I used to believe that Jesus was a Catholic God or God of the Gentiles.
I know that sounds kind of weird but it's like as a Jewish person you could
believe in anything else but Jesus. The minute you say Jesus, it's like
shame on you! Here we go another Jew for Jesus.
And that wasn't what happened with me.
I experienced God in a very deep, profound way
Being raised Jewish in my house my whole life, I felt that if I ever wanted to
really know God, I had access to him as a Jewish person.
We're the chosen ones, and if I wanted that relationship, I could
because I identified being Jewish with knowing God.
I'm 26 years old, living in Manhattan. I found myself in a very hard situation
just an emotionally downward spiral where I lost my self-esteem,
was completely broken, like completely destroyed.
And at the time my best friend, Jamie, she showed me more love than anyone
during that time period, and she was sharing with me her own faith walk
and she would talk to me about Jesus, and I was always like,
Jaim I love you - I love you so much, you know Jews don't believe in Jesus
and I'm never converting.
I had a very supernatural dream. And I had a death experience in my dream
so I died in my dream, there was this giant ball of fire
that came out of the sky and spread like wildfire and completely burned me alive
consumed me and lifted me into heaven. I felt the layers of my life kind of
lifting off of me like feathers, and I convulsed in my sleep, I remember
shaking profusely like just as if I was dying as if I really was physically dying.
And I was lifted into heaven - beautiful, glorified, happy people that were kind of like
rubbing oil on themselves, and they were all crowned and they were very happy.
Heaven stretched across the entire skyline, and you could see mansions with
just open-ended archways with the most ornate, beautiful, majestic details
like in a movie or a magazine. I could really feel the presence of a King.
I could feel this this weightiness, this heaviness... I turned to my head and
looking through one of the archways, all the clouds came together to form the
face of God. Jewish people and Gentiles kind of share the same God.
Not just that God is for Jewish people but that He is for the entire human race.
I knew instinctively in the deepest part of my understanding of myself that
that image was the reflection of the God that I had always identified
with as being Jewish. I'm receiving it in a Jewish context
because that's the only thing I have to compare it to.
That reflection was Jesus.
Suddenly I'm faced with this reality that what I had always believed to be true
which is a lie, that Jews worship one God and Gentiles and the rest of the world
this other God, and it was just God Himself revealing Himself to me
in the deepest, most inner part of my heart.
No words had to be spoken. It was... it was just there.
I know that sounds kind of weird, but it's like, as a Jewish person,
you could believe in anything else but Jesus
the minute you say Jesus it's like shame on you.
I felt very shameful about my belief in Jesus, and yet I was really being
touched in a way that I'd never been touched before
and it was kind of like dying to self. It was physically painful.
I received so much healing and so much life within me.
I'm not talking about things that make you happy or things that
make me, you know, feel content and grateful...
I'm talking about real, deep, hidden joy in the core of your being
that when you go to sleep at night, you know, wholeheartedly,
that you are exactly where you're supposed to be.
And that God has you. He's got your back.
And that's how I feel.