Today’s Broadcast

You can be right, but wrong in how you say it!

You can be delivering truth, but if you are not saying it in love, then you are wrong.  I love the phrase that I was taught in my youth, “You are seldom persuasive, if you are abrasive.”

If your mission is to offend and spew out your hurt and hate about Islam, then you will do what Reuben Israel did last Friday.  However, doing so will  cause many Muslims in the US to never give Christians a voice to communicate the gospel to them.  It will drive them to be resolved to hate Christians and Christianity.  Many of the Muslims that were throwing water bottles, crates, and eggs at these ‘Christians’ were just 10 or 11 years old.  These children were being threatened and provoked by those who called themselves ‘Christians’.  This is not the image we want to show as true Christians.

You may be interested to know that I have a Christian critic who says that I am as much to blame and equally offensive to Muslims because I speak the truth to them.  He would rather that no one speak the truth  and expose Islam’s sordid past and autocracies.    He says just speaking about it is offensive to Muslims.  I guess he would rather it be like this:  IF, after being examined by a doctor, he was found to have cancer, he would rather the  doctor NOT tell him the bad news.  Instead he would rather the doctor candy coat the news and give him a lolly pop as he sends him on his happy way.

I find this quite interesting because  many of you remark on how mild mannered I am and on occasion some of you even wish I were more aggressive.  I cannot please every man, and thankfully that is not my goal.  My goal is to please God and to glorify His name.    If the truth is ugly we still have to speak about it and face it, but we don’t have to be offensive in the way we deliver it.

There are a lot of terrible things in Islam but I am not going to blame Muslims for those things.  They are victims of Islam and need to be freed from it.  Jesus can set them free and the truth is in the Scriptures.  Let’s speak the truth, even if it is not an easy thing to do, and let us do it with compassion and gentleness.

This is the point that Reuben is missing.  He is being provocative in the manner he is speaking.  He is disobeying the scriptures and if he is a child of God, may his heart be pricked and may he repent.

I talked to a leader of the Chamber of Commerce, who are the organizers of the festival, and made a suggestion to them that might help.   They seemed to like it and tomorrow I will tell you what it is.