>> Shalom Aleichem. My name is Rabbi Kirt Schneider.
I'm a Jewish believer in Jesus, and I wanted to share with you
how I came to faith as a Jew in Jesus as the Messiah.
Growing up, I was in an environment;
I had no concept of who Jesus was at all.
In fact, Jesus never entered my mind.
And I'm not exaggerating that Jesus was so far
removed from my world.
I don't think I ever thought about him
for a second in my life. When I was about 19 years old,
I remember I was sitting at a table
with some business associates
and somebody mentioned the name Jesus,
and I just thought it was so strange and so weird.
It was so foreign and unkosher to me.
But what happened was I ran into a very difficult time in my life
when I was 18 years old.
Let me take a step back for a second,
just to set the stage a little bit further.
I was bar mitzvahed in a conservative synagogue
in Cleveland, Ohio.
I grew up in a very, very Jewish environment.
All my friends were Jewish growing up.
I just one friend through my whole adult years
that wasn't Jewish, wore a big cross around his neck,
but not because he was a Christian.
He was Italian. He was the toughest guy in the school.
And I hate to tell you, I used to follow the guy around
just to watch him beat people up.
So all I'm saying is I had no Christian witness in my life.
No one ever talked to me about Jesus.
I had never read the New Testament.
No one had ever witnessed to me in my life.
Once again, going forward, at 18 years old,
I ran into a very difficult period.
I was wrestling in high school,
but I was such a serious athlete;
I trained all year long.
It's all I thought about. I was so disciplined.
I lived it, ate it, drank it, slept it.
The people in my high school,
they all knew me as Kirt Schneider, the Wrestler.
I wore a medallion around my neck of a wrestler
on it in my room.
I had a regiment of all the exercises
that I would do every day in my training.
I remember when I was in 11th grade,
I stepped on to the wrestling mat for our first practice
and I had already lost 22 pounds before the first day of practice
because I was that serious about dieting
even before the season started. So I was consumed by this sport.
And looking back on it, I think the reason
I got so focused on the sport is it gave me identity
and it also allowed me to feel good about myself
because I was a good wrestler.
The other thing looking back, I realize it did for me
is it made me feel in control because as I got older in life,
I realized that the world was big
and it was a dangerous place.
You know, when we're young, sometimes we feel very safe
and very protected in our homes if we come from a loving family.
But the older we get, we start to realize
that there are dangerous things in the world.
I started, for example,
reading in the newspaper of young people,
teenagers my age, getting killed in car accidents.
And it just scared me. I mean, I was afraid of death.
That is like the biggest unknown.
And when you don't know what's going to happen,
you're afraid of that. So I was very afraid to die.
Try to push it aside.
For me, it wasn't like I thought about it all the time,
but it definitely was very profound, this fear of death.
And then when I was 15 years old,
I went with my friends to see that movie The Exorcist.
And that movie so shook me up. I mean, I was so disturbed
and so afraid after seeing that movie.
I had never been taught about a personal devil in Judaism.
Going to the synagogue, they never talked about it.
But I realized that they could not make a movie
like The Exorcist unless evil really existed,
because you don't have the ability
to project such incredible,
hideous evil if evil isn't out there in the universe somewhere.
And when I saw that movie
and saw that little girl in the movie
getting possessed by the devil,
I don't want to scare anybody here,
but that's what it was.
Supposedly a movie based on a true story
of a girl that got possessed by a devil.
Again, I never heard about possession before,
but when I saw that movie,
it seemed like it couldn't have happened.
That movie could not have been created
unless something like that out there existed.
So after seeing the movie, I thought to myself,
how do I know that that same evil power
won't take possession of me?
And I didn't know. I was terrified.
In fact, shortly after seeing the movie,
I shouldn't say shortly after seeing the movie.
Immediately after seeing the movie,
I'd go to bed every night, terrified, and for like a month
I'd lay in my bed waiting for my parents to go to sleep.
And then when I knew that they were asleep,
I would crawl out of my bedroom and crawl into their bedroom
and lay down on the floor next to their bed
because I was too afraid to sleep alone.
So there were some things going on in my life
as I got older and things that I didn't know how to resolve.
And then, as I indicated,
wrestling really made me feel secure and control
felt in an environment where I was safe and affirmed.
But when that ended at 18, as I alluded to earlier,
that's when the world was pulled out from underneath my feet.
I couldn't run from my fears any longer.
And this identity that I had built for myself
for like seven years wrestling, I started in seventh grade,
so maybe it was a few years less, maybe five years.
This identity that I had built for myself as a wrestler,
it no longer held up anymore
because I realized when I walked off the wrestling mat
after wrestling that last match in high school
that I wasn't moving forward to continue to wrestle people
in my little secluded weight class.
I realized I was walking in now to a big world.
I was all alone. I'm the oldest child.
I was leaving home for the first time,
and I wasn't going to be dealing with the world
that all wrestled 119 pounds, which was my weight class.
I was dealing with a huge world of wrestling,
didn't mean a thing anymore.
And so I went off to college, to the University of Tampa,
even went off on a small wrestling scholarship.
They did end up dropping the program, though.
But even though I was going to college and look like
I was going to be able to continue my my path
as a wrestler,
it didn't it didn't give me any security anymore.
And I laid in, I slept during those days.
That first year at University of Tampa,
I literally slept as much as I could
just to try to escape my pain
because I didn't know what to do.
Again, I lost my identity, losing that sense of control
that I felt when I was wrestling.
I just was afraid. I felt small.
I just I just didn't know what the answer was.
I thought about maybe becoming a doctor.
I thought maybe that would help me to feel better.
But deep inside,
I knew that I did not have the aptitude to become a doctor.
I was not a great student in high school,
and I thought about becoming
a lawyer and I said, well, maybe.
But in the back of my mind, even at 18 years old,
I somehow realized that if becoming a lawyer
started would start to make me feel better again.
I was asking myself the question,
but what's going to happen to you when you're 65 years old?
In other words, I realized that even as my world fell apart
when wrestling ended,
I realized that if I built my life on a law career,
that eventually I'd have to retire from that
and I'd find myself once again
in the same place I was at at 18.
I'd be without purpose and lost again.
So I was really grasping for straws.
I did not know what the answer was.
So in desperation, I dropped out of college.
I thought maybe if I make a lot of money,
I'll start to feel better. I knew it wasn't the answer.
I really did know it wasn't the answer,
but I did know what the answer was.
So grasping for straws,
I thought maybe it would help a little bit.
It'd be like a band aid.
So I dropped out of college to open up a discotheque.
This was in the 1970s. Discotheque were, they were really hot.
People were lining up around the block
to get in discotheques in Cleveland,
which was where I was raised.
And I thought, if I find the right city
that doesn't have a discotheque yet,
it's going to be a gold mine.
So my plan was to get investors, people that my family knew,
people that I knew that I would run the discotheque,
put it together, and then I'd be a part owner,
since it would have been my idea and I would run it.
So I knew the first thing
I needed was a good business plan.
And the first part of the good business plan
was to find the right location, to find the right city.
So I got a job selling encyclopedias door to door,
just as a temporary step to make enough money
to travel around the country
to be able to look for the right location for the discotheque.
So I'm selling encyclopedias door to door.
I'm researching the discotheque idea,
and I come to the realization in a fairly short amount of time
that I did not have enough business
knowhow or savvy to pull this discotheque idea off.
So I didn't know what to do, so I figured I'd just keep on
selling books for a while until I can figure it out.
So I'm eventually promoted to a sales manager
with this company called P.F. Collier Encyclopedia.
So I have a team of people that I'm training
and making commission off the people that I'm training
as they're going out and selling encyclopedias.
And I go to a sales managers meeting one night.
There was about six of us, but myself
and the other, another sales manager there,
we were the first ones to arrive.
We were alone before the others showed up.
So this other sales manager starts telling me about a book
he had been reading called Autobiography of a Yogi
by a guru from India named Paramahansa Yogananda,
who actually introduced yoga to the Western world.
And I was really fascinated by what the sales manager
was telling me that he had discovered in the book.
He said, this guru can beat up tigers with his bare hands
and they levitate off the ground.
And I always had kind of a mystical mindset.
I think Jewish people are attracted to the supernatural,
and I always believed in God.
And so I went out and bought the book.
It was the first book I ever bought with my own money.
So I'm reading this book.
I'm looking at the pictures in this book of this guru
supposedly levitating off the ground.
And I'm thinking, God if this is real,
if this guy can really levitate off the ground.
I said I found my new wrestling. I found it. This is my new goal.
Whatever I need to do, I want to do what I need to do
to be able to levitate off the ground.
Because I imagined in my mind's eye,
I thought how great I would feel levitating off the ground.
And I thought, this is a way higher reality than making money.
So I'm devouring the book. It was a big, thick book.
I set up a little New Age temple in my bedroom
because he was talking about meditating
and looking for your third eye.
So I'm sitting in my little New Age temple in my bedroom
trying to concentrate on my third eye.
In the meantime,
I'm becoming more and more fearful for some reason.
One night I go to sleep in my bedroom.
I'm living still in Cleveland, Ohio.
I'm living with my parents.
And it was a hot August night. It was 1978.
And I remember going to bed this night,
the incredible headache that I had before getting into bed.
I go to sleep now.
I want you to know I've never done LSD in my life.
No one had ever witnessed to me.
I had never read the New Testament.
All that's happened in my life is I'm lost. I'm struggling.
I'm looking for answers. And I'm thinking somehow maybe
if I can levitate off the ground like these Eastern gurus,
I'll have maybe found the answer that I'm looking for.
So I go to sleep this night.
Hot August night once again, 1978.
Then in the middle of the night, beloved,
I'm woken from my sleep into what I would describe
as a state of supernatural awareness.
Suddenly I go from being unconscious in my sleep
to now realizing I'm not sleeping anymore.
My eyes are closed,
but I have like a heightened state of consciousness.
I'm supernaturally aware that something's going on,
a really high state of awareness.
Then instantly in this state, in color,
in a vision of the night, Jesus appears on the cross.
As an American, I knew enough to know
that the person on the cross was Jesus.
I mean, I'd seen the Catholic churches.
He appears on the cross again. It's in color.
I can see the terrain that the cross is staked in
and there's people in the distance
looking at him as he's on the cross,
which is interesting to me because later,
sometime later after this experience,
a couple of years later,
when I was reading the New Testament,
I read that when Jesus was being crucified,
there were people looking on from the distance.
So I really believe that I was translated back in time,
2000 years, to witness the site of the crucifixion.
So once again, I'm laying in bed,
supernatural state of awareness.
All of a sudden, I have a vision of the night,
a vision Jesus appears to me in color.
I can see the ground.
I can see the cross staked in the ground,
people in the distance.
And then a ray of red light from straight through the sky.
A beam of light about this thick comes beaming down
from above the blue from straight from heaven.
The beam of light comes down through the blue sky
right on to Jesus's head.
And the vision lasted no more than a couple of seconds.
But in an instant, I knew what had happened to me.
There was no thinking about it.
I realized beyond a shadow of a doubt
that God had just revealed himself to me
and shown me that Jesus was the way to Him.
I didn't know anything about what that meant.
I didn't know anything about sin.
I knew no doctrine, nothing.
I was Bible illiterate when it came to the New Testament.
But I knew from the symbolism
God had just revealed himself to me.
And when that beam of light came down upon Jesus,
I knew that Jesus was the way to Him.
I looked at my clock radio. It was 3:30 in the morning.
I got out of my bed, went to the restroom, got back into bed.
I was excited
because hope had come into my heart just like that.
As soon as I had that vision, hope came into my heart.
I remember I was lost. I was afraid.
I didn't know who I was.
I didn't have a goal in life anymore.
But when that vision happened,
it was like all those questions God solved.
I'm not saying that everything was solved completely,
but it was like suddenly I was confident
that God loved me and had a purpose for me.
And regardless of what I was dealing with,
I was going to overcome it.
So I went back to bed. I got up the next morning.
I started telling my family about it.
Nobody reacted much at first and I had no idea what I was in
for because in my home, in my Jewish home,
we just never talked about Jesus.
I mean, there was no reason to ever bring his name up.
So I was not aware of the extreme animosity towards him
because he just was never brought up.
So I'm all excited telling my family about this.
They didn't say a word
and I knew a lot of people in high school.
Even all my close friends were all Jewish.
I still knew a lot of people.
And I'm telling everybody about this experience
because I'm so excited.
Eventually somebody says to me a few days later
or a week later, I don't know exactly how many days later.
Someone says to me, you need to go get a New Testament.
So I went to the store, bought the New Testament,
started devouring the New Testament,
and I realized that the teaching in the New Testament
was different than that New Age book
I was reading, Autobiography of a Yogi.
So I threw away the New Age book and I continued on with Yeshua.
I continued on with Jesus. So that was over 40 years ago,
and the Lord has done some amazing things in my life.
The things that were destroying me,
He broke off me.
Not that I don't have to fight every day
to keep gaining freedom and victory,
but I am a totally changed person
with soundness of mind, peace,
a beautiful wife I've been married to for over 40 years,
a thriving ministry.
Just I've been blessed in every way.
And it's all because I follow Jesus.
And before I let you go,
I want to share one really impactful experience
that I had about three years after this initial,
what I would call, salvation experience.
When I came to understand
and that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
So I'm three years into this
and I've been following him for three years,
and I decide one day
that I'm going to spend all day seeking God.
So I was sitting in a chair one day,
all day long, just seeking the Lord.
I'm listening to a Christian music.
I'm praying, I'm reading scripture.
I'm not expecting anything to happen
other than the fact that I'm just hungry for God.
I'm sitting in this chair and suddenly the spirit of God
literally appeared above my head,
just like in the Book of Acts chapter two.
I saw Him with my own eyes,
but it wasn't with my natural eyes.
It was somehow with my spiritual eyes.
But I saw as clearly as I could see with my natural eyes
and the way the spirit of the Lord
appeared above my head, it was a spirit of life.
It was spirit of life. It was in motion.
I could not have helped the experience along.
Neither could I have stopped it from happening,
which is suddenly bam!
God was there, twirling above my head
in all the colors of a rainbow. Just spiritual life,
all the colors of the rainbow in the spiritual life.
Then he came through my head. And again, I want to stress
I couldn't help the experience along.
I couldn't have stopped it from happening.
It was just that sovereign. Bam. He came through my head.
Then he came into my soul, my inner man.
Somehow I just knew that there was something inside me
that's different from my head
because I felt him come through my head
and fill and take possession of my inner man.
And then I audibly heard his voice and he said to me,
I am a servant. And that totally marked my life
because it was such a supernatural encounter
that I had when I was wide awake.
And the reason I wanted to share that with you
is that experience happened to me when I was going through
what I would call a season of repentance.
You know, repentance is an old-fashioned word.
A lot of times people hear that word
and they think of the dinosaur age.
But what it means is simply
that we turn from going our own way to follow God
instead through his Son.
So I was going through a season of repentance in my life.
I had gotten rid of my girlie magazines.
I had stopped smoking cigarets,
and I was really trying to clean my life up
that I could follow Jesus.
And it's really interesting to me that
He came to me and fell upon me
while I was going through this season of repentance.
Jesus's first words were, repent for the kingdom of God
is at hand.
So I just want to encourage you right now.
If you're listening to what I'm saying
and there's just kind of a witness on your heart,
you just sense that what I'm telling you
is authentic and true.
If you'll turn to Jesus as best you can by
His grace to follow him,
he's going to reveal himself to you, too.
And you're going to have a remarkable supernatural life
walking with a supernatural God that created you and loves you
and I more than we could ever know right now.