Make Allah your purpose, not the world
“Your salah takes priority over your schedule.”
Believers should embrace being spiritually “strange” by making Allah and the Hereafter their ultimate purpose, resisting worldly pressures, and grounding that commitment in worship and ethical conduct.
The khutbah in 6 steps
- Urges dua for Gaza and other suffering communities while rejecting joy in anyone’s death.
- Introduces the hadith about Islam’s “strangers” and defines strangeness as steadfastness when society normalizes falsehood.
- Contrasts living for Allah with making wealth, fame, career, or desire one’s functional god.
- Explains that the ruh is nourished through salah, dhikr, Quran, and obedience.
- Lists faithful distinctiveness through prayer, halal earnings, modesty, and guarding one’s eyes, ears, and tongue.
- Closes by urging purposeful faith, family guidance, support for Hidayah’s work, and continued prayer for the oppressed.
In the khateeb's words
“Islam began as something strange and it will return to being strange as it began.”
“When people make something other than Allah, their ultimate objective, whether it is money, whether it is fame, whether it is a career, that thing becomes their ilah.”
“It means that your salah takes priority over your schedule. It means you earn halal even when haram is easier.”
“Either we serve Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala or we serve something in this dunya.”
For the dinner table
The khutbah teaches that Muslims may sometimes seem strange when they choose Allah’s guidance over society’s priorities. Our real purpose is to please Allah and prepare for the Hereafter, not to make wealth, fame, or comfort our gods. We strengthen our connection with Allah through salah, dhikr, Quran, halal choices, modesty, and guarding our speech and senses. We should not celebrate anyone’s death, and we should keep suffering Muslims in our duas. At home, we can practice one act of worship and one act of kindness this week while remembering that our blessings are temporary gifts.
- What is one way we can put Allah before popularity or convenience this week?
- What worldly thing might distract us from remembering our real purpose?
- How can our family show care for people suffering far away?
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