Welcome to the Faith Debate on 930 WFMD. Thanks for spending part of your Sunday morning with us. You find us online at wfmd.com keyword faith and you can follow everything that I do. I'm Troy Skinner and all my social media and my church and this show and everything. One-stop shop. Go to HouseholdofFaithinChrist.com HouseholdofFaithinChrist.com Last week we heard a rather dramatic testimony so the gauntlet has been thrown down and this week we see if Daniel can top it. We've got a new kind of format that we've started a couple weeks ago now where you're going to hear the same panelists every time, talking about different issues every time, and to give you a sense of who we are, where we're coming from, why we think the way we do, whether you think you should trust us or not, that sort of thing. We're spending time walking through a get-to-know-you session. It's kind of like show-and-tell in kindergarten, you know? So last week, Imran Raz Razvi, who is the founder of Conquered by Love Ministries and leads a home church, he shared his rather dramatic story. He grew up Muslim and converted to Christianity. His son Daniel is part of this panel as well. He's part of that same home church. He's an attorney. He'll be sharing his story. And then next week, we'll hear from David Forsey. He is the pastor of a house church. uh... as well as i am so all of us in the on this panel now our house church people that's uh... not really by coincidence that's uh... that was my hope in trying to put this panel together that something like that would happen so it's by design we'll see if it was a good designer now not don't want to forget to do it at the end but razz well i had a good idea in between shows i figure out that i i should mention in the mention it now so i don't forget If you hear us talking about things, if you hear something in one of our stories that we're sharing in these weeks, or you hear something come up in a future show that sparks a thought and you have a question, you want some clarification about something in the Bible, you want to understand something about what's going on in the world and what do Christians think about that, because of Raz's expertise, really, when it comes to things with Islam, you have a question of clarification on that, you can email me And if you can't remember this, just remember the website. You can get to my email, but I'll give you my email in a second. But if you can remember householdoffaithinchrist.com, you can find me. But if you don't want to try to find the website first, you just want to email me, email me at pastorskinneratprotonmail.com. Protonmail is a new email service provider that's out there. So if we can remember that and my name is Troy Skinner And I'm a pastor so pastor Skinner at protonmail.com. Hopefully that's easy enough for you to remember anyway, so Before we jump into hearing Daniel's story, I think we're good, but we had some time between last week's show and this week's show. I have a zillion questions, but none of them need to be asked now. But are there any other questions, David, that you might have, or perhaps, Daniel, that you have for your dad, that you might have for Raz in following up last week's? If not, we're going to move right into Daniel telling us your story. No? All right. So I guess we're good. I guess I'm up. So you are up. So everything, your deepest, darkest secrets, everything that the world never knew until now. Well, I have, as I say, a boring testimony, which is somewhat of a blessing in that I got saved at an early age. I grew up in a Christian home and my parents were both saved and they taught me about Jesus when I was young and I remember having a salvation experience at a very very young age at four years old and I know a lot of people as They pray a prayer when they're very young and then they they get older and they say well I don't think I really ever meant it and and so I know I believe I did and I am 100% committed to following Christ. He is my Lord and Savior. And without Jesus, I have no hope. So that's where I put all my faith and all my trust in the salvation. And so I grew up in a Christian homeschool environment. And I think that was a blessing as well. I'm glad I was spared a lot of the nastiness in the culture. And we have a modern culture, and some of the things We'll get into it, I'm sure, eventually. Some of the things they teach these days to kids is even worse than it was when I was... You can't help but talk about it. Yeah. But not right now, necessarily. But yeah, you can't help it. If you're going to talk about issues in the world today, you'll end up talking about that stuff. Right. You're right. So I'm glad that I was spared some of that at an early age and I had a good foundation. And so I was, as you can say, an accelerated runner. I graduated very early due to God's grace and some wonderful teaching by my parents, especially my mom. And so I graduated high school at 11, took a few years off, didn't really do much in the way of schooling. I started a business at that point when I was 11 teaching piano and violin because I had a high school level of piano and violin skills at that time, classical music. And then I went to music school and I got my bachelor's in classical piano performance and I was 17 years old and I had a bachelor's degree and I wasn't married yet so I figured I might as well go to law school. Mostly encouragement, strong encouragement from my parents said, you know, you should do something else, you know, you always like to debate and argue and so might as well. You go to law school, and so I did. I went to Oak Brook College of Law, which I highly recommend. It's a Christian law school, which is mostly distance learning. The professors are all actual attorneys that are practicing, and they're strong believers as well, and it's a very good experience. Where are they based? They're based in California. They have, you know, it's only one or two weeks a year that you get together for classes in person, mostly, you know, it's, it is distance learning. But you get a really good perspective on legal issues from a Christian, Christian view. And Also, it kind of feels a little bit like seminary classes at the same time. So I actually learned more theological information in that experience at Oak Brook than I did at the few classes I took towards my Master's of Divinity, which I didn't actually complete. And that's a whole other topic. But I am actually very much against seminaries now. I went to one of the most conservative Christian seminaries in the country for a part, way toward an degree, but it got to the point where there were so many things that were being taught by the professors, such as denying the deity of Christ, such as the Old Testament stories are just fables and not actual history, et cetera, et cetera, and multiple classes, multiple professors at, again, one of the most conservative seminaries in the country. So I didn't end up completing that degree, but that was very disappointing to see how much the devil has crept in and is trying to sweep out our foundation. Did you share the name of the seminary? Are you comfortable sharing the name of the seminary? I didn't. For the main reason being, I believe from talking to other people and other pastors around the country that this is actually a disease in almost every seminary now. So I think if you can fill in the blank in your head with seminaries, even seminaries that used to be very conservative, very Bible-based, are now becoming infected with that cancer. And I think that's really what I want to focus on with that statement. But we can get into more detail. I'm happy to talk about the seminary itself and so on. That's what I want you to think you know we all have our guard down You know you go to a Christian school you go to a Bible school or a seminary and you think oh now is when we're gonna have Discussions with other believers and and and they're gonna teach me things and I should just you know soak it all in or you know let it all let it all sink in but there's that's where you're actually more vulnerable because The devil doesn't have to take over all of our churches, and he didn't. He only has to take over a few seminaries, and that's where all the pastors get trained. And it really spreads like wildfire. And so I think that's something. Go ahead, Rad. I'm going to steal the mic for a minute. I wanted to... say as a father i can't recommend oakbrook college of law more than anything else this is an incredibly good school and i recommend it to any place i speak any place i go any parent i talk to i always tell them hey if you got an extra four hours in the day and you want something to do go to oakbrook college of law you spend four hours a day and it's only like six grand a year and you get the one of the best educations in the world from a christian viewpoint and i feel safe sending many much of it to my children graduated from oprah college law and i have felt completely at peace that they're being taught by christians have been taught by conservatives they've been taught from a biblical viewpoint that they're not being led astray and i just wanted to point that out that uh... i'm very proud of daniel and uh... for going there but i'm just very proud of that school and many of things classmates were fifties and sixties. This is their second career, third career. They went to law school and at that age, some were pastors even and going to law school. So you can get a law degree and actually be able to be in any industry. You can have a law degree and be an engineer and still have that. You'll be more marketable. You can have a law degree and be a doctor. It's a great school. So Oakbrook College of Law, I don't give back to Daniel, but I love that school. And do the Christians that are running that and teaching the classes, do they subscribe to a particular flavor of Christian tradition? They're all over the place, the various denominations, but Bible believing, and you talked a couple weeks ago about core principles and making sure that whoever you're discussing with and you're fellowshipping with has the same core principles, and I believe they do have that at Oak Brook. And so, I don't know. Oh, no, we're good. So that's that's something that was very useful. And I think with the law school. it's a little bit different than a divinity school in that in a lot of times they used to be the same harvard actually started as a divinity school uh... you would go and get your lost law degree and a dvd degree at the same time but with oakbrook you have to in the lawyer training you have to argue both sides of every so you'll get a topic and you have to explain you know that the pros and cons of the different things and so you have to really get uh... understand the other side's perspective but there's not a wrong answer necessarily so you're not gonna get beat up by the professors for having a little bit different view like you do in many other colleges and i think that's that's important uh... but anyway after oakbrook after i got my law degree I wasn't ever really intending to practice the law per se. I do use my degree as a tax attorney with the family business, Higher Ground Financial Group. We do tax planning and risk management and so on. But shortly thereafter, I guess almost a year ago, well I guess by the time you're hearing this it will have been a year, I got married. And so I did find a wife and God has blessed me greatly with a wife and now a beautiful baby girl. And so we are very excited about that and my dad is now a grandfather and I stole the microphone back from him so he can't see. Say how, I guess you heard it anyway, how sad he is. So that's the newest thing in my life. And so we, now I'm having the experience of training my daughter in the way she should go. And by God's grace, she'll become a believer at some point in the near future. What was it like for you spending all of your memories in a, not just in a home church, but in a home school situation? How do you, do you have any sense of how you is it are you able to even comprehend how your experience was different from ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the people that are in the world around you so i do have an idea i'll clarify the home church thing was a gradual thing we'd uh... i do spend a lot of my early years in mainstream church some secret fund recharges we've we've kind of got more conservative as time went on and For the last 10 or 15 years, it's been family integrated, so very conservative, but some of those were church buildings, some of those were home churches, so it's been a mixture. And with the family ministry, Conquered by Love, we travel around and speak at and visit at different churches around the country, so we get a sense of a lot of different types of churches. As far as homeschool goes, yes, I was involved in a lot of activities as well, some community activities and so on. I played rec soccer, so I interacted with a lot of public school students and I've done various classes and things outside of strictly home school that give me a little bit of an idea, enough to know that I don't want anything to do with it, of how public school is or even honestly a lot of private school, but particularly public school I think homeschool is God's best plan for family if you can, if you can at all manage it. I read some statistic recently that if a mother only has a third grade education and she does her best to teach her kids, they will actually test average or better at high school graduates compared to nationwide public school graduates. So you don't need to be a highly educated, you know, a college professor to be able to teach homeschool to your kids. It's not a big deal. The most important thing is to be able to give them the spiritual guidance. And I think you get a lot more time with your kids if you have them all day instead of just a couple hours in the evening. Can you share a little bit about the wedding? Because I know that the way that your family celebrates a wedding is quite a bit different than what most people would be used to. Yes. So I had a traditional Pakistani-style wedding. And it's actually, in many ways, very similar to a Jewish wedding and very similar to the weddings in the Bible. All of the Middle East celebrates marriage in a very similar way. And it mirrors our relationship with Christ, in fact. And so, there's several days. That's the biggest thing that a lot of Americans see when they see a Pakistani-style wedding, or in this case, I'm going to call it a biblical wedding, is There's many, many days, so it's a lot longer than a Western wedding. So the legal ceremony, in fact, happens quite a bit early. In my case, it was about a month. In some cases, it's close to a year or more where you are actually legally married. You have the vows and go before the pastor and he pronounces you married and the marriage license is signed and all that. the marriage license, all of that's done ahead of time, but the marriage is not consummated yet. You don't move in together, there's no relations. The legal ceremony is done, and then the actual wedding happens later. And the legal ceremony is a very private ceremony. For me, it wasn't even my entire family that was there. It was very small. you know, a few witnesses and so on. Very intimate ceremony, just to get the legal part done, say the vows and so on. And then, the actual wedding is a huge celebration, where on the night before, there's some festivities and dancing and celebration for the bride's family. they put on a little party for their bride's family and a lot of women, but also there's some men there from the family. And then the actual wedding day is when I come to get the bride, to take my bride home, and that night is the wedding night. And then the next day is our first, it's like a state dinner. It's a formal event for the bride and groom to host as the married couple. And so it actually mirrors our relationship with Christ and what you see in the Bible. So if you remember in Matthew 2, when Joseph heard that Mary was pregnant, he was thinking of divorcing her. Right? But they hadn't slept together. So to a Western mind, that's a little weird. How are you going to divorce somebody you haven't even slept with so you're not married? Well, yes, they were married. They were legally married. They were betrothed. But when you get engaged or betrothed, you actually had the legal ceremony. So it would be a divorce to break that off at that point. And that's how serious it is. They were already married, but they hadn't consummated the marriage yet. what happens in the meantime well in in jewish culture and a lot of the middle east uh... new ceremony he is legally married and now he's promised to care for this bride for the rest of his life he's gonna go back to his father's house build more rooms onto the family compound and uh... the preparing place for his bride and the actual when sir ceremonies when he comes at a time that is not set in stone it's a general time like we're going to come around this time of of day or time of year whatever but It can be without notice. And he comes to get his bride and brings his whole family and friends with a big celebration and feasting and he comes to bring his bride home. And that mirrors our relationship with Christ. Jesus betrothed us to himself on the cross. We are legally his. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. We are going to be with him in heaven when we die. But we have not consummated that. We have not drank of that fruit of the vine in heaven with him. until he comes on the clouds to meet us at a time that is not announced previously a set date and time he's going to come to take us home as his bride the bride of christ and so i think the the way the wedding ceremonies in the middle east are performed is actually very very similar to the way god has a relationship with us and i think it's a great witness uh... to go to have had a wedding like that uh... with me and my wife If I remember correctly, the very first time I met you in person, you weren't married yet. And if I remember correctly, you had some concern about how you were going to be able to find a wife that was suitable, who would share your worldview and your commitment to the Bible and that sort of thing. So what did finding a wife and courtship and arriving at the decision that, yes, this is who I'm marrying, how did that happen? So we actually met online, which is interesting. And it wasn't even a strictly Christian website, it was eHarmony. I was on a few different Christian connection websites, but this one was eHarmony. And you can put in, in some of these secular sites, you can put in theological parameters that you only want to be matched with people that are of a similar viewpoint. And even so, Most of the people that the software will find for you are not even saved, first of all. But you can weed them out pretty quickly. You send a message. So my first message to anybody on one of those softwares would be, what is your eschatology? Because I always like to have a deep theological question to start something off. And I'll know by the answer somebody gives whether it's somebody that is a committed Christian or not. You know, some, if they don't know what it means, or one girl respond with, you know, her astrological sign. When I say, what is your eschatology? I was like, okay, well, I guess that's as far as we need to go with that one. I had a couple of people actually give me some answers, superficial answers, and my wife actually came up with a well-researched and thought-out answer on her eschatology. And I thought that was great, and it was a good sign somebody is committed to studying the Bible and learning about it. And so we spent the first month or so of that relationship talking strictly on deep topics not only theology but also our vision for marriage and family and so on before we had any focus on you know building a personal relationship we wanted to make sure that was the foundation was there that this could be a match for marriage that was the whole purpose I was on the website for And I think I've actually met some other people, similar to me, that are very strong conservative Christians that have found spouses on, for lack of a better word, dating websites. But you have to be careful with how you do it. And I think it's important, first, many messages and questions and comments, those need to be on deep topics. You have to agree on the core principles. Coming back to what you said a couple weeks ago, you have to agree on the core principles. If you don't, then there's really no point in moving forward and getting your emotions wrapped up in something that this is somebody else's spouse. This is not somebody you're going to marry. That's the only purpose in dating or courting is to marry somebody. I know that in my experience with some Pakistani families, that their tradition was for the parents to be very involved in helping select the future spouse. Was that the case for you guys? It was. So my parents and then Her parents were involved every step of the way. They were all aware of what we're talking about, what's going on. We talk about the pros and cons and try to be as, from a place not of emotion, step back and look at this logically. Does this look like a good match? And once we've identified, okay, this This person does appear to be saved. They appear to have similar views to you. So now it's up to you guys to decide if this is going to work out. And you need to figure it out right away, because there's no reason to drag things out with somebody that's not going to be your spouse. And so I think there was encouragement to do that. Now, because your wife met you online, she's not necessarily local. She might be, but she's not. No, she's actually from Arkansas. So, yes, it's definitely a little bit of a culture difference. But we live, I mean, we're in Frederick, Frederick County, so we're in a conservative... How well were you able to manage to know each other before you actually got officially legally married? In the first month, we exchanged the equivalent of a novel of 50,000 words in text message and email. So, I think... Publishing it any day soon? Never. But, yes. So that's what we did. And someone's knocked on the door. Yeah, I'm not sure. They're trying to get my attention, but then they walked away. I don't know what's going on. But the record light is lit. The on-air light is lit. So I'm not sure what that's about. Might be a cleaning crew looking to get in here. I guess if it's important enough, they'll break down the door and tell us. Yeah. So as a father, I wanted to be very, very strict. And you don't spend time trying to get to know somebody you're not going to marry. The purpose of courtship is to marry somebody. And you don't want to get your emotions involved. So we wanted Daniel. to really investigate and find out where the background is, what they're looking for, and get that resolved before they even met. And then Daniel did go meet them, and so forth. So it worked out, and they got to know each other pretty well, and again, that chose to love each other. Again, we'll come back to that sometime in the future. Yeah, that'll be a show that we'll do in the future. That's gonna put a wrap on this week's show. So, last week we heard from Raz and his testimony and his life story. This week we heard from Daniel and both of them are part of the Razvi family. Heard their story. And next week we'll hear from David Forsey. All of us in this room are pastors of house churches, are involved with pastoring house churches. And next week we'll hear from the pastor of the Church of Mesa David. With our churches, that sort of thing, the easiest thing, the one-stop shop is to go to the HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com website. That's my church's website, and I'm linking to everything that has links that's related to what we're doing. So you can find my email there. You can find links to this show there. It's the easiest thing, HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. Till next week, 167 and a half hours from right about now. God bless. Past editions of this program are available in the audio vault at WFMD.com. This is 930 WFMD and WFMD.com, now. WFMD News. A domestic violence and abduction case was handled by the Frederick County Grand Jury on Friday. The panel indicted Junior Anthony Francis of Walkersville for first and second degree assault, third and fourth degree sex offense, and kidnapping of a child under 16. State's Attorney Charlie Smith said on Saturday, June 20th, the Sheriff's Office responded to the 6100 block of Murray Terrace in Frederick for a domestic incident. Once again, they found it involves strangulation. And then after that, the defendant had taken her one-year-old baby, hence the kidnapping charge. The sheriff's office was able to locate Francis and the baby in Gaithersburg after pinging his phone. Francis was taken into custody. The grand jury returned 13 indictments. These cases now move to circuit court, where trial dates will be scheduled. To read more, go to our website at wfmd.com. Incumbent Mayor Michael O'Connor continues to maintain his lead in the Frederick City Democratic mayoral primary. with more than 2,200 votes. That's according to the latest count of mail-in and drop-box ballots that took place on Friday. Number two is former Mayor Jennifer Daugherty, followed by Aldermen Roger Wilson and John Funderburg. In the Republican primary, Steve Hamrick is in the lead with 472 votes, followed by Steve Garrahy with 369 votes. The Democratic aldermanic race is still showing newcomer Katie Nash out in front, followed by incumbent alderman Derek Shackleford.