Sowing seeds
“Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And it happened, as he sowed, that some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds of the air came and devoured it. Some fell on stony ground, where it did not have much earth; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up it was scorched, and because it had no root it withered away. And some seed fell among thorns; and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no crop. But other seed fell on good ground and yielded a crop that sprang up, increased and produced: some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some a hundred.”
Mark 4:3-8 NKJV
I was born into a Muslim family in Iran, but we were not particularly religious. My father just taught me to be honest and good, but he did not insist on me saying my daily prayers or fasting during Ramadan. Of course, I had to do these things at school and in public, like everyone else. My grandfather was a monarchist and supported the Shah, so he had been against the Islamic revolution. Because of his and my father’s influence on me, from a young age I did not have a strong belief in Islam. I did, however, believe there is a God. I came to view people who practised Islam as lying, corrupt and violent. In Islam, people believe that you have to be good to go to heaven, or at least you have to obey all the religious rules. This seemed to me to be just a kind of gambling with God. Nobody can keep all the rules perfectly. Nobody can be good all the time. It is impossible. All you can do is to try to outweigh your bad deeds with good ones. The Quran talks about faith and kindness, but this kindness is supposed to be reserved only for other Muslims. There is no care offered to people outside of Islam. On the contrary, the Quran advocates that non-Muslims be killed. I saw this as hypocrisy. There are also punishments in Islam that contradict the idea of a kind, loving God, like hanging, stoning women, and allowing women to be beaten by their husbands.
Despite these religious doubts, life moved on. After completing my education, I moved to Tehran with a friend in September 2016 to work in a computer store. Once there, a second cousin of mine, named Shahab, called me one day to chat and catch up, and because he had a computer that needed fixing. Following our initial meeting we began to spend time together and our relationship became closer.
I wanted to lose weight so Shahab and I started to go for long walks together, and as we walked, we talked. I had met Shahab before at family gatherings, but I could see that there had now been a change in him. He was a better listener, and his own conversation was meaningful. Shahab introduced the subject of religion. He knew that my family was not religious, so he felt comfortable talking to me about the problems he saw with Islam, and I joined him in complaining about the religion that we were both obliged by our government to follow.
As we continued our discussions, Shahab asked me about my ambitions for my life. I told him that I hoped to make a lot of money. He asked me what I hoped for after that. I listed all the material possessions that I hoped some day to be able to afford to buy. Shahab asked me again, “And what about after that?” I began to see that in reality my life was very empty. I had no purpose, no meaningful goal or destination. I did not want to be forced to think about the future. It was as though my future was obscured by darkness and I could not get to the real reason for living. I was also aware of feeling constantly guilty because I was always failing to live up to the demands of my religion.
Shahab continued with his probing questions. He helped me come to see that I was judging other people and blaming other people for my own mistakes. He told me that I should remove the log from my own eye before I focussed on the splinter in someone else’s. For example, I had blamed my friends for persuading me by peer pressure to drink alcohol with them. He explained that it was entirely my choice to spend time with these friends when I knew what they were like. I also began to recognise that in my relationships with former girlfriends I had blamed them for the problems we had, while in fact it was me who had caused the problems. I had rejected things that my father had tried to teach me, thinking always that I was right. Now I understood differently and saw that I should have respected him.
I did not understand at that time that Shahab had left Islam and had become a Christian. He was cautiously trying to plant seeds in my heart to prepare me to hear that there was another way to live that did not depend on our own efforts to please God or to achieve the successes we want in life. He was trying to gauge my response to understand if I would be willing to allow him to talk about his new faith.
About two months after my arrival in Tehran, with my mind and heart carefully prepared, Shahab invited me to his house. There he told me that I needed to get to know the real God, the only true, living and perfect God. He told me that all the wars, disasters and problems in the world were a reflection of, and were caused by, sinful human beings. I would not learn about God by looking at the world. I could only get to know Him by reading the Bible and learning about Jesus Christ. He said that the things we had discussed previously were deeply linked to Christianity. He said that there was a vast distance between me and God. Most people in Iran shared this distance from God because of how we had been brought up and taught in school. We had not learned the truth about God.
To begin with, I was very skeptical about the idea of Christianity. I explained to Shahab that I was disillusioned with the idea of religion altogether. I did not like Islam, but I did not want to consider another religion. He told me that I should give Christianity a chance. I needed time to get to understand its teachings, and he gave me a book to read. It was a portion of the New Testament: the Gospel according to Matthew.
I took my Gospel of Matthew home with me and began to read it in short sections at a time. I would regularly stop when I had questions or was simply unable to fully understand what I had read. I struggled, for example, to understand how the Son of God was also supposed to be God Himself. I would go back to Shahab with my questions. As I read on, however, I came to understand things better. I was struck by how much more profound and beautiful the message of Jesus Christ was than my first impressions had been.
Shahab explained to me a story that Jesus told from Matthew chapter 20, in which a landowner hires labourers for his vineyard. At the beginning of the story a wage is agreed upon for a day’s work. Many labourers are hired at different times of the day, some of them working from early in the morning, and some of them working for only a short time from much later in the day. When the time comes for them to be paid, they are all given the same wage. Those hired early in the day complain to the landowner that those who have worked for only one hour are paid the same as they themselves who have worked all day long through the hottest hours. The landowner answers that he is giving equal pay out of his kindness, and that it is his money to do with as he pleases. I learned from this that salvation for everyone is equal in Christianity, regardless of when someone has responded to God’s call to give their life to serve Him. I compared this idea with Islamic teaching, where salvation and rewards are dependent on the balance of good deeds and sins throughout one’s life.
I was also impressed that Christianity teaches us not to swear by God’s name. The Ten Commandments includes the command not to take God’s name “in vain”. I saw that in the culture all around me, by contrast, people would swear by God’s name whenever they wanted to tell a lie, using God’s name in a very wrong way to convince their hearer that their lie is truth. There are other differences too from what I knew before. The Quran teaches only revenge and “an eye for an eye”. Instead, Jesus said in Matthew 5:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.”
Matthew 5:38-41 NKJV
What Jesus said was clearly a radical message and not just a doctrine based on human thinking. Perhaps it really was a message from the true God, and not from a god of human invention.
When Shahab talked to me about Jesus, he told me that John the Baptist had declared Him to be “the Lamb of God”. Lambs are sacrificed in Persian Islamic culture as an atonement for sin. The Bible teaches that the death of Jesus was God’s once and for all sacrifice to pay the penalty for our sin.
The more I read the Gospel of Matthew, the more I was interested in learning about Christianity, and about how I could come myself to know and have a personal relationship with God. Shahab gave me a link to download videos about the life of Jesus, which I did using a VPN to bypass censorship filters. I see that God’s hand was on my life in this slow introduction to Christianity. I was not better than anyone else for God to choose to reveal Himself to me by using my cousin Shahab. I was just a sinner needing to be saved. Other Christians cannot save you. They can just show you the way, and Shahab was faithfully doing that for me.
I was enjoying the challenge of learning something new, but I see with hindsight that I was not a believer at that time. I was still just learning and exploring ideas that were unfamiliar to me. I continued reading my portion of the Bible, finding something new each time I read. Shahab told me that when I was ready to believe, I should testify of my faith in front of others. He invited me to go with him to his house church. It was in March 2017 that I first went there.
Everyone at the church was really friendly and behaved as though they had known me for years. This did not seem to me to be normal behaviour. In Iranian culture, people find it very hard to trust each other and if someone is very kind or polite to you, you usually ask yourself why they are being so nice and what they are going to ask from you. Over time, however, I came to really appreciate the atmosphere in the church and to see the sincerity of the believers. I realised that in a sense they had all known me before we met because Shahab had told them about our conversations, and they had been praying for me. The meetings were also helping me to understand the Bible better.
I continued to attend the gatherings on Fridays whenever I could. At one meeting Shahab and his friends were discussing evangelism. They were concerned to find ways to reach other people with the message of the gospel. Someone suggested that we could create a website or online forum where the teachings of Islam and of Christianity could be compared side by side. The church already had a Telegramgroup which we used for organising meetings. Telegram is a messaging service that was open and permitted in Iran at that time without any VPN. I suggested, however, that we could make a blog about Christianity. I said that I knew how to do this and was willing to take notes from the preaching in the church and write them up for the blog. The others agreed that we should go ahead with my idea and I started a blog in October 2017.
I continued to take notes at the church meetings and to post on the blog until June the following year. June 15th 2018 was the last Friday meeting that I attended the church. At the end of that meeting, most of the group stayed for a while to chat and to socialise. Some of the men were talking about the problems of evangelism in an Islamic culture. In Iran, the way that most people think has been shaped by the teachings of Islam all their lives. We talked about how it was necessary to point out some of the inconsistencies and problems with Islamic teaching as a first step. They also need to see how our own lives have been changed by Christ as we live according to His teachings and show love in all we do. Only then will they be ready to hear the good news of forgiveness for sins through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Finally, with prayer, we need to leave the rest in the Lord’s hands.
We began to talk about how we could start to distribute Christian materials such as books and CDs. The hope was that these would plant seeds in the minds of people we knew or met before we could speak to them more directly about Jesus. I heard that these materials had arrived from Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. I knew that two of the members of the house church had connections with Christians in those countries.
Two days after that last church meeting, I was at home in my flat in Tehran with a friend when my father called. I could immediately hear the anger in his voice. He asked if I had heard any news about Shahab in the last couple of hours. I replied that I had heard nothing. He then asked me where I was, and when I told him I was at home, he said that I should leave with as little delay as possible. He said that Shahab and one of the other members of the church had been arrested. Shahab’s father had called mine and told him that it must be because of their activities as Christians because no one knew of any other reason why they would be in trouble with the police.
I hurried to pack a few things and I broke my SIM card. I bought a replacement as soon as I could and went to a friend’s house. From there I contacted my relatives through WhatsApp via a VPN. I found out the following day from my father that another member of the church had also been arrested along with the others. The families of the three men all knew each other and were trying together to discover what had happened. For some time, I tried to believe that everything would be okay and that they would soon be released. I was wrong. Within a few days we heard that two other members of the church had been arrested. Two days later, my landlord called my father to tell him that my home had been raided. There could now be no doubt about the reason for the arrests.
My father advised me to go to Dastak in Northern Iran. I was able to stay at the villa of a former work connection of my father’s. Within days we heard that a court summons had been issued and left with my landlord. About a week later my father’s house was raided. The man I was staying with took me to Lahijan, where a man collected me and took me to Urumieh. I was there for just two days, and was then taken out of the country by car with an “agent”. It was around the middle of July by that time. My journey eventually brought me to the UK.
I started to attend a local church twice on Sundays in the city where I was settled, and also to go to a prayer meeting on Wednesday evenings. It was wonderful to find myself in a situation where I had complete freedom to listen to preaching each week, and to talk and ask questions of other believers. I came to realise that I had not really been saved before I came to the UK. I know that the Holy Spirit had been working in me and that my eyes had been opened to see truth in the Bible and to believe that it was God’s word; I had been impressed by the life and the teaching of Jesus; my knowledge and understanding had been increasing; but there had still been so many things I did not fully understand and areas of my life that had not been changed. There came one Wednesday evening when I felt God’s presence with me as I sat in the prayer meeting in a way that I had not felt before. I no longer had any doubt that the only thing I wanted for my life was to glorify God. All the questions I had previously struggled with, and my lack of assurance that I was really a saved believer, now seemed clearly answered by this sense of God’s tangible nearness to me.
I know now that everything that happened to me was God’s plan. I am His and He has brought me to where I am now – and even in the midst of my uncertain situation, God is using me to expand His kingdom. I continued to update my blog while waiting for the result of my asylum application, hoping that other Iranians would be reached with the message of salvation through Jesus. I’ve also had opportunities to minister to those closer to home, by accompanying a church member as he does evangelism. I’ve gone with him to the university Christian Union and had an opportunity to tell my story to the young people there.
I now have leave to remain in the UK, I am attending a local church, I am seeking the Lord’s will for my life, and I am waiting to see how He wants to continue to use me. I thank God for everything He has done so far!
Persian Voices 