Muslims in Iran are becoming
more open to Jesus Christ
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, July 30, 2009
NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. – Dr. Sasan Tavassoli, a former Shi’ite Muslim from Iran, remembers his first theological question, “How come Christians can drink wine but Muslims cannot?” or in other words, “Why does your word of God say one thing and my word of God say another?”
Tavassoli, now a minister in the Presbyterian Church in Iran, was telling those gathered at the New Wilmington Mission Conference July 18-25 in New Wilmington, Pa., how he – a Muslim – became a Christian.
He said when he was a teenager, his parents “planned to send me to England to live in a Muslim community,” but by God’s providence “I was sent to Portugal to a Christian school.”
The first day he was put into a Bible class to test his English. In response to his theological question, he was asked. “How do you know the Koran is the word of God?”
“I realized I had no reasons for my faith. I had no reason to believe what I believed,” Tavassoli said.
So this 16-year-old boy, for the first time in his life, read the Koran from cover to cover. He started going to church and Bible study to “try to understand which one was real,” he said.
Tavassoli said God used two things to bring him to faith. First was Isaiah 9:6: “For to us a child is born, to us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
“It dawned on me the Old Testament had prepared for Jesus’ coming years before,” Tavassoli said. “Jesus is no ordinary prophet as the Koran states.”
And the second was “the emphasis on love and grace in the New Testament,” he said. He specifically mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 5.
Tavassoli accepted Christ as his savior on Jan. 20, 1985 and has dedicated his life “to the cause of telling the good news to my Muslim community.”
“What happened in my life has been happening among Muslims around the world,” he said.
He said he was saddened to see so much fear among American Christians during his travels, because of all of the violence, death and destruction coming from the name Islam.
“I want you to know — do not allow CNN and Fox News to define reality for you,” he said. “Reality is defined by the promises of Jesus and He will build His church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. … He is accomplishing this in the Muslim world. God is doing something incredible We see all the death, but behind the scenes God is working.”
Tavassoli said while it breaks his heart to see the news coming out of Iran, an estimated 1 million Iranian Muslims have become Christians. “The moral of the story,” he said, “when things look terrible to us, … God works in amazing ways in all that evil and death.”
“There is a revolution in Iran,” he said, and “we are just see glimpses of it bubbling up – a spiritual revolution and the media is not covering it.”
Tavassoli spoke of a story he read in a magazine about “how the mullahs are leading people to Jesus.” Mullahs, Muslim men, who have been educated in Islamic theology and sacred law, usually Islamic clerics or mosque leaders.
The Iranian people are see how culture is crumbling, the economy is crashing and all of the political and social oppression, said Tavassoli and “they are open to something new – open to Jesus.”
Tavassoli said that “Jesus is running around loose in the Muslim world.”