Encountering the Messiah
I meant to write this post months ago after we initially returned from Israel, but I started a new job, moved to a new home and got married all within what felt like a few short weeks. But I still want to share the incredible experience God blessed us with in Israel.
As you may or may not know, this past year I worked with Immanuel Baptist Church of Little Rock’s college ministry. In partnership with the Arkansas Baptist Foundation and the Arkansas Baptist College and Young Leaders, we were commissioned to take a team made up of college students to Israel to share the Gospel with God’s people.
The Jewish people are lost. Of the six million Jews in Israel today, only five thousand of them know Jesus as their savior. To put that in perspective, you are 33 times more likely to “Come On Down!” on the Price is Right than you are to meet a believer on the streets of Israel. Given that a lifelong dream of mine is to play Plinko, I was surprised at the relative likelihood, but it also broke my heart for the people of Israel.
Spending time in Israel meant more than just seeing the sights. It meant more than walking where Jesus walked. It meant doing the ministry that Jesus modeled by sharing his gospel with the Jewish people — and following his command to be his witnesses in Acts 1:8.
It’s amazing to think that people in God’s promised land don’t know Him. So many Jews have never even heard the name of Jesus, yet they wait for a "mashiach" to come. They are led astray by rabbis and their family, their hearts have been hardened to the Gospel.
We spent two weeks in Israel and a majority of that time was dedicated to training and ministry work with an organization called Jews for Jesus. We learned how to more effectively share the gospel with the Jewish people. As western believers, we share our faith in a language others don’t understand. For the most part we come from Christian homes and attend church regularly. Jewish people don’t react to words and phrases like blood, cross, washed, died for my sins, and the like.
But we all respond to the idea of relationship. Whether we have few or many relationships, everyone can relate to something that binds us. In emphasizing the relationship that God longs to have with his people, we were able to share about his relentless pursuit of them from the beginning. Many of them don't know a God that loves unconditionally and without hesitation.
In our time in Israel we were able to go to the local universities and speak to college students. It made sense that young people would have the most impact on other young people. We met Jewish students who grew up in Jerusalem, right down the road from their university. We met Jewish students from New York and Boston and even Idaho. They were from Germany, Russia, Switzerland and Ireland. I met former buddhists, hindus, muslims and atheists who all became Jewish. Israel is a melting pot for diversity in ethnicity and in religion.
Even when I thought conversation would be hard, or that language would be a barrier, God always proved he was much bigger than that. He has a good track record. Not to say that there was not a challenge in sharing a presumed "heretical" gospel with those of the Jewish faith, but conversation was easy and led by the Holy Spirit.
The question on everyone's mind that I've talked to is: "Were they receptive?" And the truth is, I don't know. I felt confident in sharing what I could about my story and how Christ redeemed my life, but a common theme arose in those conversations: skepticism. But I believe that skepticism is something the Holy Spirit uses to work in a hardened heart.
Just think. If we were never skeptical of things, we wouldn't know what truth is. If we didn't first question what someone told us we would never really understand it because there would be no incentive to learn more; no incentive to research. But by speaking to these students, to these people, it raised questions that stirred their hearts. I could see it in their eyes. They wanted to learn more, and they were determined to do so.
Of course we had visible successes and very real failures while we were in Israel. Here are some of the results from our time there:
Over 28,000 tracts were placed in the hands of Jewish people,
3,600 phone conversations were sparked about Yeshua as the Messiah,
We collected 450 contacts of people genuinely interested in learning more about the New Testament and
43 Jewish people came to saving faith in Christ.
God truly blessed our time in Israel. He provided us with the boldness to go and proclaim his name, safety in working amongst religious and non-religious Jews, and the words to say when we may not have had any.
I'll close with the most valuable piece of instruction I have ever received, from Yoel Ben David, a former Scottish Orthodox Jewish man. He said to me:
The best way to get good at sharing the Gospel is to do it.
Here are a few pictures from our trip:
