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.

I would become a fugitive in my own country.

But I also knew what I was gaining.

I was gaining eternal life.

I was gaining freedom from guilt and shame.

I was gaining a relationship with the living God.

I was gaining brothers and sisters who would lay down their lives for me.

I was gaining hope, real hope, not the hollow propaganda of the revolution, uh, but genuine hope rooted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I left that warehouse district as a different man than the one who had arrived the night before.

I was no longer Colonel Amadi.

I was no longer an IRGC officer.

I was no longer a guardian of the Islamic Republic.

I was Raza, a follower of Jesus, a new creation, born again.

Over the next few days, I stayed in a safe house in northern Thyron.

Other believers were there with me, former soldiers, former government workers, people from all walks of life who had encountered Jesus during this remarkable season.

We pray together.

We studied the Bible together.

We shared our testimonies.

We encouraged each other.

We became a family.

I devoured the Gospel of John like a starving man eating his first meal.

Every word jumped off the page.

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

Jesus wasn’t just a prophet.

He was God himself in human flesh.

E and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And we have seen his glory.

Glory as of the only son from the father full of grace and truth.

I read about Jesus healing the sick, forgiving sinners, welcoming outcasts, challenging religious authorities, laying down his life for his sheep, rising from the dead, conquering sin and death and hell.

And with every page, I fell more in love with him.

This Jesus was nothing like what I had been taught.

He was so much greater, so much more beautiful, so much more worthy of worship.

I also learned about what was happening in the rest of Iran.

The reports were staggering.

The new Supreme Leader, they had finally selected someone, a relatively unknown cleric, was calling for a massive crackdown on what he called the Christian Conspiracy.

He had ordered the arrest of anyone suspected of conversion.

He had authorized the execution of church leaders.

He had deployed IRGC units to hunt down deserters.

But the movement couldn’t be stopped.

Uh for every believer they arrested, 10 more came to faith.

For every church they shut down, five more started meeting in secret.

The more the regime persecuted, the faster the gospel spread.

It was like trying to stop a wildfire with gasoline.

I heard reports that the exact number of conversions was impossible to calculate, but estimates range from 50,000 to 100,000 in the first week after KA’s death.

Uh, and the majority of these converts were coming from the military and security forces.

The very people the regime depended on to maintain control were abandoning their posts and following Jesus.

This was creating a crisis for the Islamic Republic.

They couldn’t function without their military and security apparatus.

But that apparatus was crumbling from within.

Units were operating at half strength.

Officers were defecting.

Soldiers were refusing orders.

And the regime was losing its grip on power not through external invasion but through internal transformation.

Some analysts were calling it a revolution.

But those of us who had encountered Jesus knew it was something much bigger than a political revolution.

This was a spiritual awakening.

This was the fulfillment of prophecies that the underground church had been praying over for decades.

This was God moving in power to bring salvation to Iran.

And I also learned that my name was indeed on a wanted list.

The IRGC had declared me a deserter and an apostate.

They had revoked my rank and confiscated my pension.

They had raided my apartment and seized my belongings.

They had interrogated my father demanding to know where I was.

My father, according to sources in the IRGC, had disowned me publicly.

He had said I was dead to him, that I had brought shame on our family name.

This hurt.

I won’t pretend it didn’t.

My father had been my hero and the man I had spent my entire life trying to make proud.

And now he hated me.

He saw me as a traitor, as a fool who had been deceived by Western propaganda.

He would probably celebrate if they caught me and executed me.

But Jesus had warned his followers about this.

I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother.

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.

Following Jesus costs something.

Sometimes it costs everything and but what you gain is infinitely more valuable than what you lose.

On March 8th, 5 days after my conversion, I participated in my first baptism.

Pastor Cyrus and several other church leaders had organized a secret baptism service in a location outside Thrron.

Over 300 new believers were being baptized that night.

300 former Muslims, former soldiers, former regime officials, all publicly declaring their faith in Jesus Christ.

The location was a river in a rural area.

We traveled there in small groups after dark to avoid detection.

When I arrived and saw the crowd, I was overwhelmed.

300 people, all risking their lives to be baptized, all willing to publicly identify with Christ, even though they knew it meant certain death if they were caught.

I stood in line with the others, waiting my turn.

My heart was pounding, not from fear, but from anticipation.

I was about to be baptized, about to publicly declare that I belong to Jesus, and about to bury my old life and rise to new life in Christ.

When my turn came, I waited into the cold water.

Pastor Cyrus was there along with another church leader.

They asked me if I believed that Jesus Christ is the son of God.

I said yes.

They asked me if I believed he died for my sins and rose from the dead.

I said yes.

They asked me if I was willing to follow him no matter the cost.

I said yes.

And then they baptized me.

And they lowered me under the water, baptizing me in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And I felt the weight of my old life wash away.

18 years in the IRGC.

18 years of enforcing oppression.

18 years of living a lie.

All of it was buried in that water.

And when I came up out of the water, I was born again fully, completely, irrevocably.

I was a new creation.

The old Raza was dead.

The old Colonel Amati was gone.

And in his place was someone new, a someone who belonged to Jesus.

The 300 of us who were baptized that night sang and prayed and celebrated together.

We knew we were likely signing our death warrants.

We knew the regime would hunt us.

We knew most of us would probably be arrested and executed within months.

But we didn’t care.

We had found something worth dying for.

Someone worth dying for.

Jesus Christ, the King of Kings.

Over the following days and weeks, I stayed connected with the underground church network.

I I moved between safe houses, never staying in one place too long.

I studied the Bible voraciously, learning everything I could about Jesus.

I prayed constantly, developing a relationship with God that was more real than any relationship I had ever known.

I also helped with the disciplehip of other new believers.

Many of them were former soldiers like me.

They needed guidance.

They needed someone who understood their background and their struggles.

And they needed someone who could help them navigate the massive identity shift they were experiencing.

I met former IRGC officers who were now leading Bible studies.

I met former prison guards who were now interceding for their former prisoners.

I met former intelligence agents who were now using their skills to help protect church networks from regime surveillance.

God was redeeming everything.

Every skill, every experience.

Every resource that had once been used for evil was now being repurposed for his kingdom.

The testimonies I heard were extraordinary.

One soldier told me he had been planning to commit suicide the night before Kamina was killed.

He had loaded his weapon and put it to his head.

But before he pulled the trigger, he heard a voice say, “Don’t do this.

I have plans for you.

Plans to give you hope and a future”.

He put the gun down and went to sleep.

And that night, he dreamed of Jesus.

And Jesus told him, “I love you.

I died for you.

Follow me.

He woke up weeping and immediately began searching for Christians.

Another man, a former Besi commander, told me he had been driving home from a rally where they had chanted, “Death to America, death to Israel”.

When he saw a vision of Jesus standing in the middle of the road, he slammed on his brakes.

The car behind him crashed into him.

But he didn’t care about the accident.

I He got out of his car and fell on his face right there on the highway and gave his life to Christ.

Other drivers stopped and thought he was injured, but he was just worshiping Jesus in the middle of Tehran traffic.

Story after story after story, thousands of supernatural encounters, thousands of lives transformed.

It was the most remarkable move of God’s spirit that any of the church leaders had ever witnessed.

Uh even the most optimistic among them had never imagined that God would move this powerfully in Iran.

But we also heard the darker reports.

The regime was responding with brutal force.

Public executions of Christians were increasing.

They were hanging people in city squares as a warning.

They were raiding house churches and arresting everyone present.

They were torturing believers to get information about church networks.

Many of our brothers and sisters were being martyed.

K.

Pastor Cyrus himself was arrested on March 15th.

I heard that he was executed 3 days later, hanged publicly in Thrron.

His crime, apostasy and spreading corruption on earth.

his real crime, loving Jesus and refusing to deny him.

When I heard about his death, I wept.

This man who had shown me such kindness, who had welcomed me despite everything I had done to him, who had baptized me, who had given me a Bible and a phone number and hope.

He was gone, executed by the regime I had once served.

But even in death, Pastor Cyrus’s testimony continued.

Reports said that at his execution, he sang hymns of worship as they placed the noose around his neck.

He proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord with his last breath.

And several of the revolutionary guards who witnessed his execution later came to faith because they couldn’t forget the peace and joy on his face as he died.

The blood of the martyrs was becoming the seed of the church just like it had in the early centuries of Christianity.

The regime thought they could stop the movement through violence and fear, but they were only accelerating it.

Every martyr created 10 more bold witnesses.

Every execution sparked a hundred more conversions.

I knew my time was limited.

I knew eventually they would find me.

I knew I would likely face the same fate as Pastor Cyrus, but I was at peace with that.

Jesus had given me new life, real life, eternal life, and if he called me to seal my testimony with my blood, I was ready.

In the meantime, I continued to serve the underground church.

I used my military training to help them establish secure communication networks.

I taught them counter surveillance techniques.

I helped plan safe routes for secret gatherings.

I did everything I could to protect my new family from the regime I had once served.

And I recorded this testimony because the world needs to know what is happening in Iran.

The world needs to know that Jesus Christ is alive and moving in power.

The world needs to know that the Islamic Republic’s days are numbered not because of external military pressure, but because of internal spiritual transformation.

Thousands of Iranian soldiers have laid down their weapons and surrendered to Jesus.

Thousands more are encountering him every day.

The underground church is growing exponentially.

The gospel is spreading like wildfire.

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