This audio lasts for about an hour. If you cannot finish this in one visit, please come back as often as needed – especially if you are (1), A Christian, and (2), if you are interested in how the Muslims are conquering the world while the Christian church stands by, watching, setting up the final days cataclysm known as Armageddon – just like the Bible prophesies.

“You Might Be A Muslim If”

A lesson by Pastor Brent Whitefield, Covenant Naples Church, Naples, Florida.

Rev. Brent Whitefield Ph.D., Mobilization Pastor

B.A. History, Amherst College
M.A. Christian Studies, Regent College
Ph.D. Church History, Cambridge University

(Reprinted and posted with permission)

Let’s go back to October 27^th, 1553. A Spanish theologian named Miguel Servitas was burned at the stake in Geneva, Switzerland. This was John Calvin’s Geneva. (And I’m getting feedback now. I can’t seem to find the happy medium. Maybe that’s better now. OK, we’ll give it a try. We may have to call on reinforcements from Gary if that doesn’t work.) So this was the time of Calvin’s Geneva. Now, Calvin did not approve. He thought he should have been beheaded instead. His crimes were purely theological. He had some unorthodox views. about the Trinity and he denied infant baptism. That was why he was executed. This was a big deal and in fact in some people’s mind was an abhorrent situation. It was now one generation into the Protestant Reformation And it was really the beginning of the end. It would take a while, but it was the beginning of the end of these kind of executions, executions for purely theological reasons. And part of it had to do with what the Protestant Reformation itself wrought in the world. Namely, it brought about religious pluralism in the world. Before the Protestant Reformation, within Christendom, there was only one church, one authority. But once the Protestant Reformation comes, you have an ever-changing religious landscape. You have an ever-changing political landscape that went along with the religious landscape. And you have a situation in which now things would change from time to time. So, for example, in a particular town, on one day a man might be the town pastor, the next day he’s a heretic, and vice versa. And so the reality of religious pluralism began to bring to an end the age in which everybody on pain of death has to be on the same page. Pluralism, and we take this for granted today. You know, by the same logic by which it’s easier to, it’s one thing to flick a fly off of your muffin, it’s another thing to try to take all the poppy seeds out of your muffin. One can be done pretty without much damage, one destroys the whole thing. And so once you have a situation where people are not on the same page anymore, theologically, it becomes less practical to go around killing people for having a heterodox view. And in fact, what is a heterodox view anymore is called into question. Well, why do I say this? And by the way, I’m really getting a lot of feedback here. Is Gary here? Maybe you can help. I’m getting a lot of this. I don’t know if Kingston or Gary can help me with that. In any event, or anybody else who’s got knowledge in these areas, the reason I mention that is that we have in Islam, an Islam which has never had a reformation, and has never acknowledged the reality, and for many Muslims, has never dealt with the reality of religious pluralism. And so it’s understandable perhaps that the whole way of seeing these things is different. We now in our culture, in American culture today, in Western culture today, we don’t tend to see theological matters as something worth dying for and killing for. For better or for worse, we don’t see that anymore. In the Islamic world, they still see theological matters as something worth dying for and killing for. And again, part of that has to do with the reality of the fact that you don’t have religious pluralism in most of the places where Islam is dominant. Most Muslims in the world live in countries and in jurisdictions where Islam is basically the only religion, the only accepted religion. There may be a very small minority of others, but they can be largely disregarded and managed. So you have to understand a very different context here. The Western post-Reformation world in which we live and the unreformed world in which most Muslims live today. This helps to explain, I think, quite a lot about our world and the dynamics of what’s going on with Islam today. Now, I should let you know that In the battle, if you will, with Christianity, Islam is winning almost everywhere in the world with very few exceptions. You need to understand this because you may not get this picture because you’ll hear exaggerated reports from mission entities and so on. Let me be clear, Islam is winning almost everywhere. If you look around the world today, you’d be hard pressed to find a single country, a single jurisdiction within any country, a single state in the United States, a single county in America that doesn’t have more Muslims today than it had 10 years ago. There’s a couple, Eastern and Southern Ethiopia, Christianity is pushing Islam out in some places. In Iran, the number of Christians is, rising at the expense of Islam. Some islands in Indonesia, perhaps this is the case, but very few, those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Everywhere else, every country in Europe, every country in South America, North America, Asia, has more Muslims in it today than it did 10 years ago, and will have more in 10 years than it has now. The only places where Islam is not growing is places where it doesn’t have any potential to grow, where the population is already 100% Muslim and can’t get any higher than that. So you need to understand that. You need to understand that this is what’s happening. Now, traditionally, Islam has… grown in two ways, not three, in two ways. The way it hasn’t grown primarily is through conversion, at least through free will conversion. That has been a very small part of the growth of Islam over the past 1300 years. Islam has grown principally through conquest, This explains the proliferation of Islam in the very earliest days, after Muhammad’s followers and so on, how Muslim takes over all of the Middle East, all of North Africa, parts of Southwest Europe, parts of Southeast Europe, on into the Central Asian area, all the way out to Indonesia and so on. This is all an issue of conquest. In more modern times, although it’s been a feature from the beginning, the other way in which Islam grows is through immigration. And immigration combined with allegations of Islamophobia. So what’s interesting is that the very first conquest of a major area by the Muslims was the city of Medina, which is now one of their two most holy cities, and the burial place of Muhammad himself. Medina was a largely Jewish city with some Christians. It was sort of Jewish and Christian, mostly Jewish. Muslims began to immigrate there and then began to demand their rights and eventually over time sort of took over, slaughtered the Jews, kicked the rest of them out, and took over the city of Medina. And this has been a pattern which has replicated itself time after time after time. So either by conquest, immigration, or kind of a combination of the two, Islam has proliferated. And so we see this, for example, playing out pretty well in Europe today. Where, especially in Western Europe, the number of Muslims is anywhere between five and 15% in various countries, the UK, France, Spain, Switzerland, and so on. Where they’ve gained quite a large number, but this has been through immigration. And also, the percentage has gone up because they’ve gone into countries with low native birth rates. So they’ve moved in, had a higher birth rate, and so naturally, just by natural natural course of things, the population of Muslims has risen as a percentage of population in these places. Not only that, but as wherever Islam proliferates, it creates laws and it creates cultural standards that make it nearly impossible to convert away from Islam and make it much more easy to convert to Islam. So for example, there are at least 16 countries in the world today where it is illegal, some of them at pain of death, to convert away from Islam to another religion or to abandon Islam in favor of atheism or anything. There’s at least 16 countries where either in practice or in theory, you can have the death penalty for leaving Islam. There is not a single country on the planet that I’m aware of, there’s not a single jurisdiction within any country on the planet that I’m aware of where it is illegal to convert to Islam. You understand that? on earth where it’s illegal to convert to becoming a Muslim. There’s many places on earth where it’s illegal to convert from Islam to something else. Not only that, but in addition to what the law says, there’s cultural standards as well. So far beyond the countries where it is illegal to become to convert away from Islam, the cultural pressures are so great, and maybe even greater, that makes it nearly impossible to convert away. A country like Turkey would be an example. There’s no law in Turkey that says you cannot convert away from Islam. But if you do, there’s a very good chance you’ll be killed by your family, by your neighbors, something. The government won’t kill you and can’t kill you, But within the culture, that’s nearly a suicidal act to do that. This is in a country that guarantees in their constitution freedom of religion. And this would be the case in many other countries as well. So even those places where it’s not against the law to convert away from Islam, it’s against the culture and that may cost you dearly. Again, by contrast, even in those places where there’s a general level of hostility towards Islam, there are very few places in the world where you stand to be killed if you become a Muslim. There may be a few. Some places in India might be a possibility. But in general terms, there’s very few places where, culturally speaking, you’re likely to be killed by your family or your community if you become a Muslim. So you can see it’s a very different picture, right, between the world of Islam and the world that is outside of Islam. By the way, a lot of times we think in America that the freedoms that come with democracy, and democracy is the answer. In the Muslim world, democracy has been a disaster for minority Christian communities. I don’t know if you realize this. The rise of democracy, or so-called democracy, in the Middle East has been a disaster for Christian communities in particular. There were hundreds of thousands of Christians in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. There are almost none today. Saddam Hussein, bad man, but he had no problem with Christians and actually elevated some of them to the highest positions in his government and ran interference and protection for them. Assad in Syria, bad man, no problem with Christians. That was some of his favorite people was Christians. And once he left, there’s been a slaughter of Christians after he was deposed and sent to exile in Russia. Similarly, Egypt, similar story. I could go on and on with more examples of this. When democracy has come, Usually it has meant pogroms against Christians and whatever remaining Jews might be in these countries as well. The way people have interpreted democracy in these places is that once we have the majority, we can now kick out all the minorities. The best thing for Christians and other religious minorities has been a relatively benevolent dictator or monarch. They have almost always been better at protecting Christian communities than democracy is. So it’s been a very, well, mixed blessing, not a blessing at all. It’s been a curse really for minority Christian populations throughout the Muslim world when so-called democracy has come. Because democracy has never been the goal in the first place. The Prime Minister of Turkey, Erdogan, he’s an Islamist, even though his country is supposed to have freedom of religion and supposed to be a secular country. He has said from the beginning that democracy is like a train. You get off when you reach your stop. In other words, democracy is my way of bringing Islamism into the country. Once we get there, we won’t need democracy anymore. Now, there’s good news for Christians in terms of witness, in terms of Christian witness to Muslims. Muslims are religious. They fear God. They’re monotheists. They’re not relativists. They believe in revelation. They believe in a messiah. They believe in the afterlife. That’s a very good foundation to begin to talk to a Muslim. about the Christian faith. It’s a far stronger foundation than you have to talk to a secular humanist or an atheist or even a sort of mainline American Christian about the faith. Within Islam, you’ve probably heard this before, if you’ve ever studied anything about Islam or anything about Islam, there are essentially five, what they call five pillars of the faith. Okay, there’s five pillars of the faith. I’ll even kind of write them if I can here. One of them is, sort of the basis is a declaration called the Shahada, which means when you actually say the words, there’s only one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. Saying that in sincerity makes you a Muslim. That’s a declaration that says, I am a Muslim. I believe there’s only one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger or his prophet. So that’s the first pillar of the faith. Another one is prayer. five times a day in the direction of Mecca for Sunni Muslims. It’s an obligation to pray, and it’s very ritualistic and predictable in nature, and it’s a community activity. You don’t pray in the comfort of your own home. You go to a mosque, and you pray together in community with other believers, and you’re called to prayer as a community in audible form, so you gather to pray. There’s the giving of alms. This is giving of offerings. Normally, an obligation would be 2.5% of your surplus or of your wealth should be given to the poor specifically. Okay, so the giving of alms is a duty. Another one is fasting, especially during the month of Ramadan in particular. Okay, so there’s a month set aside in the Muslim calendar, and it shifts every year based on the lunar calendar, but a whole month where you’re not supposed to eat and engage in other sorts of activities during daylight hours, and then you can engage in those things in the evening, but that’s for an entire month. And then… what’s known as a Hajj, that’s the pilgrimage to Mecca, and it’s required of every Muslim once in their lifetime, at least if they’re financially and physically capable of doing so, to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. All of these are clearly spelled out in the Quran, spelled out as duties within the Quran for a Muslim to do. Now, Islam is a legalistic faith. I resist the temptation to, in a public setting like this, to kind of throw allegations out against Islam, it’s a death cult, it’s a suicide cult, whatever. No, it’s a false religion. It’s a legalistic false religion. And in fact, it is essentially, Islam is essentially the default religion, if you will, of mankind. It has all of the hallmarks of a man-made religion. Islam is the kind of religion you would make up if you were making up your own religion. The only wrinkle is that it’s monotheistic, okay, which creates problems. If you’re gonna make up your own religion, at least make it polytheistic, okay, because that way it causes less problems. You know, I’ve got my God, you’ve got your God, we can agree to disagree, we can live in peace, you know, we’ve got our local deity, you’ve got your local deities, right? When you make up a religion and then you say there’s only one God, what does that mean? That’s something I have to impose on everybody. So again, if you’re gonna make up your own religion, have the courtesy to make it polytheistic. But what the Muslims did, and this is what has created a lot of problems in our world today, is that they created a man-made false religion, but they made it monotheistic, meaning that it applies to everybody. There is only one God, their God, and this is the God that you must serve. But this is the default religion of man. And let me suggest this to you. Most, or let me say this, most people that I know, most Americans that I know, including people who would call themselves Christians in some way, they’re basically Muslim. Maybe a quarter of you in this room, you’re Muslim, basically. You don’t call yourself that. But that’s what you are. You see, you remember that guy, who was that comedian who used to say you might be a redneck if you, you know, he made a whole comedy career? Jeff Foxworthy. Jeff Foxworthy, right? You might be a redneck if you do whatever, right? Fill in the blank. Whole comedy career on that premise, right? Well, you might be a Muslim if you believe that just sort of encanting some magical words out there makes you once and for all right with God. That’s what Muslims believe. Some Christians believe that, don’t they? What if you believe that participating in some ritual, whether it be baptism, whether it be communion, something, saves you? That’s the sum of your duty to God, is that participating in this ritual makes you right with God. If you believe that, you might be a Muslim. If you believe that God can be paid off with a mandatory offering of some kind, that you’re paying your obligation to God, or that through fasting you’re depriving yourself of something and therefore getting in good with God and helping to guarantee your salvation. That’s not a Christian view, that’s a Muslim view. If you believe that going to a particular place, whether it be a church building where you light a candle, or whether it’s going to visit Jerusalem or Rome, that you can get closer to God by being in a particular place. That’s not a Christian view. That’s a Muslim view. But how many people who call themselves Christians are essentially Muslim? They would agree with all those things. They don’t call themselves Muslim, but that’s essentially the religion that they have adopted. This is where the Christian gospel is so counter-cultural, is so different, is so unlike man-made religion. If you’re making up your own religion, wouldn’t it be good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell? That’s it, right? That seems fair. That’s not what the Bible teaches, does it? You would say, it’s based on your performance. It’s a meritocracy. That’s the religion I would create if I was, you know, meritocracy. Good people who do good things, follow the rules, follow the rituals. They get to go to heaven. People who don’t, go to hell. That’s not what the gospel teaches. The gospel is revolutionary in that regard. But Islam bears all of the fingerprints of a man-made religion. And yet, it’s so much like Now, Muslims will say that they are against idolatry. In fact, they’ll hold this up as their complaint against Christianity and every religion, whereas you guys are idolaters, and we are not. Now, you can’t blame them because for most Muslims, the closest place they might go and visit a church, they’re going to visit one of these churches that’s chock full of idols of Mary and this and that and the other thing. You can’t blame them for, almost like a Buddhist temple, you can’t blame them for coming to the conclusion that Christianity is idolatrous. But what they don’t acknowledge in their own faith is that they’re extremely idolatrous themselves. particularly relating to their obligation to visit a particular place, to walk around a rock, to in essence worship and revere that rock, the belief that God is more there than any place else, that he can be sort of contained in this one place. That’s the very definition of idolatry. It’s funny, they don’t acknowledge it because they say, well look, our mosques don’t have pictures and images, fine. But it’s extremely idolatrous at its heart. Now for Christians, we’re not idolatrous, at least we’re not supposed to be. We’ve been commanded to put away idols and embrace Christ. And yet, do we really do that? Have we purged the idols from our heart? I would suggest to you that we live in a constant battle against idolatry all the time. Our attempts to confine God to a particular space or time, don’t we? We attempt to manipulate him through our religious observances and through our going here and going there. We try to manipulate God, but he won’t be manipulated. But all such attempts, you see, are idolatry. And this is what Muslims would like to say about others who are not Muslims, that they are idolatrous. Now, Because Islam is a legalistic religion, extremely legalistic, there are a bunch of rules that you have to follow. These are but the five most prominent. There’s many rules you have to follow. Anything that’s written in the Quran, you’re obliged to follow it. And so things that we might not think about a lot but are very important to them, for example, There’s such a thing as Islamic finance. Muslims are not allowed to charge interest on money. The whole banking system is based on being able to charge interest. They have workarounds for that. They have workarounds for that, but they’re very insistent on that because the Quran spills a lot of ink on the issue of what they call usury, and usury is any charging of interest. Now again, it’s not one of the five points, but it’s important to them because the Quran is very explicit. about you can’t have usury. You can’t drink alcohol. The Quran is very clear on that. You can’t gamble. It’s unambiguously clear in the Quran. You’re not allowed to engage in those activities. So there’s a whole list of do’s and don’ts within the Quran. One problem that Christians have is that, especially in Christian witness, is that they try to go toe to toe with Muslims on the rules. Well, your religion puts this rule, what about your religion? Well, your religion says this, what about yours? You’re gonna lose in a contest of rules with a Muslim. And here’s why. For Muslims, Islam is a communal phenomenon. It has implications for all of society. So a whole country is Muslim, a whole people is Muslim, and so that’s gonna be reflected in their laws, in their culture. in a way that we as Christians say, well, we certainly hope that’s not the case. We hope that American culture is not, it’s been influenced by Christianity, but certainly has not been overwhelmed by Christianity. And so to try to go toe-to-toe with a Muslim on the rules, you’re going to lose, and you’re going to be humiliated. So for example, say to the Muslim, well, you guys have slaves right into the modern age. And they’ll say, yeah, but you guys let two men marry each other and adopt children into that abominous relationship. Mic drop. There’s no answer for that. You’re right. Well, you guys have multiple wives. Well, yeah, you guys in many of your states, you allow children to be aborted up to the day they’re born. Boom. I can’t argue with that. I can’t think of anything in Islam that you do that’s worse than that. I can’t think of anything. So if you’re going to try to go toe-to-toe with what are the moral rules in your society versus our society, you’re going to lose that debate every time. That’s not the proper way to approach a conversation. And the reason why is that Islam is cultural, whereas Christianity has always been supposed to be countercultural. So the degree to which we sort of tie Christianity to our culture, that’s a losing proposition. They’re committed to it. Islam is our culture and our religion. For Christians, we better not ever say that our American culture, Western culture, is synonymous with Christianity. That’s a losing debate point right there, and it’s not even true, right? So you have to be very, very careful about what we tie things to. We have to help people understand that Christianity is counterculture. Christianity is always a prophetic voice into a corrupt and dying culture. It’s not there to help buttress the culture. is there to be a prophetic voice into it. Yes, have a salubrious influence in that culture, but never to be one and the same with it. Always to be a counter-cultural phenomenon. But Muslims don’t see the world that way, and that’s why it’s important for them to spread Islam. Now, if you associate Islam with a particular ethnic group of people, who do you associate it with? normally. Arabs, right? And while it is true that the majority of Arabs are Muslim, the majority of Muslims are not Arab. Okay, you understand that? The vast majority of Arabs are Muslim. the majority of Muslims are not Arab. In fact, the top six countries in Muslim population are not Arab. And in fact, only two of the top 10 countries in Muslim population are Arab countries, Egypt and Algeria. All the rest, All the rest are non-Arab peoples. Indonesia, the largest. Pakistan, second largest. India, third largest. These are not Arab people. These are different ethnic groups. So Islam has spread beyond its Arab origins to much of the world. And yet, because Islam is cultural, Everywhere Islam goes, it bears the mark of Arab culture with it, specifically of 7th century Arab culture. This is important to understand, and it’s important to understand because Christianity is very different and couldn’t be more different and should be more different. You see, to become a Muslim is to embrace 7th century Arab culture, at least to a certain degree. So the Quran, for example, is supposed to be God’s word, God’s final word, but it’s only the Quran in the original classical Arabic language. Of course, they’ve translated it into every language on earth, but they will always go to great pains to say, this is not the Quran. When it’s in English, it’s not the Quran. When it’s in French, when it’s in Chinese, it’s not the Quran. It’s only the Quran in 7th century Arabic. That is, as it were, God’s language. And to embrace Islam is to, if you really want to get serious, you’ve got to learn the classical language. You’ve got to read it in the original. You have to embrace aspects of Arab culture, Arab dress, and so on and so forth. The reason why this is not simply a cultural phenomenon, but it’s actually a theological point, is that Muslims do not believe that Islam God came to us in the flesh that God can identify with us in any way. You’ve got to meet God entirely on his terms. You’ve got to learn God’s language for crying out loud. He won’t learn yours. You’ve got to embrace God’s culture. He will not embrace yours. Now listen, how different is the Christian message? that God loved us so much that he didn’t say, you have to try to reach somehow for the heavens and find me. He didn’t even say you have to meet me halfway. He said, in Jesus Christ, come all the way to you and your culture and your idiom and your language i’m going to suffer all the indignities that it means to be a human being i’m going to do it for you so i can have a relationship with you what a beautiful message that is that muslims have no conception of that god is up there he’s distant he is aloof I have to try to do something to catch his attention. I’ve got to make a sacrifice. I’ve got to fast. I’ve got to go visit a holy place. I’ve got to pray. I’ve got to do something to catch his attention. And maybe, just maybe, he will allow me to be with him someday in a far-off place. But the Christian message is Jesus Christ came all the way to be with us. No other religion in the world teaches any such thing. It’s foolishness to the Greeks, isn’t it? It’s foolishness to the world. It’s foolishness to Muslims. But if and when they understand that point, how it transforms their whole understanding of who God is. So different from the God they worship. A lot of people are hung up on the question. There’s internet debates on this. Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? I can see a point for both of them. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is, what do you say about this God? What do you know about the character of this God? It doesn’t matter what name you give him. The important point is, what do you say about God? And they believe that God is distant, aloof, He is a judge. Yes, he shows mercy occasionally to whom he wants to show mercy to. But it’s a God who, from time to time, overlooks sin when it pleases him and ultimately gives you no way of getting out of your sin. It leaves your sin problem unaddressed. The God of the Bible, however, came to us in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, not ignoring our sin, but paying for our sin. Not overlooking sin, but actually paying for it. See, this is a feature of all false religion is that it doesn’t take God’s holiness seriously enough. And it doesn’t deal with our sin problem. And this is exactly the problem with Islam. Doesn’t really take God’s, as much as they talk about it, doesn’t take God’s holiness seriously enough. He winks at sin from time to time. And it leaves our sin problem completely unaddressed. But God in Christ and only through Christ was he able to deal with our sin problem once and for all and still preserve his perfect holiness. Isn’t that a wonderful, isn’t that a wonderful picture? Isn’t that the unique picture of the Christian faith? So as I said in the beginning, Islam has always spread by conquest and by immigration. There’s very little in the way of free will conversion. There is some, and in modern times there’s certainly some, but it hasn’t been a strong feature of Islam. In the very beginning, Muslims took over places. I mentioned Medina, they did this other places as well. They came in as immigrants and ended up taking over the place. How did they do this? Well, the same playbook is happening today, and I don’t wanna spend too much time getting into the political. This is our Sunday school class after all, but it’s worth mentioning a little bit about the political, because it has some implications for the theological. So you can see a predictable pattern for Muslim takeover of areas, and it’s quite fascinating. You might think, well, you know, Muslims get into an area, and once they reach 51%, they take over the place. No, no, no. It happens far, far earlier than that. So at about 5% of the population, which is not a lot, especially a generation or so into a higher birth rate in places like Europe, at about 5% of the population, Muslims begin to demand exceptions, carve-outs, acknowledgement of their culture in various demonstrable ways within the culture. Once they achieve about 10% of the population, they feel like they can begin to really throw their weight around, particularly when they’re stepping into a religious or moral vacuum. okay so at about 10% they can begin begin to demand equality for themselves all right so we demand equality with everybody else and then at only about 20% of the population they can begin to demand superiority within a population okay so it goes from Can my child bring a halal meal to school? Sure. At 10%, we demand halal meals in the schools as an option. By 20%, we demand it be only halal food in our schools anymore. We don’t care what anybody else says. At 5%, we’d like some time off for our prayers or time off for our fasting. At 10%, it becomes more of a demand for this, or we begin to get vocal. At 20%, we might demand in our neighborhood that nobody eat during Ramadan, Christian, Jew, Hindu, or otherwise. Now, why is this the case? Why is this the case? Why don’t you need to get 50%? Well, the 20% threshold is there because you don’t need 50%. You need to get above the threshold. You need to have more people than the number of people who are willing to push back from the other side. And in most populations, that’s never more than 20% of people who are willing to fight back. And especially now, and this has gone lower and lower as time has gone by. In medieval Europe, they would have pushed back. In modern Europe, they don’t push back anymore. So you maybe even need less than 20% now to really begin to get your way. And we see this happening all the time. And places that are specifically vulnerable to Islamic immigration and Islamic takeover are places with broken families. These are places where single parenthood is the norm rather than the exception. In places where mothers are in charge and not fathers. In places that have become de facto matriarchies. So urban centers in America, much of Northern Europe can be described this way. Because they have large, father-led, two-parent families. And so the single parent matriarchies are no match for two parent patriarchal Islamic family organization. They’re no match for them. And so they’re easily, they get easily overrun. One example of this is in the 20 aughts and 20 teens, there were gangs of rapists in central England, Muslim gangs of rapists in central England, that raped thousands of women, thousands of women. And this was largely kept a secret. Where were the fathers? Where were the fathers? Well, I’ll tell you, there was mostly single parent families, so there was no father. Fathers who were incarcerated or drunk. Fathers who were so steeped in the rhetoric about Islamophobia they were afraid to say anything. Imagine their daughters being raped and they’re afraid to say anything for fear of being perceived as a racist. So thousands and thousands of women helplessly preyed upon, nobody there to protect them. So many of these places in Europe, and we see this in places in America as well, have rendered themselves almost helpless to the onslaught of a very confident Islam. There aren’t the men there to stick up for their families and their women. There isn’t male leadership to stave it off. We see this in Europe, let’s be honest, we see this in Europe. It’s become a matriarchy where even the men leaders really behave like women for the most part and their virtues are womenly, feminine rather than masculine. And so, once again, they’re no match for confident Islam moving into the area and beginning to make demands. And you see, what’s interesting is when you see politically what has happened is the, and this has been very clever, there’s a doctrine within Islam called taqiyya, which means deception. And it’s even in the Quran itself. And it’s permitted for a Muslim to deploy deception in service of the greater good, in service of a greater cause. By the way, this is an imitation of Allah himself, who is a deceiver. One of the attributes of Allah is he is a deceiver. So you can’t count on him to tell the truth. He may tell a lie in the service of the greater spread of the faith and so on. So you’re allowed to lie and deceive in the spread of the faith. Now, one of the ways this plays itself out is one thing you’ll notice in America, and this is the same way through most of Europe, is that Muslim candidates for office always present themselves as liberals, as liberal on social matters. They’re always pro-LGBTQ, they’re pro-abortion, they’re pro all of the slate of these things, which are very much against Islamic values. But the ones who have maybe come to their senses or have kind of revealed, said the quiet part out loud or whatever, if you will, have basically said, yeah, this is part of the deception program. We know we can’t get into the conservative parties of these and make a difference. So we’ve gone into the liberal parties and make an impact. But once we get in there, then we’re gonna change things up. We’re gonna flip the script. And by the way, this is happening in places where the numbers are larger. So for example, a city like Luton in England, which is maybe 60% Muslim or something now, they were kind of voted into office and brought in by sort of white English liberals, including the homosexual lobby and so on. Now they’ve said, look, we’re not having any gay bars or anything in Luton anymore. We’re closing all that stuff down in the name of Islam. So, okay, I mean, I’m okay with that, but I mean, they’re making other demands as well, saying, look, this is now an Islamic city, so we get to make the rules anymore, and these rules are not necessarily the liberal platform that we came to power on or were invited in on. So this is an exercise, you might say, in deception, right? This idea, and the reason it’s just helpful to know this in terms of how Islam spreads, at 5% we want consideration, at 10% we want equality, at 20% we want supremacy. And they’ve been able to actually make that work because they’ve had people who are not willing to stand in their way. One of the problems that we see in the political realm is that we’re highly influenced by the reportage on these things, by the media. And one thing that’s invariably true in the Western world, in America, Western Europe, and so on, is that there’s almost nobody left in the media who takes religion seriously. This is a problem that’s underestimated, but there’s almost nobody in the main media, your BBCs, your NBC News, whatever, Figaro newspaper, USA Today, and so on. In your main media outlets, they don’t have anybody who’s a Christian believer of any kind, and they don’t take seriously religious motivation. So they look at the world from a Marxist view, which is all kind of power dynamics, They don’t take seriously when Muslims say, we want to come and impose our religious values. They think, well, this is a stand-in for economic demands, right? This is a social issue. This is, no. You need to take people seriously when they tell you what their religious beliefs are and what the consequences of those beliefs are gonna be. But there’s almost nobody left in the media who takes those things seriously anymore, so it’s always reported as something else. There’s always something else going on. You can’t really believe that a Messiah is coming. You can’t really believe, Iran, that there’s a 12th hidden imam that’s going to come someday as a messianic figure and take over the world. That can’t possibly be the reason why you intend to nuke Israel, for example. Well, it is. I can assure you that’s the reason. That’s the main reason. There may be some who have a different agenda, but the media, they can’t possibly conceive of religious belief in that way. So they don’t report it or they tend to not take it seriously. So I say this not to scare you or to alarm you. I guess the point I would want to leave with you about Islam is this. that if we don’t want to see our nation become Muslim, and I think it’s a very real threat, not real soon, but it could, and certainly we see this trend happening in Western Europe, the ultimate answers are not political ones. They really aren’t. They’re not military solutions. Those things will sort of happen. The answer is a religious revival in our land. where Christians recommit themselves to Jesus Christ, recommit themselves to bold witness for Christ. Not throwing people out, not going back, you know, not beheading people, not military attacks. It’s about proclaiming fearlessly the gospel of Jesus Christ and living our lives in light of that gospel. That’s the only way forward. And that’s the only way that we actually not only save our country, but bless the nations as well. So that’s why, as I mentioned, for those of you here last week, that’s why we’re being proactive in taking the gospel to Oasis, as we’ll call it, since this is being recorded. We’re taking the gospel to Oasis because we’re being proactive. We want to see the gospel go to a place where it’s rarely been heard and where we can have an impact on the lives of Muslims. We’re not there to kill them. We’re there, on the contrary, to give them the words of life. And ultimately, that’s got to be the answer, is that we’re aggressively taking the gospel forward so that people can believe in Jesus and have life in his name. So I’ll be happy to answer any questions or thoughts or comments. Once a Muslim becomes a Christian, what happens to ensure that safety… That’s a country by country decision. So the question was, when a person in a Muslim country becomes a Christian, what’s done to ensure their safety, right? So there are, it’s a case by case situation. So let’s say, for example, if you’re in Turkey and you become a Christian, The law can’t touch you in terms of they can’t kill you or even imprison you for any period of time. They can harass you and make life difficult. If your family is not gonna kill you, you’re probably gonna survive it. You may be outcast, you may lose your job, you may lose relationships, you can probably survive it. In a country like Sudan, on the other hand, where, at least in theory, there is death penalty for becoming a Christian, and if the government doesn’t get at you or kill you, there’s a good chance your family will or your village might. In those kind of situations, you might need to flee the country if you’re going to survive. And that would be similar in places of Somalia, some places in Afghanistan. There aren’t that many places where you absolutely, when you become a Christian, have to flee for your life, but there are certainly some. And again, it’s a case-by-case situation. What’s your family like? Are they fanatic Muslims or not? That kind of thing. And so some mission organizations, some who are doing evangelism, they already kind of have, as it were, a kind of underground railroad for Christians out of the country. Now, there is a danger in this being the norm, and that is that it’s very easy for a person to claim to be a Christian just so that they can get asylum in the U.S., right, or asylum in a Western country. So it’s an easy escape mode for people. So you have to be very careful about how that’s deployed. But certainly there are places where, still today there are some places where it’s nearly impossible to be a, you know, kind of out-of-the-closet Christian if you were once a Muslim, right? it’s very hard. If you’ve lived in a traditional Christian community, that’s one thing. But if you’re known to be a convert from Islam to Christianity, there’s some place in the world where you’re not going to survive. You’re not going to survive that. Talking about dealing with sin, what’s the end point of Islam? It’s not going to be a perfect, sinless world. Well, no, so they do believe in a paradise, a very sensual paradise, you know, especially for men, it seems to be a good deal, you know, or that kind of thing. But it’s, so they do believe that you can enjoy the pleasures of an afterlife, a place with, it’s almost described as, actually very much described as kind of a Garden of Eden a recomposition of the Garden of Eden in paradise. So there’d be gardens, there’s rivers flowing through it and so on. Milk and honey, again, sensuous. So there is that promise held out for those who follow the rules, do what’s right. Muslims are very hesitant because the Quran makes this clear. I’ve never had a Muslim tell me for sure I’m going to heaven. with certainty. I’ve had some say, I really hope so. I’ve tried to follow the rules. But as a Muslim, you’re not supposed to ever say, you know, my ticket is punched for heaven. I’ve got to continue. I’ve got to finish well. I’ve got to continue doing the rules. And, you know, it says in the Quran, if you follow the rules and stuff, you will be, you know, Allah will forgive your sins and allow you into paradise. Right, but again, like any legalistic religion, it’s kind of like, have I done enough? Has my good outweighed the bad? I mean, they would literally use a kind of scale analogy. Has my good outweighed my bad? If so, probably I stand a good chance of it. of being in with Allah. But again, the sin problem hasn’t been dealt with in Islam. That’s the problem. It hasn’t been atoned for. It hasn’t been dealt with. So you’re really on your own to try to reckon with your own sin by just trying to do enough good and hope that God will even turn a blind eye to some of your sins, especially if it’s any of the big ones. So it’s problematic, for sure. Sorry? Sorry? They believe there’s hell too, yeah, absolutely. That’s all written throughout the Quran, that there is hell. And they believe it’s a place of constant torment and eternal punishment for the disbeliever. Now, the… The cardinal sin, the one that guarantees you you’re going to go to hell, no passing go, no collecting $200, is if you associate with God a companion or a partner, namely a son. You can be forgiven if you repent of that. But if you maintain on your dying day that Jesus was the Son of God, yeah, there’s no doubt about that you’re going to hell. There’s no other option. Other sins, you know, if you’ve been drinking alcohol, well, maybe he can overlook that. If you didn’t make it to Mecca, there may be some things he can overlook. That one he cannot. James talked about it last week called shirk. That one can’t be overlooked. That one has to be repented of, for sure. What about revival? I mean, we don’t have any grams anymore. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, so she said, what about revival? What do we do about revival in our land? I mean, that’s a good question. We don’t have the same kind of revival strategies or not as powerful as they once were, but we have to take into account, you know, we now have social media. That’s an important one. A lot of people see signs of revival in our land. Almost every conservative denomination has seen an uptick in church attendance over the last three years or so, like kind of post-COVID. So there’s some promising signs. Even in the UK, which is kind of dead as a doornail, church attendance among people between 18 and 30 or 35, I can’t remember, which has gone up 400% in the last 10 years. Amazing, you know, from like 4% to 16%. So, you know, promising signs of revival here and there, but we need to definitely fan those flames because, and I think, you know, in some cases, cultures have to sort of bottom out a little bit before they come to their senses, right? Kind of like the prodigal son, he had to be reduced to eating what the pigs ate before he’d actually come to his senses and go back. I think for some, we’re starting to see that rock bottom now. Real hopelessness Where do we go from here? The promises that liberalism and atheism offered us aren’t delivering the goods for us, so where else can we search for meaning? And of course, that’s where we as Christians have to be there present. We have to be present in the workplace. We have to be present in the classroom. square we have to be president politic you know everywhere christians need to be there because we’re the ones who have those answers to offer and what’s encouraging is that in some in some muslim countries now one that we talked about last week for example uh in some muslim countries uh you know they they’ve they’ve started to abandon islam you know they don’t believe it anymore but what’s going to fill the vacuum the vacuum you know and and there’s a couple of choices what we hope is that the christian faith the christian message the gospel fills the vacuum but other things can as well you know seeking the pleasures and alcohol and drugs and you know entertainment and pornography all those things can try to fill the gap right and things that well well let’s try that and see if that is a road to to pleasure or fulfillment uh for us and you know i i hope not but it may be that you have to kind of go through that valley before you realize no there’s no there’s no green grass on that side of the fence either and uh you know throw yourself on the mercy of christ so that that’s the hope is that we can be there present when people are asking those questions yeah and by the way Isn’t this the case when it comes to personal evangelism? You may have a friend or family member who has for years resisted Christ. Maybe you’ve had the conversation with him and so on. And it may just be that they have to come to a place in their life where they kind of hit bottom. There has to be a crisis. Things are going a little too well right now. I don’t need Christ. I’ve got a job. I’ve got a pretty good marriage. I’ve got my health. Things are clicking for me. What do I need Christ for? Are you going to be there for them, though, when the divorce happens, when their job is ruined and they don’t know where to turn? They’re addicted, whatever it is. They might listen then, right? But are you going to still be with them? Are you still going to be engaged in their life when those questions arise?