By Morgan Miles –
Due to growing stresses, Shafraz Jeal smoked up to 20 cigarettes a day. But when the former British Muslim got baptized, he no longer needed a smoke.
“Just boom, the chain was broke. I didn’t need to smoke cigarettes anymore,” Shafraz says on a Light of Christ Ministries video. “I came up out of the river, I felt so amazing. I could feel the fire. The color of everything looked different. The flowers looked HD.”
Shafraz Jeal’s baptism was an end of his old self and the beginning of his new being: from Islam, drugs and a broken marriage to international ministry, hope and peace.
As a kid, Shafraz was deeply affected by his parents’ divorce and then his mother’s death. “Many people said I wouldn’t make it,” he confides. “I didn’t think I would make it.”
He joined the British military and served in Iraq. For the first time in his life, he began to excel. He liked the recognition and decided to pursue it. But he didn’t know where to go after his involvement in the military.
He tried Freemasons but rejected it. He tried body-building and modeling. He took up the Islam of his father and got to the point of being a proselytizer, a “Dawah” guy.
But his mind was always active and he questioned too much. How many wives did Mohammad have? Why did he marry the wife of his adopted son?
“I began to outgrow Islam,” he says.
The next thing he was drawn to was New Age. He viewed all religions as means to a universal truth. He practiced astral projection, meditation and out-of-body experiences.
“I still felt so empty,” he admits. “It didn’t quench the thirst in my heart.”
Next he tried the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine.
“When I took this synthetic chemical, I ended up opening doorways to demonic things in my life,” he says. “Something changed inside of me. It felt really funny.”
At this time, a friend named Jacob started evangelizing Shafraz, who peppered him with questions. He noticed that Jacob always responded with patience and love. He noted the difference between Jacob and Muslims. Whenever he peppered Muslim leaders with questions, “it always became tense,” Shafraz says.
His questioning of Islam became a problem for his marriage. His wife was devout and got rankled by the suggestion that Islam might be wrong. Eventually, he lost his wife and child in his quest for truth.
“Me going on this journey to seek the truth caused a lot of strain on my marriage,” he says.
Since he was separated from his wife for months, he took up residence with some Christian guys around the corner. He still wasn’t a Christian but liked to talk about Christianity with them.
“One thing I felt from them was peace and love,” he reports.
The Christian guys gave him Nabeel Qureshi’s book, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity.
“My heart was like, Wow, there’s somebody else like me that is going on this journey,” Shafraz says. “I found myself in my bed at night crying out to God.”
He asked God for a sign, because “according to the rule of Islam I would be going to eternal hell if I confessed Jesus as Lord,” he explains. “This fear was so real. I could feel it deep in my heart that I was so scared to mention that Jesus is Lord. There was a big barrier.”
As he prayed, “a peace came over me,” he adds.
He had a vision of being baptized. He shared it with his roommates. They took him down in the basement for prayer. As they prayed, “I knew I had to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior,” he explains.
As they were praying, a pain seized his shoulder.
“It was a demonic spirit trying to stop me from accepting Jesus,” he decided. “There was a war going on inside of me.”
After struggling to say the words “Jesus is Lord,” the pain “just blasted off of me,” he says. “I felt so free from all these years since I was a boy and losing my mom and all this pain in my heart. I knew something happened, something changed.”
When he got baptized in the river a double rainbow appeared in the sky.
His addiction to cigarettes ended immediately.
“I felt so free and full of life,” he remembers.
Since the transformation, Shafraz has traveled to Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka to spread the Gospel.
“This is just the beginning,” he says. “I’m so happy to share the good news.”
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
About this writer: Morgan Miles studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near West Los Angeles.
