“It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
Your old men will have dreams, Your young men will see visions. (Joel 2:28 NASV)
When we study the Apostle Paul’s remarkable conversion on the Damascus road (Acts 9) when he was confronted by the living Christ we need to understand that it was going to take Divine intervention to convert Paul.
Paul was heavily invested in Judaism. He had previously participated in the stoning of Stephen in Jerusalem (Acts 7:54-60), the church’s first martyr, and had received authority from the Jewish High Priest to arrest Messianic Jews attending Jewish synagogues across the Roman Empire.
5 as also the high priest and all the Council of the elders [a]can testify. From them I also received letters to the brothers, and started off for Damascus in order to bring even those who were there to Jerusalem [b]as prisoners to be punished. (Acts 22:5 NASV)
So Paul was not going to be saved by some believer handing him a Bible tract, as the person would have undoubtedly been arrested and tortured.
So Christ miraculously appeared to Paul as he was on the road to Damascus to persecute Christians. It was this divine intervention that led to his conversion.
And many Muslims are facing a similar situation as converting to Christianity can result in fines, jail time, and even the death penalty in some countries. At the very least, they will face heavy persecution and ostracization by their family.
So similar to the Apostle Paul, their conversion may require some Divine intervention.
Recently, AG News had an article about how God divinely intervened in Muslims’ lives causing them to turn to Christ.
The first involved Assemblies of God (AG) pastor James Bradford from Springfield, Missouri, who recently visited a Muslim country and shared the testimonies he heard about what led them to Christ.
“Recently I was in a Muslim country and met with church leaders from several Muslim nations. One of the leaders shared a testimony from her country. A woman had left the Muslim faith, but she was full of hatred and suspicion of Christians. She didn’t know what to do — she asked God for help.
One night she had a dream where she saw a shepherd, walking about an empty tomb with a staff. The shepherd walked round it a few times, and then He headed directly towards the woman. He had a loaf of bread in His hands, which He broke and offered it to her and as He did, He said, ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’“
Shortly after the dream, the woman approached a person that she knew to be a Christian and told the person about her dream.
The believer then showed the Muslim woman, who had never read a Bible before, the spot in the Scripture (Matthew 26:26) where Jesus said the very words spoken in her dream, “Take, eat, this is my body,” leading the woman to accept Christ on the spot.
Another global AG worker, Dick Brogden, shared several testimonies of Muslims coming to Christ through dreams, including a strange set of dreams, in which Jesus hit A Sudanese man on the head with His cross:
“A Sudanese Muslim was a fierce fundamentalist and persecuted his family who had become followers of Jesus.
One night in his dream, he saw Jesus walking towards him, and Jesus was carrying the Cross. Jesus approached him, lifted up the Cross, and whacked him over the head with the Cross.
“Waking with a start, he was troubled. The man thought the dream demonic. He rose, performed the Islamic abolitions and ritual prayers, and then went back to bed.”
But it didn’t stop there as the man had the exact same dream twice more that same night.
This led him to tell his cousin about the strange dream.
The cousin decided to turn to the Bible to find out more about Jesus and that decision led to both of them becoming Christians.
OpentheWord.org 