All sinners… listen up!

All Sinners… Listen Up!

Shaykh Hisham Abu Yusuf

The Gym Analogy

Who here is a personal trainer or serious gym goer? SubhanAllah, only the masjid — the place you can't find many people putting their hands up on this topic. So some will tell me, they say that for your muscle to develop, it has to tear. Can you explain that to me? What the personal trainers and the gym goers say is that your muscle cannot grow until you tear it — you apply pressure to it until it breaks down, then it recovers the next day and it's stronger than the previous day.

The Athlete Analogy

They say the same thing with athletes. A good coach will tell you that when he sees his athlete running 100 meters in six seconds, he wants his athlete to run 100 meters in five seconds. But how does he push him out of the comfort zone? There has to come a point in which this athlete injures, feels the pain of the sprint — that's when you know the muscle is growing, that's when you know they are developing.

If there's no pain, there's no gain.

The Medical Analogy

Who here works in healthcare? I know there's a bunch of you here and I know specific names and you're all hiding.

They say today people become allergic very easily. Maybe a hundred years ago, your generation, people were not allergic to a lot of things — but today everybody is allergic to something. And they say it's because we have so much cleanliness, so much purity — you're not exposed to filth, to dirt, to disgusting stuff — so you actually become more weak. Why is it that the immune system only gets strong when it gets sick, when it gets exposed to dirt or filth? The body needs to understand what the enemy is. You have to keep being exposed to the enemy again and again to develop the strength in order to deal with it.

What About the Finance People?

Now the finance people are going to say, where's the finance example? There's no example for you — zero. I don't use Microsoft Excel, so I don't know nothing about finance. I'm just joking.

The Real Point: Sin and Drawing Closer to Allah

These examples, these analogies — why am I giving them to you? Many times as human beings, we see sin as a problem. When we sin or when we make a mistake, many of us have the reaction of becoming withdrawn from Allah. We despair from Allah. We feel so ashamed that many of us don't even address the topic with Allah. We just leave it in a dark corner. Let's not talk about it.

Why is that? Because many of us, the way we perceive sin, the way we perceive mistakes — we perceive it as something horrible, something to be ashamed of, something disgusting, something bad for us.

But just as a bodybuilder or someone exercising — your muscle cannot grow without tearing, your health will not improve without getting sick — just as this is the case, you cannot become closer to Allah without sinning. It's a very, very strange contradiction.