PEOPLE of Iran, Jesus has come to reign in Iran.
That was me with 3,000 of my brothers, soldiers who swore to fight Jesus and Christianity fall on their faces before Jesus.
I don’t know how to process what I just witnessed.
My name is Colonel Raza Amadi.
Until 4 days ago, I was a commanding officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC.
For 18 years, I served the Islamic Republic.
I led operations.
I enforced the regime’s will.
I believed in the revolution.
But on March 3rd, 2026, something happened that shattered everything I thought I knew.
This is my testimony.
I need you to understand who I was before I tell you what happened.
I wasn’t some low-level conscript.
I was Colonel Raza Amadi, IRGC 25th Division, stationed in Thrron.
My father served under Kmeni during the revolution.
My grandfather fought in the Iran Iraq war.
Military service wasn’t just my job.
It was my identity.
It was my family’s legacy.
It was everything we stood for.
I I grew up in a household where the Islamic Republic was sacred, where Kmeni’s picture hung in every room, where questioning the revolution was unthinkable.
My father used to tell me stories about the early days, how they overthrew the sha, how they built a new Iran based on Islamic principles, how they resisted American imperialism.
These weren’t just stories.
They were our scripture, our truth, the foundation of everything I believed about the world.
When I was 18 years old, I I joined the Revolutionary Guard.
It was the proudest day of my father’s life.
I remember him standing at attention when I came home in my uniform for the first time.
He saluted me, his own son.
And I felt like I was carrying forward something holy, something bigger than myself.
The IRGC wasn’t like the regular army.
We were the ideological backbone of the Islamic Republic.
We weren’t just soldiers.
We were guardians of the revolution.
We protected the Islamic system from internal and external threats.
And I took that responsibility seriously, deadly seriously.
Over the years, I rose through the ranks.
I led operations against Kurdish separatists.
I coordinated security during protests in 2009 and 2019.
I interrogated dissident who spoke against the regime.
I had arrested protesters.
I had led raids on underground churches.
I had done things in the name of the Islamic Republic that I thought were righteous, necessary, a patriotic.
I’m not proud of that now.
But back then, I believed I was protecting Iran from foreign influence, from Western corruption, from people who wanted to destroy our Islamic identity.
I believed Christians were agents of the West, that they were trying to colonize our minds the way the British and Americans had once tried to colonize our land.
I had personally overseen raids on house churches in Tehran.
I had seen the fear in people’s eyes when we broke down their doors.
I I had confiscated Bibles written in Farsy.
I had sent pastors to Evan prison.
And I had felt nothing but contempt for these people.
They were traitors to Iran, traitors to Islam, traitors to everything we had fought for.
But then February 28th happened.
Supreme Leader Kamay was killed in an Israeli air strike.
I’m sure you saw the news.
The whole world saw it.
The man who had ruled Iran for over three decades, gone in an instant.
The footage was everywhere.
the compound in flames on the emergency vehicles, the chaos.
But what you didn’t see was what happened inside Iran’s military in the hours and days that followed.
What you didn’t see was the absolute panic that gripped our command structure.
Because Kamoi wasn’t just our leader, he was the foundation of our entire system.
Without him, everything felt uncertain, unstable.
like the ground had disappeared beneath our feet.
Within hours of his death, the assembly of experts convened an emergency session and they began the process of selecting a new supreme leader.
Names were circulated, clerics, political figures, military commanders.
But there was no consensus, no clear successor.
And in that vacuum, something started to crack.
I was in the IRGC command center in Thran when the first report started coming in.
Strange reports, disturbing reports, reports that didn’t make any sense.
Soldiers were deserting, not just one or two, entire units, companies, battalions.
Oh, we started receiving calls from base commanders across the country.
Men were walking off their posts, abandoning their weapons, refusing orders.
At first, we thought it was fear.
We thought our soldiers were terrified that Iran was about to be destroyed, that American bombers were coming, that we were all going to die in retaliation strikes.
But then we started hearing something else, something that made my blood run cold.
We started hearing that these deserters were surrendering to Jesus and not surrendering to America, not surrendering to Israel, surrendering to Jesus Christ.
Some kind of mass religious hysteria was spreading through our ranks and we had no idea how to stop it.
I remember sitting in a briefing room with other senior officers on March 1st.
We were trying to make sense of the reports.
One general suggested it was a CIA psychological operation.
Another thought it was some kind of chemical weapon that caused hallucinations.
A third officer, a man I’d known for 15 years, stood up and said something I’ll never forget.
He said, “What if it’s real? What if God is actually moving in Iran?” The room went silent.
And then the commanding general ordered him removed from the meeting.
ordered him to report for a psychiatric evaluation.
Because in the IRGC, you don’t question the revolution.
You don’t question Islam.
And you certainly don’t suggest that Jesus Christ might be doing something in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But the reports kept coming faster and faster.
A besieged garrison in Shiraz, 200 men deserted overnight.
an IRGC base in Mshad.
An entire mechanized unit abandoned their vehicles and walked away.
Artillery positions in Kerman Sha.
The crews just disappeared.
It was like our military was melting away before our eyes.
And then I started hearing the testimonies.
Soldiers who had been arrested for desertion.
When interrogators asked them why they left their posts, they all said the same thing.
And they said they had encountered Jesus.
They said he appeared to them in dreams, in visions, in moments of prayer.
They said he spoke to them, called them by name, told them to lay down their weapons and follow him.
I thought it was mass delusion.
I thought these men had been brainwashed by underground church networks, that Christian missionaries had somehow infiltrated our military and poisoned the minds of our soldiers.
So, I decided to investigate myself.
I I wasn’t going to sit in a command center and receive secondhand reports.
I was going to see this phenomenon with my own eyes.
On March 2nd, I drove to a Basie garrison south of Tehran.
This was a facility where an entire company, 200 men, had reportedly deserted the previous night.
I wanted to interview the officers who remained.
I wanted to understand what had happened.
I wanted to find the source of this infection so we could cut it out before it spread further.
Oh, when I arrived at the garrison, the scene was surreal.
The base was nearly empty.
Guard posts were abandoned.
Vehicles sat idle in motor pools.
The few officers who remained looked like they were in shock, like they’d witnessed something that broke them psychologically.
I found a captain in the operation center.
He was sitting alone at a desk staring at nothing.
I walked up to him and demanded answers.
I asked him where his men were.
He just looked at me with empty eyes.
And then he said something that haunts me to this day.
He said, “They met him, sir, and once you meet him, you can’t go back to what you were before.
” I grabbed him by his uniform.
I shouted in his face.
I demanded to know what he was talking about.
Who did they meet? Where did they go? Was this a coordinated operation? Was there a foreign agent involved? But he just kept staring at me with those empty eyes.
And then he started weeping.
A grown man, a military officer, weeping like a child.
I ordered him arrested on the spot.
I had him taken into custody for dereliction of duty and possible collaboration with enemy forces.
But even as I gave the order, something felt wrong.
This wasn’t the behavior of a traitor.
This was the behavior of someone who had seen something that shattered his understanding of reality.
I drove back to Thrron that evening with more questions than answers.
I filed my report.
Uh, I recommended a full-scale investigation into possible psychological warfare operations targeting our military.
I suggested we needed to crack down harder on underground church networks.
I even proposed that we should execute a few deserters publicly to send a message and restore discipline.
But that night, I couldn’t sleep.
I kept thinking about what that captain had said.
Once you meet him, you can’t go back.
Who was him? Jesus.
How could an entire company of soldiers meet Jesus? It It didn’t make sense.
It violated everything I understood about the world, about religion, about reality itself.
The next day, March 3rd, I received intelligence about a gathering.
Our informants reported that thousands of former soldiers were meeting in an abandoned warehouse district on the eastern edge of Thyron.
They were meeting with members of underground churches, Christian pastors, house church leaders.
This was it.
This was the conspiracy.
And this was where we would find the source of this movement and crush it before it destabilized the entire country.
I assembled a tactical team.
20 of my best men, veterans, loyal IRGC officers who had served with me for years, men I trusted with my life.
We loaded into three vehicles and drove toward the warehouse district.
Our mission was simple.
Raid the gathering, make mass arrests, confiscate any foreign materials, identify the ring leaders, and restore order.
It was evening when we arrived and the sun was setting over Tehran.
The city was unusually quiet.
Normally, you’d hear traffic voices, the sounds of urban life, but that night, everything felt muted, like the whole city was holding its breath.
We parked several blocks away from the target location and approached on foot.
I had my sidearm.
My men carried rifles.
We moved tactically using cover, staying in radio contact.
We were professionals.
We had done this a hundred times before.
We knew how to conduct raids.
Uh how to establish perimeters, how to neutralize threats.
But when we reached the warehouse district and saw the gathering, everything I knew, everything I had trained for became irrelevant.
There were not hundreds of people.
There were thousands.
The intelligence report had said thousands, but I hadn’t believed it.
I thought it was an exaggeration.
But no, there were actually thousands of people gathered there.
Former soldiers in civilian clothes, bas militia men, IRGC officers, men I recognized, a men I had served with, men I had trained.
They weren’t armed.
They weren’t plotting violence.
They weren’t organizing an insurrection.
They were kneeling.
Thousands of grown men on their knees, weeping, praying, singing songs I had never heard before.
And there was this presence, this overwhelming sense of something I couldn’t name, something powerful, something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I stopped.
My hand went to my weapon.
My training kicked in.
I should radio for backup.
I should establish a perimeter.
I should neutralize the threat.
But I couldn’t move.
I was frozen.
Not from fear exactly, but from something else, something I had never experienced before in my entire military career.
My men felt it, too.
I could see it in their faces, the way they slowed their pace, the way their hands trembled on their rifles, the way they looked at each other with confusion and something close to terror.
We were warriors, and we were trained to face danger without flinching.
But this wasn’t danger.
This was something else entirely.
And then I heard the singing.
Thousands of voices rising together, singing in Farsy.
But the words, the words were about Jesus, about his love, about his sacrifice, about his resurrection.
These were songs of worship, not whispered in secret, not hidden in underground gatherings, but proclaimed loudly, boldly, a by thousands of men who had once sworn oaths to defend Islam and the Islamic Republic.
I watched as one of my soldiers, a sergeant named Hassan, who had served under me for seven years, lowered his rifle.
Just lowered it without asking permission, without waiting for my command.
He took two steps forward, then another, and then he started walking toward the crowd, toward the thousands of kneeling men, and I shouted at him to stop.
I ordered him to return to formation.
But he didn’t even look back as he walked into that crowd and he fell to his knees and he started weeping.
And then another one of my men did the same thing.
And then another.
And within minutes all 20 of the soldiers I had brought with me had dropped their weapons and joined that gathering.
All 20 men without a single shot being fired, without any resistance.
I stood there alone, the only one still holding a weapon, the only one still trying to maintain some kind of military discipline, not the only one still clinging to the identity I had built my entire life around.
Colonel Reza Amadi, IRGC officer, guardian of the Islamic Republic, defender of the revolution.
But I could feel something pressing against that identity.
Something trying to break through.
Something that terrified me more than any enemy I had ever faced.
Because I knew in that moment that if I took one more step forward, everything I was would be destroyed.
Everything I had believed, everything I had fought for, everything that made me who I was.
And then I felt it.
Not a voice.
At least not a voice I heard with my ears, but a presence standing right behind me.
I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there.
As real as the ground beneath my feet, as real as the weapon in my hand, as real as the thousands of men kneeling before me.
And I knew without turning around, I knew it was him.
Jesus, the one these men were worshiping, the one they had encountered, the one they had surrendered to.
Or he was standing right behind me, waiting, not forcing me, not threatening me, just waiting, waiting for me to turn around.
Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run, to call for backup, to retreat to my vehicle and drive back to headquarters and pretend this never happened.
to maintain the lie that I was in control, that my worldview was intact, that I was still the man I had always been.
But I couldn’t run.
My legs wouldn’t move.
My body had stopped obeying my commands.
A and in that paralysis, I realized something.
I realized that I had been running my entire life.
Running from the truth.
Running from the doubts that crept in during quiet moments.
Running from the guilt I felt when I arrested innocent people.
Running from the emptiness I felt despite all my accomplishments in rank and power.
I had arrested Christians.
I had destroyed their churches.
I had torn apart their families.
I had sent pastors to prison where they were tortured and sometimes killed.
And I had told myself I was doing the right thing, that I was protecting Iran, protecting Islam, protecting the revolution.
But standing there in that warehouse district with thousands of former soldiers worshiping Jesus, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.
I knew the truth.
I had always known it deep down.
I wasn’t protecting Iran.
I was protecting a system that ruled through fear, through violence, through oppression.
I wasn’t serving God.
I I was serving men who used God’s name to justify their power.
And Jesus was standing behind me.
The one I had been taught to respect as a prophet, but never worship as God.
The one I had been told was just a messenger, just a teacher, just a man.
He was standing behind me and he was so much more than anything I had been taught.
So much more than anything I could comprehend.
I dropped my weapon.
It clattered on the pavement and I fell to my knees.
Not because someone pushed me.
Uh not because I was physically weak.
I fell because I finally understood who I’d been fighting against all these years.
I finally understood what I had been running from.
I finally understood who was standing behind me.
And I turned around in my heart, in my spirit, in the deepest part of my being.
I turned around and I saw him.
Not with my physical eyes, but I saw him as clearly as I had ever seen anything in my life.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, was standing before me with eyes full of love.
Not anger, not judgment, not condemnation.
love.
Pure, overwhelming, incomprehensible love for me, for Colonel Reza Amadi, for the man who had spent 18 years enforcing a system that persecuted his followers, for the man who had arrested his servants, for the man who had destroyed his churches.
He looked at me with love and I wept.
I wept like I had never wept before.
deep wrenching sobs that came from a place I didn’t know existed inside me.
All the pain I had caused, all the lies I had believed, all the evil I had participated in, it all came pouring out of me in those tears.
And Jesus, he didn’t turn away.
He didn’t condemn me.
He didn’t remind me of my sins.
He just stood there loving me, accepting me, forgiving me.
I don’t know how long I knelt there.
Time lost all meaning.
It could have been minutes.
It could have been hours.
But at some point, I became aware of people around me, former soldiers, and men who had once served under me.
Men I had arrested in previous raids.
They were praying over me, laying hands on my shoulders, welcoming me into this new family, this family I had once persecuted.
And then I heard a voice, a physical voice this time, speaking in Farsy.
An older man knelt beside me.
He had a gray beard and kind eyes.
He introduced himself as Pastor Cyrus.
He had been leading an underground church in Tehran for 20 years.
I recognized him immediately, and I had arrested him in 2019.
I had personally transported him to Evan Prison.
I had testified against him at his trial.
He had been sentenced to 10 years, but here he was somehow released, somehow free.
And he was kneeling beside me with no trace of anger or bitterness in his eyes.
Only compassion, only love, the same love I had just encountered from Jesus.
He asked me if I understood what had just happened to me.
And I nodded.
I couldn’t speak.
My voice was gone, but I nodded and he smiled.
Aren said, “Welcome home, brother.
Welcome to the family of God.
” “Welcome home.
” Those words broke something else inside me because I realized I had been searching for home my entire life.
I thought I had founded in the IRGC, in military service, in the revolution, in defending Iran.
But none of that was home.
It was all just a substitute, a counterfeit, a shadow of the real thing.
Home was this.
Home was Jesus.
Home was being loved unconditionally by the God who created me.
E home was being welcomed into a family that transcended nationality and politics and military rank.
Home was finally belonging to something eternal, something that couldn’t be destroyed by air strikes or regime changes or political upheaval.
Pastor Cyrus helped me to my feet.
My legs were weak.
I could barely stand.
He put his arm around me and led me deeper into the gathering.
And as we walked, I looked around at the faces of the men there.
Thousands of faces, former soldiers, a former IRGC officers, former besiege militia men, men from every branch of Iran security forces.
All of them with the same expression, the same peace, the same joy, the same freedom.
These men had all encountered Jesus just like I had.
Some in dreams, some in visions, some through the testimony of Christian family members or friends, some through reading the Bible in secret.
But all of them had encountered the living Christ, and their lives had been transformed.
They had laid down their weapons.
I They had abandoned their posts.
They had walked away from everything the regime promised them.
And they had found something infinitely better.
I spent the rest of that night in that gathering, listening to testimonies, hearing stories, learning about Jesus from people who knew him personally.
Pastor Cyrus introduced me to other church leaders, former Muslims, former atheists, people from every background imaginable, all united by their encounter with Christ.
A one man, a former revolutionary guard colonel like myself, told me his story.
He had been in charge of a detention facility where political prisoners were held, Christians, activists, journalists.
He had overseen their interrogations, their torture, their executions.
He had blood on his hands just like me.
But two months earlier, he had a dream.
In the dream, Jesus appeared to him and called him by name.
And Jesus said, “Why are you persecuting me?” And the colonel said, “I don’t know who you are.
” And Jesus said, “I am the one you are persecuting when you persecute my followers.
Every time you torture one of my children, you torture me.
Every time you imprison one of my servants, you imprison me.
” And the colonel woke up from that dream and couldn’t stop weeping.
He went to work that day and resigned his position.
He told his superiors he was sick, that he needed medical leave, and he went searching for Christians.
He found an underground church.
I he showed up at their secret meeting place and fell on his face and begged for forgiveness.
And they forgave him just like that.
No conditions, no requirements.
They forgave him and welcomed him and taught him about Jesus.
And now he was here in this gathering of thousands helping other soldiers encounter the same grace he had received.
I looked at this man and saw myself, saw my future, saw what Jesus could do with a broken, guilty, bloodstained life like mine.
As the night went on, I I learned more about what had been happening in Iran over the past few days.
The gathering I was attending wasn’t the only one.
There were similar gatherings happening all over the country in Shiraz, in Mashad, in Isvahan, in Tre.
Thousands upon thousands of Iranians, especially soldiers and security forces, were encountering Jesus and surrendering their lives to him.
The underground church leaders said they had never seen anything like this in their entire lives, and they had been praying for revival in Iran for decades.
They had been interceding for their nation, risking their lives to share the gospel in secret, planting house churches, translating Bibles, discipling new believers, all in the face of constant persecution and danger.
But after Common’s death, something shifted in the spiritual realm.
It was like a dam broke, like chains fell off.
Like the powers that had kept Iran in darkness for so long suddenly lost their grip.
A and the spirit of God began moving across the nation in unprecedented power.
Pastor Cyrus told me that his network of house churches had baptized over 5,000 new believers in just the past 3 days.
5,000 in 3 days.
And that was just his network.
There were dozens of other networks across Iran, all reporting the same thing.
Mass conversions, supernatural encounters, entire families coming to Christ, communities being transformed.
Uh, and the most remarkable thing was that the conversions were happening among the very people who had been most hostile to Christianity.
IRGC officers, Basiji commanders, intelligence agents, prison guards, government officials.
The architects and enforcers of persecution were becoming the targets of God’s grace, and they were falling like dominoes.
I asked Pastor Cyrus if he was afraid.
The regime would inevitably crack down on this movement.
They would arrest people, execute people.
I’d do everything in their power to stop what was happening.
And he just smiled and said, “Brother Raza, we’ve been afraid our entire lives.
We’ve lived with the threat of arrest and execution for 20 years, but perfect love casts out fear.
And now that we’ve encountered God’s perfect love, we’re not afraid anymore, even of death.
” His words pierced my heart because I realized I had lived my entire life in fear.
Fear of disappointing my father, fear of failing in my military career, fear of appearing weak, fear of questioning the regime, fear of eternal judgment if I abandoned Islam.
My whole life had been ruled by fear.
And I had compensated for that fear by becoming hard.
By becoming cruel, by becoming the kind of man who could arrest innocent people without feeling anything.
But Jesus was offering me something different.
He was offering me love instead of fear, freedom instead of bondage, life instead of death.
And all I had to do was surrender.
And all I had to do was lay down my weapons, both literal and metaphorical.
and follow him.
When the sun began to rise on March 4th, the gathering started to disperse.
People left in small groups carefully, knowing that the regime’s intelligence services would be hunting for them.
Pastor Cyrus gave me a Farsy Bible.
He told me to read the Gospel of John first.
He said it would help me understand who Jesus really is.
He also gave me a phone number, e a secure line to a network of safe houses where believers were hiding from the authorities.
He said I would need to go underground, that my name and face would be on every watch list by now, that the IRGC would be searching for me, that my own former colleagues would hunt me, and if they caught me, they would execute me as an apostate and a traitor.
I understood all of this.
I knew exactly what I was giving up.
My career, my rank, my pension, my status.
I My family, my father would disown me when he found out.
My entire identity as Colonel Reza Amadi of the IRGC would be erased.