On Easter Sunday 1973, Pastor Kefa Sampangi was targeted for assassination by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Kefa had just preached in his town’s soccer stadium to over 7,000 people. After the service, three of Amin’s Secret Police followed him back to his small church.

Kefa had just finished praying when the soldiers entered the room and closed the door behind them. Three rifles were pointed at Kefa’s face. “We are here on a mission. We are here to kill you,” said the soldier. “Do you have anything to say?” Kefa thought of his beautiful wife and daughter and began to shake. He struggled for several minutes to say anything. Finally, he looked at the soldier and said, “I am already dead, who are you going to kill?”

The soldier paused, confused by what he had just heard. “What do you mean you are already dead?” Kefa said, “The Word of God says that in Christ I am already dead, and that my real life is hidden with Him in God. It is not my life that is in danger, but yours. I am alive in the risen Lord but you are still dead in your sins. May He spare you from eternal destruction.” The soldier stared at Kefa for a long time. Then he lowered his gun and said, “Will you pray for us?”

The soldier told Kefa they had planned to kill him in front of everyone to show their power. Instead, they kept sitting in the service. The man said, “I didn’t hear anything you said, I could only see the widows and orphans who were sitting around me. Some of them I knew. I had killed their men with my own hands, and I expected them to be weeping and mourning. Instead, they were clapping, they were singing songs and they were happy. Their joy made me so afraid. I thought to myself, if for one moment I could understand it, I would give up everything.”

In his book, “A Distant Grief,” Kefa admitted he silently wondered how God could forgive such a man. Yet he pushed those thoughts aside and told the soldier about God’s love and forgiveness. He read Isaiah 44:22, “ I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.” That man, living in the darkest of sins, found forgiveness and redemption in Jesus. He later told Kefa, the one he had come to kill, “I have found the love of Jesus Christ. I am a new man. I can feel it, my sins have been taken away.” From that day on, the soldier protected Kefa with his very life.

Perhaps Kefa is an example of what Jesus meant when He said, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:24-26)