Arabs are the enemy that was the reality i was born into i grew up in i was raised in a
small religious settlement somewhere in the west bank surrounded by olive trees and Arab villages
i was forcefully thrown into a complex political struggle from a very very young age it was
all around me it was in the schools it was on the news in kindergarten it was at home and
you you just can't get away from it and children who grow up in those places are never sheltered
from this harsh reality of war and death it is all around us and and your childlike view of a
safe world is just completely gone i want to share with you a little bit about how i felt
coming close to arab people when i was a kid i was terrified i remember when we would drive
through arab villages i would stare out the window and i would look at the signs they
were written in this curly language that i didn't understand but had a very scary connotation for me
but the thing that scared me the most was the arab language when i heard it
it reminded me of shootings and rocks flying and people i i knew and got killed
but all that was about to change and that's what i want to share with you today one thing
that didn't make any sense to me growing up in a religious little place was the contradictory way
that i would read and meet the god of the bible
and then the way that the rabbis would present god when we would study in their rabbinic literature
so on the one hand you have this very loyal strong loving warrior king the god of israel in the bible
but on the other hand the rabbis painted a picture of a very cold and distant god almost robot-like
a type of god that wouldn't think twice before he would strike you down with a lightning bolt if you
dared to tear a little piece of toilet paper on saturday which is forbidden completely in judaism
and so i admired the god of the bible with all my heart as a kid i wanted to follow him like
abram did i wanted to charge into the battlefield in his name like David i wanted to proclaim his
righteousness like the prophets but at the same time i was so angry at the god that the rabbis
painted i thought to myself how can he expect me to do all these laws and rituals that are written
and that i have to perform without knowing how it feels like to be a human being without knowing how
it feels like to be trapped inside this body and inside this rotten fallen world now Jesus
was a completely foreign idea to me i had no idea who he was it's a different culture it's
crosses crusades and popes uh we never learn about him in school uh we kind of forcefully
ignore his existence in a way we never acknowledge him as one of our own and um sorry just a little
so we moved out of the little settlement i lived in and i realized that i don't want to
live in this fake little game that i was playing pretending that everything was okay and i was
fulfilling the law so as a teenager i decided that i i respect god too much and i fear him too much
and i'm just gonna leave religion but god was still there somewhere as this distant character
or um you know a name you call out in times of trouble so um so back to the idea of Jesus in the
jewish mind we would never even consider following him because for us it will feel like a betrayal
of the god of the bible the god of israel that even though it's kind of distant from us
at the moment it still has this really strong grip in every jewish heart and this weird
paradoxical loyalty that we feel towards him creates this barrier between Jesus and his people
now that same exact barrier crashed down to the ground with me the first time i opened chapter
53 in the book of isaiah we call it the forbidden chapter we're not allowed to talk about
it or to ask questions about it we just skip it the first time i read it something happened
i recognized him i saw him and all my questions were answered at that same uh second and i i
realized that he knew what it was like to be a human he knew exactly and he made a way for us to
get to him because we couldn't do it by ourselves sorry um yeah and that moment when it happened
um i started seeing the world through Jesus's eyes everything was different like a blank page
my life just completely changed and i wanted to know more i wanted to learn more about him
and so i signed up to study at the one for israel bible college that we have and i want to share
with you the first time i sat in the chapel they had a worship service and they started singing
a song in arabic and i sat there and i remember every note that they played took off layers and
layers of fear hate pain war everything that was just choking me every note that they played and
every word that they said in that same language that terrified me to death a few years before
sounded like the most beautiful thing in the world to me and that my friends is
the power of the gospel it has the power to clean and heal and make us new again
today i am a part of the small media team in Netanya and the one for Israel and what we do is
we produce videos and we share them with everybody we have our testimonials i don't know if you guys
heard about them it's the i met messiah videos where we have Jewish people just sharing their
experience and finding god we also have some Israeli testimonies they sit there they tell
their story it's not easy to come out we call it coming out of the messianic closet it's not easy
you get a lot of bad reactions from people in the street but people do it we started doing it
and we also have a series of apologetic videos in which we take arguments that rabbis make against
Jesus and we just tear them apart one by one we do it from a biblical perspective we take some
atheistic claims as well and we just explain god's existence creation versus evolution and all of
that in the Hebrew language now what's so special about it is it's not just videos for me at least
it's a beginning of a revolution and that's what i want to share with you guys today because you see
for the last 2 000 years we had these gatekeepers that's how we call them and that's the Jewish
religious leaders they get the final word and they decide what goes in the Jewish communities
and it is very easy for them to stop the gospel from coming in because they decided
and it was very easy for them to do so because you know in the last
two millennia a lot of people who claimed to be followers of Jesus
did some very horrible things to our people and so it's easy to paint Jesus as a traitor
as um you know this forbidden name that you can't even pronounce they don't even say his name Yeshua
they can't say it they say Yeshu which is a curse word and so that's that was their ground but there
is one thing that the rabbis have no control over whatsoever and that my friends is the internet yes
it is this you know neutral battle ground and we leave the gatekeepers completely powerless
the internet is a land of its own i call it the outermost place of earth and Israelis i
don't know if you've noticed walking down the streets but they're constantly on their phones
their face is stuck to their phone they are online 24 7. they don't notice what goes around them and
actually we are uh one of the leading nations in using social media sites like YouTube Facebook
and so on and so this is the place where we go and we place the gospel and they can't ignore it it's
on their news feeds it's in their mailboxes it's everywhere they have to face us now and all these
forbidden secret chapters are no longer secret they all know what
Isaiah 53 is and they're all gonna read it for themselves and see for themselves if that's um
that's the truth or not and it's happening they they come to faith in
huge numbers we get messages every single day now i look back at what god did with me
through the gospel i come from a very radical mindset very very radical
and if god was able to change my point of view today i love my arab brothers and sisters i pray
for muslims for their salvation every single day i see them through Jesus's eyes and i believe that
if we bring the Israelis to faith if they will see the world through Jesus's eyes they would love the
Arabs as well so we believe that the best way to bless Israel is with the gospel that's what we
do
i want to share with you um you know first of all it's not easy to say these things to the Israelis
they're pretty mad at us the leaders the religious leaders want to stop us every way they can
so what they do they will tell their followers that we are blasphemers that we try to steal
Jewish souls that's our purpose and they would send death threats to us and to our families but
we don't consider them the enemy even though they consider me and us and the whole team the enemy we
see them as broken lost people that simply need the love of Yeshua in their life and once
they will find Jesus they will find this piece and that would be the same piece that would
finally break the sparrier like the veil that was ripped between Jews and between Arabs so that's
our mission in what we're doing uh but some of the reactions are good you would not believe
some of the people actually like us we i want to share with you this really short story one time
we got a message from this Israeli guy he writes down please come and pray for my kid he's dying
we never got that type of message before it's usually curses and so um apparently this guy
Israeli guy used to watch her videos for a while he wasn't a believer yet
and um his son was dying with cancer his son's name is stav this cute little three-year-old kid
and the treatments caused a flesh-eating bug to hurt his eyesight he was completely blind
and the doctor said that you have to do this operation on the kid or else he dies but
the father wanted to put his faith in god and he didn't go forth with the operation
he called a lot of rabbis to come help him and pray for the kid most of them turned him down
they didn't want didn't want to go or they asked for these really huge sums of money that he didn't
possess so when he contacted us me eitan and moti the three people you'll see in the videos
went down to the hospital and we prayed with them and their families and his family
and i got to play a little bit with little staff we became friends you know he couldn't
see but apparently you don't need eyes to play it's like this universal language
and and that was it and we left and three days later the doctors
called in the family and they said that the cancer was gone and that no operation was needed
but that is only the beginning of the miracle that that's just the small part
because what happened later was his brother Jacob who used to be really much against us
he would argue with him about our videos and how bad they are he came to faith and then
their sister came to faith and their mother and the whole family dedicated their lives to Jesus
and after that we called uh Jacob and tel asked him to record his testimony you could actually
watch it it was one of our most successful testimonies it got more than uh 500 no sorry
yeah half a million views i wanted to say 500 million that's too much uh 500 000 views in total
and just so you grasp the numbers Israel has 8 million citizens plus minus
our Hebrew speaking videos got more than 18 million views in total and in total all around
the world we have more than 68 million views so people are watching the stuff
things are happening and by the way today Jacob is one of the leaders in a congregation in ashdod
so i get to witness from you know the front row how you know god is transforming the Israeli
people and i even get to take part in it uh take an active part and that is an experience
that leaves you know a wretch like me completely humbled and even just standing here tonight before
you guys as you can see i was pretty nervous but i really wanted to share this with you so
so you know what's happening because it is hopeful and things are happening and
this is we talk about prayer all the time and i have a prayer request from you guys
i ask you to pray for a true spiritual revival in this country with the Israelis with the Arabs
and i just ask that the name Yeshua will no longer be a curse word on the Jewish tongue
but it will be said in the same breath as the god of Israel who he is Yeshua is making
aliyah okay he's no longer a foreign idea and his name is Yeshua again