Ex-Muslim: How One Daring Prayer to Jesus Changed a Life Forever by Naeem Fazal

Author:Naeem Fazal
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Christian, Biography
ISBN: 9781400206070
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2014-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

FIRST STOP: CHARISMANIA

I’ve already mentioned my friend Pastor Satish. The first Sunday Paul and I and a few other friends from FCA went to his charismatic church in Columbia, I thought, Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Something big and God-sized appeared to be going on there. It wasn’t predictable like the Baptist church. I never knew what was going to happen next. It felt dangerous, in a good way. It wasn’t stuffy and controlled—far from it. Wow, I thought, when the Holy Spirit moves the pastor, his voice even changes.

That first Sunday, I took a big gulp of the Kool-Aid. And I kept on drinking it. Someone gave me a Dake Bible, often dubbed the “Pentecostal Bible,” which included a bold commentary that assured believers of guaranteed prosperity and health, and I just ate it up. “Name it and claim it” was a good thing, apparently. You just had to have faith in your faith. I discovered Benny Hinn, and I thought he was the jam! I decided to become a faith healer and travel the globe. There was a heavy emphasis on getting a “word from the Lord,” or listening in prayer in order to hear a specific phrase from him—something personal that was meant to encourage or exhort others. So I prayed for words, and sometimes I got them. Older men in the congregation would pray over us, and there was intense pressure to speak in tongues or fall out on the carpeted floor or give some other supernatural evidence of the Holy Spirit. The gift of tongues was considered the supreme proof of a person’s salvation.

The first few times a leader prayed over me, nothing happened. Then, one day, a pastor simply said, “Tongues of fire” over me, and the Lord unlocked something in the deepest part of my heart. I not only spoke in tongues; I began to experience more of the Holy Spirit. To this day I’m still not totally sure which of these experiences were real and which were not, but at the time I was certain every bit of it was authentic. I continue to have a lot of respect for Pastor Satish. He is a godly man, and I can never thank him enough for his influence on my growth during this time of my life.

And yet I was beginning to realize that what I thought was unscripted was just as predictable—in a very different way—as the Baptist church. Not every expression of the Holy Spirit was in fact the Holy Spirit. It’s not like anyone was faking—far from it. It’s just that, like every church, this one wasn’t perfect. But this was a slow dawning.

We didn’t break our ties with the Baptist church. In fact, our little band of friends ministered every chance we got. We led a series of revival meetings at a rural Baptist church not far from Charleston that happened to be Paul’s father’s church. I’m sure they still wonder what hit them that weekend—I’m not saying God didn’t work or that we were not effective ministers.

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