This story was sourced by R & M, Multiply workers in Europe who serve with StoryChannel (storychannel.tv), a media ministry to reach Berber-speaking people groups across North Africa (multiply.net/storychannel).
My name is Ghaith and I’m from Tunisia, North Africa.
When I graduated from high school, I went to university, and it was a new beginning for me. On our campus, there were a lot of concerts at the start of the year, with a lot of foreign bands singing and dancing. For young university students, it was wonderful and exciting.
One of the bands was from North America and, although we didn’t realize it at first, they were singing songs of worship to Jesus. We didn’t mind because we just liked the melodies.
When the concert ended, we met with one of the band members. His name was Nate. We discussed a lot of issues with him about the differences between our cultures, our countries, and our religions. Afterward, we exchanged contact information and we kept in touch, even after Nate returned to North America.
My email conversations with Nate often came back to the differences between Christianity and Islam. I had always respected other religions like Judaism and Christianity, but I knew almost nothing about them. I believed that there was something good in them, something from God, but I had also heard that they had been corrupted over time. I wondered how that had happened, and even why God would allow it.
However, I never had the opportunity to meet a Jew or a Christian, so that I could talk about these things. Until I met Nate.
Nate showed me passages from the Bible that I had never seen or heard. They described a religion that was so different to what I had experienced in Islam. In our traditions, in order to communicate with God, you had to clean your hands, wash your face and your feet, which wasn’t really something spiritual. You needed to repeat these same movements, the same rituals, bowing down and reciting prayers from the Qur’an. But it didn’t feel like a relationship with God, at least not an intimate one.
From Nate, I learned that Christianity was different, very different from Islam. With Christianity, there is a spiritual relationship with God. It is not about cleaning your hands or washing your face. It is not about how many times you pray or how you bow down. You may do all these things, but if your heart is not clean, then the traditions are worthless. In fact, Christianity is not about religion, it is about relationship with God the Father, and he is the God of love. There is no doubt about this in the Holy Bible. You wouldn’t find anything like that in the Qur’an. It is a totally different message in the Bible, a beautiful message that we never heard in Islam.
When I heard these things from Nate, I felt things in my heart for the first time. The Word of God had a special influence on me. It touched me. I felt Jesus knock on the door of my heart. However, I did not respond right away. In fact, it took me a long time. But after five years of looking for the truth, I finally decided to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
It was the best decision I ever made in my life. Immediately, I was different. I felt peace and I felt comfortable within myself. No pain and no stress. Nothing. It was total comfort.
The biggest thing for me was the unconditional love of God. There was no limit to how I could communicate with him. He was my Father in heaven and I was his child. I was no longer an unworthy slave, with no dignity. God did not create us to be his slaves. He does not need our worship. He doesn’t need anything from us. We need him, and so he came for us in the flesh, and he died for our sins on the cross, and then he rose from the dead.
I would love to recommend that all followers of Jesus show the love of God to Muslims. Give them a Bible. Be their friends. Just hang out with them, share a coffee, talk, debate, laugh together. Play video games, listen to music together, anything that would be helpful and relevant to them, to help them understand that Christians are not the enemy. Many Muslims have the wrong idea about Christians. They think we will not accept them. So, our mission is to show them love. That is our responsibility. Muslims just need to know about Jesus. So many of them are thirsty. They sincerely want to know God. We need to show them the Word of God and show them the love of God.
That is our mission as the ambassadors of Jesus Christ, and that is what we must do. It is our duty of love.
