TOWARD THE FULLNESS OF GOD.

Jesus could have been speaking to Muslims today in quoting the prophet Isaiah in Matthew 15 :8-9 when he stated, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men." Likewise, the Apostle Paul's message to the Athenians in Acts 17:22-23 rings true in Muslim cities today, "I see that in every way you are very religious... Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you." Indeed, the fullness of God can only be seen and experienced in Jesus Christ (Col. 1: 19). Thus, while Muslims the world over often worship God with a zeal that is lacking in the Church, Allah remains distant and unattached, because apart from saving faith in the one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ, he is unapproachable. Therefore, it behooves Christian communicators of the Gospel to help their Muslim friends to encounter the Biblical meaning of the fullness of God in Christ through the use of culturally and religiously intelligible means. As truth is best communicated through story in traditional Islamic societies, Chronological Bible Storying methods have shown great promise in helping Muslims come to salvific faith in Christ. But with an increasingly hostile environment to the Christian message, many Muslims are not open to traditional Bible storying methods. This paper seeks to address this issue by presenting "bridge stories" from within Islamic culture that are designed to soften hardened hearts so that they might consider the stories and ideas of the Bible for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]