I’m An Ex-Muslim, I Died & Jesus Showed Me These 7 Worship Songs Make Him Weep

When I opened my eyes in heaven, the first thing I saw was Jesus Christ standing in front of me.

And he was crying, not quietly, not gently, the Lord of all creation, the Alpha and the Omega, the one whose voice holds the stars in place.

He was standing in front of me with tears running down his face and his hands trembling.

And he looked at me, a 46-year-old former Muslim from Oman who had only known his name for 4 years, and he said something that I am still losing sleep over 11 weeks later.

He said, “Khaled, my people are breaking my heart, and they do not even know they are doing it.”

I said, “Lord, how how are they breaking your heart?” And he said, “With their songs.

Their songs, not their sins, not their lies, not their backsliding, their worship songs, the ones they sing every Sunday with their eyes closed and their hands in the air and tears rolling down their cheeks.

The songs they play on Christian radio in their cars, the songs they post on Instagram, stories with little candle emojis, the songs they think are honoring me.

He said, “I am going to show you seven of them. Seven songs that are sung in my name all over this earth.

And I am going to show you what I hear when they sing them, not what they think they are saying to me, what I actually hear.”

And then Khaled, I’m going to send you back and you are going to open your mouth and tell them.

I said, “Lord, I was a Muslim for 42 years. I have been yours for four.

Nobody is going to listen to me. And he looked at me with those ancient burning tearfilled eyes and said, “That is exactly why I chose you.

You came to my worship with fresh ears. You had no childhood memories of these songs.

No sentimental attachment. You heard them the way I hear them. And even you within 4 years started singing words to me that you did not mean.

Imagine what has happened to the ones who have been singing for 40 years without stopping to ask if I was even in the room.

I fell on my face and then he showed me the first song. Now I need to stop right here because I know you want me to go straight to the songs.

I know. I can feel it. And I promise you, I’m going to give you every single one of them.

Every word Jesus said, every vision he showed me. Nothing held back. But you need to know who I am first.

Not because my story matters more than his message. It does not. But because when you understand that the Lord Jesus Christ chose a man who used to pray to Allah five times a day, a man who memorized half the Quran before his voice changed, a man whose own family in Oman has not spoken to him in years because he dared to say the name of Jesus.

When you understand that this is the man he pulled out of a coffin and sent back with a warning for the American church, you are going to understand just how serious this message is.

Stay with me. Do not touch that scroll button. What I am about to tell you is going to change the way you worship for the rest of your life.

And the seven songs are coming. I promise you on my life they are coming.

But first, let me tell you how a boy from Muscat, Oman, ended up dead on the floor of a church in Los Angeles with Jesus Christ weeping over his body.

My name is Khaled Adam al-Mawali. I am 46 years old. I was born in Muscet, Omain, into an oil family so rich my grandfather owned a fleet of boats and three houses on the coast.

Before I even took my first breath, I was raised Muslim, strict Muslim. I prayed five times a day facing Mecca.

I fasted every Ramadan without missing a single day. I had half the Quran committed to memory by the age of 13.

And I loved Allah the way I was taught to love him, with my forehead on the ground and my mouth full of words I was told never to question.

My father sent me to America in 2006 to study mechanical engineering at a university in Boston.

He paid my tuition in cash. He bought me a car. He told me to get my degree, come home, and take over the family’s oil services company.

That was the plan. That was always the plan. But America did something to me that Oman never could.

America made me think. In Oman, you do not question Islam. You do not ask why.

You do not wonder if there is another way. The walls around your mind are built before you can walk.

And by the time you are old enough to notice them, you have forgotten they are walls.

You think they are just the shape of the world. In America, I met Christians for the first time, real ones.

Not the Christians I had been warned about in mosque. The crusaders, the colonizers, the ones who hate Muslims and want to destroy Islam.

I met a kid from Ohio named Danny who sat next to me in a thermodynamics lecture and shared his sandwich with me on the first day of class because I looked lost.

Danny was a Christian. He did not try to convert me. He just loved me.

He invited me to Thanksgiving at his parents’ house because I had nowhere to go.

His mother hugged me at the door like I was her own son. They said grace before the meal.

And when Dany’s father prayed, he said, “Lord, thank you for bringing Khaled to our table.

Bless him and his family back home.” Nobody had ever prayed for me by name before.

In the mosque, you pray to God. You do not hear God pray for you.

That prayer at Danny’s table planted something in me that took 15 years to sprout, but it sprouted.

I finished my degree. I got a job in Los Angeles. I stayed in America.

My father was furious. We did not speak for almost 8 years. I married a woman, an American, a Christian woman named Grace, if you can believe that name.

And my family in Oman acted like I had died. To them I had. But God was working for years.

I carried a Bible in my nightstand drawer that Grace had put there. I never opened it.

I told myself it was a book of lies. But late at night when Grace was asleep and the apartment was quiet, I would sometimes pick it up and hold it and feel something I could not name.

A pull, a warmth, like the book itself was breathing. One night in 2022, I finally opened it.

I opened it to the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse 1. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

I read that sentence and my whole body went cold. Because in Islam, we are taught that Jesus was a prophet, a good man, a messenger, but not God.

Never God. To say Jesus is God is the worst sin in Islam. It is called sherk.

It is unforgivable. And here was this book in the first sentence of the first chapter of the first gospel saying it plain as day.

The word was God. I stayed up until 4 in the morning reading. I read Matthew.

I read Mark. I read Luke. I read John again. By sunrise. I was sitting on the edge of my bed with tears running into my beard.

And I said out loud and my voice was shaking so badly I could barely get the words out.

I said, “Jesus, if you are who this book says you are, if you are really God, then I have been wrong about you my entire life.

And I am sorry and I need you. I need you right now.” And he came.

I am not going to describe it in detail right now because we will be here all day and I have seven songs to tell you about.

But I will say this, he came into that bedroom the way the sun comes through a window warm, certain, undeniable.

And he did not scold me for being late. He did not say, “Where have you been for 42 years?”

He just said very quietly, “Khaled, I have been waiting for you. Welcome home.” I have been a Christian for 4 years.

I have led 21 people to Christ since my conversion, including three former Muslims. I joined a church in Los Angeles.

I joined the choir. I learned to sing worship songs that I had never heard before in my life.

Songs written in the language that was not my first language. To a god I had spent 42 years being told did not exist the way he actually exists.

And I sang them with everything I had. Every Sunday, every practice, every note, and then on a Friday evening in January, I died.

We were in the sanctuary worship practice. Seven of us, the choir director, the keyboard player, two guitarists, a drummer, and me.

I was standing at the microphone going over the set list for Sunday. We were rehearsing the second song when I felt something strange in my chest.

Not pain, more like a fluttering, like a bird was trapped behind my ribs. I put my hand on my chest.

The choir director, a woman named Sister Patrice, 60 years old, voiced like an angel from Alabama.

She looked at me and said, “Khalid, you okay, baby?” I opened my mouth to say, “Yes.”

And then I was on the floor. I do not remember falling. I do not remember hitting the ground.

I just remember sister Patrice screaming my name and the drummer, a young brother named Terrence, maybe 23 years old, jumping off his stool and running to me and starting chest compressions.

He was an EMT on weekdays. God had already placed the right hands in that room before I ever hit the floor.

The ambulance came. They told me later my heart had stopped for 6 minutes and 41 seconds.

Cardiac arrest, no warning, no history of heart problems. 46 years old and healthy as a horse.

My doctor said afterward he could not explain it. I could. God stopped my heart on purpose.

He stopped it because he needed to talk to me. And I was singing too loud to hear him.

I am going to tell you what happened in those 6 minutes. And then I am going to give you every single song one by one exactly the way Jesus gave them to me.

I am not here to judge any songwriter. I am not here to cancel any worship leader.

I am here because the Lord of heaven told me to open my mouth. And I am a man who spent 42 years disobeying God.

I am done disobeying him. When my heart stopped, everything went quiet. Not silent, quiet.

The way the world gets quiet right before the sun comes up. A wholly quiet.

And I felt myself lifted. Not floating. Lifted the way a father picks up a sleeping child from a car seat and carries him inside.

I was being carried. And then I was standing in a place I cannot describe with English words or Arabic words or any words any human tongue has ever made.

It was not a room. It was not a garden. It was presence. Pure, raw, overwhelming presence.

The air itself was worship. The ground beneath me was worship. Everything in that place existed for one single purpose to honor the one who sat at the center of it.

And he was there. The same Jesus I told you about at the beginning of this video.

Tears on his face, scars in his hands, and the message burning in his chest that he had been waiting to deliver through the mouth of a former Muslim who had only known his name for 4 years.

He looked at me and then he showed me the first song and what I saw undid me.

Song one way maker s. The first thing I saw was a church. Thousands of people, hands raised.

The band was playing that familiar progression. If you have been in any church in the last 5 years, you know the sound.

And the whole room was declaring at the top of their lungs, way maker, miracle worker, promisekeeper, light in the darkness, “My God, that is who you are.”

Jesus stood next to me, watching. His face was still, not angry, grieved. Listen to what they are singing.

Khaled, he said they are singing my titles. Way maker, miracle worker, promisekeeper. These are true.

I am all of these things, but watch ye their hearts. And he opened my eyes to see what he sees.

Not the lifted hands, not the closed eyes, the hearts. And what I saw made me sick.

Most of the people in that room were not worshshiping. They were demanding. They were shouting way maker the way a child shouts at a parent who will not buy them a toy.

They wanted a miracle. They wanted a breakthrough. They wanted a bill paid, a marriage fixed, a diagnosis reversed.

And they were using this song like a magic spell, repeating it louder and louder as if volume could force the hand of God.

They call me miracle worker, Jesus said. But they treat me like a magician. They want my hand but not my face.

They want what I can give them but not who I am. They declare even when I don’t see it.

You’re working but the moment I don’t work the way they expect they walk away offended.

He turned to me. Khaled in Islam you prayed five times a day facing Mecca.

You did not ask Allah for things during those prayers. You submitted. You bowed. You surrendered.

My own children have forgotten what surrender looks like. They think worship is a transaction.

Sing loud enough and I will pay. That is not worship. That is commerce. That cut me deep.

Because he was right. Even in my short four years as a Christian, I had caught myself singing way maker while thinking about my bank account.

While thinking about my father in Oman who still will not speak to me while thinking about me.

The song is not the problem, he said gently. The heart is the problem. Tell them to stop singing my titles and start living my ways.

I am the way maker but my way is the narrow road and few are willing to walk it.

Song two. Reckless love. Cory Asbury. The second vision came fast. Another church. Another crowd and the bridge was building.

Oh, the overwhelming neverending reckless love of God. And the whole room was swaying with their eyes closed.

Jesus stood beside me and his face tightened. Khaled, he said. Do you know what the word reckless means?

I nodded. Careless without thought, without control. Yes, he said. And that is what my children are calling my love.

He let that land. My love is not reckless, Khaled. My love is the most deliberate force in the universe.

I chose you before the foundation of the world. I counted the hairs on your head.

I planned every step of your journey from Muscat to Los Angeles to that bedroom where you finally opened the book of John.

Does that sound reckless to you? It did not. When my people call my love reckless, they make it cheap.

They turn it into a feeling instead of a covenant. They use it as permission.

Permission to stay in sin. Permission to skip repentance. Permission to live however they want because God’s love is just too wild and crazy to hold them accountable.

That is not my love. That is a lie wearing my name. He showed me something then that I will never forget.

He showed me the cross. Not the clean wooden cross in a church lobby. The real one.

The one with the blood. The one with the nails. The one with his skin hanging off his back in ribbons because a Roman soldier had whipped him until the bone showed through.

“Does that look reckless to you?” He asked quietly. “Or does that look like the most intentional act of love in the history of creation?”

I was on my face weeping. Tell them, he said, my love is not reckless.

It is holy. It is costly. It is precise. Every drop of blood I shed on that hill was measured and meant.

Do not cheapen it with a word that belongs to teenagers driving too fast on a highway.

Song three. Good father, Christomlin/housefires. This one hurt me personally because this was the first worship song I ever learned after becoming a Christian.

Grace taught it to me. She played it on her phone in the kitchen while she was cooking.

And I stood behind her and listened to the words, “You’re a good good father.

It’s who you are.” And I cried because I had spent 42 years being told that Allah was merciful but distant.

And here was a song saying, “God was a father, a good one.” So when Jesus brought me to this song in heaven, I almost said, “Lord, please, not this one.”

But he did. He showed me churches singing it. And he said, “Khaled, the problem is not the song.

The problem is what they have done with the word father. My children sing good, good good father and they mean it as a laabi.

They mean it as comfort. They mean it the way a child pulls a blanket over their head to block out a storm.

But I am not just good. I am holy. I am just. I am the father who disciplines the ones he loves.

The father who says no. The father who leads his children through the valley of the shadow of death, not around it, through it.

He paused. In the west, you have a problem I did not see in the east.

Your children want a father who only comforts, never corrects, never confronts, never says you are wrong and you must change.

They want a father who is safe, but I am not safe. I am good.

Those are not the same thing. I thought about the Quran, about Allah, about the 99 names of God in Islam, and how many of them are names of power, the compeller, the sovereign, the avenger, the Abbaser.

In Islam, they had made God too hard, too distant, too frightening. But in Western Christianity, Jesus was showing me they had made God too soft, too tame, too much like a greeting card.

I am a good father, he said. But a good father does not just hold you.

A good father also shapes you and shaping hurts. Tell them to stop using my goodness as an excuse to avoid my holiness.

Song four. Oceans where feet may fail. Hill Song United. Jesus showed me a vision of a woman, young, maybe 28, standing in a worship service with her eyes closed and tears streaming down her face, singing at the top of her lungs.

Spirit, lead me where my trust is without borders. Let me walk upon the waters wherever you would call me.

Beautiful words, brave words, words that sound like total surrender. Then Jesus showed me her Monday.

She woke up late, skipped her Bible reading, scrolled her phone for 40 minutes, argued with her husband about money, gossiped about a coworker at lunch, watched 3 hours of television after dinner, went to bed without praying.

This is what I hear when she sings, “Take me deeper,” Jesus said. Arashi sang a vow on Sunday.

By Monday, she had forgotten it. By Tuesday, she had broken it. By Wednesday, she was living as though she had never opened her mouth in my presence at all.

I stood there in silence. Because I recognized that woman’s Monday, it looked like mine.

Khaled, every lyric of worship is a vow. My people do not understand this. When you stand in my house and you say, “Spirit, lead me where my trust is without borders.”

I hear a covenant. And when you walk out of that building and live the exact opposite of what you just declared to me, do you know what that is?

It is a lie. A beautiful, emotional, well prodduced lie sunk to my face. He was not angry.

He was heartbroken. They want deep waters that feel like warm pools. But my waters are for cleansing, for refining, for testing.

When I actually lead them into the deep, through a job loss, through a sickness, through a season of silence where I do not answer the way they want.

They stop singing. They get offended. They ask, “Where is God?” And I am standing right there in the deep water.

I brought them to saying, “This is what you asked for.” Tell them, he said, “Do not sing what you will not live.

It is better to stay silent in my house than to make a vow you cannot keep.

Song five. What a beautiful name. Hillong Worship. This one confused me at first because the title alone sounds like pure praise.

And the melody I have heard it fill entire stadiums. I have felt the goosebumps when 10,000 voices sing together.

What a beautiful name it is. The name of Jesus Christ. My king. But Jesus brought me to one particular line.

And when he repeated it to me, I understood his grief. The line was, “You didn’t want heaven without us.

So Jesus, you brought heaven down.” He said, “Khaled, do you hear what that line is saying?

It is saying that I died because I could not bear to be alone. Because I needed man.

Because heaven was not enough without human beings in it. He let the silence stretch.

I have existed in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Spirit since before time began.

I did not die from loneliness. Khaled. I died from obedience. I died to satisfy the justice of a holy God.

I died because sin required a price and I chose to pay it. My love for them is real.

Fierce and unshakable. But it isn’t a desperate love. It is a sovereign love. And when my people rewrite the motive of the cross to make themselves the center of it, they diminish what I did.

This hit me in a way that only an ex-Muslim can understand because in Islam, God does not lower himself.

God does not need man. And when I became a Christian, I fell in love with the idea that God chose to come down.

But Jesus was showing me that the Western church had taken that beautiful truth and twisted it into something man- centered.

They had made the cross about how special they are rather than about how holy he is.

I love them more than they can hold in their hearts, he said. But my love is not desperation.

Tell them to stop rewriting Why I bled. Song six. Graves into gardens. Elevation worship.

I saw a vision of a praise break. A full band. The bass was shaking the floor.

The crowd was jumping. The lead singer was shouting. You turn graves into gardens. You turn bones into armies.

You turn seas into highways. Energy, joy, celebration, power. And Jesus stood beside me quiet.

Khaled, do you see what is happening in this room? I looked again. The people were happy.

They were celebrating what God can do. Turning graves into gardens, making dead things live again.

Now look at their lives, he said, and I saw it. The same people who were shouting about graves and gardens were going home to graves.

They refused to let me touch dead marriages. They would not bring to me dead prayer lives.

They would not revive dead relationships with their own children that they sang over on Sunday but ignored on Monday.

They celebrated my resurrection power in a song but would not let me resurrect the things in their lives that needed my hand the most.

They love the metaphor. He said they do not love the process. To turn a grave into a garden, you must first dig in the dirt.

You must get your hands in the death, you must let me uproot what you have been protecting.

And my children do not want that. They want gardens without graves. They want the after without the during.

He looked at me with those ancient burning eyes. Khaled, you know what a grave feels like.

You buried your identity. You buried your family’s approval. You buried your name in Oman so that you could follow me.

That is what it costs to see a garden. Tell them I am not a god of metaphors.

I am a god of shovels. And if they will not let me dig, I cannot plant.

Song seven. Holy Spirit, you are welcome here. Francesca Batistelli Lash Brian and Katie Torwald.

The last song. Jesus saved it for last for a reason. And when I tell you what he said about it, I want you to understand that he was not angry.

He was the most tender. I had seen him the entire time. Like a father about to tell his child something hard but true and leaning in close so the child can see his eyes while he says it.

He showed me a worship service, a beautiful one. Soft lighting, acoustic guitar, a gentle voice singing, “Holy Spirit, you are welcome here.

Come flood this place and fill the atmosphere.” People were crying, swaying, whispering. It looked like the holiest moment you could imagine.

And the Lord said to me, “Khaled, they are inviting my spirit into the room.”

I nodded, “But they have conditions.” I looked at him. They say you are welcome here.

But what they mean is you are welcome here as long as you make us feel good.

As long as you give us goosebumps, as long as you move in the way we planned for you to move.

As long as you stay within the time slot the pastor gave you on the program.

They invite me in and then they put me on a schedule. They ask me to flood the place and then they drain the water the moment the sermon needs to start.

They say fill the atmosphere. But what they mean is give us an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling, a production value.

They do not actually want me to fill the room. Because if I truly fill the room, khaled, half of them would fall on their faces and not get up for hours.

Meetings would be cancelled. Plans would be thrown out. Pastors would weep at the pulpit instead of preach and most churches are not willing to let that happen.

He paused. In a man, you spent 42 years in a religion that had rules but no spirit.

In America, my church has the spirit but puts him in a box. Both are prisons.

Khaled, tell them to open the box. Tell them if they say welcome, they must mean it.

All of me, not just the parts that fit the program. I was on my knees shaking.

Tell them, he whispered that when they invite me in and then show me the door an hour later because the service needs to end on time.

I do leave, I leave. And most of them do not even notice I am gone.

They keep singing, they keep swaying, they keep crying, but they are worshiping an echo.

Khaled, not me. That last sentence hit me so hard I thought I was going to die a second time right there on the floor of heaven.

Then the visions stopped. The seven songs faded. And it was just me and Jesus standing in the presence of a holiness so total that every bone in my spirit was trembling.

He put his hands on my shoulders, those scarred hands. I could feel the holes in his palms pressing against me.

Khaled, he said, I chose you for this message because you came to my worship with no baggage.

You had no childhood memories of singing these songs. You had no sentimental attachment. You heard them fresh.

And even you, even you within 4 years started singing words you did not live.

That is how powerful the drift is. That is how easily my people slide from worship into performance without even noticing.

Go back, tell them what I showed you. Tell them, “I love their singing. I love their voices.

I love every hand they lift, but I want their hearts more than their harmonies.

I want truth more than tears. I want obedience more than atmosphere. And I want them to know every single one of them that I hear every word they sing, every single word.

And I hold them to it. He leaned closer. Tell them worship is not the warm-up before the sermon.

Worship is the offering, and I will not accept an offering that costs them nothing.

Then he kissed my forehead the way my father in Oman used to kiss me when I was a small boy before I disappointed him before the distance before the silence.

A father’s kiss and the light went white. I woke up on the floor of the sanctuary with Sister Patrice holding my head in her lap and Terrence pumping my chest and the whole choir praying over me in a language I did not recognize.

It might have been tongues. It might have been just the sound a human being makes when they are begging God to give somebody back.

The paramedics arrived. They told me later I had been gone for 6 minutes and 41 seconds.

They could not explain why I came back. One of them, a young man named Raphael, looked at me in the ambulance and said quietly, “Somebody up there wanted you to come back pretty bad.

I grabbed his hand. I said, “Yes.” And he gave me a message. I have been home for 11 weeks.

I have not stopped thinking about those seven songs for a single day. I still sing worship.

I still stand in that choir every Sunday next to sister Patrice and Terrence. I still close my eyes and lift my hands and open my mouth.

But it is different now. Before I died, I sang to feel something. Now I sing to give something.

Before I died, worship was about what it did for me. Now worship is about what it costs me.

Before I died, I thought the goal was to be moved. On now I know the goal is to move him.

I am a former Muslim. I spent 42 years on the wrong side of the door.

And when I finally walked through it, I spent 4 years singing songs I did not fully understand to a god I was still learning how to honor.

And he loved me through all of it. He loved me through every offkey note and every half lyric and every Sunday morning when my mouth was praising and my mind was wandering.

But love does not mean silence. And Jesus is no longer being silent about what is happening in his church.

If you are a worship leader watching this, hear me. The Lord is not against your music.

He is not against your gift. He is not asking you to stop writing songs or stop leading praise.

He is asking you to weigh every word you put in his people’s mouths like it is a vow being made before the throne of heaven.

Because it is. Every lyric is a covenant. Every chorus is a promise. And heaven is keeping record.

If you are a Christian watching this and something in your chest just got tight, that is not condemnation.

That is conviction. There is a difference. Condemnation says you are worthless. Conviction says you are worth correcting.

Jesus is correcting because he loves. He showed a former Muslim from Oman these seven songs because he wants his bride to be ready.

He wants the church to stop rehearsing and start worshiping. He wants the songs to match the Mondays.

If you are a Muslim watching this, and I know some of you are because the algorithm does not care about religion, I want to talk to you for a moment.

Brother, sister, I was you. I was exactly you. I said the shahada. I faced Mecca.

I believed with everything in me that Jesus was only a prophet. And I was wrong.

I was not a little wrong. I was completely wrong. Jesus is not a prophet.

Jesus is God. I have stood in front of him. I have seen his face.

I have felt his hands on my shoulders. I have watched him weep. Prophets do not sit on thrones in heaven with the scars of crucifixion in their palms.

God does. He is real. He is alive. He loves you the same way he loves me.

And the door is open. It has always been open. You just have to walk through it the way I walked through it on your knees with your pride in pieces saying, “Jesus, I was wrong.

Forgive me. Take my life. He will. He will take it. He took mine. And I have never been the same.

My name is Khaled Adam al- Mawali. I am 46 years old. I was born Muslim in Muscat, Oman.

I became a Christian in Los Angeles, California. I died on the floor of my church for 6 minutes and 41 seconds.

And the Lord Jesus Christ showed me seven worship songs that make him weep. I did not come back to judge the church.

I came back to warn the church. Worship is not a genre. It is not a set list.

It is not a feeling. It is a throne room audience with the living God.

And he is listening to every word. Sing carefully. Sing truthfully. And above all, sing to him, not for yourself.

He is worthy of so much more than what we have been giving him. In Jesus’ name.