Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Jews Who Met Messiah
A new website has been launched that shares the video testimonials of Jews in professional business who have all received Jesus as the Messiah.
Launched by Eitan Bar, pictured above, a Messianic Jew himself, www.IMetMessiah.com is an evangelistic effort to speak to Jews curious about Jesus.
“As Jewish people, most of us grow up without considering whether or not Yeshua is the Messiah expected by our people for millennia,” he explains on the site. “Yet, something happened in our lives that changed each of us and caused us to rethink the usual Jewish views about Jesus.”
“We offer these stories to you and hope that your relationship with God will deepen through meeting our storytellers,” Bar says.
With over a dozen testimonials posted online and many more marked as forthcoming, www.IMetMessiah.com presents the testimonies of Mottel Baleson, now a messianic preacher in New Jersey, Michael Goldstone, the founder of Regency Lighting, Grant Berry, creator of Styli-Style Cosmetics, and others.
Berry said that as he moved to America from Israel and became successful in the beauty industry, he he still felt empty and depressed. However, a make-up artist that he began working with, named Maria, soon told him about Jesus. He then ventured on a spiritual journey as he opened up the New Testament and began reading.
Berry said that he tried to pray to God each night over a period of three weeks but felt like his prayers were bouncing off the ceiling.
“I was frustrated,” he recalled. “Here Maria was, this Christian girl that had a relationship with my God—the God of Abraham—and here I was, a Jew, trying to have a relationship with my God—the God of Abraham—and nothing. I was disconnected.”
Berry told her about his frustration with feeling that he was unable to reach God.
“I have been trying to tell you for six to eight months … You can’t have the Father without the Son,” Maria replied.
He immediately returned to his apartment where he cried out to God to show him if Jesus was really the Messiah. Berry said that he felt a rushing wind in his being and knew that God was speaking to Him. From that moment, he believed.
Baleston said that he had always heard about the outward things that one needed to do to be close to God, but never could make sense of it. He was also curious after his grandparents warned him to stay away from the New Testament as they asserted that it was filled with hatred against Jews.
“Growing up, we always understood that we had our Bible and the Gentiles had their Bible—the New Testament—and that they were two completely separate books,” Baleston said.
But as a college student, Baleston began to read the Scriptures one day while visiting the library and found the truth for himself.
“I thought it was going to be a handbook on how to persecute the Jews,” he recalled. “And yet, when I opened it, I read a story written by Jews about Jewish people.”
Baleston said that he opened up to the genealogy of Jesus, who was written as being the son of David, the son of Abraham. He was amazed as all three were Jews, and soon realized that the New Testament wasn’t against Jews at all as it was written by and about Jews.
“This is the One who was promised in our Bible [in] the 53rd chapter of Isaiah,” he exclaimed. “It is astonishing. If you were to just read that chapter … you would say, ‘Oh, this is some Christian Bible. This is Jesus.’ What you realize, though, is that it is in the middle of our Bible—our Jewish Bible!”
He soon told his father about his faith in Christ, and although he was skeptical, Baleston’s father opened the Scriptures and received Jesus as well.
Goldstone first heard about Jesus while hitch-hiking to Mexico with his best friend Ron. He had been experimenting with drugs and was dabbling in books about Eastern religions in an attempt to find God.
While making a stop in San Francisco on the way back home from trying to obtain mushrooms to start a drug business, he met a girl named Debra and began to pour his heart out about his search. Goldstone soon began to read the New Testament and learned about Jesus.
“Some of the things He said really disturbed me,” he recalled. “He said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life, and no one can come to the Father but through Me.’ I said, ‘How can this be?'”
Goldstone called out God that day and asked Him to show him the truth. As he did so, he believed that something happened in his heart. He told Ron, who said that he had been on the same journey and had received Jesus as the Messiah.
“Here we are that next day just embracing each other and crying, and sharing with each other how God met us, and how we both had asked Jesus to come into our life,” Goldstone recalled.
But the story didn’t end there. After he began attending church, a minister came to see him and began reading Isaiah 53 out loud.
“He said, ‘Brother Michael, where do you think this is?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Matthew? Luke?” Goldstone said. “And he hands me the book and it said Isaiah. And I said, ‘You’re kidding. This is the Old Testament?’ It was so obvious to me that this was talking about Jesus.”
The minister proceeded to show him Scriptures throughout the Old Testament that were prophesies of the Messiah, and Goldstone came to faith in Jesus. Debra soon became a Christian as well, and his mother and father also came to Christ.
https://www.youtube.com/user/wwwoneforisraelORG
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