Earlier this week we shared a story about an Indian pastor who once persecuted Christians. What follows is part two of this pastor’s journey to faith in Christ. This is a true story, although names and certain details were omitted for security purposes.
My friend and I left Bible study one night and walked home together. We were both from a high caste in Hinduism and could not quite figure out why we kept wanting to go to church. I knew that I still was missing something, even though I wanted to obey the teachings of the Bible. Could I really leave my Hindu religion behind after all that I had worked for up until this point? What would my family say? What would the RSS do?
“Why are you so quiet?” my friend asked me.
“What if it is true what they say about Jesus?” I said, immediately looking away and wondering if he would laugh or hit me. He stopped and faced me, staring at me as if asking me to explain myself.
“The pastor always preaches that Jesus is alive. Whoever is alive does not need any kind of proof to show that. He can talk. He can see. You can touch him.”
That’s when I started to get excited. “Jesus is God and we cannot see him. We cannot see air either, but we can definitely feel it. If we cannot see God, I wonder if we can at least feel him.”
“That makes sense,” my friend said as he paced back and forth with his hands in his hair. “So what do we do?”
Excitedly I blurted out my plan, “Let’s pray right now in this park. And let’s pray that if God is real that he prove that to us right here, right now.”
And so we did. We moved to a darker part of the park so that people wouldn’t be looking at us wondering if we had gone crazy.
We bowed down on our knees and we started praying.
I said to God, “If you don’t prove yourself to us today, then you are like one of our Hindu gods who we cannot see or speak to or have any real connection with at all. If you don’t show yourself to us, we will go back to our Hindu temple.”
Our eyes were closed, and we were praying. The park was pitch black.
At once I began to notice a light, even though my eyes were still closed. Brighter and brighter the light became until it seemed to me that daylight had come. Then I felt lightness in my body like I was floating.
I knew in my heart that God was there with me. A rock slid past me and I noticed that the ground was moving.
I opened my eyes as we finished up our prayer. Everything looked new to me—the leaves, the trees, the grass, the moon—it all looked new and wonderful.
Finally I said, “Did you feel the earth shaking?”
“Yes! The whole place. It was moving!” my friend said jumping up and down. “I felt that somebody was behind us in white clothes and he was blessing us. I know that it was Jesus!”
At that moment we gave our lives to Jesus and never looked back to our Hindu gods.
— To hear the first part of this former Hindu’s testimony and his initial exposure to the gospel, see the previous post here.
India is our prayer focus for Secret Church 16: A Global Gospel in a World of Religions. Join with us as we learn about India—its culture, its people, and its persecuted church. To sign up for the Secret Church simulcast, click here.
