that God has not looked away from you through 40 years of the Islamic Republic through the executions and the imprisonments and the economic suffering and the social oppression, through the protest movements and the crackdowns and the generations of young people who grew up in a country that told them their deepest longings were dangerous.

through all of it.

And before all of it and after all of it, he has not looked away.

He sees Iran.

He has always seen Iran.

And I believe I believe it in the same place where I believed in the margins of a prison Quran.

In words only I could read in years when I did not know if I would ever be free.

I believe that the story of Iran and the story of the gospel are about to intersect in a way that will be talked about for generations.

Not because I am optimistic by personality.

Not because the political situation has produced comfortable conditions for it, but because the God who sustained the underground church through 40 years of suppression is not a God who does things halfway.

He sustains through the dark so that he can release into the light.

And the Iranian church has been sustained.

It is alive.

It is ready.

And the light is beginning to come.

Iran, it is your time.

Not the time of any political faction.

Not the time of any foreign power with interests in your geography.

Not the time of the regime that is ending or the replacement that is forming.

This is the time of the God who has been waiting at the door of this ancient, beautiful, suffering, searching people and who is now, I believe, about to make himself known in Iran in a way that the world will not be able to ignore.

Pray for Iran.

Pray specifically and persistently.

Pray for the believers who are still inside that they will have wisdom and courage and supernatural protection in this transitional period.

Pray for the Iranian people who are watching the collapse of the only governmental framework they have known that they will find not just political freedom but the deeper freedom that only God can give.

Pray for the leaders who will emerge in Iran in the months ahead.

That among them will be people of genuine conscience and genuine faith who will help their country find a different path.

And and if you are Iranian in Iran or anywhere in the world and you are searching and you want to know the Jesus that I have been talking about, he is not hard to find.

He is not behind the locked doors of an institution or a program or a denominational system.

He is available to you right now wherever you are in whatever language you carry your innermost self in.

You can speak to him directly.

You can ask him to make himself real to you the way I asked in a prison cell with nothing left.

More the way Miam asked in a kitchen in Tehran before she fully understood what she was asking.

The way tens of thousands of Iranians have asked in secret over these 40 years and have received an answer.

The door is open.

It has always been open.

And I believe that in this moment in Iran’s history, it is open wider than it has been in a very long time.

My name is Elias Hoseni.

I am an Iranian man.

I am a husband and a father.

I am a pastor.

I I was imprisoned for 8 years in Evan prison for the faith I am still standing here declaring I am free.

My family is free.

And the God who freed me is the same God who is moving across Iran right now in ways that are visible and in ways that are not yet visible.

Hold on, Iran.

Your time is here.

The light is coming.

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Sometimes I wake up and forget everything that’s happened.

For a few seconds I’m just a regular Muslim kid again and my mom’s going to call me down for breakfast and my dad’s going to ask if I prayed fajger.

Then I remember and it hits me all over again.

I need to tell you my story not because I am special or brave or anything like that.

I need to tell it because there are others out there like me sitting in the rooms right now terrified and alone wondering if following Jesus is worth losing everything.

And I need to tell it because my family needs to know that I still love them even though they don’t believe me anymore.

Let me start at the beginning.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother 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.

Let me start at the beginning.

I was born in a Middle Eastern country.

I won’t say which one because I still have family there and things are complicated enough already.

My earliest memories are good ones.

I remember my grandmother’s house, the smell of her cooking, the sound of the call to prayer echoing through our neighborhood five times a day.

I remember my father taking me to the mosque, holding my hand as we walked through the streets.

I remember feeling safe.

My father was a good man.

He still is, I think.

Even though we don’t talk anymore, he worked hard, provided for us, taught me to respect my elders, and memorize Quranic verses.

My mother kept our home spotless and halal, and she could make the best lamb and rice I’ve ever tasted in my life.

I had two younger sisters and an older brother.

We fought like all siblings do, but we were close.

When I was nine, everything changed.

My father got a job opportunity in the United States.

I remember the adults talking late into the night.

Weighing the decision, America meant better education for us kids, more opportunities, a chance at a different life, but it also meant leaving everything we knew.

We moved to New Jersey.

There is a large Muslim community there which made my parents feel better about the whole thing.

We could still go to mosque, still celebrate Eid properly, still find halal meat and other families who understood our way of life.

Those first few months in America were strange.

Everything was bigger, faster, louder than back home.

The school was huge compared to what I was used to.

Kids dressed differently, talked differently, acted differently.

I didn’t speak much English yet, so I mostly stayed quiet and watched.

But my parents made sure we didn’t lose our identity.

If anything, we became more religious in America than we’d been back home.

I think that happens a lot with immigrant families.

When you’re surrounded by people who are different from you, you hold tighter to what makes you who you are.

We prayed five times a day every day.

My father woke me before dawn for fajger prayer, even on school days.

We fasted during Ramadan.

We went to Islamic school every Sunday where they taught us to read Arabic and understand the Quran better.

My mother made sure we only ate halal food.

When other kids at school brought ham sandwiches or pepperoni pizza, I ate the lunch my mom packed.

I didn’t mind really.

It was all I knew.

This was normal to me.

As I got older and my English got better, I started making friends at school.

Real friends, not just the Muslim kids from our community.

There was this kid named Marcus who sat next to me in seventh grade.

He was into basketball and video games and he didn’t care that I was Muslim or that I had an accent.

We just clicked.

Marcus was Christian, but he never made a big deal about it.

Sometimes he’d mention going to church or youth group, but mostly we just talked about normal stuff, sports, homework, which teachers were annoying, that kind of thing.

I started noticing things though, little things that didn’t quite add up in my mind, like how Marcus and some of my other Christian friends seemed genuinely happy.

Not the forced kind of religious happiness I sometimes saw at mosque where everyone’s trying to look more pious than they actually feel.

Just regular happiness like they had some kind of peace I didn’t understand.

I remember one time in 8th grade Marcus invited me to his birthday party.

My parents almost didn’t let me go because they knew his family would probably serve non-halal food and there might be music and dancing.

But eventually they agreed because they wanted me to have friends and do well socially.

At the party before we ate pizza, Marcus’s dad said a quick prayer.

It was so simple.

He just thanked God for the food and for everyone being there.

No ritual washing, no specific position, no Arabic words most people didn’t understand.

Just a normal conversation with God.

It stuck with me even though I didn’t know why at the time.

The older I got, the more questions I had, but these weren’t questions you could ask out loud, especially not in my family.

I wondered why we prayed five times a day in a language most of us didn’t fully understand.

I wondered why God seemed so distant and stern in everything we were taught.

Like he was always watching to see if we’d mess up.

I wondered what happened to all the good people I knew who weren’t Muslim.

Were they really all going to hell just because they believed differently?

I wondered about the violence I sometimes saw in the news done in the name of Islam.

My family would immediately say those people didn’t represent real Islam that they twisted the religion and I believed them.

But still I wondered how the same book could be read so differently by different people.

I kept these questions buried deep inside.

Asking them felt like betrayal.

By the time I was 15, I’d gotten pretty good at living between two worlds.

At school, I was just another American teenager.

I played soccer, hung out with friends, did my homework, complained about tests at home and at mosque.

I was a beautiful Muslim son.

I prayed, fasted, memorized verses, respected my elders.

But inside, I was starting to feel like a stranger to myself.

There was this girl at school, Sarah.

She was in my chemistry class sophomore year.

She was quiet, smart, always nice to everyone, even when they didn’t deserve it.

I noticed that she’d bow her head for a few seconds before eating lunch, like she was praying.

One day, I asked her about it, just curious.

She said she was thanking God for her food.

Simple as that.

But then she said something that stuck with me.

She said she could talk to God anytime, anywhere about anything.

That he wasn’t just the creator watching from far away, but like a father who actually cared about the details of her life.

A father.

I never thought of God that way before.

I started paying more attention after that.

Not in an obvious way, just watching.

I noticed how some of my Christian friends were different from others.

Some of them seemed just as religious and rule focused as what I knew, but others had something else, a lightness maybe.

Like their faith wasn’t a heavy backpack they had to carry, but something that actually helped them.

Then something happened that changed everything.

It was the summer before my junior year.

I was 16.

My uncle back home, my father’s younger brother, got very sick.

Cancer.

It happened fast.

Within 3 months of his diagnosis, he was gone.

My father was devastated.

He’d wanted to go back to see his brother one last time, but the timing didn’t work out with his job and the travel restrictions.

He didn’t make it in time.

I watched my father grieve.

He prayed more, read the Quran more, gave more to charity.

He kept saying it was God’s will that we had to accept it.

And I believed that.

I really did.

But I also saw that it didn’t seem to bring him any comfort.

It was just acceptance of something painful, not peace in the middle of it.

Around the same time, Marcus’s grandmother died.

I went to the funeral because he was my friend.

It was my first time in a church.

I didn’t know what to expect.

Maybe I thought it would feel wrong or uncomfortable, like I was betraying something by even being there.

But it wasn’t like that at all.

The service was sad.

Obviously, people cried, but there was something else, too.

Hope maybe the pastor talked about how Marcus’s grandmother was with Jesus now.

How death wasn’t the end but a transition to something better.

He talked about how Jesus had defeated death.

So those who believed in him didn’t have to fear it.

People sang hymns.

Even through their tears, they sang about how great God was, how he loved them, how nothing could separate them from that love.

I sat in the back and watched and something in my chest felt tight.

This was so different from what I knew.

This wasn’t just acceptance of God’s will.

This was trust that God’s will was somehow good.

Even when it hurt, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks after.

I started doing something I’d never done before.

I started researching, not for a school project or because someone told me to, just for myself in secret.

I’d wait until everyone was asleep.

Then I’d pull out my phone under my blanket and search for answers to questions I’d had for years.

What did Christians actually believe?

Why did they think Jesus was God when that seemed impossible?

What did the Bible really say?

I was careful.

I cleared my browser history, used incognito mode, made sure no one would ever know what I was looking at.

The first time I read actual verses from the Bible, I didn’t know what to make of them.

I started with the Gospel of Matthew because someone online said it was a good place to start.

The language was strange to me and some of the cultural stuff didn’t make sense at first, but then I got to the part called the sermon on the mount.

Jesus was teaching a crowd of people and the things he said were unlike anything I’d ever heard.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

He talked about loving your enemies, praying for people who persecute you, not judging others, forgiving people who wrong you.

He talked about God knowing what you need before you even ask, about God clothing the flowers and feeding the birds.

So, how much more would he take care of people he loved?

He loved.

That word kept showing up.

love.

Not just mercy or justice or power, but actual love.

I read it again, then again, I couldn’t stop.

In the Quran, God is described with 99 names.

The merciful, the just, the powerful, the all knowing, beautiful names, important names.

But I’d never heard him called father.

I’d never heard about him loving us the way a parent loves a child.

I kept reading night after night.

I read about Jesus healing people.

Not just performing miracles to prove he was powerful, but actually caring about individual people’s pain.

A touching lepers when everyone else was afraid of them.

Talking to women when that wasn’t socially acceptable.

Welcoming children.

Eating with people that religious leaders looked down on.

I read about Jesus crying when his friends Lazarus died.

Even though he was about to raise him from the dead, he cried because the people he loved were hurting.

This wasn’t the distant, stern God I grown up learning about.

This was someone who became human, who felt what we felt, who suffered with us and for us.

Then I read about the crucifixion.

In Islam, we’re taught that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross.

That God wouldn’t let his prophet be humiliated like that.

So, he substituted someone else and took Jesus up to heaven.

But the Bible said differently.

It said Jesus chose to die.

That he could have stopped it but didn’t.

that he went through torture and execution willingly because it was the only way to pay for humanity’s sins, for our sins, for my sins.

I didn’t understand it at first.

The whole concept felt foreign.

In Islam, everyone is responsible for their own deeds.

You do good works.

You follow the rules.

You hope your good outweighs your bad on judgment day.

The idea that someone else could pay for what I’d done wrong, that I couldn’t earn my way to God, but had to accept a gift instead.

It felt too easy, like cheating somehow.

But the more I read, the more I realized it wasn’t easy at all.

It cost Jesus everything.

I was 17 when I finally admitted to myself that I believed it.

all of it.

That Jesus was more than a prophet.

That he was God in human form.

That he died for me and rose again.

That this wasn’t just a different religion, but actual truth.

I believed it.

And I was terrified because I knew what believing it meant.

I knew what it would cost me if anyone found out.

my family, my community, my whole identity, everything I’d ever known, all of it would be gone.

I tried to push it away.

I tried to go back to just being a good Muslim, to forget everything I’d read and felt and understood.

I increased my prayers, read more Quran, volunteered more at the mosque.

If I could just be better at Islam, maybe these feelings would go away.

But they didn’t.

They got stronger.

I’d be at mosque prostrating during prayer and all I could think about was Jesus.

I’d break fast during Ramadan, and I’d wonder what it meant that Jesus said he was the bread of life.

I’d hear the Imam talk about obeying God’s commands.

And I’d remember Jesus saying his yoke was easy and his burden was light.

I felt like I was being torn in half.

There was this Christian guy at school, David.

He was a senior when I was a junior.

We had the same lunch period and sometimes played basketball together.

He wasn’t pushy about his faith, but he was open about it.

He led a Christian club that met before school once a week.

I started watching him, trying to understand what made him different.

He had this piece about him that I wanted.

Even when he was stressed about college applications or failed a test, he didn’t fall apart.

He’d just say something like, “God’s got this”.

and actually mean it.

One day, I took a risk.

I told him I’d been reading the Bible and had some questions.

Not because I was interested in converting, I lied.

Just academically curious.

He didn’t push.

He just answered my questions honestly and when he didn’t know something he said so.

We started meeting sometimes during lunch and he’d explain things about Christianity that I didn’t understand.

He told me about grace, how it meant getting something good that you didn’t deserve just because God loved you.

He told me about the Trinity, which I still didn’t fully grasp, but was starting to see wasn’t just Christians believing in three gods like I’d always been told.

He told me about the Holy Spirit, how God actually lived inside believers and helped them live the way Jesus taught.

He never once attacked Islam.

He never told me Muslims were stupid or deceived or evil.

He just shared what he believed and why.

And he lived it out in a way that made me want what he had.

I remember the night I finally prayed to Jesus for the first time.

It was late, maybe 2:00 in the morning.

Everyone else was asleep.

I was sitting on my bedroom floor, back against my bed, phone in my hand with the Bible app open.

I’d been reading the Gospel of John.

Continue reading….
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