Seeking experience, finding God
Tell me Thou art mine, O Saviour,
William Williams, 1717-91
Grant me an assurance clear;
Banish all my dark misgivings,
Still my doubting, clam my fear.
O, my soul within me yearneth
Now to hear Thy voice divine;
So shall grief be gone forever,
And despair no more be mine.
I would describe my family as I was growing up as semi-religious. My parents did not really push me to pursue a strictly Muslim lifestyle, but I was always aware that showing a great deal of interest in and commitment to Islam was the most sure way of pleasing them. However, as a teenager, I resented the feeling that I had no choice in my beliefs, and my mind was always filled with questions that I longed to have answered by someone wise who might be able to direct my thinking. So many things seemed to me to make little sense. For example, I was taught that I had to pray in a dark place and I wondered what would happen if I prayed in broad daylight – but no one was ever able to give me any kind of satisfactory answer to this question. And why did I have to pray in Arabic? Why could I not speak to God in my own language of Farsi? Surely God was powerful enough to understand me speaking to Him in my native tongue. I had questions also about fasting: why should making myself suffer hunger pangs have any bearing with God?
More seriously, while I always understood quite clearly that I was a sinner, I was not taught what I should do to be free from my sin. It seemed that I would be a sinner forever, and that life would be a constant battle between right and wrong choices. I would always be unable to make the right choice at every moment of every day. It was a task I knew I was absolutely unable to fulfil. I sensed that I was on a road through life with no way to turn around and go back, and no way to clear the sins I had committed in the past and those I knew I would continue to commit in the future. A path of certain failure stretched out ahead of me.
As time went by, and I grew up, I began to get into arguments with the rest of my family because of all these questions I was constantly troubled with. From thirteen years old until thirty, the same questions would whirl around in my head and prevented me from having any sense of inner peace or contentment with life, and I could not always keep my anxieties to myself. Eventually, a certain estrangement developed between me and my parents and siblings. I came to hate the religion I’d been raised in, and especially the constant refrain of the Arabic phrases insh’Allah (if God wills it) and mash’Allah (what God wanted has happened) – the unvarying answers to any question I asked. I was always told, “Yes, there are many things we can’t understand, and you will never have your answers until after you die.” I concluded that all religion was bad and that the best thing for me was to have nothing more to do with it.
I trained as a mechanic, and at thirty years of age I was introduced to and began working for an Armenian in the garage that he owned. I remained with him for the next ten years of my life, and in that time got married and started a family. As I got to know my boss, I came to really admire him and his whole family. He was very hospitable to me, frequently inviting me to his home, and even to his daughter’s wedding, and his family also spent time in my home with me and my new wife and small son. There was something about their lifestyle and their manners and habits that was really attractive to me, and was completely different to anything I had seen before. My boss especially seemed to radiate a constant peace, and there was a depth of kindness in his eyes whenever he spoke to me that I had never encountered in anyone else. Even to this day, I have never met anyone else like him.
Instead of trying to imitate my boss’s life, I only felt jealous of the peace that he had. I began to ask him many of the questions that I had always asked from childhood within my family, but I particularly asked him about the peace that he had. I wanted to know how I could have the same peace to anchor me through life. To any question I had, my boss had an answer, and every time, what chiefly characterised his responses was the same kind of peace I always observed in him – both his manner and the ideas he expressed to me were full of that peace.
I came to understand that he was a Christian, though he never spoke about what he believed or the way that he lived in religious terms. He talked about his “way”, and this appealed to me, since I had developed such a distaste for formal religious practice. I did not consider myself to be Muslim anymore. I reasoned that while I had been born a Muslim according to the law of my country, I had not chosen to follow Islam, so I could not really consider it to be my religion. I still asked why, if God was willing to give me anything good in life, He should need my empty ritualistic prayers and fasts. What was the purpose of formal religious observances? I was attracted to my boss’s idea that his Christianity was a “way” rather than a religion. This seemed to place an emphasis on knowing God and having a relationship with Him, rather than on obeying a list of rules. He told me that following rules about prayer was not the only thing that was important. The “way” to know God was about far more than that. It was about yielding the whole of one’s life to Him.
What affected me more than anything was the consistency of my boss’s life. I worked for him for ten years, and for all of that time he was the same man – always kind, and always filled with peace. He was not kind just to me. I observed that in every relationship and with everyone he met, he showed the same kindness and respect.
As an Armenian, my boss was permitted to worship in an Armenian church, but he could not invite me, as a Persian Muslim, to attend there, and he could get into serious trouble if he was ever suspected of proselytising. A death sentence would be a certainty, in fact. He was extremely cautious when it came to speaking about religion – preferring, as I said, to always talk in terms of his “way” – or to mention the Bible and its teachings. He could see, however, that I was desperately hungry for truth. I needed to find meaning, reality, and above all, that peace that had made me so jealous.
Because of my persistence and eagerness, my boss eventually introduced me to a Persian Christian who had converted and who attended a secret house church. It was this man who finally gave me all the information I needed. The first time we met was just in the street, and we spoke in very general terms, without making any mention of the Bible or of belief. We met again, this time in his car, where we were able to speak a bit more openly. I explained that I was longing to have the peace that I had seen in my Christian boss. He told me that while he could show me the way, he could not give me that peace himself. Only God could bring me to Himself and give me a new life. He gave me a Bible, which I took home and began to read. It was a month or two later that I felt ready to call him again, and I began to attend the house church. Reading the Bible caused me to have even more questions, but I began to believe that I was on the right path to really knowing God.
The first thing that changed for me was my understanding of the nature of God. Being brought up as a Muslim, I had never doubted the existence of God, but the Muslim God had seemed to me to be one I could not trust. It had appeared to me that there was no way to know for certain how to please God or to know what He wanted from me. I learned that the God of the Bible is eternally just, eternally opposed to sin, and that He had provided a way for my sin to be forgiven by sending Jesus to die for me and to pay the penalty for all my wrong. God had made a path for me to come to know Him. It was no longer a matter of me trying to find the way by striving endlessly to outweigh my bad deeds with good ones. This was a God I could trust because my salvation depended on Him and not on me. I came to a place where I felt fully convinced that this God was the real and living God.
In attending the house church, however, life for me had become one of secrecy and a certain level of stress. The church met in a summer house in the garden of a house outside the city. The location was ideal for meeting because the house was at the end of a street, and beyond it there were three streets into which we could flee separately if the police ever came. We had two rooms and we arranged one of them to look like an English class was taking place, with English study books placed open on chairs and tables. There were six of us who met, two women and four men including the pastor, and we held our small meeting every Friday. We always met at the same time, and we never communicated by calls or texts, even to confirm that our meeting was taking place. We just arrived every Friday at the same time. Although I had been given a Bible, that was an exception, and in general all of our Christian literature was kept securely in our meeting room. We were not permitted to take any of it home or move it to another place. The room in which we met was very simple, with just a rug on the floor and cushions for sitting on.
I was always afraid to take my wife along with me to the house church, but I had told her that I wanted to convert to Christianity, and she was interested in finding out more herself. For this reason, I made the mistake of taking a Christian leaflet from the church one day to give to her to read, and from this action our trouble started. I do not want to go into the details here of what happened, but eventually the police were alerted to our church meetings, and I had to leave my wife and son and flee to the UK as a refugee. Thus, a new and challenging chapter of my life began.
After arriving in the UK, I began slowly to believe that although I had learnt a lot about the Bible and about Christianity, I was not really a Christian. I knew very little English, but I found that there was a church I could attend in the city I was sent to where there was Farsi interpretation. During the services each week, I felt that I was really hearing God speaking to me through the pastor’s preaching. As soon as I was out of the door, however, I became immediately distracted by all my worries and anxieties about my situation as an asylum seeker, the urgency of my need to learn English and to sort out my accommodation, and how my wife and son were coping without me. I forgot everything that the pastor had preached. The peace I had observed in my Armenian boss was entirely absent from my life. I did not think to give everything over to God in prayer and trust Him to rule over and calm the storm that my life had become.
I remained one hundred per cent certain that the God that my Christian friends spoke about, and who was revealed in the Bible, was the real, true God. I just felt that He was not yet Lord over my life. The question that now burned in my heart was how I could know that I was really a Christian and that my life was really secure in Jesus Christ. No one I asked seemed to give me an answer that could satisfy me.
In the end, I found the answer for myself through conviction of my own sinfulness. I overheard a conversation one day about the pastor of another church in the city. It was being said that this pastor would baptise every single Iranian who went to the church and asked for baptism, and would support every one of them in their asylum application. It was also being said that as a result of this the pastor was not taken seriously by the Home Office judges. I never met the pastor of that church, but in one meeting with my solicitor I repeated to him the conversation that I’d heard. My solicitor became immediately very angry with me and told me that I had no right to pass judgement on someone I had never met. I did not know whether those other Iranians who asked for baptism and asked for support from the pastor were genuine Christians or not. He said that I could not know the reasons they had left Iran, or what suffering there might have been in their backgrounds. I felt truly humbled by my solicitor’s response. He was not a Christian, but he had rightly rebuked me for the arrogant, judgmental attitude I had displayed. I left his office feeling that I was not yet truly a Christian myself. I had not seen real change in my life. I had felt myself to be better than others, when in reality I was not. I felt that I had just been trying to be a Christian, and I was tired of trying. It was not really any different from trying to please God with my good deeds as a Muslim.
I knew other Iranian believers who said that they’d had some supernatural meeting with Jesus through a dream or a vision. I had been hoping for a similar experience, and I did in fact have a dream one night that felt significant to me, but, in truth, I felt that anything I dreamt about was just the natural result of what my mind had been dwelling on during the day. A dream was not enough to transform my heart. It was not until I stopped seeking an experience, through sheer failure and weariness, that God Himself became real to me and allowed me to know Him.
I was touched deeply by the truth that we can speak to God anywhere and in any way, without ritual washings or any special ceremony. He was a God who could understand my Farsi prayers – the cries of my heart in my own language. One night, although I am afraid of the dark, I went out of my house alone and wandered around near the rugby stadium close to my house. I felt totally at the end of myself. Whatever I wanted to do to please God, I could not do it. I understood in a way that I had not understood before that God had to save me because I could not save myself. I cried out to Him on that night from the depths of my heart. That was the 24th November 2018, and it was on that night that I trusted everything to God. I put my faith in the perfect life that Jesus lived in my place, and in the death that He died to pay the penalty that should have been mine for my sin and brokenness.
To begin with, my eyes were opened in a new way to His word. As I read the Bible more, every word became so clear to me. I could understand its message in a way I had not done before. I read about how Jesus compared people to good trees and bad trees:
You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every good tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
Matthew 7:16-20 NKJV
This really spoke to my own situation as I felt that the fruit I had been bearing in my life showed that I was not one of the good trees that Jesus spoke about.
My foundation for everything is God’s Word, the Bible. I know that this is where God has revealed the truth, and His Word is reliable and trustworthy in a way that dreams and visions can never be.
I still have struggles in trying to learn more about the Bible and about the Christian faith. I believe strongly that the churches here in the UK need to run more courses for young Christians to become grounded in their beliefs. We need prayer and support and clear teaching from our brothers and sisters in Christ in the UK, but this is not always easy to find. It has left me feeling that if I have any question, I should look only to the Bible for my answer, though perhaps this is not a bad thing.
Some of my Iranian friends, when they moved from the city I live in now, asked their pastor and elders to recommend a church in the city that they were moving to. However, they were not given any guidance, and were just told that they should find a church for themselves. Some Christians sincerely believe that they would be wrongly showing preference or favouritism to one church over another if they were to recommend a church, but as new believers, Iranian Christians need guidance. We do not come from a background where we could possibly have any understanding of denominations or sects, and it is really not helpful to us to withhold this type of advice. In Iran, I just thought that you could be either a Muslim or a Christian, or maybe Baha’i or Hindu or Buddhist, but I had no idea about the different types of churches that would all call themselves Christian.
I trust God that my wife and son will be able to join me before long. My wife has a good level of English, and I pray that she will attend church with me and come to know the Lord too. I am attending English classes every week, and I hope to be able to get work again as a mechanic in the future. I am very grateful for Christian friends at the church who have welcomed me and helped me in many ways. I am considering changing my name because my name is such a traditional Muslim name, and people I meet assume that I am Muslim. If Muslims see me eating food they consider not to be halal, they ask me why I am eating it. I tell them that all food is given to us by God, so it is all halal! This is an opportunity for conversation, but I would still like to maybe change my name to something that sounds more Christian, and to signify the complete change in my life. Please pray for Iranian Christian refugees like me with all the struggles we face.
Persian Voices 