Friday Sermon by: Rashad Khalifa, Imam of Masjid Tucson
Summary:
In this Friday sermon, given on New Year’s Day 1988, Rashad Khalifa explains that repentance lets us start a new life at any time, and that the secret of happiness is returning to God and following the Quran.
Video Transcript:
Alhamdulillah. We praise God and we bear witness that there is no God except the one God. Today is the first day of a new year. It is January 1st and I don’t see a single person with a hangover in here. The first day of the of a new year 1988 is also the first day of the rest of your life. And the Quran provides the ways and means of starting all over again anytime you want to. You can forget completely about the past and start as a totally new person beginning a totally new life. the concept of repentance. Repentance, returning to God, being unaware for a while and now deciding to return and be with God. I have put uh the theme of the new translation of Quran on the wall here for you and I’m going to read it cuz I wanted to share it with you.
Well, before I read it, I’d like to say that finally we’ve discovered the secret of happiness, the most elusive of all human searches. The secret of happiness is in is in this short theme here. Happiness is a quality of the soul, the real person, not the body. Therefore, a body that achieves all the material successes it longs for, money, fame, power, good looks, carnal satisfactions, often belongs to an unhappy person. The real person’s happiness depends totally on the degree of growth, development, and fulfillment of the real person. This book, the Quran, maps the road to perfect happiness for both body and soul, both in this temporal world and in the eternal hereafter. So, this is the secret of happiness. And uh you’ve seen the video that we made a couple of weeks ago and they mentioned in it Eddie Murphy in his interview with Barbara Walters and how he owns this big estate in New Jersey. He has his family, his mother. seeing him successful. He’s got the success, the fame, the movies, the TV, millions of dollars, five cars, two Rolls-Royces, a Porsche, a Mercedes, a Corvette. Yet, he said that he was not happy. So, what does a human being want in this world? Is this what isn’t this what everybody out there thinks they want? the millions of dollars, the Rolls-Royces, the Mercedes, the the estates, the palaces, and he’s not happy. So, this proves once again, this been proven over and over that material success does not bring happiness. If the soul is shrunk and not fed and not nourished, there is no happiness. This is the secret of happiness. Nobody can be happy unless the soul is nourished and develops and grows. Just try not to feed your body for one day and see how miserable your body is. Try for one day not to feed your body or give it water. The soul is exactly like that. If if the soul is not nourished but in our dimension here, we do not feel the pain. It is reflected in what Eddie Murphy told Barbara Walters that he was not happy. It’s reflected in there. This is the secret of happiness. A few weeks ago, they had the Barbara Hutton story on the TV and many of you saw it. It’s the same thing. wealth, fame, anything she wanted. Yet you saw her in the program trying to commit suicide. This is the true true story. How miserable she was. The exact opposite of happiness. So what does everybody out there want? You want money, fame, good looks, success. But then if the soul is not nourished, there is no happiness. the nourishment for the soul. God teaches us in the Quran just like like is mentioned in the theme here that the Quran maps the road to perfect happiness and it starts the minute you wake up.
We’ve been learning here from the Quran that when you wake up in the morning the first thing you say is right there it’s a good snack for the soul. It’s a bit of nourishment. The minute you open your eyes in the morning, you say there’s no God except the one God. The Quran teaches us specifically when you admire anything that belongs to you, you must say, “Mashallah.” This is the Arabic. You can say it in English. This what God gave me in English. Say mashallah we admire your car, your children, your spouse, your house, anything that belongs to you and this invokes protection for your belongings and it is nourishment for the soul cuz the soul is a piece of God and when you say mashallah your soul grows another bit of nourishment you praise God you say alhamdulillah thank God or praise God when something Good happens when you finish eating. When you start your car, you say and you when you start eating, you say in the name of God. And when you finish, you say alhamdulillah. Thank God. Praise God. When you see something wonderful, the sunrise or the sunset or a flower or a fruit or anything God created or a cute cat, you say, “Subhan Allah, God be glorified.” Subhan Allah. God be glorified. Anytime you think of God, because your soul is a piece of God, your soul will be nourished. Don’t just don’t just eat the apple or the orange. Think who made this? Where did it come from? Where did the apple come from? The perfect flavor, the perfect sugar, the perfect texture, the crunchiness. Who designed this? Where did it come from? It came from the air, by the way. And the and the liquid from the soil. That’s what the apple came from. It starts as a little ovary and then it grows. The leaves of the tree collect carbon dioxide from the air and link it together in chains.
The sugar is carbon. C see C. Six carbons make one one molecule of sugar. So the leaves of the tree photosynthesis. You heard of photosynthesis and the energy from the sun and the water from the soil. This is it. This makes the apple and all the other chemicals. Don’t just eat the apple to feed your body. Eat the apple and feed your soul by saying, “Subhan Allah, God be glorified.” Because the body you’re going to throw away. The soul is you and you’re going to last forever.
The best nourishment of all is the contact prayer. Making contact with God. These are casual snacks. Mashallah. Alhamdulillah. Inshallah. You should never say I’m going to do something the next hour or at 2:00 or tomorrow or next month or next week without saying inshallah. God willing. You’re going to shock your American friends first. But then they will get used to it and they will respect you later and you will nourish your soul as you remind them and remind yourself say inshallah. So these are the the snacks for the soul and they may barely spare you misery be it temporary or eternal hell. It might. But the best nourishment is the five daily contact prayers. These are specifically prescribed by God at specific times with specific utterances and specific movements. It’s a numerical code. It’s a combination that that causes contact with God. Then your soul really grows.
And like you heard on the tape the other day, the soul grows in leaps and bounds, which makes nourishment a lot more crucial and a lot a lot more important than your meals for the body. Because okay, you’re going to give your body three meals today. How much will you grow today? The children probably grow at the higher rate, but what is the maximum we grow? one pound. Hopefully not. But the soul, if there is a weight for the sword, you may grow by 10 tons. The soul has a weight in the other dimension, not in this dimension. In this dimension, I think they determined that the soul is 1. They put a dying person on a scale and they weighed him before he died and weighed him after he died. And the difference was 1 ounce. This is scientific research. They wanted to catch the soul scientifically in the material world. But in the other dimension, wow. You know, when they go to the other dimension, they’re going to see the angels and the gems and all the other creatures of the other dimension.
And one prayer very easily makes you grow by 10 tons. 10 tons. Imman, how many tons do you carry in your 18 wheelers? 80. 80 tons. 40 tons. 80,000. 80,000 lb over 2,000 is 20 tons. 80,000 lb. Over 2,000 is 40 tons. Yes. 40 tons. Yes. 80,000 tons. Okay. You can you can load eman’s truck with just one prayer. I don’t think you’ll forget this now. So this makes feeding nourishing the soul all the more important in surah 22 or is it 21? Let me also can go and refer to it. 20 21 it says that the reckoning is approaching while the people are totally unaware.
21 The reckoning for the people is fast approaching why they are totally unaware heedless. Reckoning of what? It’s calculating how much you deposited in your account, how much growth you attained for yourself. And you can’t just wait and wait and wait and then try to feed a shrunken soul. There is such a time where it’s impossible. You have to do it every day. You have to do as much as you can. This is what we’re really here for. The reckoning for the people is fast approaching. That day will come sooner than you think cuz life goes fast. For the young people, it seems so far away.
The recording for the people is fast approaching while they are totally unaware, heatless. Did you hear all the halabalu and the parties last night for the bodies that they throw away? They did nothing for their soul. If anything, they did things against the soul. It went into the negative.
The health department was distributing condoms to the bars. So they give the drinks and condoms. I mean what is this? You can be sure most of it is not legitimate relationships. I mean Satan had a heyday last night and these are negative. The souls go into the negative. That wasn’t the news all day yesterday, you know. Don’t forget, get your condoms. Whenever a new reminder comes to them from their Lord, they listen to it thoughtlessly. I mean, you remind them that they’re going to throw away their body and their soul is going to remain forever and will be assigned a rank forever on the day of eternity. And they are thoughtless. They Oh, sure. You know, they’re they’re so unaware. Their hearts are distracted. Satan succeeded in distracting them and the wicked confide to each other. Is he not just a human being like you? They will not take anything from you. Any advice from you? They hate the advice. They hate the truth. Would you accept magic? Why do you see their hearts are distracted? And in the second inshallah I will I think I discovered something I’d like to share with you that will help us not to be distracted.
Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God. I bear witness that there is only one God. He has no partners.
We are a very very lucky generation. In surah 56, we’re told that the lower heaven is going to be relatively crowded. It’s going to be full of all the children who die, all the people who die before the age of 40 and the adults who did not nourish their souls enough. It’s going to be like the coach in the plane. Be crowded. First class heaven will not be crowded. Big seats, comfortable. They all go to the same destination. See? But you remember going in the plane and these people sitting in first class looking at you like I’m in first class. I have a big seat. Yeah. And you go in there and you squeeze in this coach in the plane. They make a seat that you just barely fit in. Especially if you’re a little bit heavyweight like myself, you really squeeze him there. So the coach is going to be very crowded first class. God says in surah 56 that there will be multitudes of the early generations which ours is one of them and few of the later generations. You know God wills that this generation of ours witnesses a renewal of the message. You know the the Christians has gone astray. They have been worshiping Jesus. The Muslims gone totally astray worshiping Muhammad and the saints and the people forgot about God and all of a sudden there comes into focus God alone message with this fantastic miracle that is coming to to enhance that. I’m sure there were many many people thought of it and I have met a few of them but they did not have the authorization or the power or or this mathematical code in the Quran that points at God alone. 19 means God is one. God alone and this is our generation. You can be sure that subsequent generations be fewer of the people. And here we are. We’re pounding on each other’s head every day. Let’s worship God alone. Let’s worship God alone. You’re idol worshiping. I am idol worshiping. You know, we are reminding we are lucky generation. There will be multitudes of us of our generation inshallah in first class in the high heaven. Now the difference is much greater than first class and courtship of the plane. But then as as the message as they move further from our witnessing of the miracle we are witnessing the miracle before our eyes and as as the they move further there’ll be less and less according to surah 56. So we are a very lucky generation and this brings to us more privilege. I will not call it responsibility. I will call it privilege [crying] to be much more careful to do our five daily prayers to observe God, observe his laws, make continuously. Oh, this reminds me if we get distracted the new addict. I was listening to the Quran the other day and the reader in a beautiful voice was saying the part of Quran where God says do they think that I do not hear their secrets and their conspiracies? Do they think that I do not hear their secrets and their conspiracies? And when Moses and Aaron said, “We’re afraid. Pharaoh may kill us.” God said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be with you. I hear and I see.” And this inspired me as I was going to sleep two nights ago to to say, “Well, God hears my secret and my declarations. God knows my secrets.” And this evolved gradually until I said, “God is here in this room. God is here now.” in this roof, God sees me, hears me. And this what you have to visualize and materialize and it has a tremendous a great effect. I’m sure your soul will grow tremendously. And if you had any devilish thoughts, they will go away. You just visualize God with you. God is in this room. Wherever you are, God is here now. God is with me. This is a new God is teaching us and it will help you a lot. It helped me and this what I’m sharing with you now. God is with me. God is in this room. He is see as we talk now God is in this room. God is omniresent in every room everywhere and personally with you as well as that ant out there by the roses. God is with that ant with God controls everything that the ant is doing. How much food it gets. God is with me. God is here. He hears my secrets, what I’m thinking. And this will will help a lot. The miracle. I’ll just give you a a piece of news as to what I’m doing since we’re all in this together. What I’m doing now is I’m going to give the the mathematical miracle of Quran a lot of attention in the coming days and weeks inshallah. And what I’m doing is I’m making a generic video tape on the miracle. Generic means that it will just have the facts in the video and anybody can dub his or her own language on the tail. So I’m going I’m going to do the English and the Arabic.
We’re going to have Mtasham or Abdullah or both do the Turkish. Gat will do the Indonesian, Malaysian. Francisco will do the Spanish. we’re going to dig up somebody to do the Ordo and and so on. Susan will do the Pharisee and the French cuz she’s good in both. So here and so we’re going to have it in English, Arabic, Ordo, Turkish, Indonesian, Malaysian, Farsy, French. Eric is going to do it in Swedish. Eric Tornwall. So we will also have these flash cards. These are flashcards and I can have them by next week and they help a lot of people especially that there must be like 75 to 80% of the people have a mathematical mental block. No. What’s 1 plus 1? She doesn’t know. It’s called It’s called the mathematical mental block. A lot of people have them. They’re geniuses. But this flash card you have to have a point the flash nice and easy. with it. We’re going to edit this out. Sometimes you get intoxicated. You know, this is called God’s intoxication. the smallest thing, you know, the people who drank last night think they were intoxicated, you know, and at first the smallest thing makes him laugh, you know, then they wake up in the morning with a huge hangover. And sometimes God’s people get like that, you know, the smallest thing make him laugh out of control. This is the title. It says mathematical miracle of Quran. And this says these are all physical facts. [cough] And this is the last statement before the the the actual facts. The Quran is mathematically coded beyond the human intelligence. This is Arabic and English by the way. We’re going to have a nice size cards for everybody. Here is Oh, this is another set. The last one I promise. It says the Quran’s mathematical code is based on the number 19. And here is fact number one. You will see how simple it is. Fact number one. Opening statement of the Quran consists of 19 Arabic letters. This fact number one. Fact number two. The Quran consists of 114 suras or 19* 6. Fact number three. First revelation of Quran was 19 words. Fact number four, first revelation the 19 words are 76 letters. 19 * 4. First revelation is 19 verses. And it goes on like that. Last revelation was 19 words. So they’re all concentrated facts. This is the quick summary. And then what I will have after this will be the pictures from the blue book for example where it shows bismillah broken down into letters 19 letters and then gat will say in Indonesian that these are the documentation now of these facts this will take only like 5 minutes all of them and then so we’ll come to fact number one the documentation for fact number one gut will say in Indonesian the basa consists of 19 letters as you see And anybody can say in any language.