By Karine Keyser –
After threatening to leave his wife for pestering him to convert to Christianity, Mohsen Kazemi had a dream. A man in Iran in his old neighborhood with red hair and a red beard told him: “Change your way of thinking.”
“Two nights later, I had a dream; Jesus standing here with a white robe with pierced hands and he’s looking at me very compassionately and deeply,” Mohsen recalls. “I said to him, Why do you say Jesus is the son of God? He looked at me very compassionately and he says, Change your way of thinking.”
Today, Dr. Mohsen Kazemi is senior pastor of the Iranian Mohabat Alliance Church in Toronto, Canada.
Mohsen Kazemi was born to a highly religious Muslim family. When he was 15, Iran went through the Revolution, which made laws regarding Sharia Law stricter.
He aspired to be a doctor. University was free to students who scored high enough on the entrance exam.
After he got a 90 on his exam, he figured it would be a slam dunk. There was only one problem, he wore a Western suit, so he was rejected by the medical schools and dentistry schools. Instead, he was sent into the army, which was a “death sentence for me,” he says.
“There was no freedom of speech,” he said. “You can’t really say anything, and it was a very select few that, if they were for the regime, would go wherever they wanted to go.”
He fled the country and wound up in a refugee camp in Austria.
“Everything was scarce,” he remembers. That’s where he met for the first time in his life some Christians, who opened a coffee shop right across from the refugee camp. Mohsen engaged in conversation with one man, Douglas, and even debated him about religion.
“I was quite hot temper,” he says. “But the next day, he was like nothing happened. He said, We love you.
“Wow, this is different,” he thought.
“That was my first time meeting real Christians,” he said.
He resettled in Canada. He studied and advanced in life. Even though he lived now in the West, he remained firmly entrenched in the religion of his upbringing.
“In Canada, I was just standing everywhere to argue and say I am who I am with regard to my Islamic theology and understanding,” he says.
Then he met and married Insuk, who was a Christian.
She encouraged him to know Jesus, but he insisted that Jesus was merely a prophet. After one year, he gave her an ultimatum: stop “blaspheming” or he would disappear. She responded that if Jesus were the God’s Son, wouldn’t he be able to reveal himself to Mohsen.
It appeared to be a reasonable proposition to Mohsen.
Before going to bed, he prayed: “Jesus, I know you as an amazing prophet, one of the strongest, most powerful prophets. But if you’re really the Son of God, show yourself to me.”
In his dream that first night, he was transported back to Iran where the red-bearded man challenged him to change his thinking. On the heels of this dream, another two days later showed Jesus telling him to change his thinking.
He began to read the Bible. In Jeremiah, he found “God says a day shall come that I make a New Covenant with Israel and Judah. Not the one like the one that I made with Moses but the one in this one I will write my laws on their heart and on their mind that they would not disobey me.”
Mohsen was deeply moved. As a devout Muslim he had always striven to please Allah but was painfully aware of his short-comings. He longed for God to write his laws on his heart.
“Whoa, God, I want you to write it in my heart, in my mind, so I don’t disobey,” he recalls. “How do I do that? How do I get that?”
“Sacrifice” was the one word reply.
“How could one sacrifice be enough?” he wondered.
The answer he found in the Book of Hebrews in the Bible.
“The solution is that God comes, he dies so that his blood is enough for all who were and are and are to come,” he says. “Jesus sacrificed himself once and for all, and his sacrifice is enough and he stands on the right hand of the father.
“When I got there. I could not say no.”
Today, Dr. Mohsen Kazemi has written multiple devotionals and books including his latest ones, A Daily Heart to Heart Talk with the Father and 60 Days Prayer for Iran. He also performs chiropractic rehab on sports injuries.
“You know, it’s easy to think that certain people groups are off bounds,” Mohsen says. “But it’s really important to remember that God so loved the whole world that he gave Jesus. And I want to encourage our viewers to continue witnessing the love of Jesus to all nations, tribe, tongue and religions because God loves them.”
