Strategy III

A few years ago, I became fascinated with the idea of a pressure cooker.  It’s something I never used in Egypt as I have always enjoyed cooking and letting cooking run its course.  I didn’t know that there was a rice cooker that you put the ingredients in and it cooks by itself.  The idea is less effort, less time.

In evangelizing Muslims, it’s the other way around.  You have to forget about instant coffee and instant tea.  No microwave mindset.  To work on the mind of a Muslim it’s slow heat in the same way you would cook rice.  It can be done in a rice cooker, but nothing is like taking your time . . . enjoying the process of cooking.

Looking at what’s happening in Iran and the pressure cooker explosive events over forcing women to wear the veil, the hijab.  It shows that religious beliefs fail when enforced.  Force is being applied to establish supposed morality.  Saudi Arabia has always had the morality police.  Recently I have come to see in the news Iranian women dressed all in black.  You can only see eyes glaring when this ‘morality’ is enforced on women.  In oppressed societies, where the devil is roaming around and having a heyday, it is women who are the supposed source of sin.  To deal with sin they suppress and mutilate women.  Women and non-Muslim minorities always take the brunt of their simmering anger.

There has to be liberation.  People may revolt.  (It’s good that they oppose injustice.)  But the greatest need is for a revolution in hearts . . . hearts that rebel against darkness.  It has been night for too long.  

We always rejoice when we attend Iranian Spirit-filled churches . . . to be in the house of God where they mean business.  They never forget that they had to pay a very dear price in order to gather together for prayer and Bible study.  There’s freshness about their faith as opposed to when Christians in some traditional churches are just going about the motions and it’s nothing more than a ritual.  One Iranian convert, Hassan Dahqani, said that what moved his spirit deeply to convert was attending a prayer meeting and seeing how people talked to God.  Their warmth and geniality got ahold of his heart.  The Spirit does His work, but we ourselves have to be fervent in the Spirit.  It’s such a contagious faith that makes the gospel irresistible and joyfully received.
 
Timothy Abraham