Two days ago, I was training for soccer with a friend who
had just recently rejected the Muslim faith and became a Christian. We started
talking and I asked him to tell me what had motivated him to become a
Christian. I knew that just a few months ago he had refused to come to church
and was very defensive about his faith. His story went like this:
My whole family is Muslim,
so I grew up with it embedded into me. Every Friday I went to the Muslim call
to prayer and I knew the Arabic prayers by heart. I didn’t know what they
meant, but I knew them. I got married at a young age and I tried to provide for
my family, but jobs were scarce where I lived. I had a brother who owned land
near SOS, and so I left my wife and kids at her mom’s house and went to try to
start a new life for us. I entered a state of depression. I feared that I would
never be able to provide for my family and so I started to drink heavily.
Soccer and beer were my way to numb my mind from my problems. A Christian boy who
also got saved at SOS invited me to play soccer with him at SOS. So I started
playing every evening; that’s where I met the Hurley family. They reached out
to me. Elisa invited me to church many times and I told her that I’d come, but
I had no true intention of ever joining. I was a Muslim. Alcohol was my way of
escape. I would pass out on the side of the road. During that time, no person
from my mosque ever came and confronted me about my sinful lifestyle. No one
cared enough. But the Hurley’s came to my house all the time telling me that
drinking was wrong and I needed to stop. They cared. I started to give Christianity
a second thought. I wasn’t satisfied with Islam. One thing that caused me to
second guess my beliefs was that the Koran and the Bible’s Old Testament are
very similar, but Mohammed is only talked about in the Koran. He is nowhere to
be found in the Bible, but Jesus is found in both holy books. That proves Jesus’
superiority. I started to go to youth group, then from there I started
attending church. It was exciting! Shannon gave me a job, a house, and brought
my family to live with me. The Hurley kids fetched my family water from the
bore hole for our first month in our new house. The Christians cared about us.
I decided that Christianity must be true, because it is lived out and I can understand
it.
If you love someone, you will tell them that they are in
sin. My friend’s Muslim friends didn’t love
him enough to tell him that what he was doing was wrong. We did. How many times do we care more about our
friendships than our friends? Our friends are about to get hurt by sin, but
because we care too much about our relationship with them, we do nothing about
it. Come on, dear Christians, we need to love people with Biblical love. Jesus
loved people, but he called them to repentance. That’s true love. Love that
cares more about people than ourselves. Who do you care about that is in sin?
Call them out! Love them with Jesus’ love.
