Seeking Allah Finding Jesus, Video Study: Session 1

I'm excited to share with you what Muslim life is like because we need to understand our friends and the people we want to share the gospel with if we're going to share it with them in a compelling way now Muslims are not like the average secular person generally insofar as they believe in God and they're quite often if they're devout Muslims trying to follow God in many avenues of their life they're regularly remembering him their praying memorized prayers or sometimes even occasional prayers from their heart so let's take a look at what Muslim life was like and I can share that with you from my story when I was a young child my mom had taught me that I need to follow Islam to the best of my ability and so what I had been taught was to start off the day first thing in the morning by thanking Allah for waking me up the prayer that I had memorized I would recite in Arabic alhamdulillah Hilla dionneb Adama al-madinah what a lie hidden eschewed I didn't know what that meant at the time my mom hadn't taught me the translation but later I found out what it meant was all praise belongs to the one who gives me life causes me to die and will raise me up again so it's a prayer thanking God for the afterlife thanking him for the fact that we will all be raised from the dead on the day of judgment but it was also a reminder to thank God for waking me up from sleep because sleep is a sort of death Thank You Allah for waking me up every morning for the day so that's how I would start the day before my feet left the bed after leaving the bedroom I would go to the bathroom to do a ceremonial washing and before each of the five daily prayers Muslims do a ceremonial washing it's called weather and during the weather itself you're reciting prayers that you had memorized in Arabic well while walking into the washroom to to start the weather I would remember everyday to walk in with my left foot first and the reason why I would do that is because Mohammed is reputed to have done that whenever he went to do other and as Muslims devout Muslims anyway we're supposed to try to follow Mohammed to the greatest degree possible even in so forth such a small detail as walking into the bathroom how to do it so we would remember Muhammad constantly in little steps of life well then after washing up I would go downstairs to the prayer rugs and I would pray the fudge with prayer the first of the five daily prayers and then after the fudge of Prayer I'd go to the breakfast table and my mom would give me food but before eating she would always say the veal what do we say before we eat and I would say bismillahirrahmanirrahim in the name of Allah the most gracious the most merciful we would pray that small prayer before we did anything and then we would eat the food and after eating my mom would say what do we pray now and I would pray a prayer thanking Allah for the sustenance and for making me a Muslim and then she would send me out the front door she'd remind me to recite a section of the Quran a long section of surah al-baqarah called ayah delicacy and then she would also say recite that one section of the Quran which is a prayer that Moses recited to Allah when he was supposed to speak before the Pharaoh in in the Quran there are stories of biblical prophets and in this case the Quran says that Moses stuttered and he would ask Allah for wisdom and for the ability to speak so my mom would remind me every single day to pray that prayer as I would go to school now this all would happen before seven o'clock in the morning that's just how much we remembered a lot constantly as devout Muslims and as you grow up in life that was of course in middle school but then as I got older you start to embrace more and more of an Islamic identity you start using your Islamic lifestyle as a marker of who you are you see yourself as a Muslim because when you go out into the public my mom would point this out to me she'd say Nabil your face gives you away as a Muslim it doesn't matter how good a student you are it doesn't matter how great a person you are even if you were president of the United States people would look at your face and say he's a Muslim before anything else you represent Islam so see yourself as an ambassador of Islam and so Islam was my identity I would see myself in public as a Muslim and adult Muslims of course they have their own lifestyles and customs for example a devout Muslim will not pay interest it's it's illegal in according to Sharia to pay interest a develop Muslim will not eat pork of course or drink alcohol these kinds of little lifestyle markers but also then things that are more important to a man's heart such as meeting at the mosque for prayers and then building community that way spending time together during the month of Ramadan fasting together so Islam is more than just a set of beliefs especially for people from the east it's you don't separate yourself from your beliefs like that Islam is who you are it's your very life your identity and that's how we need to understand Muslims that we interact with unless they were born and raised in the West more than likely they see Islam as a part of who they are not just what they believe so Muslims see their faith as their identity but there are of course impacts of the Islamic faith on the way Muslims see the world so the Islamic world view is important to understand and basically the way Muslims see the world develop Muslims is Allah has created this world to worship Him to serve Him and this is why by the way a common Muslim name is Abdullah Abdullah means the slave or servant of Allah so Allah has then sent messengers to every single people throughout history in order for people to know who Allah is according to Muslims 124,000 such messengers called prophets have come to this world to lead every people group to Allah to point to Allah and so Allah has sent prophets such as Adam Noah Moses Abraham alot Jacob all of these names show up in the Quran as messengers that Allah has sent to guide people now according to the average Muslim the full message was never given it was only partial messages given to each people as it was required for their time so for example Muslims will often say that Moses received part of the message that he shared with his people what they needed to hear which was be willing to fight against the Pharaoh and the Egyptians in order to liberate yourselves whereas another part of the message was given to another prophet who is Jesus Muslims believe that Jesus is a prophet in Animus ayah but not God himself Jesus was given a part of the message which was do not resist show grace and they believed that had Jesus been given the message to fight then the early Christians would have been slaughtered so Muslims say that Moses got part of the message Jesus got part of the message all these different people got parts of the message as their people needed to hear it it wasn't until the final Prophet Muhammad when one man was receiving the entire revelation and he was able to pass that on to the Muslims to his followers and that is the final revelation no law would come after Muhammad and so that's the way Muslims see the progression from the beginning of the world until the advent of Islam now you may have noticed that I said Muslims believe Jesus is the Messiah and that's true they do but they don't use the word Messiah the same way Christians do and in fact Jews don't use the word Messiah the same way Christians do everyone interprets that word slightly differently the way Muslims see the Messiah is someone chosen by God to to offer the reformed revelation of Judaism try to bring people back to what Moses had taught but unfortunately Muslims believe that after Jesus was raised to heaven and they do believe that that the followers of Jesus slowly began to abandon his message that they turned him into a god and by doing so created committed blasphemy so the concept of the Messiah is that Jesus was a reformer but that ultimately Christians started their own religion Muslims believe that all these former prophets who came were themselves Muslims the word Muslim means one who submits it's it's a form of the word Islam Islam means submission Muslim is one who submits and so all the prophets including Jesus Moses Abraham etc Muslims believe that they were all Muslims and their followers were Muslims because they submitted to Allah it wasn't until later when there must messages slowly became corrupted that people left their Islamic faith and that's the important point here Muslims believe that Judaism slowly became corrupted that Christianity slowly became corrupted and that is slow is the only incorruptible faith Allah has miraculously guarded Islam so Mohammed is the final messenger the Quran is the final text those messages and the Quran will be guarded till the end of times according to Muslims now the essential message of Islam then is that we ought to submit to Allah we ought to follow him so whereas in Christianity you may have come to realize that the essential message the the critical problem of mankind is that we have sinned and rebelled against God that's not the case in Islam in Islam the essential messages we are all ignorant and we've all gone our own ways and if we are just guided if we're just told how to follow God then we will and we can and so we need to have rules to follow and that's what Sharia is Sharia is Islamic law it's that what how you should live in order to submit to Allah it doesn't come in the form of a book you know if you want to read the 613 laws that the Jews had to follow the mitzvoth you just read the Torah they're found there that's not how shoddy I works it's much more complicated than that you have the Quran which is the book of the Muslims the holy scripture and then you have the traditions of Islam you have the hadith and the Sunna these are the things that Muhammad said and did Muslims use those to interpret the Quran and to expand upon things not explicitly mentioned in the Quran those two are the main components of Sharia there are two additional components of Sharia there's the consensus of the Muslim scholars in analogical reasoning called chaos but that's less important really what we ought to understand is Islamic law is not just derived from the Quran it's derived from a composite of the understandings of the Quran and the hadith so when we understand what Sharia is we have to then follow it well how do we understand it as Muslims how we follow Sharia well we don't have the training to understand it ourselves we have to hear it from the scholars we have to listen to our Imams we have to hear it the precedence as they have been given from centuries past and so Muslims generally do not themselves engage in interpreting the hadith and the Quran they usually received that from their Imams this is why by the way there are so many different views of Islam because people are receiving the interpretation from a wide body of hadith literature and the Quran and many of these hadith certain Muslims say well these are not trustworthy other hadith or trustworthy and different Muslims will disagree with them they'll say no those are trustworthy and these are not and so disagreeing on the body of canonical literature is what causes Muslims to have so many different varieties of Islam peaceful Islam as we see in the West many Muslims say Islam is a religion of peace well part of the reason why they say that is because of the way they interpret the hadith and the Quran which they use in which verses of the Quran they interpret through those hadith other Muslims such as terrorists in the Middle East they will interpret the violent hadith as the ones that take precedent and they will interpret the violent sections of the Quran is the one they ought to follow so it's because of the way Sharia is interpreted that we have such a wide expression of Islam in the Islamic world but at the end of the day the basic worldview is the same Allah wants us to submit to him and to follow the law that he's given Sharia now that we understand what Muslims believe in how they see the world it's important to get a little bit more of an idea of how many there are and where we can find them a Pew Forum survey indicated that in 2011 there were 2.6 million Muslims in the United States now that's point eight percent of the u.s. population just under one percent but the percentage is projected to grow by the year 2030 approximately 1.7 percent of the u.s. population will be Muslim that's one out of every 50 people but when you put this number in global perspective there are 1.6 1 billion Muslims around the world that's a quarter of the world's population let's compare that now to the Christian demographic so we can get some perspective the following year a Pew Forum survey show that there are 243 million Christians in the United States that's 7 eight percent over three quarters and globally there are 2.2 billion Christians in the world that's 32 percent of the world's population now you might say Nabila I don't think all those people are actually Christian they probably don't follow Jesus or really understand the beliefs and I would actually agree with you these are people who self-identify as Christians and the fact the matter is the same is the case for Islam not all the people who self identify as Muslims are actually living an Islamic lifestyle many of them might be nominal Muslims but when we take a look at the figures 1/4 of the world does self-identify as Muslim so it is important to understand how to interact with them and who they are around the world there are various kinds of Muslims not all Muslims believe the same thing there are two major branches of Islam Sunni Islam which makes up 80 to 85% of the Muslims in the world and Shia Islam which makes up about 10 to 13 percent of the Muslims so if you run across a Muslim chances are they are Sunni Muslim and when you hear pop people talk about Islam they're probably talking about Sunni Islam the other 2 to 5 percent of Muslims around the world are various other sects of Islam that don't quite fit in easily into Sunni or Shia Islam now around the world Muslims often tend to point the finger at one another and say you are not Muslim or you are not Muslim for example throughout most of the Middle East less than 40 percent of Sunni Muslims see Shia as Muslim but in certain places where Sunni and Shia live close to one another like Iraq and Lebanon they understand that they are Muslim so we have to understand that there's a lot of division within Islam and how are we approach these Muslims how are we understand whether someone is a Muslim or not my suggestion to you is if someone follows Muhammad and declares the Shahada this is the Islamic Proclamation la ilaha illallah muhammad rasool allah there is no god but allah and muhammad is his messenger if someone exclusively follows Muhammad and Allah then they are a Muslim that's my best indicator of how to and whether someone is a Muslim or not without getting embroiled in their own polemics now I just mentioned Iraq and Lebanon most people do associate Muslims with the Middle East but it's interesting to note that the nation with the most Muslims in the world is Indonesia and the second nation with the most Muslims in the world is Pakistan number three is India and number four is Bangladesh none of these are Middle Eastern countries and so we ought not think that Muslims just come from the Middle East they come from all over the world and with these different national backgrounds come lots of different cultures Indonesian culture is different from Pakistani culture Pakistani culture is different from Moroccan culture so let's keep in mind that the culture for Muslims can vary tremendously only about 20% of Muslims come from the Middle East in North Africa and their lifestyle their language is quite different from say a bossy and Muslim or a Turkish Muslim so the point of all this is that there are different denominations and branches of Islam that there are different cultures and national backgrounds for Muslims and even considering that there are different levels of devotion for Muslims some of them are very very devout and some are completely nominal the upshot of all this is that Muslims are individuals when you run into a Muslim when you meet a Muslim neighbor or friend you have to get to know them for who they are there's simply no way to paint everyone with the same broad brushstrokes get to know your friends get to know who they are and what they see about Islam how they understand it how they live it in their lives so that you can interact and love them personally a relatively new phenomenon is Muslims who are being born and raised in the West now that's me myself I was born in the United States raised in the West and so I see the world differently from those who were raised in the east of course we might have the same religion we might even be in the same family for example my parents were born and raised in the East but we see the world differently because the West's culture has an impact on the way we understand things the most prominent way in which there's a difference between east and west is what I would call and others call as well the honor shame paradigm in the East people tend to make decisions based on honor and shame whereas in the West we tend to make decisions based on innocent in innocence and guilt what do I mean by that well in the West people tend to think is this thing right or wrong I'm going to do what I think is right so even if someone does something that is wrong we tend to exculpate them if they thought it was the right thing to do whereas in the East that's not the case at all it doesn't really matter what you think is right or wrong you should do what is socially the right thing to do what everyone tells you is the right thing to do what the authority tells you is the right thing to do so for example we see that very commonly in marriages in the East arranged marriages are a common phenomenon because parents friends aunts and uncles grandparents everyone thinks that you should marry a certain person therefore you should marry them it doesn't matter if you think you should marry them or not you should marry them because everyone else thinks so and so that's one way this is often displayed in the East another way is in terms of how we react to things that we think we needed to do we felt compelled to do but others shouldn't know about because if they did find out we would lose honor it would bring shame upon our family and so in the East there is a great tendency to hide things people will try to just brush things under the rug and we've seen that a lot in the past but also in the present with for example family members that have certain incapacitation be it physical or mental they'll often be hidden from view when people are victims of crimes for example rape or or sexual abuse of some kind often that will be hidden and you won't go to therapy therapy would be shameful and so those are the kinds of phenomenons that happen because of the honor shame paradigm people are coming from that cultural background to the United States and so we need to understand that they often see the world differently from those raised in the West now people like me my parents were from that paradigm so I have some of that in me but I was raised in the West so I have a lot of the innocent and guilt perspective driving me as well so it helps to understand that not everyone in the world sees things the same way we do people may actually think and process differently it's very fascinating to get to know other people's cultures and in fact we shouldn't see our culture as necessarily better than theirs if you read the Old Testament you will find that in many cases it was an honor shame paradigm that was present amongst the Jews in the Old Testament so it's not about better or worse we ought not see ourselves as superior just understand that others may see the world and process matters differently and we might have to spend some time and some effort getting to know them and understanding them before we can click the way we want to one last thing to notice about people from the Middle East they are often a very passionate people and so they love hospitality they love putting people in their homes and taking care of them and just giving them more food than they could ever hope to eat but another thing that they're passionate about are the very things that we tend to be reserved about in the West I remember when I was in 2nd grade I was asking a teacher what what party she was going to vote for here in the US and she looked at me and she said Nabil we do not talk about politics and religion and I just remember thinking really that's all we talk about at home is politics and religion and that's how Muslims generally are from the Middle East anyway and from various other Islamic cultures people talk about what they're passionate about and so they are expecting you to talk about what you're passionate about and this is why I suggest to Christians that they feel free to talk about their faith because Muslims are expecting it and feel free to talk about politics to just don't be upset if other people get passionate and respond passionately that's actually a sign of them being engaged in what you're saying so don't don't be afraid engage in these matters talk about these things but specifically I would suggest you not be afraid to discuss apologetics with Muslims because Muslims usually speaking if they're devout and they've come from the mosque and they've heard they're in Mom's preach they've usually heard arguments as to why Islam is true and Christianity is false and these aren't peripheral matters to them they are a part of their worldview they this is why they can have confidence in Islam they are confident Muslims often because they see Christianity as blasphemous they see the Trinity as polytheism so I could never become a Christian that would be polytheism that would be blasphemy so that's a part of the way that they respond to other religions that's partially why they are really passionate about the Quran because they believe the Quran is the inspired Word of God it has science in it it has miraculous mathematical patterns it has prophecies that came true so these apologetic arguments form the basis of their confidence in the West a lot of Christians are Christian because they enjoy their relationship with Christ and that's fine a lot of other Christians are Christians because they were raised in a Christian home not necessarily because of the apologetics and so the apologetic issues often don't come up but for Muslims they want to discuss reasons to believe they want to have the arguments they want to talk about truth and so be willing to engage in that and that's part of the reason why in the next few sessions we're going to cover a lot of the evidence because we need to be able to share it with Muslims as part of my ministry here in the US and around Asia in other parts of the world what I do often when I encounter Muslims is I share the gospel with them and then almost always they respond with questions about Jesus about the Trinity about the Bible and I'm telling you this to help encourage you many Muslims that I have encountered in fact to just last week after hearing the answers to some of these questions were willing to accept the gospel and so it does happen it happened for me after three and a half years of investigating Christianity and Islam it was then that I turned to God and asked him to reveal himself to me and it was dreams and visions combined with an encounter with the with the god of the New Testament it was when I opened up the Bible after all of that that I finally gave my life to Christ but in order to get to that point I needed my friend to share answers with me for him to be able to help me through this minefield of evidence and information because there is a lot of misinformation out there about the Bible Muslims believe for example that the Bible has been corrupted Muslims believe that the Trinity is three gods not one God and so my friend David had to walk with me through these questions over the course of many many years now he wasn't an expert by the way it wasn't that he knew all the answers it was that he was willing to look up the answers when the questions came around and that's all I'm suggesting you do be willing to look up answers to questions as you converse with Muslims and that will go a long long way there are barriers that people have erected between them and hearing the gospel people will say to me Nabil we can't argue others into the faith we can't argue people into the kingdom and I would tend to agree with that we can't but there are barriers between them and hearing the gospel for what it is apologetics destroys those barriers so people can hear the gospel clearly and at that point is between them and God whether or not they will receive the gospel but it's our task to witness and for those of us witnessing to Muslims it means oftentimes discussing these passionate issues of religion and apologetics so in some Muslims come from a variety of places around the world they have a variety of beliefs but there is a basic worldview that we can engage with and thankfully there's a lot in common in that worldview in ours they believe in a God they believe in truth they believe in morality they believe in heaven in hell all we have to do is begin to show them the reliability of the gospel message of the Bible of the Trinity of Jesus death and resurrection and we need to be conversant with them about Muhammad and the Quran and this can happen over time and when we do we can level the path such that we can reach them with the truth of the gospel

Channel: zondervan

Views: 925,979

Rating: 4.6818252 out of 5

Keywords: Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, Seeking Allah Finding Jesus, Nabeel Qureshi, Video Study, Muslims, Islam, Apologetics, Christianity

Id: O9rcFduex1Q

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2016