illogical that three cannot be one.

But we do not believe in three gods.

We believe in one God who eternally exists in three persons.

This is mysterious.

Yes, but not contradictory.

And it makes sense of how God can be eternally loving and relational.

You say God cannot become man, that it is beneath his dignity.

But God can do anything.

And if he chose to reveal himself by becoming human, who are we to say he cannot?

And the incarnation makes perfect sense.

If God wants to truly reveal himself to humanity, the most effective way is to come himself.

You say the Bible is corrupted, but you have no evidence for this claim.

Every manuscript discovery confirms the Bible’s reliability.

Meanwhile, the Quran has variance in manuscripts, lost verses, and was compiled after Muhammad’s death with disagreements about what to include.

Uh, you say Jesus did not die on the cross, but you are rejecting unanimous historical testimony from eyewitnesses based on a claim made 600 years later by someone who was not there.

I say these things not to attack you, but to plead with you to examine your beliefs honestly.

Your eternal destiny is at stake.

I know what you were thinking because I thought the same things.

You were thinking, “This man has been deceived by Satan.

He has lost his way.

He has traded truth for lies”.

I understand that is what I would have thought about someone like me when I was a Muslim.

But consider this possibility.

What if Satan’s greatest deception is not to make people worship him openly, but to make them worship God wrongly?

What if Satan’s strategy is to take people’s sincere religious devotion and direct it toward a false image of God, toward a false prophet, toward a false hope?

What if Islam itself is the deception?

I know that thought is terrifying.

It was terrifying for me to admit you have been wrong about something so fundamental that your parents were wrong, your teachers were wrong, your entire civilization was wrong.

This is incredibly difficult.

But truth is truth regardless of how many believe it or how long it has been believed.

At one point almost everyone believed the earth was flat.

That did not make it true.

I am not asking you to accept my word.

I am asking you to investigate for yourself.

Read the Bible to study the historical evidence for Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Compare the character of Muhammad and Jesus honestly.

Examine the logical problems in Islam and pray.

Pray to the true God, whoever he is, and ask him to show you truth.

Do not pray to Allah as you have been taught because you are assuming Allah is the true God.

Instead, pray to the God who created you and ask him to reveal himself.

I prayed that prayer when I was in crisis, asking for truth above comfort and and God answered by leading me to Jesus.

He will answer your honest prayer too.

To my Christian brothers and sisters, I also have words for you.

You must understand how difficult it is for Muslims to consider the gospel.

Islam is not just a religion but a total system that encompasses identity, family, culture, and law.

Leaving Islam costs everything.

Be patient with Muslims who are seeking.

They are wrestling with questions that could destroy their entire life.

They need time and space to process.

Share your own testimony.

Muslims respect personal experience.

Tell them what Jesus has done in your life.

Tell them about the peace, the assurance, the relationship with God that Christianity offers.

Learn about Islam so you can engage meaningfully.

Understand what Muslims believe and why.

This shows respect and makes you more effective.

Do not be afraid of the difficult questions.

The gospel can withstand scrutiny and truth is not threatened by honest examination.

Above all, love Muslims genuinely.

They can sense whether you truly care about them or just see them as conversion targets.

Jesus loved people first before they believed anything about him.

And pray.

Pray for Muslims to encounter Jesus.

Pray for dreams and visions.

God is using these powerfully in the Muslim world today.

Pray for protection for secret believers and for those who share the gospel openly at great risk.

And the harvest among Muslims is ripe.

More Muslims are coming to Christ now than at any point in history.

Despite persecution, despite opposition, the spirit is moving.

To those who are seekers who are reading this with curiosity or perhaps secret doubt about Islam, I want you to know Jesus is worth it.

Yes, following him may cost you everything.

It cost me my family, my career, my reputation, my home.

I live as an exile, unable to return to my country.

And I may never see my children again in this life.

But Jesus is worth it.

The peace I have now, the joy, the assurance, the intimate relationship with God.

I would not trade this for anything.

I have eternal life, not uncertain hope, but certain promise.

I know my sins are forgiven.

I know I am loved unconditionally.

I know I am a child of God.

Islam never gave me any of these things.

It gave me rules to follow, rituals to perform, fear of judgment, and uncertainty about my fate.

Jesus gave me everything Islam could not.

He gave me himself and he offers himself to you.

The question is what will you do with Jesus?

You cannot remain neutral.

You cannot call him just a good prophet when he claimed to be God.

Either he was telling the truth or he was a blasphemer and liar.

There is no middle ground.

CS Lewis put it well.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher and he would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the devil of hell.

You must make your choice.

Either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman or something worse.

Who is Jesus to you?

The Quran calls him the word of God, born of a virgin, sinless performer of miracles, the Messiah.

The Quran says he will return at the end of days.

But it stops short of the full truth.

Jesus is the son of God and the exact representation of the father.

The one through whom all things were made.

The one who took on flesh to save us.

The one who died for our sins and rose again.

The one who is alive today and reigning as Lord.

He is calling you right now as you read these words.

He is calling you to come to him.

He is calling you to lay down your burden of religious performance and receive the rest he offers.

He is calling you to stop trying to save yourself and trust in what he has already done.

And he is calling you to know God not as a distant judge but as a loving father.

He is calling you to life, abundant life now and eternal life forever.

What will you do with this call?

I pray that you will respond as I did.

I pray that you will have the courage to follow truth wherever it leads, even if it costs you everything.

Because in the end, gaining Jesus and losing everything else is not loss.

It is gain beyond measure.

He is the treasure hidden in a field.

He is the pearl of great price.

He is worth selling everything to possess.

7 years ago, I was a respected Islamic scholar, comfortable, secure, certain in my beliefs.

Today, I am an exile, cut off from family, living modestly, considered a traitor by those who once honored me.

But I would not go back.

I would not trade what I have in Christ for all the comfort and security of my former life because I have found the truth.

And once you know truth, you cannot unknow it.

Once you see light, you cannot pretend to be blind.

And once you taste living water, you cannot be satisfied with sand.

Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.

No one comes to the father except through me”.

This is either the most arrogant claim ever made by a human or it is the most important truth in the universe.

I have examined the evidence.

I have weighed the cost.

I have experienced the reality.

And I know I know that it is true.

Jesus is the way.

He is the truth.

He is the life.

And he is offering himself to you.

Come to him.

Trust him.

Follow him.

It will cost you everything.

But you will gain what no money can buy, what no achievement can earn, what no religion can provide.

You will gain God himself.

And in him you will find everything your soul has been longing for.

This is my testimony.

This is my plea.

This is my hope for you.

May the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ open your eyes to see truth.

give you courage to follow it and grant you the eternal life that only he can give.

Amen.

 

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Sometimes I wake up and forget everything that’s happened.

For a few seconds I’m just a regular Muslim kid again and my mom’s going to call me down for breakfast and my dad’s going to ask if I prayed fajger.

Then I remember and it hits me all over again.

I need to tell you my story not because I am special or brave or anything like that.

I need to tell it because there are others out there like me sitting in the rooms right now terrified and alone wondering if following Jesus is worth losing everything.

And I need to tell it because my family needs to know that I still love them even though they don’t believe me anymore.

Let me start at the beginning.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

Let me start at the beginning.

I was born in a Middle Eastern country.

I won’t say which one because I still have family there and things are complicated enough already.

My earliest memories are good ones.

I remember my grandmother’s house, the smell of her cooking, the sound of the call to prayer echoing through our neighborhood five times a day.

I remember my father taking me to the mosque, holding my hand as we walked through the streets.

I remember feeling safe.

My father was a good man.

He still is, I think.

Even though we don’t talk anymore, he worked hard, provided for us, taught me to respect my elders, and memorize Quranic verses.

My mother kept our home spotless and halal, and she could make the best lamb and rice I’ve ever tasted in my life.

I had two younger sisters and an older brother.

We fought like all siblings do, but we were close.

When I was nine, everything changed.

My father got a job opportunity in the United States.

I remember the adults talking late into the night.

Weighing the decision, America meant better education for us kids, more opportunities, a chance at a different life, but it also meant leaving everything we knew.

We moved to New Jersey.

There is a large Muslim community there which made my parents feel better about the whole thing.

We could still go to mosque, still celebrate Eid properly, still find halal meat and other families who understood our way of life.

Those first few months in America were strange.

Everything was bigger, faster, louder than back home.

The school was huge compared to what I was used to.

Kids dressed differently, talked differently, acted differently.

I didn’t speak much English yet, so I mostly stayed quiet and watched.

But my parents made sure we didn’t lose our identity.

If anything, we became more religious in America than we’d been back home.

I think that happens a lot with immigrant families.

When you’re surrounded by people who are different from you, you hold tighter to what makes you who you are.

We prayed five times a day every day.

My father woke me before dawn for fajger prayer, even on school days.

We fasted during Ramadan.

We went to Islamic school every Sunday where they taught us to read Arabic and understand the Quran better.

My mother made sure we only ate halal food.

When other kids at school brought ham sandwiches or pepperoni pizza, I ate the lunch my mom packed.

I didn’t mind really.

It was all I knew.

This was normal to me.

As I got older and my English got better, I started making friends at school.

Real friends, not just the Muslim kids from our community.

There was this kid named Marcus who sat next to me in seventh grade.

He was into basketball and video games and he didn’t care that I was Muslim or that I had an accent.

We just clicked.

Marcus was Christian, but he never made a big deal about it.

Sometimes he’d mention going to church or youth group, but mostly we just talked about normal stuff, sports, homework, which teachers were annoying, that kind of thing.

I started noticing things though, little things that didn’t quite add up in my mind, like how Marcus and some of my other Christian friends seemed genuinely happy.

Not the forced kind of religious happiness I sometimes saw at mosque where everyone’s trying to look more pious than they actually feel.

Just regular happiness like they had some kind of peace I didn’t understand.

I remember one time in 8th grade Marcus invited me to his birthday party.

My parents almost didn’t let me go because they knew his family would probably serve non-halal food and there might be music and dancing.

But eventually they agreed because they wanted me to have friends and do well socially.

At the party before we ate pizza, Marcus’s dad said a quick prayer.

It was so simple.

He just thanked God for the food and for everyone being there.

No ritual washing, no specific position, no Arabic words most people didn’t understand.

Just a normal conversation with God.

It stuck with me even though I didn’t know why at the time.

The older I got, the more questions I had, but these weren’t questions you could ask out loud, especially not in my family.

I wondered why we prayed five times a day in a language most of us didn’t fully understand.

I wondered why God seemed so distant and stern in everything we were taught.

Like he was always watching to see if we’d mess up.

I wondered what happened to all the good people I knew who weren’t Muslim.

Were they really all going to hell just because they believed differently?

I wondered about the violence I sometimes saw in the news done in the name of Islam.

My family would immediately say those people didn’t represent real Islam that they twisted the religion and I believed them.

But still I wondered how the same book could be read so differently by different people.

I kept these questions buried deep inside.

Asking them felt like betrayal.

By the time I was 15, I’d gotten pretty good at living between two worlds.

At school, I was just another American teenager.

I played soccer, hung out with friends, did my homework, complained about tests at home and at mosque.

I was a beautiful Muslim son.

I prayed, fasted, memorized verses, respected my elders.

But inside, I was starting to feel like a stranger to myself.

There was this girl at school, Sarah.

She was in my chemistry class sophomore year.

She was quiet, smart, always nice to everyone, even when they didn’t deserve it.

I noticed that she’d bow her head for a few seconds before eating lunch, like she was praying.

One day, I asked her about it, just curious.

She said she was thanking God for her food.

Simple as that.

But then she said something that stuck with me.

She said she could talk to God anytime, anywhere about anything.

That he wasn’t just the creator watching from far away, but like a father who actually cared about the details of her life.

A father.

I never thought of God that way before.

I started paying more attention after that.

Not in an obvious way, just watching.

I noticed how some of my Christian friends were different from others.

Some of them seemed just as religious and rule focused as what I knew, but others had something else, a lightness maybe.

Like their faith wasn’t a heavy backpack they had to carry, but something that actually helped them.

Then something happened that changed everything.

It was the summer before my junior year.

I was 16.

My uncle back home, my father’s younger brother, got very sick.

Cancer.

It happened fast.

Within 3 months of his diagnosis, he was gone.

My father was devastated.

He’d wanted to go back to see his brother one last time, but the timing didn’t work out with his job and the travel restrictions.

He didn’t make it in time.

I watched my father grieve.

He prayed more, read the Quran more, gave more to charity.

He kept saying it was God’s will that we had to accept it.

And I believed that.

I really did.

But I also saw that it didn’t seem to bring him any comfort.

It was just acceptance of something painful, not peace in the middle of it.

Around the same time, Marcus’s grandmother died.

I went to the funeral because he was my friend.

Continue reading….
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