Born of the Spirit

I belong to a prayer partner Facebook group that was started by a friend from college. The most recent post was a photo of a small group of Christian Saudi Arabian students here in the U.S. They heard a testimony by a young person who said they came to Christ through "kind American Christians and a dream."

This is the not first time I've heard about Muslim people encountering Jesus through dreams. Probably the first time was a few years ago, when author and apologist Nabeel Qureshi visited our church. Qureshi told us about how he came to Jesus through a long process of investigation and debates with college friends about the historical claims of Christianity and his natal religion, Islam.

Then, during a period of 5 months, he experienced three vivid dreams telling him the Christianity was true and he should follow Jesus.

The Gospel Coalition has a detailed story about Qureshi here: TGC Qureshi Obituary
Qureshi wrote a NYT bestselling author about his experience called Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.

Dreams are not normally taken seriously in our culture. Most of time when we hear people talking their dreams, or getting into dream interpretation, we are skeptical and think they are a little "out there."

Another thing we tend to be skeptical about is miracles. We are anxious to find scientific reasons for things such as healings or supernatural phenomena. To most of us, such things happened "back then" or "somewhere else."

But the truth is, if we believe in God and His creation and all the little details about our world that we take for granted, then we should believe in miracles and dreams and other things that are "outside the norm." We should not be immediately dismissive of these things when they are relayed to us. Conversations such as these can be pathways to great discussions about spiritual matters.

John 3: 6-8 tell us "Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. So don't be surprised when I say 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can't tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can't explain how people are born of the Spirit."