Game Changer—an Interview with NPI author Nikolai Dimitrov

Melanie Hemry

Guest essay by Melanie Hemry

Eighteen-year-old Nikola Dimitrov stood on the terrace of his family’s apartment looking over the familiar scene of Burgas, the fourth largest city in Bulgaria. He understood that the choice he made right now would change his life forever. Nikola felt as though he was standing over a fault line, a chasm spreading between his feet. He couldn’t straddle it. He’d have to choose. Either stay with the familiar life he knows, or take a leap of faith to a new one.

His life until now hadn’t been bad. He lived with his parents and younger brother in a loving family. His father worked at a technical facility as a mathematician. His mother worked in schools as a dentist. Back in 1992, computers, phones and the internet weren’t available in his country. For a kid in a communist state, he’d lived a normal life—occupying his time by playing sports and games outdoors. Still, when Nikola assessed his life, he considered himself adrift. Untethered. Irresponsible. Out of 1250 classes required to move to the next grade, he had skipped 1200. It wasn’t that he couldn’t grasp his studies. He just didn’t want to bother with them. He preferred working out, strengthening his body for what he loved—sports. He did graduate eventually, but he really didn’t care. The first quake in life as he’d known it, had been the fall of communism.  It had opened the door to waves of people who had previously been forbidden to enter the country. Missionaries had come with outrageous stories about God and how He loved people. They spoke with reverence about a Name no one in Bulgaria knew—Jesus.

Nikola had just returned from another city where a guy had told him about the Name. He’d heard about the Garden. Sin. The Fall of Man. He’d heard about Jesus, Calvary, death and hell. He’d heard about a new kind of life as a believer. The message had tugged at his heart in a way that nothing else ever had.

That was the choice he had to make—whether or not to follow Jesus and serve Him.

Nikola stood still, listening to the sounds of children playing.  The hustle and bustle of city life. Making a choice, he bowed his head, pouring out his heart to God, repenting of all his sins. Then, as his friend had suggested, he asked Jesus into his heart.

Afterward, Nikola felt different.

No more adrift, he felt tethered to something or Someone greater than himself.

In that divine connection, Nikola felt something about his life he had never experienced.

Purpose.

A New Life in Christ

“Jesus’ presence in my life instantly filled it with purpose,” Nikola recalls. “I was a different person who made different decisions. Until then, I’d been interested in sports. Now I wanted nothing more than to serve God.

“The first thing I did was lead my brother to the Lord, then my parents, and my grandparents on both sides of the family. Before long, every member of my family was a Christian. My mother was 41 years old, and she had never heard the Name of Jesus. None of my family had—not even my grandparents. I later learned that there had been an underground church all along, but it had been persecuted so hard that after the fall of communism, only a few pastors, now in their 90s, had survived the atrocities of the regime against the evangelical church.

“I spent a lot of time praying, asking God to connect me with other believers. We lived in a block of apartments, 100 families in each block. One hundred apartments on eight floors with four entrances. I witnessed to my best friend, and he became a Christian. Together, we started evangelizing the kids on the block. Soon, we had won about 25 other young people to the Lord. We started meeting together in my home

“None of us knew much except the plan of salvation, but we were starving for God’s presence. The guy who told me about the Lord had given me a magazine called Believer’s Voice of Victory that was published by Kenneth Copeland Ministries. I’d taken English in school, but you have to actually attend classes to learn. Now I worked hard to take what I knew and persist in learning English so that I could read that magazine. It was my strong motivation.

“The city of Burgas is divided into regions and I lived in the largest one. There were some other believers in another region who heard about us. We met and merged, becoming one larger group of young believers, most of us in our 20s. Together, we set about evangelizing the city.”

Using the address on the magazine, and every cent he had, Nikola ordered other materials from KCM.

“There were very few churches at the time,” he recalls. “We had no one to mentor us. So, we depended on those materials to learn. I also ordered tapes, listened to them and translated them to the group. The only gospel we’d ever heard was the message of faith.”

Army Life

In 1994, Nikola began serving in the army. Military recruits were forbidden to practice Christianity. They were required to sign papers about that and pressured not to speak of their faith. So, Nikola used the time to learn. Taking all the materials he had received from KCM with him, he hid them under the seat of his army truck. During every free moment, he immersed himself in them.

Unable to go home, except for a few very short visits, he wrote long letters sharing what he’d learned with his friends. Whenever possible, the leaders of the group back home took a bus to visit him. Nikola preached to them and then sent them back to share what they’d heard with the others.

In 1995, after being discharged from the army, Nikola continued to order all the tapes, videos, books and other materials from KCM that he could afford. In all, he bought over 40 different teaching series, spending all the money he had. When he saw an ad in the magazine to order back issues of the magazine, Nikola ordered them all.

“At the time, there were very few Christian materials in Bulgarian and not many Bulgarians could speak English,” Nikola explains. “But people were hungry for the Word of God, so we gathered in homes, in churches and outside. I translated the messages from KCM into our language for them. I also taped improvised translations of Brother and Sister Copeland’s teachings and distributed them around the country. We were just a bunch of 20-year-old kids, but we were on fire for God.

“I’m not sure where the man who shared that BVOV magazine with me got the copy,” Nikola recalls. “There had to be a connection somewhere, but during those early years I never heard anyone else preach those messages. I don’t mean to say people weren’t preaching faith in God, because they were. I mean I never heard anyone else preaching KCM’s specific messages. Over the years, I’ve translated and distributed more than 1400 messages from KCM, including ones by Creflo Dollar, Jesse Duplantis and Jerry Savelle. They have been like manna for us.

“In 1996, our first church started a prison ministry. Soon the church inside the prison outgrew the one outside. Although at one point the group had not been allowed to officially register as a church, they continued to thrive, registered as a ‘charity organization,’ with the leaders meeting every day to pray, prophesy and practice moving in the spirit.”

During one meeting, the Lord told Nikola that Helen, one of the other leaders, was to be his wife. Two years later, Nikola and Helen were married. Their first child, Anna, was born in 1999 and then in 2001 Mikaela was born.

“In about 2000, we began ministering to the Gypsies, called Roma in Bulgaria. The Lord connected us to a Gypsy reformer we have been working with to transform the Roma ethnicity in our nation, which involves spiritual, educational and social work among the poorest of the poor amidst severe racism and discrimination. Their living conditions are appalling. We are committed to working with this leader and doing whatever we can to help.”

Faith for Food

The aroma of baking bread wafted in the air as Nikola stepped into his apartment. Helen called, “Dinner’s ready!” urging their children, Anna and Mikaela, to the table. Helen cut each of them a piece of bread, plating it and drizzling honey on top. Seated at the table, the family bowed their heads as Nikola thanked God for the bounty of their meal. They took their time, savoring each bite.

Bulgaria had long been among the poorest nations in Europe. But after being under the heavy rule of communism for more than 45 years, in 2007, when it was admitted into the European Union, there had initially been a slow drip of financial aid. The economic depression that followed, however, had left the Bulgarian people in even worse financial shape.

The price of petrol, food and clothing had skyrocketed to match those in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain. But there had been no matching increase in income. Except for those in the capital city, the average Bulgarian made an equivalent of $300 to $400 a month.

Millions fled the country to escape starvation. Although Nikola had numerous job offers outside the country, he’d refused each one. He loved the Bulgarian people and was determined to stay and help them.

Besides, Nikola and Helen had been very blessed. Helen’s parents owned a small plot they allowed someone to use to plant crops. In return, they received flour which they shared with Nikola and Helen. Helen’s grandparents were also blessed to have a beehive on their property. They gave Nikola and Helen a bucket of honey each year. Nikola’s parents were a tremendous help during those hard times as well. They bought food, paid for utilities and took care of the children’s immediate needs as much as they could.

Even though Nikola and his family had gone on bread and honey for quite some time, it never occurred to them to complain. They were grateful for every bite. Blessed far beyond most of their neighbors, they had something many people in Bulgaria did not have.

They had food.

“Our children were small and growing,” Nikola says. “We made sure they had enough to eat. Helen and I often didn’t get enough, especially me, but I can live now on one small meal a day. We’d always shared our food with others, but once the depression hit, we had less to share.

“About five years ago, I saw a man living nearby whose wife occasionally attended our church. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months and asked about her. He said, ‘Hadn’t you heard? She died. Starved to death.’”

The woman was 45 years old.

“The situation is a lot better in and around the capital,” says Nikola. “Some people there now make up to $700 to $800 a month. But once you drive 100 miles away, there isn’t enough money to buy food. Those of us who began on a solid foundation of faith are still standing. We did as we were taught. We never talked about the problem. We spoke the Word of God. We never talked about poverty and lack. We spoke the blessing of the Lord.

Faith for Miracles

“In 2014 and again in 2018, we planted new churches. As the church has continued to grow, we’ve experienced amazing healing miracles. In 2017, someone brought a Muslim woman, a heavy smoker, to us. She’d been diagnosed with end-stage cancer which had spread to her liver, lung and breast. She had been given 10 days to live. The entire church prayed for her in glorious unity.

“Afterward, we sent people to her house every day to pray for her, cook and clean. Her doctors couldn’t understand why her tumor markers started dropping and continued to drop. Today she is totally healed, vibrant and walks faster than I do.

“More recently, one of my friends called to say his wife had had a baby. Immediately afterward, she suffered a stroke.  The situation looked grim. I told him, ‘Don’t listen to your thoughts. Don’t listen to relatives. Don’t listen to the doctor’s prognosis. Listen to me. I guarantee you by the Lord’s living Word that your wife will recover. When this passes it will be as if she never went through it.’

“I notified the intercessors at the church, and we committed to pray until her healing manifested. It took 5 hours and 23 minutes before her brain was restored, she woke up and was discharged from the hospital. All to the glory of God.”

The Lord instructed Nikola to write a book in English, a compilation of the four Gospels. The book combined Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a single chronological story written in a novel format. Not a single word or punctuation was deleted, only repetitive words. Nikola spent 10 years writing the book and then trying to get it into print. Facing thousands of rejections, he refused to get discouraged and quit. Instead, he stood in faith, speaking God’s blessing over the book.

Then, one day Nikola received a call from an American publisher asking to publish his book. A well-respected theologian endorsed it, and  The Four in One Gospel of Jesus was accepted into the Oxford Library of Apologetics.

“When I look back over the past 27 years,” Nikola says, “all I see is God’s faithfulness. I am 100 times hungrier for God today than I was yesterday. All these years later, those young people on fire for God are still on fire. I can’t fathom what we would have done without the uncompromised Word of God, which I was first introduced to through KCM, as our foundation. That’s what partnership with KCM means to me. It’s been the difference between life and death. Many times, it has meant not only the difference between life and death for individuals, but for the church in Bulgaria—and for the nation.”


Melanie Hembry is a published author and ghostwrite with over thirty years in the industry, including six books under her own name and forty-eight books she has ghostwritten.

Nikola Dimotrov is author of the Nordskog Publishing title The Four in One Gospel of Jesus: Chronologically Integrated According to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Nikola pastors a church in Bulgaria with a vigorous ministry to his community. 

The original of this interview appeared in The Believer’s Voice of Victory magazine published by Kenneth Copeland Ministries, July 2019. 

© 2019 Used by Permission

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