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When I was confronted with the reality that Christianity was full of objective truth and my defense of Islam was subjective at best, I started praying. Repeatedly, I asked God for a vision or a dream or anything that might show me the truth.
Now, understand that in Islamic culture, there is a lot of stock put in visions and dreams. My father knew all sorts of things about future events because of dreams and visions. I saw proof of this with my own eyes! When my father was in the U.S. Navy, taking his test to move from an E5 to E6, he tested with five of his friends. At that time, he had a dream that he was out in the middle of a field with his five friends. They were getting shot at from all sides and they saw a fence in the distance. He knew that they had to run and make it over the fence in order to survive. So, the six of them ran for safety, but only my dad and one of his friends made it over the fence.
A few weeks later, they received the scores from their tests; and wouldn’t you know it – he and that one friend were the only ones out of the six of them to pass and receive promotion.
My mother, when she married my father, had a dream that she planted four seeds. Two of these seeds sprouted, while two did not. She shared this dream with my aunt. Years later, after my mom’s second miscarriage, my aunt told me about my mom’s dream and that my mom knew that she would have two children and two miscarriages before I was ever conceived!
When my grandmother passed away, my mom and her sister in England had the same dream – three nights in a row – telling them that their mother was about to die.
Does all this mean that God is inspiring these dreams and working through the dreams and visions of Muslims? I don’t know. Does it mean that there is an evil spirit leading Muslims around the world? I’m not saying that either.
All I’m saying is that Muslims take huge stock in visions and dreams and they have reason to do so.
So, I asked God to give me visions or dreams to reveal to me who He really is.
I was broken.
I had just found out things about Muhammad that broke my heart. I learned things about the Quran that made Islam unconscionable for me. This was one of the most humble points of my entire life.
For the first time, instead of thinking I had all the answers, or investigating for all of the answers for myself, I turned to God for His truths. Before that, I would have never dreamt of asking God if Jesus was Lord. I would have considered the very idea of this plain blasphemy. But, because of the apologetics – the arguments and case for Christianity – that I was confronted with, I found myself at God’s feet begging Him to tell me who He was.
Meanwhile, I was also going from mosque to mosque, asking imams to answer my questions about Muhammad, the Quran, and God. I was living in Virginia and I traveled all over the eastern U.S., to Canada and even to England seeking answers. But no one could give me a sufficient response.
No one but God.
I received the vision that I had prayed for in three dreams. After I received these dreams, I had to wrestle with the fact that in order to accept what God was telling me, I was going to have to give up everything – my family, my friends, my position as spiritual head of the household when my father was away, and everything that I and my family had ever stood for. Plus, if I was wrong in what I was about to leave Islam for, I would burn in hell for all eternity.
Needless to say, this was a very difficult time in my life.
But, God left me no recourse.
After my visions and dreams, I knew what I had to do.
I was in my second year of med school, and I remember driving to class, praying: “God, I want to accept you and your Son, Jesus Christ… but I have to mourn right now.”
I needed comfort. Immediately. I went back to my apartment and opened up the Quran. Flipping through its pages, I couldn’t find anything that could speak to me at all. So, without a clue of where to start, I opened up the Bible that my friend, David, gave me.
I figured the New Testament was a good a place to begin as any, so I opened the Bible up to Matthew 1:1 and found the verses laying out Jesus’ genealogy.
Skipped right over those.
Then I found the Beatitudes, especially Matthew 5:4 which says,
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
All of a sudden, I knew and understood what it meant for God to be alive and to speak to me directly through His word. It was as if the Bible was shooting “spiritual electricity” into my heart. Suddenly, I was struck with the truth that the Bible was God’s word, speaking truth directly and intimately to me. He didn’t leave me here on earth alone. He left his word – His Truth – for me, right in the pages of the Bible. I received comfort. I received encouragement. I received the truth that I had been searching for.
I found Matthew 7 and Matthew 21, where Jesus tells us:
“Do not be afraid before the Lord because you will receive whatever you pray for.”
I then saw a note that guided me to flip over to 1 John 5, where I read:
“You will receive whatever it is you pray for because you have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord.”
I looked to heaven and smiled, knowing that I hadn’t actually done that yet.
But, I kept reading, and kept reading. It took me weeks before I even made it to Matthew 10, where Jesus says:
“He who accepts Me before the people of this world, I will accept before My Father in heaven. And he who denies Me before the people of this world, I will deny before My Father.”
I had all the apologetic arguments that I ever needed. I had all the spiritual guidance I could need through my visions and dreams. I had the emotional guidance and comfort that I had been striving toward.
What else could I possibly want or need before accepting Christ?
Nothing.
That’s when I got down on my knees, prayed, and accepted the Lord into my heart.
Just a couple weeks after that day, I learned just what the Gospel means:
When you have a God who is willing to sacrifice Himself for the sake of those who sinned against Him… when you have a God who knows absolutely everything about you, and chose to make you exactly as He did, and STILL LOVES YOU… and in fact, doesn’t just love you, but He puts you exactly where He puts you in a specific time and place for a very specific reason… when you have THAT God – THAT powerful, THAT loving – willing to come into this world and suffer humiliation from day one, die the most humiliating and painful death ever devised by man… ALL FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US. In light of this, I couldn’t help but wonder, what in the world was I doing living a life for myself, planning my own future, trying to build up a future for myself, when my God set the example for me to sacrifice myself for those who sin against Him.
God died for His enemies. How much more is it my responsibility to follow His example? If I’m going to follow Jesus, THAT is what the Gospel means.
And that is how the Gospel revolutionized my life.