Secret Church

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The High Cost of Following Christ in a Muslim Family Posted: 24 Jun 2014 10:01 PM PDT “Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.” Matt 10:21-23 Josef’s home is in Pakistan, but he is no longer welcome there. In fact, that’s quite an understatement. His brother–Ibrahim–is currently pursuing him, murder in his heart. But “murder” is not how Ibrahim would probably view it. As far as he is concerned, Josef has rejected his family’s faith, and as a worshipper of Allah, his angry determination to kill him is right. For now, Ibrahim knows only the general whereabouts of his brother: Kabul, Afghanistan. So he is there, too … insistent upon Josef’s death in a country that’s more than sympathetic with Ibrahim’s stop-at-nothing pursuit of his apostate brother. Meanwhile, Josef is holed up in a basement somewhere in the capitol city. He is exiled from his homeland, rejected by his family, and apart from his wife and son … but he’s never been more sure of himself. Read his story in this New York Times article: KABUL, Afghanistan — In a dank basement on the outskirts of Kabul, Josef read his worn blue Bible by the light of a propane lantern, as he had done for weeks since he fled from his family in Pakistan. His few worldly possessions sat nearby in the 10-by-10-foot room of stone and crumbling brown earth. He keeps a wooden cross with a passage from the Sermon on the Mount written on it, a carton of Esse cigarettes, and a thin plastic folder containing records of his conversion to Christianity. The documents are the reason he is hiding for his life. On paper, Afghan law protects freedom of religion, but the reality here and in some other Muslim countries is that renouncing Islam is a capital offense. Josef's brother-in-law Ibrahim arrived in Kabul recently, leaving behind his family and business in Pakistan, to hunt down the apostate and kill him. Reached by telephone, Ibrahim, who uses only one name, offered a reporter for The New York Times $20,000 to tell him where Josef was hiding … READ MORE (HT: Albert Mohler)

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