A few days ago, our all female team was walking house to house with the pastor that we are working with this month. After visiting two homes, we saw four men. The pastor told us that they were Muslim University students at the local Muslim University (the only one in Tanzania happens to be in Morogoro). We approached them and started to talk about our respective faiths and our holy books. As we continued, our friendly discussion started attracting more and more students. Some of my teammates were able to talk to some of the students one-on-one while the group was debating. By the end of our talk, there were more than thirty-five Muslim University students.
A Muslim man named Jesus (very ironic, I know) started being the primarily contributor for their side. This Muslim man Jesus misused the Bible by taking verses out of context. I admit that I personally became offended and raised my voice more than once because of how and what he said. (I have since had to apologize and ask for forgiveness to my teammates, God, and to this man about my tone.)
As we debated though, I learned a lot more about Islam. We also discussed the similarities and differences of our religions. I had already known that the first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) of our Holy Bible and theirs is the same. I did not know that they believed in the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
Because we needed to spend time doing other evangelism, we had to cut our talk short. So we arranged for a debate to take place on Saturday morning (earlier today). We invited them to come and talk about two topics. We decided on two topics for both sides to discuss: the legitimacy of scripture and the religion of Jesus.
We decided that we should have a moderator so both sides could have a time limit to present their cases. Because we have other WR teams (Dustin Suttle, Brooks Elliot, and Allan Boehm) from our squad in or around Morogoro, we invited them to join us for this debate. All of Dustin’s team and part of Brooks’ and Allan’s teams joined us. We were moderated by Brooks which gave an equal amount of time to both sides. Both sides were able to present their points of view. As we continued, we knew that both sides felt strongly about their faith. We both wanted the other side to convert to our religion. We had the opportunity to speak to somewhere around seventy or eighty Muslim people.
As the Muslim brother Jesus presented his points with scripture, he again would take verses out of context or only read part of the verse. It made me think of the false prophets. 2 Peter 2:1 says “But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them…” 1 Timothy 1:3-7 states “stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. These promote controversies rather than God’s work- which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Some have wandered away from these and turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.”
As we finished our debate, our closing argument focused on the four gospels. One of our men asked how many of the Muslims had read our Holy Bible. The only ones who had were the three presenting for their side. Our men then begged them to pray about understanding and then to read the four gospels. They finished the talk by talking about how we love them because God is love. That was why he sent his Son Jesus to be the sacrifice for our sins.
2 Corinthians 10:3-5 declares “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
