PANIC IN IRAN: Pastor Jailed by Ali Khamenei Says Jesus Revealed the Supreme Leader’s Death to Him

I want to start by saying something that might surprise people.

I was not always a Christian.

I was not born into a Christian family.

I did not grow up going to church.

I did not even know what a church looked like from the inside until I was already a grown man.

I was born Muslim, raised Muslim, and for the first 26 years of my life, I lived as a Muslim.

Not a radical one.

Not the kind the world sees on the news with a weapon in his hand and fire in his eyes.

are just a regular Iranian man who fasted during Ramadan, who said his prayers sometimes more out of habit than conviction, who believed in a general kind of way that God existed and that Islam was the path to him.

That was the world I came from.

And I think it is important to say that clearly because the story I am about to tell you is not the story of a man who had nothing and found religion as a crutch.

It is the story of a man who had a life, who had a family, who had plans, and who was interrupted by something he could not explain and could not ignore.

My name is Elias Hoseni.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother, Reverend Elias Hoseni from Iran continues his story.

We’d love to know where you are watching from, and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

I was born in Thran in 1976.

I am the second of four children.

My father was an engineer who worked for a government ministry.

My mother was a school teacher.

We were not wealthy, but we were not struggling either.

We lived in a middle-class neighborhood in the north of Tehran.

It was an ordinary life in many of the ways that ordinary lives look similar everywhere.

Children playing in the street, adults working and worrying, the rhythms of meals and school and family visits, and the kind of small daily drama that fills up a life without you ever quite noticing how full it is.

My parents were educated people.

My father especially was a man who read widely and thought carefully.

He was not someone who accepted things simply because tradition handed them to him.

So he asked questions.

He weighed things.

He was a practicing Muslim in the sense that he observed the outward forms of the faith.

But he was never a man who used religion as a club.

He had a kind of intellectual integrity that I always admired even when it frustrated me as a young person.

I think I inherited that tendency from him.

The inability to simply go along with something that did not sit right inside me.

The need to examine.

The refusal to let things be settled by authority alone.

I I went to school, studied hard, and eventually entered university in Thran where I studied civil engineering.

Those were interesting years and I say that with full awareness of the complexity of what university life in Iran actually involves.

From the outside, people often imagine Iranian universities as tightly controlled spaces where only approved thinking is permitted.

And it is true that there are restrictions, significant restrictions.

But inside those spaces among the students, or there is more intellectual life than the official picture suggests, there are young people wrestling with ideas they are not supposed to wrestle with.

Books passing from hand to hand that were not on any approved list.

Conversations happening in corners and in whispers about philosophy, about politics, about the meaning of existence.

I was one of those students who read whatever I could find or Persian poetry.

Our poets are among the greatest in human history and they have always carried spiritual weight and foreign literature and philosophy and whatever else was circulating in those informal networks.

I was not politically active in an organized way.

But I was searching.

Something in me was perpetually unsatisfied and I kept turning over rocks looking for whatever was underneath without being able to name clearly what I was looking for.

After university, I joined an engineering firm in Thran.

I was 24 years old, beginning a professional life, beginning to build something.

I married Miam when I was 28.

She was from a similar background, educated from a middle-class Tehran family, thoughtful, not rigid in her practice of Islam, but respectful of it as the framework of our culture and community.

We were well matched in the ways that matter for a marriage.

We could talk.

We had genuine friendship underneath the romance.

We shared a way of looking at the world that was curious rather than closed.

Within a few years, we had our son Dara and then several years after that, our daughter Sharan.

I remember holding Darra for the first time in the hospital.

This small complete person who had not existed and then existed and feeling something that I did not have a theological framework for yet, but that I now understand was the presence of the holy in the ordinary and the feeling that life was more than the sum of its material parts.

that whatever this was, this mystery of a new human being arriving in the world, it pointed to something beyond itself.

Our life moved forward the way lives are supposed to, work, family, the apartment we slowly made into a home, the routines of parenthood and marriage and career.

I was by any external measure a man who had everything he was supposed to want.

and I was not unhappy.

I want to be precise about this because I have told the story in different contexts and I have noticed the tendency for people to fill in a backstory of misery or crisis when none existed.

My life was genuinely good.

I loved my wife.

I was engaged with my work.

My children were healthy.

I had friendships.

But that restlessness was always there.

It had been there since I was a teenager and it never left.

It is not the kind of thing that ordinary contentment can touch because it is not about circumstances.

It is something at the level of the soul.

A deep persistent awareness that something fundamental is unanswered.

that for all the prayers I said, for all the fasting I did, for all the religious observances I performed, I did not actually know God.

Not personally, not in a way that was real and present and alive.

I knew propositions about God.

I had been taught what to believe, and I broadly believed it.

But knowing about someone and knowing them are two entirely different things.

And somewhere inside me there was a hunger for the second kind of knowing that nothing in my religious life had come close to satisfying.

I think many people many people across many religious traditions know exactly what I am describing.

The gap between the religion you practice and the encounter with the living God that the religion is supposed to point toward.

The feeling of going through motions.

The prayer that feels like speaking to a ceiling.

The rituals that feel empty without meaning them.

I was living inside that gap.

And I had been living inside it so long that I had almost stopped noticing it.

The way you stop noticing a low-grade physical pain that has been present for years.

The first time I ever held a Bible was in 2005.

I was 29 years old.

My a colleague at work, a man I will not name because he is still in Iran and his safety still matters, left a Persian New Testament in the drawer of a desk we shared.

I do not know to this day whether he left it deliberately or by accident.

He never mentioned it.

I found it one afternoon when I was looking for something else, and I took it out and looked at it for a long time before I opened it.

I knew what it was.

I also knew in a practical sense exactly what it meant to be found holding it.

Possessing Christian scripture in Iran is not something the authorities treat casually and distributing it or sharing it carries serious risk.

I was aware of all of that and still I could not put it down.

I opened it and it fell to the Gospel of John.

I do not have a dramatic explanation for why I started there.

It was simply where the book opened in my hands.

And I began to read.

I read the first few verses.

The part that says in the beginning was the word and the word was with God.

And in the word was God.

And I stopped.

I read it again.

There was something in those opening sentences that was unlike anything I had read in any religious text before.

Not because I fully understood what they meant.

I did not.

Not then.

But because they had a weight to them, a density that I felt more than I processed intellectually, like standing near something very large and feeling the gravitational pull of it before you understand what the thing is.

I read on.

Uh, I read through the entire first chapter and by the time I put the Bible back in the drawer, my mind was going in directions that I could not entirely control.

The language of this text was doing something to me.

I was an engineer.

I was trained to be logical and precise and to distrust what could not be measured.

and I sat there in my office afterward staring at my work and thought something just happened to me.

I over the following weeks I kept going back to that desk when my colleague was absent and reading more.

Chapter by chapter slowly, carefully.

I was reading it the way a man reads something that he senses is important but does not yet fully understand.

with a mixture of fascination and caution.

And as I read, something was accumulating in me.

A conviction still wordless at that point that the person these pages were written about was real.

Not historically real in the limited sense that any ancient figure was real.

Real in the sense of present, alive, actually there.

I need to tell you about the dream because the dream is where things moved from searching to encounter.

It was an ordinary night.

I had not been reading the Bible that day.

I was not in any heightened spiritual state.

I went to sleep the way I always did beside Mariam in our bedroom with the sounds of the city outside.

And in the night a dream came that was unlike any dream I had had before.

There was a man.

I cannot give you a precise physical description that would satisfy a painter, and I will not try to manufacture one.

What I can tell you is that there was a man standing in a quality of light that was not theatrical or blinding, but simply clear, a clarity that made everything in the dream visible and present.

And I knew in the way you sometimes know things in dreams without being told who this man was.

And he did not preach to me.

He did not give me a list of things to do.

He simply looked at me.

And in that look, in whatever that moment of being looked at fully was, I experienced something that I had been reaching toward my entire life.

It was the experience of being completely known.

Not in a frightening way, not in the way of an interrogation or a judgment, but in the way of being seen to your very foundation by someone who finds nothing there that changes their love for you.

And I felt known and I felt accepted in the same breath.

And those two things together produced in me a peace that I can only tell you was the most real thing I had ever felt.

More real than the walls of the room I would wake up in.

More real than the work problems I had been thinking about the night before.

I woke up and sat in the dark for a long time.

Miam was asleep beside me.

I did not wake her.

I just sat there with whatever that had been, turning it over, and knowing that something had fundamentally shifted, even if I could not have told you exactly what or how.

I was not a Christian yet in any formal or confessional sense.

But the door had opened, and I knew I was going to walk through it.

In the months that followed, I read everything I could access.

I finished the New Testament, moved into the Old Testament through passages I could reach.

I read whatever theological or explanatory material I could find through careful means.

Some of it online through systems that people in Iran used to access restricted content.

Some of it through physical materials that passed through the informal network of people who were curious about or connected to faith.

I prayed differently.

not in Arabic, not in the formal postures I had been taught, but in Persian, in my own words, are in the way you speak to a person who is actually there and who you are beginning to know.

And I was being answered, not always in dramatic ways.

Sometimes in the quality of a particular morning.

Sometimes in a sudden clarity about something I had been confused about.

Sometimes in a physical warmth in prayer that I could not explain but that I had also learned to stop trying to explain away.

God was present.

That was the simple fact of it.

Uh the God I had been reaching toward through years of former religion and intellectual searching was present.

And he was not cold or distant or conditional.

He was close and warm and deeply personal.

And discovering that after years of the other thing, the empty ritual, the ceiling prayers, was like a man dying of thirst, finding water.

I need to find other believers.

That was the thought that settled in me after some months of this private solitary journey of faith.

And I could not do this alone indefinitely.

and I knew it.

The scripture I was reading was not the scripture of isolated individualism.

It was relentlessly communal.

It spoke of a body, a fellowship, people who needed each other.

But finding other Christians in Iran is not a straightforward thing.

It requires time, caution, and the slow building of trust that only comes through careful relationship.

It was through a friend who had a friend through a chain of indirect connections in that I eventually made contact.

The introduction was indirect and deniable at every link in the chain.

And after several conversations and a gradual establishment of trust, I was eventually brought to a gathering.

There were nine of us the first time I attended.

We met in a small apartment sitting on the floor and on the edges of the furniture close together because the room was not large.

Everyone had brought something.

Food, a small contribution of some kind.

I There were people from across the range of Thrron’s middle class.

A doctor, two university students, a woman who worked in government administration, a retired teacher, a man who ran a small printing business.

All converts, all from Muslim backgrounds, all people who had through different paths and different encounters found their way to the same place I was finding my way to.

They read scripture together.

They prayed together in Persian.

In voices that stayed low, not from lack of conviction, but from the awareness of what surrounded them.

They sang softly, carefully, but they sang.

And there was something in that room among those nine people in that small apartment with the curtains drawn that was more alive than anything I had experienced in any mosque I had attended in 29 years of practicing Islam.

The presence of God was palpable.

I know that sounds like the kind of thing people say at Christian events without always meaning it specifically.

I mean it specifically.

There was something in that room that was not explicable by the human ingredients present.

And everyone there knew it and none of them had to say so for everyone to know it.

I wept.

I did not plan to.

I am not a man who cries easily and I have never been.

But sitting in that room for the first time, I was surrounded by these people who had paid real prices for the thing I was only beginning to step into.

I wept with relief.

Mostly the relief of a man who has been alone with something enormous and has finally found people who understand it.

Over the following months, I became a regular part of this community.

I formally gave my life to Christ in that group, not with any ceremony or elaborate ritual.

I simply with a prayer said aloud in the presence of those people that I have never tried to repeat verbatim because I do not think the specific words were the point.

The point was the intention, the surrender, the full and final stepping through the door that had been standing open since the dream.

Now I need to tell you about telling Miriam because this was not a small thing and I will not pretend it was.

I told her gradually, not in one conversation but over several weeks.

I’m peeling back layers as I gauged her responses, watching her face for the fear I knew was likely and for the openness I hoped was also there.

I told her first about the Bible I had been reading.

then about the dream, then about the group, and she listened to all of it in the quiet, attentive way that is very characteristic of who Mariam is.

She does not react quickly.

She processes, she thinks, and then she speaks from that place of having thought carefully.

Her first honest response was fear.

I I want to be clear that this was a completely reasonable response.

What I was telling her was that her husband had been secretly reading a banned religious text, attending illegal religious gatherings, and was in the process of converting from Islam to Christianity.

A conversion that in Iran carries the legal designation of apostasy and can carry a death sentence.

The fear was not weakness.

The fear was wisdom.

She understood the stakes completely and she was frightened for our family.

Uh but Miriam is also a woman who does not dismiss things she cannot explain and she could not dismiss what she was seeing in me.

The change in me was real and it was visible.

I was calmer.

I was kinder.

There was something in me that had settled.

that restlessness that she had known about since before we were married, that she had lived alongside for years without being able to touch.

It was quieter and she noticed.

She began her own inquiry.

She started reading carefully, privately, and with the same caution I had used.

She prayed in her own way and she told me later that she had said to God in that prayer, “If this is real, show me.

If Jesus is who Elias says he is, show me.

” It was an honest, unadorned prayer from a woman who was not going to be swept along by her husband’s experience without her own.

It took almost a year.

And then one evening in the kitchen of our apartment, she told me that something had changed in her.

That in prayer, she had encountered something she could not explain and could not dismiss.

That she believed.

She did not use a lot of words to describe it.

That is also characteristic of Mariam, the compression of deep things into few words.

But her face told me everything the words did not say.

And from that night, we were walking this together.

I want to say something about what it means to hold a faith in secret in Iran.

I because I think people outside that reality sometimes romanticize it without understanding what it actually costs in daily life.

The double life is exhausting in a way that is not dramatic or acute, but chronic and grinding.

Every day you make small calculations.

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