Once-Muslim Man's Faith Falls Apart After Reading One New Testament Passage

Abdu Murray had a knack for dismantling the faith of Christians — until he didn’t.

The now-Christian apologist was born and raised in Detroit to Muslim parents who brought him up in the Islamic tradition. In the 1980s, when Murray was grappling with things of faith, he saw cultural Christians — a fad still very much in vogue at the time — as “low-hanging fruit.”

It was easy, he said on a recent episode of CBN’s “Faith vs. Culture,” to argue with those whose faith was, in his estimation, paper-thin and hardly robust enough to withstand critique.

“Cultural Christians were abundant,” Murray said. “They were low-hanging fruit for me, and I thought Islam was the truth and everyone should believe true things and not false things and I looked at Christianity as a system of belief that was wrong-headed, even though it might have been right-hearted.”

He saw Christians as people who wanted to recognize God’s greatness, but failed to do so correctly. He believed the central tenets of Christianity — Jesus coming to earth in human form, His death on the cross, and the concept of the Trinity — “insulted God’s greatness.”

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Along the way, Murray met his match. He came across Christians who knew their stuff, believers who had studied Scripture, whose faith was dyed-in-the-wool and battle-tested — a reality Murray wasn’t anticipating.

“There were some Christians who did know what they were talking about and gave me some great answers to my objections,” he said. “[W]hat I had to figure out was: ‘Do I believe something because it’s tradition, or do I believe it because it’s true?'”

Murray recalled trying, as he framed it, to “knock the faith out of” a couple of Christians. As he prepared to argue with the two believers, he said he came across Luke 3:8.

The New Testament passage reads, “Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (ESV).

John the Baptist was warning against believing tradition or ritual could bring salvation.

“It suddenly occurred to me I was challenging Christians by saying, ‘Don’t believe something just because it’s tradition; believe it because it’s true.’ But John the Baptist — in a Bible I didn’t even believe in — was challenging me and saying, ‘Don’t believe something just because it’s tradition; believe it because it’s true.’ And that started a nine-year philosophical, theological, historical, existential investigation into the underpinnings of various worldviews, including — and especially — Islam and the Christian faith.”

Ultimately, Murray said, he was moved by the historical evidence of Jesus’ earthly ministry and the reality that his heart’s desire and his intellectual curiosity “could be merged in the Christian faith.” Christianity, he explained, spoke to his whole being.

“Over the course of that nine years,” he said, “I began to see not only the truth and the beauty but also the value of embracing the Gospel message.”

You can hear more of Murray’s testimony in the episode of “Faith vs. Culture” above.

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