When he returned to sleep, Tofik* immediately had another vision of Jesus. “Jesus appeared saying ‘It’s Me, follow Me. When you follow Me you will pay a price, there will be persecution in your life, but in the end, you will be victorious. I am with you...’ ”
“...I told them about my dreams and everything else, so they accepted me and prayed for me,” he said. “I wanted to show my change externally, so I stopped wearing Islamic styled clothes. The news of my attending church spread quickly back home and many people started to cry, thinking of me as ‘as good as dead,’ because in Islam when you convert to another religion people receive it that way.”
His tribe was especially angry over his decision to follow Christ. “They reacted by coming to my home saying, ‘this brother is dead.’ In our culture, when someone dies, their property is shared. So they destroyed my house, setting it on fire, and they took my cattle, and the remainder of my property,” he said. “They then falsely accused me of burning another house, so I was jailed and taken to court. It was only in the court process that the witnesses proved their dishonesty by having contradicting testimonies.”
After being released from jail, Tofik helped bring more than 200 people to faith in Jesus. “The Bible became my weapon. I traveled many places to preach and teach about the Christian faith… I planted a church right in the compound where I live and many people decided to follow Christ—as a result, local villagers were upset. So again, they attacked me physically and burned my house...”
...Tofik said initially he wanted to retaliate; his dreams persuaded him otherwise. “The voice of Jesus himself spoke to me in my dreams about persecution, so I knew it was going to come and was ready,” Tofik said. “For those who destroyed my household, I was initially involved in prosecuting them at court, but later I said ‘no’ and chose to forgive them and leave it in the hands of the Lord, so the people were released...”
*name has been changed