A Jihadist Overcome by the Love of Jesus || Al Fadi former Wahabbi Muslim from Saudi Arabia

thank you so much I appreciate it I was still in the group before you that I was disappointed that the Cardinals are not playing today for some reason I thought they were how is everyone today thank you so much for this wonderful invitation I was really blessed to be here and it's always a privilege and an honor to share what God is doing in someone's life and in ministry and also our life story of how how the Lord is at work all the time today I am even more privileged to share with you about my people about the people that I grow up to be part of I was a former Muslim I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia a country that is probably the most closed to the gospel in the world there is a lot of risk for people to go and share there is a lot of risk for people from within to ask and inquire and the government is always keeping watch on anything or any activities leaving people to learn more about Christ or even their in to venture outside of the realm of Islam so I as I share with you today I want you to always be a mindful of them and praying for them and asking the Lord to keep workin to soften the hearts of those who are in that particular group you know there's about 1.5 billion Muslims in the world we're talking about 25 percent of the world population one out of four literally in the world belong to Islam it is the second fastest growing religion in the world today even here in our own country and many times we ask a lot of questions about the faith of Islam and often our questions are stemming out of fear more than out of desire to reach out to them and for the right reasons September 11 I believe have opened our eyes to a reality concerning what Islam really teaches and how far those devout followers are willing to go and I was one of those at some point in my life even I was willing to go and fight and die for God that's the kind of religion we're dealing with I lived most of my life back home in Saudi i memorized a book called the Koran half of it at least by age 12 and my goal was to memorize all of it and the reason why I did that because Islam is a religion of works and every single thing you do to please this God that you're following will add more good deeds that you may need on Judgment Day to help you earn your way to heaven however also a Muslim is brought up to believe certain things that I like to call the psychology of the religion you're brought up to believe that Islam is the final religion the only acceptable religion to God the way if you wish if you are not a follower of this religion therefore you have no hope whatsoever to make it to paradise or even to heaven as Lomb teaches that the messenger of Islam is the final messenger and prophet even though there are prophets that came before him including Jesus by the way the Quran calls him a prophet each one of those prophets at some point in the history of mankind were sent by God for a specific group of people to share a certain message but when it came to Islam 14th centuries ago it is the only universal message now that is being sent to all mankind and also islam teaches that its book the quran is the final revelation from god all other books that came before that are either lost or corrupted as in the case of the bible with that kind of mindset you grew up as a locked into this false sense of reality that you are part of an elite group a chosen nation if you wish or people that god decided for you to be now the only acceptable group of people into his kingdom when I was growing up thinking about all these things it instilled something inside of me and that's to look down at others who do not follow that religion in fact even as a pious Muslim you begin to even look down at your own people who follow Islam but they're not that religious because it all has to do with being pious religious doing your deeds and being in full submission to this God that demands everything out of you but never ever will guarantee you anything not even a single hope of your own salvation even if you go as far as you're willing to die for him and that's indeed what I wanted to do at some point realizing that that's the only way my sins will be forgiven and I have the hope of making it all the way to paradise that if I will be willing to fight and die for this God and in 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and many Muslim men left their countries and they went over there to fight and I wanted to go and do the same and really I didn't want to go just fight and earn your deeds I wanted to go and fight and die knowing that this is my hope to earn that salvation yet my mother God used her to step step-in and prevent me from doing that and I call this my amar Kaul number one in my path and journey to know in the Lord a couple of years later I finished school I went to a Islamic University in Mecca which by the way was about 45 minutes away from where I lived I went there and I began to study Sharia and my hope was to become a Sharia scholar and possibly even a judge down the road but I year a half later I don't know what happened but somehow the Lord just turned my heart off on this idea and that would have been mile marker number two in my journey because if I would have continued along that path I'm not so sure that I'll be standing here today but only God knows finishing basically that path and decided to follow now a different path I moved back home and I attended my local university and I earned an engineering degree and when I graduated my father really surprised me and asked me if I would like to go to the west to either Europe or to the US and earn a graduate degree from there in engineering now you know as a Muslim and and and this is true of majority Muslims that live back home in the Middle East or in their own countries but what we tend to think of the West as a corrupted society we blame the West for anything and any on all of our problems that take place we blame them for being the enemies that are usually plotting against us and we think that their society is corrupted because their Bible has been corrupted we believe that all of them are born Christians but not all of them are that faithful Christians anymore and even if they wanted to be faithful there are no moral values left in there because their book has been corrupted so with all of that I was still excited when my father offered me to go to the West I would consider that a bit of hypocrisy actually why would I go somewhere that I despise and I wanted to go and earn that degree and have that prestige of saying that I have a graduate degree from this University or that I certainly did not reject that idea and I pursued it and I finally after receiving permission from the embassy to apply I did so and the first University that sent me an acceptance letter was U of A hold your horses I just want to apologize because I didn't know any better at that time so I made it basically and I was so excited everybody was telling me that you're going to eat desert environment and I'm thinking it's similar to where I grew up until I landed and it was completely different and then more I've been studying English most of my life and the only thing that was worried about when I decided to go to the West was the cultural shock you see many of my friends back home who are very religious like myself and normally we would have a beard and we would go to the mosque all the time and and we would do all of these religious rituals periodically and many of them would leave sometimes during the summer just to spend a vacation and they will come back with ponytails and no beard anymore and I would ask what happened and of course I saw how strong the influence of the culture was and I was concerned about that but I convinced myself maybe I could make my trip and mission to convert people to Islam and that was really my true motivation never that I thought English was going to be a problem until someone asked me what's up and I looked up I did not know really what was up and then people would ask me about what is going on and I say well I don't know what is going on actually people want to pull my leg and others want to pick my brain and it was needless to say it was becoming very uncomfortable to have these conversations I would understand 50 to 70 percent and then the rest is lost somewhere in me up and down I went back to my teacher I told her I thought I was ready to start but I don't think I am and she was laughing when I explained to her why and she said this is called conversational English it's okay you have to be willing to build relationships with American students and American families and your neighbors and listen to how they say phrases and ask questions and with time you'll be able to master this but if you want to really expand I that she said we do have an organization right here on campus called Friends of the internationals you can sign up with them they'll end up me achieving you up with either an individual or a family that would work with you to improve your language she just left a small part out that it was a Christian ministry I went and I signed up and within a couple of weeks I received a letter introduced in a family that will be in touch with me and then within a couple of days from receiving letter the family called me and the husband introduced himself to me and we decided to meet for the first time up until that point I am of the mindset that everyone I met so far is a Christian and they really didn't look any different than those that have been watching on movies for instance or TV until I met this family and something was so special about them they were different their lifestyle was different their attitude was different their love and kindness was different and I can tell that they have this genuine heart desire to help me and do whatever it takes for me I remember when I was graduating from the English school to start my program that they took the time to take a day off on Friday and come and surprise me to attend my ceremony basically and and that really touched my heart but nevertheless I did not want to give in to any religious discussions with them although my desire was to convert them to Islam but I felt like I'm not ready yet to get into that discussion I'm still learning how to converse and somehow after seven eight months of having this relationship I decided to change my major I went and I applied at other universities and long and behold it was a su that accepted me at that time you can call me a safe devil if you like I'm okay with that I moved came over here and I finished my degree and in the course of doing so about three years I began to learn about the culture of the religion itself freedom of religion many people you know don't call themselves Christians I met people that don't want even talked about God and I mean I met others that they would say that I go to church only periodically or here in this occasion or that occasion and all of this opened my mind and my heart to a reality that not everything I learned about Christianity back home was true and that the fact that not everyone really is born Christian or inherit the religion as I was told it kind of bothered me but still I was convinced Islam is the truth but maybe the version of Islam that I learned was a little bit twisted in its teaching and I kept those to myself a couple of years after graduation I met another young person at work and he was a believer in Christ and he reminded me immediately of that first family that I met years earlier which by the way when I left I suffered my relationship with them I never bothered to contact him or even update my contacts with them and I was encouraged now because I have been able to converse better to open a dialogue with him and his wife and his family and and through this relationship that we built over the course of a couple of years I began to share with him about Islam thinking that maybe I will surprise him with the information that I'll be sharing with him that the Bible is corrupt and that Islam is the truth and and many of the other realities that I was really taught that he worships 3 gods that the cross never took place and and to my surprise nothing shook him at all actually he was able to refute anything that I was throwing his way and that bothered me because I felt like maybe I wasn't ready yet to share about Islam or even be able to convert anyone to Islam but everything that he was firing back at me was kept inside and I would go back home and begin to think about what he says why did he reject the idea that the cross never happened why is he convinced that the Bible is been errant Word of God and many other things and why does he truly believe that Jesus is God in the flesh and I continued to search on my own time and compare Islam to the form of Christianity that I am hearing now and I began to realize there is more to the story of the Cross and the gospel than what I was told or at least grew up to believe you can say that those two families got used to plant the seeds of salvation I got to a point where I was so discouraged about my own faith that I lost even any interest in doing my religious duties any more to the point that sometimes my friends at work who are not religious don't even care for God will remind me that how come I'm not fasting anymore how come I don't take the breaks to go and pray you see the enemy sometimes want to attack you somehow want to prevent you from seeking the truth and uses any means to do so but God was so graceful and merciful and patient with me in 2001 one Sunday in May after being invited to go to a church many times by some friends I've decided that Sunday for whatever reason to go to church and I had an agenda I said I'm gonna go to church sit down and learn from their sermons and preaching exactly do they teach people like my friend and that family so that I can use it against him and convert him to Islam now as an engineer I thought it was a perfect plan so did the Holy Spirit also I arrived that day I sat down at the very last Pew and I remember watching him singing hymns and rejoicing for the Lord and then the preacher began to preach and the entire message was directed to me I was kind of bothered because I thought my friends told the pastor that I was there I came the following Sunday and the same thing happened the whole message was directed to me and every Sunday I would come in and God would deliver a message tailored just to me and then they began to preach from the Gospel of John to finish a sermon series from the book of John's that they started at five years earlier and through that journey I began to hear some magnificent things about who Jesus was and all of a sudden the mindset of a Muslim person who rejected Christ as the Son of God or God incarnate I fell in love with this Jesus and I said I really want to follow him even if he was a figment of my own imagination yet I just wasn't April yet wasn't able to connect the dots it was still hard for me to take myself off of that mold that I was in for all of my life and in fact for fourteen centuries I was in drench entrenched into it but God was patient and he was dealing with me according to my own understanding September 11 happened in the course of that time I was very discouraged about the whole thing I knew why it happened at some point in my life I was willing to do something similar to that at least back in Afghanistan when I wanted to go but it was a wake-up call for me and then I began to get this dream this vision I would call it a nightmare actually almost the same every time I have it I died I'm standing before the throne of God and God is asking me a simple question why did you reject my son and I didn't have an answer for that a couple of months later it was November of 2001 when I finally had the courage to admit that I was a sinner and in need of a savior and I prayed and I accepted the Lord and Savior and from that point forward that was 12 years ago I began to see the hand of God in my life ministry doors began to open and I realized quickly that the calling for me is to teach equip and encourage and I have to tell you up until that point I never thought I can stand before an audience of two and talk yet God have shown me that if you were to humble yourself I will open so many doors for you that will blow your socks off I didn't know that phrase at that time by the way God is so draped during the course of the last twelve years this message by the way has been heard by thousands and then five years ago the door opened up for me to appear on satellite TV that airs in the Middle East 60 million households usually watched that particular program and I was asked by the host who's a former Muslim himself to share my testimony I was scared at the beginning because by the way leaving Islam means that there is a death penalty against me already my family have already disowned me as a result of this my own brother is the one that wants to come after me all the time and I told him you want me to appear where exactly and do what you know what's gonna happen to me he says yes and that's the beauty about the whole thing I felt like he didn't care but he told me that we want to reach out to our own people and no one can be more effective with them other than their own that have left an accepted Christ and indeed I appeared for the first time in 2007 I still remember it it was in December 2007 and I shared my testimony and a Saudi woman who was a college student at that time accepted Christ as Lord and Savior nine months later her father and brother discovered that and killed her as a result of this this is what we're dealing with many times later appeared in the same show and thousands upon thousands of people have listened the message and teachings and many other things and then three years ago I even got involved with another daring project with the same ministry and that's to be a co-author of a book called the Quran dilemma critically analyzing the Quran to show the Muslim people my own people that the book that they believed with all their heart is a perfect book that is the only book that God somehow preserved over the Bible is a book that doesn't worth the papers it's on and if their foundation is shaken then they must seek the real foundation and thus our Lord Jesus Christ the rock that was the hope I can tell you a lot of encouraging stories but Tuesday when I'm here I'll be more than happy to answer many questions about the book and the impact that is making and I'm involved also now in ministries through social media I have my own TV show called the Islamic dilemma so the Lord has blessed me with so many opportunities for one purpose not to think that I was the one who did it but to remember that it was he who brought me to this point and entrusted me with a message to share with you and encourage you and my hope and my prayer that when you walk out of here today any fear you had about Islam or Muslims will decimate completely that you will walk out of here loving him even more now let me tell you I know that one of the biggest hurdles that we will face usually in evangelism is fear I mean many of us wonder if they have the eloquence e to share the gospel if they have the right tools to respond if they are capable of even discuss issues that are so huge and so big am I gonna offend the person I'm talking to and then on top of that you're asking me to share it with who with Muslims are you out of your mind don't you know that they might kill me what about them if they converted aren't they gonna die that is true fear is legitimate here is what the Bible says about that if we were to go for instance to first Corinthians chapter 2 and we would start reading from verse 1 Paul reflecting back on his own feelings to the Corinthians and he's saying and when I came to you brothers I didn't come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech of wisdom for I decided to share with you or know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified and here is the catch and I was with you listen to what Paul is saying in weakness in fear and much trembling you realize what is going on here this is Paul who is responsible for almost half the New Testament who was called an apostle by Christ by God himself yet he is declaring and being so transparent with us that he had fear in him whenever he goes to share the gospel what is the conclusion if you have fear you qualify that's what it says and you should have that fear because you're sharing the most precious news that the whole world must know about another thing that we need to also be aware of that we must be ready all the time to give an answer a defense if you wish to those who ask us about the hope that we have in us that's force Peter 3:15 now we're all basically called apologists according to that passage we are all expected to know how to respond about our own hope as simple as sharing our own testimony of why Jesus is our Lord no excuses we don't need to be us become scholars we don't need to go to seminaries to be able to evangelize our Lord in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14 2:16 expected all of us to be evangelists when he says you are the light of the world he didn't say that some of you are the light he said you are and not just a light the light of the world so let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father who's in heaven that's what happened in my case when I saw that light of Christ in a life of two families which by the way up until last year the first family didn't even have a clue that I am a believer in Christ because I cut my ties with them for 23 years Paul was encouraging young Timothy in 2nd Timothy 4:2 telling him that he needs must preach the word in season and out of season and that's my other admonition to you that you must be ready at all times and prepared to share at all seasons there is no right and wrong time to share only God opens the door the right door at the right time and we must be always ready to deliver finally I want to share with you a passage that summarizes my entire testimony Paul after being persecuted in Ephesus to the point of almost dying went to Thessalonica and spent three weeks in there and God used that time to establish a church that received two letters first and second Thessalonians that are in our Blessed Bible today in his first letter Paul was trying to explain to the people in Thessalonica how he felt about them and why he decided to come and share the gospel with them in the second chapter 1st Thessalonians 2:8 this is what he says so being a fiction Utley desirous of you we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our very selves our own selves our very life why because you have become so dear to us let me tell you what Paul is saying keep in mind Paul is talk to them today as believers yet he's saying before he came to them to share the gospel what does that mean when they were still pagans and Gentiles did not know Christ or God are not saved yet he says he loved them so much and decided to share not just the gospel in words but in lifestyle and even if this meant their very own lives to be sacrificed he's just been persecuted and stoned yet he was still willing to come again and share the gospel here again with another group of people do you love the people that you want to share the gospel with even from before you have seen them are you praying for certain groups of people that you may never need in your life are you praying for Muslims for Mormons for atheists do you have the desire for them to know Christ our Lord because that's what the scripture is teaching you see evangelism is not step 1 step 2 step 3 it's not about earning a degree it's not about following a model or a style evangelism starts with the right heart and right attitude in Christ Jesus the least we can do for them is to pray for them the least we can do last year I after searching for the family for almost 11 years since I became a believer I lost hope that I will ever find him I just wanted to thank them that God has used them in my life 23 years earlier to plant a seed that flourished into a salvation that God used in his own power to open many doors that millions of Muslims have heard the testimony millions of Muslims read it millions of Muslims are being reached out through social media ministry that I'm involved in or the TV programming or many others because of their faithfulness because of sacrifice and their life and sharing the gospel in words and lifestyle and finally somehow God decided it was the right time believe it or not it was Super Bowl Sunday there was Super Bowl Sunday that that happened when I found the very original envelope that I received the first time from the University about that family not knowing where to find them I used a very powerful tool called Google it was so easy to find their entire history from before their birth I know everything about them that they probably didn't even know but I was searching for one thing where are they today and I found that and I contacted them you know what they told me we were just praying for you this month 23 years they never cease to pray and they didn't even know that I'm a believer yet and when I shared with them they were blown away by how God used such a simple ministry to blossom into what it is today because they decided to quit that ministry couple of years earlier thinking that it wasn't working because they haven't seen the fruits of that ministry in their lifetime our God is a powerful God there is a reason why in 1st Thessalonians we read that when we plant a seed one will plant one will water but God will grow that seed have faith in him he will do the work that you and I will never be able to do so I just want to leave you with this if you came here today fearing the Muslims my hope that you will walk out of here running to hug them and to pray for them and to share the truth with them in words and in life let's pray our Heavenly Father we are so thankful so thankful Lord that you would use our weakness our doubts our fear our inability is Lord to do the mighty work of your kingdom Lord we are so privileged Lord that you have called us to be partners with you and workers in your own fields father I pray for the Muslims today that they will be reached by my brothers and sisters and others like them that we will be praying for them all the time I pray for my people I pray for the Saudis I pray for the King Lord that you would soften his heart that he will come to know you as well Lord father I pray that they will cross that boundary from the kingdom of light darkness to the kingdom of light we ask all of this in the mighty name of Christ amen [Applause]

Channel: Your Living Manna

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Keywords: Malayalam, Christian, Sermon, Pentecostal, Malayalam Christian Songs, Malayalam christian messages, Malayalam Full Movie, Malayalam Christian Speech, Malayalam Christian Testimony, Kerala, India, India Pentecostal Church, Church of God, Assemblies of God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Spiritual, yourlivingmanna, livingmanna, Manna Tv, Religion, Christ, Worship, Christianity, Inspirational, English, Tamil, Hindi, Pastor, Lord, Ministry, Word, youtube, TBN, Billy Graham, God

Id: 6az_5mGa3QA

Length: 34min 44sec (2084 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016