We’ve spent the last few weeks delving deeply into the awe-inspiring faith of Mary. We now turn our hearts toward her place, her chosen destination. The Bible explicitly teaches God’s design for life in community. We are not meant to be alone nor to do life on our own. There’s no sense in denying it: we are simply better together!
This week our Advent story finds us right in the middle of Mary’s stunning revelation from the angel: she has found favor with God! What a wondrous thought! Don’t we all long for this?
God loves women. He loves Christian women. He equally loves Muslim women. God loves all women. Women matter to God. In a day and age where not every culture or country celebrates this fact, we need to hear this truth again straight from the Word of God. Never doubt for a moment that women matter to God.
This interactive 2-hour workshop will invite Christian women into the wonderful privilege of sharing life in Christ with Muslim women by addressing commonly-held fears and misperceptions that have for centuries kept us apart. We’ll learn how the separate origins of Islam and Muslim women make the women more like us than we think. God’s strategies make us neighbors, so that we can engage. We get to do this!
She leaned across the table and pierced my eyes and my heart with her words: “I am sitting here with my hijab. You are there with your blonde hair. And yet we can talk like this.”
Many Christian women would agree that we need to pray more for Muslim women, but most of us don’t know enough about them to pray effectively. Informed intercessions are key to moving God’s heart for them. They are also key to growing our love for Muslim women. The more effectively we pray, the more we yearn to live our lives with them and personally love them like Jesus does.
Prayer-walking is a specific kind of intercession that takes us to specially targeted neighborhoods, schools and work districts to pray for and with people who need Jesus—right where they live. It’s on-location intercession. We call it prayer-walking, but it might mean that we push a stroller, casually jog, ride in a car, or perhaps even take public transportation to facilitate purposeful prayer for the community we serve. Once we get started, we’ll realize that there are many ways to be very present and fervently prayerful at the same time. We can adapt our “walks” to our goals.
If we are able to see the Muslim women in our communities through Jesus’ eyes, we might have a better sense of why we get to see them at all! From the beginning of time, God planned that He would always, until the end of time, be seeking and saving the lost. (Luke 19:10) More than a full tenth of all the world’s people are Muslim women, most who have never once heard adequately about Jesus.
Magda’s story will challenge your faith and deepen your desire to intercede for women like her, whose commitment to faith in Christ costs her daily.
