Sharing Christ with a Muslim in two simple lessons
Often we dive in and learn a boatload about the Koran and the beliefs of the Muslims around the world but when it comes to sitting down and sharing the message of hope with an honest, seeking Muslim we are not sure where to start. After all, it is a big book!
Here is one idea. I am writing this as if I am talking to a Muslim. The parentheses are to you. There are only two lessons here for a number of reasons.
-First, to cover the whole Bible from Adam to Jesus will be too much to take in at one time. Attention will be lost and the Spirit won’t have a chance to convict the hearer of the important foundational truths of the Word.
-Second, it will give you an excuse to test their sincerity by meeting a second time.
-Third, the gospel is arrived at fairly quickly, two meetings, in order to begin answering their subsequent questions.
-Forthly, two lessons are easy for any Christian to memorize and teach. Some series go for 10 lessons or more. Most can’t remember or concentrate for that long.
Lesson 1
Will we go to paradise (Jenna) when we die?
THE PROPHET ADAM
Point 1: Gen 1:26-28 GOD’S CREATION
God made Man and loved his creation
Point 2: Gen 2:15-17 GOD’S COMMANDMENT
God gave the ONLY commandment: don’t eat of this tree
Point 3: Gen 3:1 ALL MEN ARE TEMPTED TO SIN
Satan (Iblis) tempted Eve (Howa) to sin
Point 4: Gen 3:6-7 ALL MEN ARE SINNERS
The Prophet Adam sinned against God
Point 5: Gen 3:23-24 SIN EXCLUDES US ALL FROM PARADISE
That ONE Sin got Adam kicked out of paradise
Point 6: Gen 3:14-15 BUT GOD PROMISED HOPE
God promised Satan that the seed of the woman would defeat him forever. That is our only hope: that seed of the woman would kill
To understand Christ and the reason he had to come to earth to die for our sins, you will have to first get an understanding of God from the very beginning (Muslims believe in all the prophets but have much of their stories wrong. To start at the beginning is to begin to correct all the wrong perversions of the stories from the first).
In Genesis 1 the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth. On the sixth day he created man and saw that everything was good. The Bible says that God created man in his image. He created man with a spirit (Muslims believe that man has an eternal spirit. They don’t have the concept of a living or dead spirit. Here you can establish the existence of a living spirit with in them personally).
To make that spirit live within man, God breathed his own breathe in Adam. God created Adam and Eve to have a personal relationship with them (Islam has no idea of a personal relationship with God. Since God created us to need a relationship with him, this will begin to meet that need.)
There was no sin in the garden. Everything was perfect.
God only made one rule: don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Many Muslims believe that in order to get to heaven you must obey God. To establish this command is important.)
God only made one punishment: In the day that you eat of that tree you will die. (You must lay the ground work well, that one sin brings death. Not the common Muslim idea that the books kept in heaven must tilt in your favor.)
In Chapter 3 Satan enters the picture. He takes his first steps to trick man with this lie: in the day that you eat, you will not die! After Adam and Eve had both sinned against God by eating of the tree, God came looking for them as he always did in the garden. But they had hid themselves in shame. The judgment for their sin was death. Their relationship with God was broken. (Your Muslim friend needs to understand that he has a personal spirit that has been seperated from God. The Muslims think in groups. However, the spirit is in an individual and he must make an individual decision to accept or reject God’s Word.)
Their spirit that had been made to live by the breath of God was dead on the moment of sin. Their bodies would soon follow in death. God kicked them out of Jenna.
God, however, loved the man and woman so much that from the very beginning God provided a way to take away their sin (Islam does not teach that God loves man). God killed a sheep, his own creation. (The major reason that Muslims cannot understand that Christ would have died is because Christ was God’s prophet in their book. Christ to us is God’s Son. “How could God let his Son die?” This can be understood by seeing how God killed his own creation first because of his love for man.)
He took the skin of that sheep and covered the shame of sin of the man: his nakedness. He even made a promise to Satan. Though Satan had conquered the spirit of man with Sin, God would send the seed of the woman to bruise the head of Satan. From Adam, the first man and prophet, the command was given to yearly sacrifice the blood of a sheep. (The Muslims have a yearly festival called the “Aid el-kabir”. They kill a lamb per family just like the Jews did. Another thing that Mohammed borrowed from the Jews. Some Moroccan berber tribes even take the blood and put it on their door just like the Jewish Passover Feast. They don’t believe that this lamb is a sacrifice for sin. They can see however in the OT how every sacrifice of a lamb was for the covering of sin.) The death of that sacrifice would cover the sin of the man as they waited for the promise that God had told them would come: the seed of man who would bruise Satan’s head.
Lesson 2
THE PROPHET ISAIAH
(Muslims have never heard of Isaiah (Ishaiah) since he is not in the Quran)
-Written more than 600 years before the Injeel was written
In Isaiah 53 the prophet gives us further details about who this seed of the woman would be. He would be bruised for our iniquities. He would be taken to his death silently as a sheep goes to the sheerer. He would forever take our sin from us. (A crucial truth that will lead to the conversion of a Muslim is when they realize all the prophesies that Christ fulfilled. The more the better.)
It only take one sin to deserve death. God cannot forgive that sin in your life because that sin caused the death of your spirit. The only thing that can make your spirit live again is to transfer your sin onto someone else.
John chapter 3 brings all of this foundational teaching about God, the judgment of sin, the death of the spirit, etc into the life of Christ. The major points to hit in this session are:
Point 1: John 3:3 Every man must be born again in the spirit because his Spirit is dead to God.
Point 2: John 1:12 The new birth creates a new man with a new family: the family of God.
Point 3: John 1:14 Jesus, the Word of God, came as God’s final sacrificial lamb who would defeat Satan and the power of death with his resurrection.