In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

My mind reeled.

In Islam, the Quran is the eternal word of Allah uncreated.

But here, this book was saying that the word was a person.

That God didn’t just send a book.

He sent himself.

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

I stopped.

I stared at the Persian script on the page.

God dot dot dot becoming flesh.

It was the most blasphemous concept a Muslim could imagine.

God is great.

Allah Akbar.

He is transcendent.

He is far above human concerns.

He does not eat.

He does not sleep.

He does not bleed.

To say that God became a man is to insult his majesty.

But as I read those words, a strange warmth began to spread through my chest.

It was the same warmth I had felt in the mosque.

It was the same presence.

It wasn’t an intellectual agreement.

It was a recognition.

My spirit knew the author.

I kept reading.

I read through the miracles.

I read about the water turning into wine.

I read about the healing of the blind man.

But what shocked me the most was not the power of Jesus.

It was his kindness.

In the Quran, Issa is a prophet of power.

He breathes life into clay birds.

He speaks from the cradle.

But here in this forbidden book, Jesus was touching lepers.

He was eating with sinners.

He was speaking to women with dignity.

He wasn’t a remote judge sitting on a throne.

He was walking in the dust, getting his feet dirty, crying at the tomb of his friend.

And then I turned the page to chapter 3.

And I read the verse that would dismantle 30 years of Islamic theology in 30 seconds.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

I read it again and again.

For God so loved the world.

In Islam, Allah has 99 names.

The merciful, the mighty, the avenger, the judge.

But love is not his defining characteristic.

He is loving to those who earn it.

He loves the righteous.

He loves the obedient.

But does he love the world? Does he love the sinner? Does he love the caffer? No.

But this book said God loved the world, the whole broken, messy, rebellious world, that he gave his only begotten son.

There it was the word that had terrified me in Mecca, son.

The Quran explicitly says God beggets not nor is he begotten.

To say God has a son is considered sherk, the unforgivable sin.

But as I read that word on the page, the voice from the mosque came rushing back to me like a tidal wave.

Raza, my son, it clicked.

The pieces of the puzzle slammed together with the force of a revelation.

The voice in Mecca wasn’t a chin.

It wasn’t a demon.

It wasn’t madness.

It was him.

It was the one this book was talking about.

He called me son because he is the son.

He called me into a family that whoever believes in him should not perish.

Whoever, not just the Arabs, not just the Jews, not just the good people, whoever, even a suicidal Salafi Muslim in Tehran who has spent his life hating Christians, even me.

And then the final phrase, have everlasting life.

Not might have, not hopefully have.

Not if you work hard enough you might earn have present tense a guarantee a promise the stone in my stomach the weight I had carried to Mecca and backed the burden of the law the fear of judgment it vanished I cannot explain it in physical terms.

It was as if someone reached into my chest and pulled out a tumor that had been growing there for 30 years.

I took a breath and for the first time in my life the air tasted sweet.

I fell forward onto the carpet not in the ritual prostration of salah but in a heap of broken gratitude.

I wept but these were not the tears of Mecca.

Those were tears of desperation.

These were tears of relief.

I [snorts] felt light.

I felt clean.

I realized that I didn’t need to go to Mecca to wash away my sins.

I didn’t need to scrub my skin raw in the hotel bathroom.

The washing had already happened.

It happened 2,000 years ago on a wooden cross that I had been taught to despise.

I looked up at the ceiling and I whispered the name again.

But this time, I didn’t whisper it in fear.

I whispered it in love.

Yeshua.

And the room filled with peace.

A peace that surpassed all understanding.

A peace that the world cannot give and the world cannot take away.

I stayed there for hours soaking in that presence.

The sun began to rise over Terrron.

The call to prayer adon began to echo from the minouetses across the city.

Allahu Akbar.

Allahu Akbar.

Usually that sound triggered a response in me, a Pavlovian need to rush and wash and pray.

But this morning I sat still.

I listened to the chant and I felt no fear.

I felt pity.

I felt a deep heartbreaking sorrow for the millions of people waking up in this city.

Waking up to perform a duty to earn a love that was already available for free.

I knew my life was over.

The old Rosa was dead.

The architect’s son who wanted to build a perfect life was gone.

In his place was a child of God.

I also knew that my life was in danger.

I knew that what I had just discovered was a capital offense in my country.

I knew that if my father found this book, or if he knew what was in my heart, he would be obligated by his own faith to disown me or worse.

But as the morning light hit the floor of my room, I didn’t care.

I had found the pearl of great price, and I was willing to sell everything to keep it.

Before I tell you what happened next, how I found others like me and the underground world I entered, I need to stop and talk to you.

Yes, you.

I know that for many of you hearing this story, it sounds like a fairy tale.

Or maybe it sounds like a nice story for someone else.

You might be thinking, “Good for Raza.

He found peace.

But my life is too complicated.

My sins are too deep.

My questions are too big.

” If you are feeling that tug in your heart right now, do not ignore it.

That is not just emotion.

That is the same voice that spoke to me in Mecca.

It is knocking at the door of your heart.

You don’t have to go to a pilgrimage to answer it.

You don’t have to fix yourself first.

You just have to open the door.

If this moment, the moment of revelation resonates with you, I want to ask you to do something simple.

Leave a comment below with just one word, truth.

Let it be a marker for you today that you are open to hearing that voice.

And if you want to support us in sharing these stories with more people, specifically with people in the Middle East who are desperate for this truth, please consider subscribing and sharing this video.

Your click might be the reason someone else finds this freedom.

Now, let me explain to you exactly what changed in my mind that night.

Because it wasn’t just a feeling.

It was a complete restructuring of my universe.

I want to share with you the three fundamental differences between the master I served and the father I found.

When I look back at my transition from Islam to Christianity, many people ask me, Raza, what is the real difference? Aren’t they both Abrahamic faiths? Don’t they both worship one God? Don’t they both teach morality and [clears throat]
prayer? On the surface, yes.

From a distance, a mosque in a cathedral might look like they serve the same purpose.

But when you get close, when you look at the blueprints, to use my father’s language, you realize that the foundations are built on two completely different continents.

That night in my room reading the Gospel of John I realized that I had crossed a border that cannot be uncrossed.

I discovered three distinctions that changed everything and I want to share them with you because I believe that many Christians living in the west have forgotten how precious these truths are.

You have grown used to the light so you don’t realize how dark it is outside.

The first difference is the transaction versus the gift.

In the world I grew up in, everything was a transaction.

It is an economic relationship with the divine.

You perform the salah.

You pay the zakat.

You fast during Ramadan and in exchange.

You hope you hope that Allah will grant you mercy.

It is a wage.

You work, you get paid.

And if you don’t work, you get fired.

Or in this case, you get burned.

remember my bargain in the hospital.

Save me and I will be your perfect slave.

That is the heartbeat of Islam.

It is a contract.

But when I met Jesus, I realized that the economy of heaven is upside down.

The gospel is not a wage.

It is a gift.

You cannot buy it.

You cannot earn it.

You cannot deserve it.

Imagine you owe a bank $10 billion.

You can work every day for a thousand lifetimes and you will never pay it off.

That was my debt of sin.

Islam told me, “Work harder, pay a penny a day, maybe the banker will forgive you.

” But Jesus walked into the bank and said, “I will pay the debt.

” He didn’t ask me for a down payment.

He didn’t ask me to promise to be perfect.

He just paid it with his life.

In Islam, I was willing to die for Allah.

I was taught that the greatest honor was to shed my blood for him.

In Christianity, I discovered a God who was willing to die for me.

Who shed his blood for me? Do you feel the difference? One demands your death, the other offers his life.

One is a master taking from the slave, the other is a father giving to the child.

This leads me to the second difference, the distance versus the intimacy.

My father, the architect, built beautiful mosques.

He designed them with high domes and intricate calligraphy.

They were designed to make you feel small, to make you feel the grandeur and transcendence of God.

And that is true.

God is great.

But in that greatness, there is a distance.

In Islam, Allah is not your father.

He is not your friend.

He is the holy king and you are the subject.

You bow your face to the ground.

You do not look him in the eye.

Even in paradise, the Quran describes rivers of wine and beautiful virgins, but it rarely speaks of the intimacy of seeing God’s face.

I traveled to Mecca because I thought I had to bridge that geographical distance.

I thought God was there, not here.

But Jesus shattered that distance.

When the veil in the temple tore when the Holy Spirit descended, God didn’t just come near us.

He came inside us.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? The Bible asks, “Think about that.

My father built temples of stone, but Jesus builds temples of flesh and bone.

I became the mosque.

I became the Holy of Holies.

I didn’t need to fly to Saudi Arabia to find God because the God of the universe had taken up residence in my broken suicidal heart.

That intimacy is terrifying to a Muslim because it feels disrespectful.

But to a child, it is everything.

And that is the third and most important difference.

A master versus the father.

This is the core.

This is the heartbeat.

In all my years of studying the Quran, I never once heard Allah referred to as father.

It is considered a blasphemy to attribute human relationships to God.

He is the master.

Rab we are the slaves.

Abe e.

A slave has rules.

A son has a relationship.

A slave can be fired.

A son can be disciplined, but he is never disowned.

A slave works for approval.

A son works from approval.

When I heard that voice in Mecca say, “My son,” it rewrote my identity.

I realized I wasn’t fighting for a spot on the payroll anymore.

I was already sitting at the dinner table.

I want to speak directly to you, Maria.

I want to speak to you, John, Sarah, David, whoever is listening.

You might call yourself a Christian.

You might go to church every Sunday.

But I have to ask you, are you living like a slave or a son? Do you feel like you have to perform for God? Do you feel like if you miss a prayer or make a mistake, God is angry with you? Do you feel like you are one bad day away from being fired? If you do, then you are living in a spiritual Mecca.

You are circling a black box of rules, hoping for a zap of approval.

You are acting like a slave when you have the paperwork of a son in your pocket.

Stop.

Stop running.

Stop trying to build a tower to heaven.

Stop trying to be the architect of your own salvation.

Jesus is not looking for employees.

He is looking for his children.

He wants you to know that the distance is gone.

The debt is paid.

The master has left the building and the father is home.

This theological shift wasn’t just an idea for me.

It was survival.

because I was about to need every ounce of that sunship to survive what was coming next.

I had found the truth, but I was still living in a lie.

I was a secret Christian in a radical Islamic Republic.

I couldn’t tell my father.

I couldn’t tell my mother.

I couldn’t tell my friends.

I needed a family.

I needed brothers and sisters who understood this new language I was speaking.

But where do you find a church in a country where churches are illegal? Where do you find light in a city that is legally obligated to keep you in the dark? I began a new quest.

Not a quest for God.

I had found him, but [clears throat] a quest for his people.

And that journey would lead me into the underground.

Into the secret basement and hushed living rooms of the Iranian underground church, a place where the danger was real, but the joy was explosive.

Let me take you inside the hidden world of the persecuted church.

Let me show you what it looks like to worship Jesus when a knock on the door could mean death.

So, what does it look like to follow Jesus in a country where his name is a death sentence? I want to take you inside a living room in Tehran.

It is a Friday night.

The curtains are drawn tight.

The lights are dimmed.

Outside on the street, the morality police are patrolling, looking for satellite dishes, alcohol, or mixed gatherings of men and women.

But inside this small apartment, something ancient and powerful is happening.

There are 12 of us.

We arrived separately, staggered by 15 minutes so the neighbors wouldn’t get suspicious.

We parked our cars blocks away.

We didn’t carry Bibles in our hands.

We carried them on USB drives hidden in our pockets or memorized in our hearts.

We sit on the floor in a circle.

There are no pews, no stained glass, no organ music, just a pot of tea in the center and a single candle.

This is the church.

When I first walked into one of these meetings months after my conversion, I was terrified.

I thought, is this a trap? Is one of them an informer? Trust is a luxury in a totalitarian state.

But then we began to pray and I heard it again.

The sound of freedom.

It wasn’t loud.

We couldn’t sing at the top of our lungs like you do in the West.

We had to whisper our worship.

But let me tell you, a whisper that risks death is louder in heaven than a shout that costs nothing.

I looked around the circle.

There was a former drug addict who had been set free by Jesus.

There was a young woman who had been abused by her husband and found dignity in Christ.

There was a university professor who had lost his job for asking too many questions.

And there was me, the former Salafi, the son of the mosque architect.

We were a ragtag group of outcasts.

But in that room, we were royalty.

We broke bread together, just simple flatbread from the corner store, and we passed around a cup of grape juice.

And as we took communion, I realized that this was the true Hajj.

This was the true pilgrimage.

Not walking around a stone building, but walking together in the spirit.

Living as a secret Christian in Iran is like walking on a tight rope.

You have two lives, the public mask and the private truth.

By day I was still Rasa, the beautiful son.

I went to work.

I nodded when people praised the ayatollah.

One avoided religious debates.

But my heart was exploding.

I wanted to tell everyone.

I wanted to grab people on the street and shake them and say, “You don’t have to live like this.

The cage is open.

” But I couldn’t.

Not yet.

Wisdom is the better part of valor.

However, the light has a way of leaking out.

My mother noticed first.

She saw that the anger was gone.

She saw that I treated her with a new tenderness.

She saw that the dark circles under my eyes from depression had vanished.

One day she asked me, “Rasa, what happened to you?” “You are different.

” I looked at her and I knew it was a risk, but I also knew that love casts out fear.

Mom, I said, I met someone.

He changed me.

She thought I met a girl.

Who is she? She asked, smiling.

It’s not a she, I said.

It’s him.

I met Issa.

I met Jesus.

Her face went pale.

In that moment, the wall between us went up.

The fear in her eyes broke my heart.

She wasn’t angry.

She was terrified for me.

She knew the law.

She knew the penalty.

“Don’t say that name,” she whispered.

“Don’t ever say that name in this house.

That is the cost.

It’s not just the threat of execution by the state.

It’s the wall it builds between you and the people you love most.

” Jesus said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

I used to hate that verse.

Now I understand it.

The sword cuts away the false piece to make room for the true one.

It separates the lie from the truth.

I had to leave Iran eventually.

A pressure became too great, the close calls too frequent.

I packed my life into a suitcase and left the only home I had ever known.

I left my father’s blueprints.

I left the mountains of Tehran.

I left my mother’s cooking.

I became a refugee.

I lost my country, my status, my career.

To the world, I was nobody.

Just another immigrant with a funny accent.

But I have never been richer.

I traded a religion of slavery for a relationship of sunship.

I traded a distant master for an intimate father.

I traded the fear of death for the assurance of life.

And that brings me back to you.

Why did I tell you all this? Why did I relive the terror of Mecca and the darkness of my depression? Because I know that right now as you are listening to my voice, you are circling your own Cabba.

Maybe it’s not a black cube in Saudi Arabia.

Maybe it’s a career you are obsessed with.

Maybe it’s a relationship you think will fix you.

Maybe it’s an addiction you are using to numb the silence.

Maybe it s a religious performance trying to be the good Christian so God will finally love you.

You are tired.

I know you are.

You are exhausted from the striving.

You are exhausted from the mask.

I am here to tell you that you can stop walking.

You can stop climbing.

You can stop bleeding.

The work is finished.

The same Jesus who walked into the Grand Mosque to find a suicidal Muslim is walking into your room right now.

He is not afraid of your mess.

He is not intimidated by your doubts.

He is not pushed away by your sin.

He is close, closer than your breath.

If you have felt that cold electricity, that tug in your chest while listening to this story, do not brush it off.

That is him.

That is the father calling you home.

I have a challenge for you.

If you are a believer, if you know this Jesus I am talking about, I want you to do something bold.

I want you to become an ambassador of this freedom.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »