CHINESE WHISPERS
10 minutes
Split your young people into groups, stand them in lines and whisper the same message into the ear of the first person. Pick a message that can be easily distorted. Get your young people to pass the message along the line by whispering (no repeats allowed!). Initiate distractions such as loud music, shouting random words or squirting water. When the whisper has got half way, ban whispers and ask the young people to carry on the message through body language alone. Get the last person in each line to shout their version of the message. Hopefully it will be totally different from the start!
Say: By the time information gets to us, it’s often been distorted. How many of you know for certain what other religions believe? Have you asked a Muslim friend about Islam?
ARE ALL RELIGIONS THE SAME?
5 minutes
Many people think that all major religions are equally valid because they basically teach the same thing. Let’s look at the nature of God to examine whether their teachings are the same. How do they answer the question ‘who is God’? Religions generally fall under three main categories:
Pantheism: pan = ‘all’, ‘theos’ = God. In religions such as Buddhism, the basic idea is that all is God and God is all. We all are part of an ‘ultimate reality’, which is ‘God’.
Polytheism: poly = many. Hindus believe there are about 330 million deities in this world that are visible personifications of an invisible reality. These deities are to help us be part of ‘God’. Hindus have figures of these deities to worship.
Monotheism: mono = one. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam believe that there is one God.
The major religions have different views about who God is. They also have different answers for questions such as ‘who am I’, ‘what is sin?’, ‘how am I saved?’ and ‘what happens when I die?’
DO MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS BELIEVE IN THE SAME GOD?
5 minutes
Though Islam and Christianity all believe in the concept of one God, they drastically differ about who this one God is.
Islam: Islam teaches that God is one and his name is Allah. Allah has absolute authority – everything in this world is pre-destined and determined by him. Allah cannot have any association whatsoever with humanity. Muslims deny the very thought of Allah revealing himself in human form.
Christianity: God is one, eternal, exists in tri-unity and his name is Yahweh. Christians believe that God, who is the creator, is love and that he revealed himself in human form in Jesus Christ so that we can personally connect with him. There is already a close relationship of love within the Trinity and we are invited to be a part of that.
KEY POINT 1
Islamic and Christian understandings of God are contradictory. God either revealed himself in Jesus Christ, or he did not.
LOVE AND GOOD WORKS
15 minutes
Discuss what religions have in common (all speak of a spiritual reality, have moral codes, believe in being compassionate and helping the poor). Doing good works is common among religions. However these are surface-level similarities. If we explore why each religion believes in loving or doing good works then we find striking differences, especially between Christianity and Islam.
In Islam, we hope that our good works and obedience to the five pillars of Islam will please Allah enough that he may grant us paradise. However, salvation is still not guaranteed because Allah is unpredictable: even if our good works outweigh our bad, salvation is still ultimately up to Allah and he can choose to overlook our good works and send us to hell, perhaps like a mean immigration officer. Watch the Come fly with me clip here.
Ask: Can you be sure that you are forgiven? Can you know that you are going to heaven? Read Titus 3:3-7 and discuss what the cross means for us.
KEY POINT 2
If we believe Allah to be the true God, then our obedience to Islamic practices and good works are a requirement to please God even though our salvation is uncertain. In Christianity, we can be sure of our salvation because it has nothing to do with us.
GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOD?
15 minutes
Every religion sees murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, and false testimony as wrong. They give tips to avoid these behaviours and promote good works. However they seem to dismiss the role of the heart, where our intentions are manufactured. Read Matthew 15: 19-20 and say: Jesus Christ diagnosed the real flaw in humankind. He pointed out that our actions don’t make us good or bad in God’s eyes. He knows that we are helpless at changing our own hearts. That’s why he himself decided to help us transform our hearts by extending the invitation saying, ‘Come to me I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28). This call of God’s love without any requirement makes Christianity ‘good news’.
Watch the Nabeel Qureshi clip here. Nabeel was once a devout Muslim but when he heard some of the evidence surrounding the Bible and the resurrection and encountered Jesus Christ for himself, he accepted Jesus’ offer to ‘come’.
KEY POINT 3
The uniqueness of Christianity is that Jesus Christ not only diagnoses the problem of our human heart, but also fixes our condition without any payment required from us.
CLOSE
5 minutes
If Allah is the only true God, he is a distant god; one that cannot understandwhatwearegoingthrough. If Allah is the only true God, we cannot be sure of our salvation; we would live in constant fear of hell. Thankfully, through the death of Jesus, we see a God who intimately experienced every human emotion and who, more importantly, assures us of our place in heaven.
Allan Varghese grew up in India and studied evangelism and apologetics at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics
