Melanie grew up as a military kid, living in various places worldwide. She and her husband work with Chi Alpha students. She recently visited Central Eurasia with a team of university majors. 

Stand, kneel, prostrate, sit. Head to the floor. Recite the ritual words. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is legalism. This is what Jesus came to do away with. This was supposed to be finished thousands of years ago….but these precious people have not gotten the message, the good news. Jesus, why is this way of life still here?

I turn my attention from the men praying below, to the women on my left and on my right. To the left, a beautiful young mother sits covered by a soft pink hijab and the sunlight streaming in from the mosque window. She reads and prays. Her baby contently lies in her mother’s lap gazing up at the ceiling of the mosque. I can tell just by looking at her that she’s a well-loved child. And, from infancy she is being brought up inside the bars of religion.

“Can you really believe that these people will live eternally separated from God?”

If it didn’t come from Jesus, I don’t know that I could. These are normal people, who love one another and who want to do right by God.

May the Blind Yet See

I’m naturally an optimist, so when I think about evangelism, I tend to focus on the peace, joy, and life that we want to bring. I want people to know Jesus because He is indescribably good and nothing is sweeter than the life that He brings. It’s rare that I spend time thinking about the death, separation, and pain that we want to prevent. It’s rare that I spend time thinking about the highway to hell that so many of the people I meet are headed towards. But both are true and cannot be ignored.

How is it that they don’t know? Nobody has told them.

And the worldview they’ve been instilled with makes it hard to see the beauty and the freedom that is offered in the Cross.

There is no freedom in legalism, only futility. The scene that I took in at that mosque, was not The Law of the Old Testament but it is a law, which even by their own standards they cannot live up to. We can’t even meet human made standards, let alone God’s. Legalism’s attempt to do so only puts on display the brokenness of our condition and our desperate need of help. It is a diagnostic, not a cure. The only cure is the Great Physician: Jesus, the Word of God, the fulfillment of The Law, the only perfect one. He came to do for all nations and peoples what we could never do for ourselves.

One of the missionaries prayed that the call to prayer would stay etched in our minds and scar us, so that we wouldn’t be able to forget what we had seen and learned about the great spiritual need in Central Eurasia. For my part, the scar comes from that visit to the mosque, that baby girl lying in her mother’s lap contently being nursed into the system that, baring a miracle, will blind and separate her from the saving power of the Cross.