This crie de Coeur is very apparent to missionaries who work with Muslims, both in traditional Islamic countries and in the West. I recently heard from a reliable source that in the Muslim world, there is roughly one missionary for every one million Muslims. If the USA were a Muslim nation, there would be a total of 325 missionaries in our entire country. No wonder few Muslims ever hear the gospel.

But what would you say to a Muslim, if you had the chance? What is the spiritual bridge you might attempt to cross? What is the exact nature of this heart cry that God has placed within every human breast? Perhaps most importantly, how can we show Muslims that in God's eyes we are all the same and struggle with the same problems? To answer this question we must address squarely the root of the Islamic faith, which is founded in the pursuit of honor and the avoidance of shame. When Ishmael was born, God said to Abraham, "He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers." (Gen. 16:12.)

Though God clearly loved and provided for Ishmael and his descendents and uttered promises for him, Ishmael was never going to be the child of promise. His descendents were never going to be God's chosen people. This fact is crucial to understanding the Islamic world and the rise of Mohammed as a prophet. In essence, the Islamic world as we see it is based on the attempt to gain favor before God and man by force, conquest and human effort, an attempt doomed to failure not just for Muslims but for the whole world. It is the age old attempt to get back into God's and the world's good graces by our own devices. The quest to regain honor by human means is being lived out tragically to this day in the Islamic world.

Muslims fail to see that even Abraham himself, to whom Muslims look as their father, according to Paul in Romans 4:10, was credited as righteous "before not after circumcision." In other words, Abraham's standing was a gift rather than something he earned. What the Bible teaches us is that human effort can never put us right with ourselves or others, not to mention with God. Yet even today, the Muslim world's "hand" is too often against all others, even other Muslims, and its "hostility" is evident in rhetoric read daily in newspapers and on the web, all reflecting the need to assert some kind of status before God and man. Western materialists wage this achievement war on other fronts, through corporate and media rivalries, competitive relationships and prideful institutions.

All are doomed to disappoint and lead to depression. Similarly, the restless young Muslim men who inhabit internet cafes throughout the Middle East and the slums of London, Paris and Amsterdam also seek a way to assert their anger as a way to justify their existence. This is one of the world's largest and most urgent mission fields.

Connected to attempts to win favor is the desire for honor. Anyone who has lived in the Middle East knows that honor and hospitality are intimately related. Guests are treated with food and drink, lavish gifts and attention, even when they are sometimes unknown to their hosts. Dishonoring someone can be met with the severest penalties. Several years ago, an American college student decided to take an adventurous trip to Yemen, a country in which seven year old boys routinely ride around with loaded automatic weapons.

Near the end of his stay, the young man was gathering in a tribal tent with a sheik sitting in the customary circle. Suddenly he realized and then announced that his cell phone was missing. The sheik, who by now had pistols in each hand, asked everyone in the circle to empty their pockets. The missing cell phone fell from another man's hands onto the floor, whereupon the sheik shot the offending party through the head. This is how seriously bad hospitality can be punished in a culture of little mercy.

The Muslim world is built on the avoidance and elimination of shame. The above behavior and that demonstrated through stonings, honor killings and the unequal treatment of women in sharia law are all attempts to drive shame away, to remove it and destroy it. But the truth is that shame cannot be destroyed in this life. It can only be transferred, born by another. It can only be absorbed. It can only be carried by someone. But who will bear it? Ask a group of kids who broke a window playing baseball or an antique vase, "who did it" and one is likely to get "Who me?" "I didn't do it." or "Johnny did it." This is as old as time. "The woman thou gavest me..." The Jews were given the scapegoat, (Lev. 16:10) who received the sins of the people through the laying on of hands and then was sent into the wilderness.

In the divine exchange Paul articulates in 2 Corinthians 5:21, he speaks about Christ becoming "sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God." The mistake the Islamic world makes is the attempt to cast this dishonor upon others by violence or inflammatory rhetoric, which only continues the cycle of shame and dishonor. Often this takes the severest form of cutting off hands and feet as Islamic radicals did to American workers when they hung their bodies from the bridge at Fallujah in the Iraq War. The cycle of shame is extended not ended.

So if Muslims, or anyone else, cannot create their own honor by assigning those who oppose them or violate Islamic law to shame, where are they to turn? What can stop the endless cycle of "living in hostility against all his brothers"? There is only one answer and it is provided by the same God who received Abraham by faith. Jesus will take the shame. In fact, He has already taken all the shame for all time from the beginning of time to the end of human history. He bore this "in his own body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness." (I Pet. 2:24.) Christians now live in the glorious liberty of sending their shame daily to the cross of Christ. It is only in Christ that shame meets its end.

But the problem is that Muslims often see Westerners as not experiencing shame and dishonor as they do. How can we possibly understand what they have been through? How can we ask them to take this step toward the cross when they see us a standing above them, oblivious to their plight? It is at this point that we must share with them our own experiences of rejection, exclusion, dishonor and our own accompanying attempt to justify our own existence.

This may not have come through oppressing others, violence and sharia law, but it has come in many other ways, through false trust in material things, power, position, ego, boasting and myriad other attempts to assert our status over against others. The truth is that Muslims, unbelievers, agnostics and the whole human race must meet at the foot of the cross to deal with our shame. A friend of mine has a Roman Catholic priest friend who has served for 45 years. He once remarked, "I cannot tell you the substance of any confession I have heard, but I can tell you this. We are all alike."

It is at the cross and only there that we allow Jesus to do his work and take the shame for all mankind and for each of us individually. It is absolutely essential that we meet the individual Muslim there as an equal, before God, as both condemned and redeemed sinners. It is at the cross that "we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort that we ourselves have received from God." (2 Cor 1:4) Until that shame is removed, there will be no recovery of the Muslim world. At the cross, Ishmael's sentence is removed. At the foot of the cross, we are all alike.

But we cannot stop there. There must be a new heart placed within us all and that includes the Muslim who turns to Christ. The heart softened by forgiveness begins to demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit. The spiritual birthright of the believer is a new heart. "I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit within them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people and I will be their God." Ez. 11: 19-20.

The irony and glory of what God offers the Muslim is this: Jesus will establish their sonship in God forever as a gift through Jesus's death and resurrection. There are no second-class citizens in Christ; no more Ishmaels; no more exclusion. There is no more striving for the honor that is given as a free gift. No more violence to drive away shame. In fact, violence is no longer needed because the shame has been born away once and for all. God's message to all humankind including the Muslim is this: "No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother saying know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest." Jer. 31:34. I believe we are living in these days as the cultural barriers to the gospel continue to fall.

This is where the healing of the rift between the Christian and Muslim worlds begins. Where it will lead is anyone's guess. But it will likely be to a much better place both politically and relationally than we could possibly imagine today. May we all begin to build those bridges as God gives us the opportunity.

----Jay Haug is a member of Redeemer Anglican Church in Jacksonville, Florida. You may e-mail him at cjcwguy@gmail.com