James White - How Should We View And Reach Muslims?

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If you'll turn with me, please, in your Bibles to Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1.

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Let's begin with verse 8. First I thank my

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God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world.

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For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the gospel of his Son, is my witness as to how without ceasing

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I make mention of you. Always in my prayers, earnestly asking, if perhaps now at last, by the will of God, I may succeed in coming to you.

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For I long to see you, so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be strengthened.

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That is, to be mutually encouraged while among you by each other's faith, both yours and mine.

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I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that often I have planned to come to you, and have been prevented so far, so that I may have some fruit among you, also, even as among the rest of the

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Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.

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In this way, for my part, I am eager to proclaim the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the

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Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous will live by faith.

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These are the words of God. Rome was an amazing, amazing place.

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You've heard the old saying, all roads lead to Rome. What they meant by that was, of course, that during a period of hundreds of years, the

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Roman Empire provided peace and stability. Oh, there were always some local things happening, and certainly, as the empire began to crumble, ironically, from inside, due to a degradation in morality and ethics amongst the people.

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That's always how major empires collapse, and that's certainly what's happening in our own situation, though things move much more quickly today than they did in the ancient world.

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But still, for hundreds of years, you could come to Rome, and you could see almost anything.

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Pretty much every language was represented in the people there, because people had to travel to Rome to do business from all the corners of the empire, and so there were different languages and cultures.

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And that means there were all sorts of different religions, and in the ancient Roman context, what they wanted from their empire, they knew that it would be foolish for them to take their gods and to try to force them upon all the peoples that they conquered.

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And so what they did is they tried to be inclusive. Yes, that's not the first time the term's been used.

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They tried to be inclusive in the sense that they would allow, when they would conquer a nation, they would allow its religious activities to continue.

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They knew that the greatest way to produce a constant irritant, an enemy, would be to seek to undo their religious beliefs and to destroy their temples and to destroy their priests.

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And so they wanted to, they recognized the necessity, the need, to allow for some kind of religious freedom.

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But what they required, though, was that everyone not only submit to the

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Roman emperor, but that there needed to be an attitude of inclusivity, in other words, no exclusive claims of religious authority and truth.

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Now the one group that they sort of worked out a deal with along these lines were the

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Jewish people. The Jewish people had a huge impact around the

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Roman Empire at the time of Christ. They had worked out an agreement with Rome where they did not have to abandon the exclusivity of the worship of their

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God in Jerusalem. And they did not have to make some of the religious accommodations that other people did, such as saying

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Caesar is Lord. They had worked these things out primarily because they had a fair amount of impact in the

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Roman Empire in regards to business and banking and activities in arts and gold and silver and things like this.

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There probably was a little bit of gold and silver exchanged to buy that kind of freedom back in that particular context.

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But there were many religions represented in Rome when

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Paul wrote to the church there. They would have encountered religions from the east and the west and obviously in later centuries as the pagan tribes up at the northern border began to make infiltration, even some of the paganism that would be represented in what we would know from the

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Norse gods and things like that. There would be people in Rome that would know these things. And what does Paul say?

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Does Paul spend all of Romans talking about how to deal with this particular religious belief or that particular religious belief?

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No, he does not do that. He knows that if he plants in Rome a solid church and if he writes really what is his thought -out gospel and sends it to that church knowing that it's then going to be copied by people who come to Rome, and hence it's going to go all over the known world, that he's going to be laying that solid foundation.

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And that's what you have in the book of Romans. You have his thought -out gospel. And that's exactly how it worked out.

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Copies this gospel – gospel, epistle of Paul, but really it is his thought -out understanding of his gospel – ended up all over the world.

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And even though the Roman Empire did try, eventually, to destroy this

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Christian religion, why did they do so? Because of the exclusivity of its claims.

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Because they couldn't say Caesar is Lord, because they already said Jesus is Lord. They recognized that that claim,

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Jesus is Lord, had many political implications to it. And hence, beginning with Nero, and then for a while in one area and a while in another area you had the persecution that began in 64

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AD, and eventually, by 303 AD, a period of ten years of persecution began across the empire.

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It's either going to be us or this religion, and that religion won.

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If you know the story, it's a fascinating story. Don't have time to go into it today, but the point is a period of persecution began, and it was primarily focused upon the fact that the

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Christian faith made claims that the Roman Empire recognized were in contradiction to its ultimate claims over its citizens.

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Now, why do I mention this today? Well, because we live in a world today, because we have these devices, we have bigger versions that appear on our desktops, we have communication instantly around the world.

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There are people watching our service right now in South Africa, in Russia, in Australia, across Europe, not only just across our nation, but in South America as well.

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We have people watching this program from around the world, and that means we now have interaction with so much more in ways of religious beliefs than anyone possibly could have in the ancient world, except maybe those who walked through the marketplaces in Rome and encountered so many of those religious beliefs.

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And we have a message for anyone in any religion. We have a message for anyone in the

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Eastern religions, for anyone who believes in reincarnation or believes in 330 million gods,

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Vishnu and others. We have a message for those who seek to find in the suppression of human desire, peace for themselves, through contemplation and a denial of the physical reality that is ours.

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We have a message from the Creator who made them, and who made them to experience the full range of human desires, and to learn to conquer them not through our own power, but through the work of the

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Spirit of God within us. We have a message for the

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Jewish people. How many times has Pastor Jeff stood here and gone through the prophecies in Daniel, Isaiah, the second

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Psalm, the 110th Psalm? We certainly should be a people who desire to have the opportunity to speak to our

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Jewish friends and to say, the Messiah has come. There is a man right now that's there in Israel, and there's a great deal of excitement.

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Is he the Messiah? And there are people saying, he's worked miracles.

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The only problem is that their own scriptures have told us that there must be certain things true of the one who is the

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Messiah, and after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, to be able to fulfill those requirements, no one can do it any longer.

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And yet there is still this desire. We're looking for our Messiah, and our message is, your

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Messiah has come, and he has made it possible for you to have true peace with God, true shalom.

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We have a message for the Jewish people. My heart is burdened this evening in bringing this message, and it's what's brought me to this.

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I was going to speak from 1 Peter actually on holiness and God's call for us in those ways, and then

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I began to see more and more because of what started over a week ago now or right out a week ago now.

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War once again in the Middle East. Believe me, I'm old enough to have heard about lots of wars, and there have been so many wars and so much violence, and this situation is an unusual one.

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I'm not the only one by any stretch of the imagination who just doesn't feel like this doesn't fit.

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This doesn't make any sense. The pieces aren't fitting together. There's something more going on here, and when you get conflicting videos – and today we live in a world where you can create pictures, you can create video, and it looks so real, and it's fake, it's

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AI. And so it's so difficult anymore. I mean, we have biblical standards for proof, and how do you even apply them anymore?

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And we know that there are powerful forces in our world that want us constantly in fear.

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They want us constantly at war, and we've been that way for a while now.

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Things going on in Ukraine, a nation that I visited many, many times from –

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I believe my first visit, I think, was 2014. Yes, it was. It was in 2014. And that nation has been ravaged, and it's hard for us to imagine there would be people who would be willing to sacrifice the number of lives that have been sacrificed there just simply to test out new weapons and keep the military -industrial complex funded.

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But the reality is, yes, there are people that evil in our country and in other countries, and they'll sacrifice our young men and anybody else's for their privilege and their power.

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And so we have yet another war, and we hear conflicting stories, and we hear about armies moving toward the north, and, well, will this nation engage or will they not engage?

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And we don't know. Our own nation freed up $6 billion to Iran.

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And now we're the ones selling Iron Dome interceptor missiles at $50 ,000 a pop to Israel to shoot down the incoming missiles that, hmm,

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I wonder where they got all the money to have all these missiles. It's amazing the corruption and everything else that's going on in the world.

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And so I get how it is that many people are confused and many people are very angry.

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And I began seeing this quite some time ago, but I've seen it coming into reformed, allegedly, whatever that term means today, into reformed sources, a fundamental bias, prejudice, and even hatred toward the

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Jewish people. I don't mean the stuff about Israel. I don't mean the people wrapping themselves in the flag of Israel and going, you know, this is

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God's country. This is God's nation. He made it. And I'm like, how did you do that in 1940?

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How did you do that before the United Nations created this nation, which is one of the most

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LGBTQ plus friendly places on the planet? How did you do that?

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How does that work? Are you sure this is some kind of prophetic fulfillment going on here?

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Boy, there are a lot of people that are absolutely positively convinced of it. And they're the ones looking for, hey,

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Israel's now in existence. We can now build temples and we can bring about dispensational conclusions, eschatology.

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And I'm sitting there going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Did you not listen to Jeff Durbin's four -year -long sermon on Matthew 24?

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We did. We had no choice. Okay, it wasn't really four years, just seemed like it.

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So seriously, it's very concerning to see the attitudes that people have.

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And I'm not talking about anything that has to do with the specific nation of Israel.

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I'm talking about what's called antisemitism, but what's specifically focused upon an anti -Jewish bias and prejudice.

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And it's getting louder and louder and clearer and clearer, and it's being expressed by people who call themselves

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Reformed. And I hear it and I go, what is going on?

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What is going on? Now, how can anyone who is Reformed embrace any kind of perspective that would in any way hinder you from speaking the gospel to anyone, no matter what their ethnicity, religious background or anything else?

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That's something that is not an option for us. And to start engaging in conspiracy theories about how the

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Jews are behind this and the Jews are behind that, I'm like, what is happening here?

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I know that there are evil forces behind much of what's going on in the world, but to attach that to a single ethnicity.

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I stood right out there, right in that foyer, not 18 months ago.

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And some guy had come in and – you just don't know how often it is.

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I'm so thankful for Rich Pierce at Alpha and Omega because he answers the phone and I don't.

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I'm not sure I'd still be doing what I'm doing if I did answer the phone, to be honest with you, because he tells me stories.

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And there are people that call there and there are people who walk in here and they have a message for us from God.

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And they need to meet with Jeff Durbin and they need to meet with James White and they need to tell us what

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God has spoken to them. And I stood right out there in that foyer and I had this guy start telling us about what the

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Lord has taught him from Scripture. No, okay. I just had a feeling

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I knew what was coming. And I had to do some digging. But eventually what came out was, you need to understand,

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I'm so thankful you all are doing what you're doing with abortion and what you're doing in evangelizing the

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Mormons and all the rest of that stuff, but you need to understand, it's all irrelevant if you're not involved in exposing the people that are in control of everything evil happening in this world, and it's the

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Jews. And that was his message to us. And he could tell once I dragged it out of him that this was going to be a short conversation.

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So he wanted to get it all out there real fast. There's a lot of people like that, and it's poison.

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It's absolute poison. I warn you against it. You've probably been hearing it, and there are a lot of people out there that are promoting it.

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And so with the war starting, there are a lot of people going, see, this is actually being started by them and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

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And at the same time, I made a statement, and you'll have to forgive me,

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I made a statement on Twitter that people didn't like. It's never happened before. Well, before yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.

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I made a statement. And basically what I said was, we need, as the people of God in this world, the followers of Jesus, need to be praying that God would place in our heart such a love for all of those around us, wherever God places us, that we would be ready to speak the gospel to anyone at any time.

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No matter what their background, no matter what their ethnicity, no matter where they came from. And I said it within the context of what's happening in regards to this

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Middle East conflict. And then I made the mistake of going back and looking at the comments.

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That's always a bad thing to do. It's enough to take you from postmillennialism to dispensational premillennialism very quickly.

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I couldn't believe what people were saying. It's fascinating what people hear you actually saying.

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What you intended to say, and said rather clearly, and what they think you said.

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And so I doubled down and I posted another statement. And basically what

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I said in this statement was, we need to be able to differentiate between the religion of Islam and the

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Muslim people themselves. Because what I was seeing was many people gleefully hoping for utter destruction and death upon Muslim people.

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Oh, I know. If they claim to be a Christian, they know how to use the right terminology.

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They know how to basically say, well, we want to see the destruction of Islam as a system, not just the

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Muslim people. But they weren't really making that distinction at all. And for many years, my first debate, not with a

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Muslim, but with at least some knowledge finally of Islam, took place in 2006.

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My first debate with a Muslim was in 1999. But I was simply defending the

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Trinity. I had not yet begun my studies of Islam. But the first Muslim debate was in 2006.

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And I've done many since then. And I miss having that opportunity. I haven't done a debate with a

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Muslim for a little while now because of the travel situation. Especially when

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I would go to South Africa frequently, and one trip to South Africa, I'd do two or three debates there.

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Sometimes in mosques. And some of you have seen those debates.

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And I became convinced a number of years ago that one of the reasons that the church does not seem to be having the impact amongst the

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Muslim people that it could is because we are afraid. We fear

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Islam, and we allow that to make us fearful of Muslims individually.

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Part of it is simple ignorance. The vast majority of Muslims have never read the

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Bible, or even the New Testament. And in fact, their knowledge of what's in the

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Bible or the New Testament is secondhand and normally extremely twisted and inaccurate.

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And most of us have no more knowledge of Islam than they have of Christianity.

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And it's strange, because the fact of the matter is, the

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Qur 'an claims to be the continuation of the revelation that God gave to Moses and to Jesus.

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If you've not read the Qur 'an, and the vast majority of Christians have not, it's just a little bit more than half the size of the

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New Testament. It's not a huge book. If you ever choose to read it, let me give you a real practical exhortation right now.

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Get my book first. Now, that sounds like a horrible advertising, and I'm horrible at advertising anyways.

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But the reason is, in my book, somewhere around page 45, I think, it's in the first section of the book, there's a chart.

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If you tried to read the Qur 'an, if you start with what's called surat al -Fatiha, the opening surah, the opening chapter, and then surah al -Baqarah, the cow, and then surah 3, surah 4, there's 114 surahs.

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You're not going to have almost any idea what in the world's going on. And that's because the

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Qur 'an is organized by size, not by chronology. And so surah al -Fatiha is just an opening prayer, it's just a certain number of ayat.

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An ayah is a verse. It's short, but then surah 2 is the longest.

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It's a book unto itself. And surah 2 actually covers a bunch, a fairly lengthy period in Muhammad's life.

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But then surah 3 is a little bit shorter, surah 4, surah 5. And as a result, you're jumping back and forth during different periods of Muhammad's life.

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And so most people, I remember back when 9 -11 took place, reporters are running into, we used to have things called bookstores back then, it was before Amazon.

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And they were buying Qur 'ans, and they're sitting there and they're leafing through the Qur 'an trying to find something to add to their reporting.

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And they can't figure anything out, it doesn't make any sense to them. And to most of us

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Westerners, it doesn't make any sense. And you must realize, the average Muslim does not view the

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Qur 'an the way you and I view the New Testament. They don't interact with it the way you and I interact with the

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Bible. It has much more of the sense of a magic talisman type thing than it does you and I looking at Romans.

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And what did I do when I started talking about Romans? I started talking about the historical background. That's just not what happens.

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When Muslims gather on the Friday for the sermons in the mosque, you're not getting exegesis of the

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Qur 'an, you're getting stories from what's called the Hadith, the actions and sayings and stories concerning Muhammad and his companions collected about 300 years after his death.

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And that's the lens through which the Qur 'an is read. I remember very clearly going to, flying to an undisclosed location early on in my ministry to the

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Muslims, and I recorded programs that were then translated into Farsi and were satellite beamed into Iran.

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You can see why we didn't advertise where we were doing the recordings. And I did a session on Surah 112,

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Surah Taliqlas, which is one of the most important surahs, but it's a short surah, because it's toward the end of the

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Qur 'an. So, yeah, it's going to be rather short. And I went through the background and the language and all the rest of the stuff.

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Most of the people that were doing the video recording were former Muslims themselves. And they came up to me afterwards and they said, you need to understand, we've never heard anyone go through Surah 112 the way you just did.

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And we're former Muslims. We grew up in the religion. We never heard anyone do it.

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They don't do that in the mosques. And so it's a very different way of viewing the

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Qur 'an than we have of viewing the New Testament. Okay? So, if you're going to read it, the only way to start making any heads or tails out of it is to read it chronologically, which means you need a chart that gives you our best guess, because there's two major portions in Muhammad's life.

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The first part of his life, he's a persecuted religious minority.

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The only reason he's still alive is because his uncle,

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Abu Talib, is protecting him from the rest of his own clan, the

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Quraysh. But then, after they move, after his religion, his small number of followers move from Mecca to Medina, now he is the prophet at the head of an army.

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And everything starts changing. And when you read the Qur 'an that way, you can see it.

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The sections where he's in minority, he's being persecuted, that's the only place where you have religious freedom, or a plea for religious freedom, or he's trying to get the

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Jews and the Christians to believe in his prophethood. And he's saying, look,

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Allah, he gave the Torah to Moses, this is in Surah 5, beginning around Ayah 44, he gave the

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Torah to Moses, and then he gave the Injil, the Gospel, to Jesus, and Jesus confirmed what had been given to Moses before him.

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And now he's given the Qur 'an to me, and the Qur 'an confirms what's come before it in the

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Injil, and in the Torah. So see, it's one God, and he's given different revelations, and in fact,

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Muslims believe that Allah sends a prophet to every religious group. There's been hundreds and hundreds of prophets.

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In fact, how do you become a Muslim? I'd be interested in knowing. How many of you in this room know how you become a

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Muslim? How many of you know how you become a Muslim because you watch something that Alpha and Omega Ministries produced?

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Okay. You become a Muslim by saying what's called the Shahada, but you have to say the

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Shahada in Arabic. You can't say it in English, German, French, anything else.

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You have to say it in Arabic. La ilaha illallah wa muhammadan razu lillah. I just became a

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Muslim. No, I didn't. I didn't because there are at least seven different things that have to be present in saying those words to actually become a

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Muslim. So no, I did not become a Muslim, even though I did just say the Shahada in Arabic. But what's interesting from their perspective, that first part, la ilaha illallah, there is only one

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God worthy of worship, Allah. From their perspective, all the prophets brought that message, including

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Moses and Jesus. What makes their

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Shahada the final Shahada is that wa muhammadan razu lillah, Muhammad is the razul of Allah.

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He is the prophet of Allah. He's the seal of all the prophets. He's the final prophet. So for example, there are heretical groups in Islam, lots of heretical groups in Islam.

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And there's one particular group, the Ahmadi Muslims. They're a standard

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Sunni Muslim. The Sunnis represent about 89, 90 % of the Muslims in the world. The Shia in Iran, maybe eight or nine percent, and then there's other groups mixed in with all of that.

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And the Sunni would view the Ahmadi the way we view

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Jehovah's Witnesses. And the reason for that is the Ahmadi believe that a prophet arose after Muhammad.

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Oop, you're out, that's it. For them, that's like the Jehovah's Witnesses denying the deity of Christ.

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It's absolutely definitional to believe Muhammad's the final prophet, okay? And so they have their different perspectives, but the idea is

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God has sent a prophet to every group, and they all said there's only one God worthy of worship, Allah.

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And that's what Jesus taught. We are addressed in the

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Quran. You and I are addressed in the Quran. In fact, one of the easiest ways

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I have found in opening the door to witness to Muslims is to talk about one of two things.

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Either I talk about what the Quran says to us as Christians. I've taken the time to read the

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Quran multiple times, and I know what it says to me as one of the

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Al -Anjil, the people of the gospel, or the Al -Kitab, the people of the book. Sometimes people of the book is

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Jews, sometimes it's Christians, sometimes it's both. Depends on the context. The other way that I have opened the door is that I have read the

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Sunni Hadith, at least Sahih al -Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, that's eight and nine volumes respectively for each one.

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There are thousands of them. And so every time I would travel, every time

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I took an Uber or a cab in the United Kingdom, I always had a Muslim driver.

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Every single time. And the conversations we would end up having, because I'd narrate one of the

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Hadith, and they're blown away that there was a Christian who knew their

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Hadith, the ones that they hear regularly in the mosque. And then I would use that as a means of opening the door to the gospel.

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By the way, the Muslims want to talk about Jesus.

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Did you know that? I mean, we stand on our heads, we spin around in circles to try to get secularists to talk with us about anything spiritual, right?

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And here's an entire group of people that want to talk to us about Jesus. That takes me back to my point.

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Why don't we do it? Because we're afraid. We're afraid. We don't know enough about what they believe.

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We are afraid we're going to say something that will offend, maybe that will cause violence. And can

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I say something else? Some of the kindest people I have ever met, hospitable people

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I have ever met, were Muslims. And everybody who does missionary work overseas will tell you that.

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They've experienced it. And in all of those conversations, every single time that I have debated in a mosque,

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I have stood in the Gray Street Mosque in Durban, South Africa, which at the time was the second largest mosque in the southern hemisphere of the world.

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It burned down a few years ago, I'm not sure if they've rebuilt it. But I've stood in the

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Gray Street Mosque and defended the deity of Christ with Muslims seated on the floor, unlike Christians who are wimps.

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We have to have pads on our seats and all the rest of that stuff. They will sit for hours on the floor.

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And they'll sit much closer than anyone is right here. And I had the opportunity to look them right in the whites of their eyes and say to them,

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I'll never forget this one. I'll never forget this one. It was in a church. And the church was only two stops down the tube in London from where the explosions in 7 -7 took place.

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I don't know if you remember, but the UK had its own 9 -11, but it was 7 -7. It was

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July 7th, where there was terrorist attacks all across London in buses and on the tube and things like that.

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And so we were very close to where those attacks had taken place. And as the people had come in, the

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Christians and the Muslims had segregated themselves. We didn't ask them to, but they had.

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And so the Muslims were all sitting over on one side. And I will never, ever forget this.

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And I am so thankful I had the opportunity to do this. Because we were talking about the deity of Christ, and I just ignored the

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Christians. And I just turned to the Muslims. And I said to them, you need to understand something.

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You've been taught that Jesus is a prophet, but he is just a prophet. A mere rasool is what the

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Quran says, but you need to understand something. Long before, whoever it was that wrote the Quran wrote the

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Quran. And they believe the Quran is eternal. The Sunni Muslims do.

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They believe it's eternal. Long before the Quran ever appeared, the disciples of Jesus taught that Jesus had eternally existed as God.

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And that means you can't treat him merely as a prophet, as an apostle.

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Every breath of your mouth, every beat of your heart comes to you from his hand.

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He is your maker. You dare not view him simply as one amongst many apostles.

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They were just as close to me as you are. And I could do that in mosques.

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And I was never afraid. Not because I'm brave. In fact,

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I will never forget that when I was in the Gray Street Mosque, and I was defending the deity of Christ, and I was saying, we need to use the same standards.

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There was this one Muslim. He was seated right about there. And he was listening so intently.

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And when I emphasized the fact, you can't use one standard to defend the Quran and a different standard to attack the

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New Testament. That's just not right. It's uneven scales. He's going, yeah. He's nodding his head.

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I have a picture. Got it right here. After that debate, he was brought up to me.

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He was the imam of the mosque. And he heard what I had to say.

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So let me communicate something to you right now. You know why we have had such an effective ministry amongst the

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Muslims globally? You know why? Because they don't know what to do with a

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Christian who knows what he believes, knows what they believe, will not compromise, and looks them in the eye and says,

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I love you. I care for you.

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I've sat with some of my opponents. I first did this,

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I forget which year it was, but I was debating in Dublin, Ireland. I was doing two debates with Adnan Rashid.

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You can find all these on YouTube. They haven't been taken down yet, anyways. Between those two debates,

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Adnan and I met at a restaurant. Sort of hard to find restaurants to eat at with Muslims. You know, you've got to have the halal food and stuff like that, and I don't really have a wide palate myself, but we found a place.

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And Adnan, you can go online and you can find all sorts of videos of Adnan. He's a firebrand.

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He's a big, tall Pakistani dude. And he'd go to what's called Speaker's Corner there in London, and he would just go at it.

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And he was used to Christians just yelling at him and arguing with him. What he wasn't used to is when a

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Christian sat down across the table from him and explained exactly why I do what

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I do. And it's not to win an argument with you. It's because I care.

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I care about the Muslim people. I believe what I believe. And if what

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I believe is true, then you need to believe it, too. And so my heart is in this.

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I care about you. You know what? That night, and we had debated before this in London.

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Now we're in Dublin, Ireland. That debate was completely different.

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Our interaction was completely different, because he knew he was now talking to a person who cared about him as an individual and about the

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Muslim people as a whole. Changed everything. Changed everything. I've sat with Muslims that I was going to do debates with, and I've talked with them about the fact, about stuff like how important it is to find your wife before you're too old to enjoy life together with her.

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And I'm encouraging them, because their individual is much younger than I was. And I was encouraging him, and he couldn't, just couldn't wrap his head around the fact that here is a

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Christian man, and he's concerned about my personal happiness. I'm not compromising anything.

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He knows exactly where I stand. He knows I'm not going to compromise in the debate. But he also knows

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I care about him, and that makes all the difference in the world. And brothers and sisters, what

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I'm concerned about is I am seeing so many people who will just openly as Christians say,

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I don't care. I don't care. These people need to be bound back to the stone age.

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And I'm like, what's filling your heart? Hatred?

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Anger? Is that supposed to be in a Christian heart? Are we supposed to have that toward anyone?

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Well, the Bible says God hates sin, and so we… Okay, let me ask you a question. Did the person who brought the gospel to you have the same attitude toward you that you're not having toward others?

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Or they come to you as a redeemed sinner. I know

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God hates evil. I'm not for a second saying that Islam as a religious system is to be respected as the continuation of Christianity.

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It's not. They know that, and we know that. I don't compromise on that for a second.

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But any of us knows that if someone comes to us and they are just simply mouthing platitudes, you're not going to listen.

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You're not going to hear what they're saying. And it's the same thing when we reverse that.

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I am deeply concerned. When Paul wrote to the Romans and he says he's not ashamed of the gospel for it's the power of God of salvation, to who?

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For everyone who believes. That was sent to the most metropolitan city in the ancient world.

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That gospel for Jews and Gentiles, Scythians and barbarians, it's for everybody.

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And I cannot imagine that Paul for a second would have given permission to anyone to cultivate in their hearts a prejudice, a bias, a dislike, and a hatred toward the individuals in false religions.

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We, as Christians, have to differentiate between the religious system that traps people and holds people and those individuals themselves.

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I have seen the Lord free people from all sorts of false religion. I have been blessed over 40 years of ministry now.

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We have seen so many people come out of Roman Catholicism, find peace in Christ, get off the treadmill of penances, but at the same time

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I know many people and they have such an animus toward the system that they can't differentiate between the system of doctrine and belief and the individuals who are under its sway.

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And if we don't make that spirit -born distinction, we will never be used by God to bring the truth to those people.

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You don't think over the years I have personally stood and witnessed to more than 5 ,000

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LDS missionaries. I've seen what Mormonism can do. I've seen its deceptiveness.

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Do you think we would have had the kind of – that God has blessed us with the success we've had in seeing people come out of Mormonism if we hated

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Mormons? But you see, the Mormons look like us.

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The Mormons look like us. They're sort of an American religion. The thing that concerns me is there are a lot of supposedly

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Reformed Christians. Their understanding of the Muslim people is not formed by a prayerful consideration of what's in this.

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It's formed by Fox News. If it was formed by MSNBC, they'd just be confused because they'd have no idea what's going on because nobody on MSNBC has any idea what's going on either.

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But I had an experience in the past 48 hours with a man with whom

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I have ministered in the past. I've done conferences with him, and when

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I said on Twitter that we as the people of God need to be praying,

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God give us a love for the Muslim people. Not only – it's real easy for us to sit here and go, oh

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Lord, help the missionaries over there. That's easy. We have mosques right here.

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We have mosques right here. We have Muslims right here. They're in your workplaces, your neighborhoods.

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And I dared to say we need to pray that God would give us a love for the

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Muslim people. Opportunities to present the gospel to them, to remove the fear from our hearts.

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This man with whom I have worked came after me and attacked me for being an apologist for the

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Islamic faith. I'm actually telling people we need to preach Jesus and who

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Jesus is to the Muslims, and that makes you an apologist for the Muslims. Breaks my heart.

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It breaks my heart. It should break yours as well. But I just want to ask each and every one of you.

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I don't have time tonight. We're actually wrapping up. Believe it or not, you look at your watch and going, what? But I need to ask each one of you.

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I could sit here and in a fairly short period of time run through the major barriers in evangelizing

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Muslims and stuff like that. The fact of the matter is I've done all of that many, many times.

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You can go on YouTube, watch a presentation I did down in Louisiana over two nights at a large church there called

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Islam A to Z, Islam A to Z. A lot of my

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Muslim presentations, not just the debates, but discussions of the Quran and the transmission history of the

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Quran, and we go into depth on all sorts of things. What do Sunnis believe and what do Shiites believe? And all of this, it's available.

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But here's my question for us, and then via these digital devices, everyone who's watching.

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I want to ask you personally. You see what's going on.

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You've seen the videos. A video appeared of a

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Muslim at Speaker's Corner in London just a couple days ago. A Christian was asking him, do you hate me?

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And the Muslim said, yes. You lie about Allah. And he asked, if you could, would you kill me?

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And he said, Allah commands it. And you've seen these things.

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You've seen the masked people and the beheadings and all the rest of this stuff. And have you allowed that to convince you that that's what every

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Muslim is about? And therefore, because of that fear, if the opportunity arose, and look, folks, listen to me.

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You know how this works. You know how there's that moment in time, that statement that is made that opens the door, and if you hesitate, the door closes.

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We all know how it works. We know how it works with the Mormons and the

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Jehovah's Witnesses, and we're all ready for all of that. But when that moment comes with a

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Muslim, will you allow the door to close out of fear?

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Fear for yourself? Fear that you'll say something you shouldn't say?

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When was the last time any of us prayed, Father, give me a love? How about have we just admitted,

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Father, I don't have a love for the Muslim people? Give me a love. If you're going to call me to do it, you're going to have to give me the love.

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You're going to have to change my heart. I've seen so much. I need to be changed. Are we willing to pray that prayer?

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Will we be the people who will reach out? We need to be the one.

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We have the message they need. I can't tell you how beautiful it is to listen to the testimonies of Muslims who have come to know who

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Jesus is, because you need to understand something. Remember what I said during the catechism.

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They have no mediator. They have a

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God who sends people to hell and seems to enjoy doing so.

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There is more discussion and description of hell in the Quran and in the Hadith than in anything you'll find in Christianity.

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And there is an arbitrariness in Islam. In Islamic theology, there's something called

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Qadr. It's power, but it's also power in predestination.

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And there are many Christians who, for example, attack Reformed theology by saying it's just the same thing that Muslims believe.

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That's not true. There are fundamental differences. I've even done debates on that subject in South Africa.

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But there is a sense in which your fate is determined by Allah, and Allah, He will send one person to heaven and another person to hell.

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In fact, there's a Hadith – I'll quickly narrate it for you – there's a Hadith where Muhammad said there are those – there are people who do the deeds of hellfire their entire lives until what is written of them overtakes them and they enter into paradise.

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And there are people who do the deeds of paradise their entire life until what is written concerning them overtakes them and they go into hellfire.

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The idea being there are certain people who will do righteous deeds their entire life and end up in hell because it was decreed.

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And then there are others who will live a horrible, sinful life and will end up in heaven because it was decreed.

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And you have no way of knowing because you have no mediator. You have no intercessor.

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There is no one to stand between yourself and this transcendent

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God. That's not a beautiful life.

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I normally finish one of my presentations on Islam by showing video from an attack in,

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I believe it was 2007, at the Glasgow Airport in Scotland.

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There's a jeep and it's on fire, it's fully engulfed in the doorway of the airport.

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And two men, two Muslims, had driven that jeep into that doorway and then had detonated a device that was supposed to cause, it was filled with flammable liquids, it was supposed to cause that flammable liquid to fly into where all the people are checking in and cover them in flames and destroy them.

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It didn't work out quite that way. The only two people who died were the two men in the vehicle and they died slowly over the next two weeks from their burns.

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It's a horrible way to go. Now, one of the reasons I showed it is I've walked through that door.

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I started ministering in Glasgow at the Reformed Baptist Church of Annie's Land in Glasgow in 2005.

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I had been in and out of that door on my trips there. It's sort of weird to see some place you've been and see that type of thing happening.

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But here's the main thing. Those two men weren't down -and -outers.

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They weren't construction workers that had nothing else to live for. They didn't have family back in the

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Middle East and some terrorist group was going to give them money if they went ahead and did this.

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You know who they were? They were National Health System physicians.

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They were medical doctors. What would cause two medical doctors to fill a

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Jeep with flammable liquids and explosives and drive toward that doorway knowing that there's all sorts of people all around, knowing that when they hit that door, they're going to press a button and immolate themselves and they hope all sorts of other people.

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You know what motivated them to do that? No. In the Qur 'an, the only way you can know that when you die, you will go to paradise is if you die in an act of jihad.

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It's the only way to know, the only way to know. No mediator, no empty tomb, no message of repentance and faith and life because you see,

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Allah is not going to be that intimately connected to his creation.

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That's against Islamic thought. And when the author of the

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Qur 'an denied what Christians believed about Jesus, he cut them off from life.

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He cut them off from life. So there are a billion people on this planet and they need to hear the message of life.

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Who are they going to hear it from? And by the way, ladies, in most

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Islamic cultures, me as a male, I'm not going to have the opportunity to talk to a

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Muslim female. Now, it does happen here in the United States. After I had a dialogue in a mosque in Memphis a number of years ago, two young, beautiful Muslim ladies in full hijab came up to me and by the way, ask yourself how you would have answered this question.

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I'm sitting there with a big old honking chocolate chip cookie in my hand. They've provided refreshments.

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And they come up to me, can we ask you a question? Sure, you bet. Let me finish this mouthful. Here was her question.

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She said, how do you deal with the influence that Emperor Constantine had over the

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Council of Nicaea in regards to their definition of the deity of Christ? You ready for that one?

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I was. They got a 10 -minute lecture and they loved it. They listened.

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And the only reason I got the opportunity to do that is because I had purchased that time because what had happened earlier in the evening is the imam of that mosque,

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Dr. Yasir Qadhi, had told that entire audience about me and about how he had never met a

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Christian who was willing to study and learn about Islam accurately like I had.

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That's why they're willing to ask the question and listen to the answer. But it's unusual for a male to get to talk to a female in that way.

01:00:03

In most Middle Eastern cultures, you ladies are going to be the only ones that have that opportunity.

01:00:13

And I know in the United States right now, in the medical field, in so many areas, you're getting more and more of those opportunities.

01:00:22

Will we pray that God will give us a love that will overcome our fear?

01:00:33

That's the question. That's the question. This is Basic Christianity 101.

01:00:42

And sadly, there are people right now watching this livestream who think they have a theological argument to justify their hatred, but they have none.

01:00:54

I know no one here is trying to do that. Not in our fellowship.

01:01:01

Not the way we give ourselves to evangelism. But to those out there, we need to be an example.

01:01:10

Will we pray, Lord, give us love. Give us boldness.

01:01:17

May we be the ones who bring the message of life to those who need to hear it. Let's pray together.

01:01:26

Our gracious Heavenly Father, at some point in time in our lives, someone with love in their heart brought the message of life to us.

01:01:43

And Father, in this world, where there is so much hatred and there is so much violence, we want to be a people.

01:01:52

Having been redeemed, having received grace, to be a channel through which that grace flows to so many others, including those who don't necessarily look like us, sound like us, dress like us.

01:02:11

Father, protect us from that kind of Christianity that makes it convenient.

01:02:22

Protect us, implant within us a holy boldness and love that will overcome any barrier set in the way.

01:02:38

Give us opportunity, Father. Prepare our hearts, prepare our minds, but give us opportunity.

01:02:44

You know that we seek these opportunities outside abortion clinics and Mormon wards, but Lord, when it's the next -door neighbor, when it's the co -worker, when we're going to have to invest ourselves, help us to do so out of love, first and foremost for You and then for them.

01:03:10

Make it real, make it last, make it self -sacrificial. Use us to bring the message of peace to all, the

01:03:25

Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, yes, but to the billion people who have been told about hellfire but they haven't been told about a

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God who would condescend to enter into His own creation and provide the perfect way.

01:03:50

Give us that chance, Father. Use us to be that channel of love and draw

01:03:58

Your people unto Yourself. We pray in Christ's name, amen.