Title: Sharing Jesus with Jews pt. 2

Many Jews disagree what it means to be Jewish. One point all non-Christian Jews agree on is this; being Jewish means you don’t believe in Jesus. I’m Charles Morris and this is a program called Haven Today. If you are Jewish and you listen to this Christian program I would invite you to stay with us for the next few minutes. We will be joined again today by a Jewish scholar at Jews for Jesus and will be joined by a Jewish evangelist from Philadelphia. We also have a free booklet available for you on our website at haventoday.org and you'll see the booklet called Yeshua; Let’s Get Things Cleared Up. Stay with us won’t you on a program we are calling Sharing Jesus with Jews.

Song: One Faith, One Hope
Sung by: Haven Quartet

Welcome back to Haven Today for the second day of a program called Sharing Jesus with Jews. Joining us from San Francisco is the theologian scholar and residence at Jews for Jesus; Dr. Rich Robinson. Rich, welcome back to Haven Today.

(Rich)
Thanks a lot Charles.

(Charles)
And coming to us from Philadelphia is Reverend Fred Klett who is the head of Chaim Ministries which is a ministry of Jewish outreach leading Jews to Jesus as well; Fred, thank you for joining us again.

(Fred)
Thank you Charles.

(Charles)
Are you going to pronounce your ministry name one more time for us?

(Fred)
Chaim….C H A I M.

(Charles)
And that is not a toast. What does Chaim mean?

(Fred)
Well, La Chaim is a toast which means “to life”; Chaim just means life in Hebrew.

(Charles)
Okay, that’s great. Let me read a true statement from someone in Baltimore where we are on the radio station WRBS every day just before lunchtime; this is a woman who professed faith in Christ at a Messianic Congregation and then returned to Judaism and rejected Christianity. Here is her statement and I’m quoting, “In Judaism you're a good person and it's what you do that make you a better person.” Fred, do you want to go first?

(Fred)
Well, to some degree Judaism doesn't have the same view of human depravity as the New Covenant faith does.

(Charles)
By that you mean sin.

(Fred)
By that I mean sin. But Judaism does recognize that you do have a struggle with sin and that what we are fallen creatures but the understanding of the fall doesn't go quite as deep. So even her statement I think fell a little bit short. Rich do you agree with that?

(Rich)
I think in most Judaism today there is sort of the view that we’re all neutral and we just need to choose the good and reject the evil. There is certainly no concept of depravity or of sin being sort of a spiritual disease of some sort that really needs radical handling; there is no idea of that.

(Fred)
There isn’t the idea of original sin. And there is the idea that we really can redeem ourselves. We can participate with God in rebuilding the world and we don’t need grace from the outside to come in a transform us.

(Charles)
Let me just say, from having lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Philadelphia for a number of years, that is a lot of Jews spend a lot of time thinking about being Jews and also that Gentiles think about the Jews Jewishness a lot too. What do Jews think about Christians?

(Rich)
Most of the time we don’t spend a lot of effort thinking about Christians one way or another unless there is something in the news that has to do with an anti-semantic act or something of that nature. Most of the time for Jews especially here in the United States we know that our neighbor's are not Jewish so we assume they are Christians if they're not Buddhists or Muslims and most of our energy tends to be directed towards our own people. The thing that's on the minds of most Jews, that was on the mind of you know my Jewish community in Brooklyn growing up, was how can we stick together as Jews? What we do to further the survival of the Jewish people? How can we protect ourselves from the inroads of anti-Semitism?

(Charles)
Would it be safe to say that most Jews would think all Gentiles are Christians?

(Rich)
All-American Gentiles; if they’re not Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim; if they’re a churchgoer they’re a Christian. As believers in Jesus what we understand is that becoming a Christian means a personal faith commitment. There's really no parallel in Judaism to that sort of a faith commitment and we don’t understand that. We are born Jews, our parents are Jewish we’re descendents of Abraham Isaac and Jacob were part of a people with a history and a common culture. So we just assume that all non-Jews at least American non-Jews for the most part are Christians. They’re born to a Christian home they go to church and we believe that's what makes them to be Christians.

(Fred)
The Pope, Billy Graham and Adolph Hitler are Christians you know.

(Charles)
You are a little serious in saying that, aren’t you?

(Fred)
Well, what I’m saying is that there isn't generally speaking an understanding of the difference between a Protestant and Catholic and a real Christian who has been born of God's Spirit and one who's just culturally Christian.

(Charles)
Hence the old line; Hitler and Billy Graham are the same, they are called Christians.

(Fred)
That's a common perception I think that as Rich said that if you're not Jewish than your Christian. Sure people know that there are Buddhists and Muslims and so on but generally you have a Christmas tree, you celebrate Christmas you must you're considered a Christian.

(Charles)
And you’re not celebrating Hanukah then.

By the way if you missed our program yesterday you can go to haventoday.org and you will find it there on our homepage.

Rich Robinson with Jews for Jesus in San Francisco, share with us in a nutshell how you the good Jewish boy from Brooklyn came to faith in Jesus.

(Rich)
Well you know I was on a spiritual pilgrimage I think beginning in high school and by one way or another I got very interested in studying the writings of kind of a psychical or a clairvoyant by the name of Edgar Casey.

(Charles)
Kind of early New Age.

(Rich)
Early New Age; this is the 60’s and 70’s. Edgar Casey just fascinated me because supposedly people who are sick and their family doctor couldn't cure them they would go to Edgar Casey and supposedly he would diagnose them or prescribe a very weird type of cure and again supposedly they would be cured. I kind of just accepted that and said gee this is fascinating whatever else Edgar Casey says must be true also. I just became interested in everything else he had to say. The interesting thing he had to say is that he talked somewhat about Jesus. When I tell people my story I usually give it a name like; coming in through the back door. What I mean is this; if someone had just walked up to me out of a church and told me to believe in Jesus I probably would have blown them off and tell them that I’m Jewish. But here's the really interesting thing and this kind of encapsulates where the Jewish community is at spiritually today; The Jesus Edgar Casey spoke about was a very eastern very Hindu type of Jesus who had been reincarnated any number of times and who was sort of the great example of the great avatar to bring us to God. In the Jewish culture today almost any spirituality is okay except for the Jesus of the Bible. So this was kind of an eastern Jesus and that was okay. So here I was studying this sort of Hindu Jesus at the same time as I was in college at this point being a card-carrying member of Hillel the Jewish Student Organization and seeing no conflict that all between being Jewish and pursuing the sort of eastern type of thinking. But because I was so intrigued by Jesus who was just enough of an open door that there was a day when one of the Christians from a campus group came up to me and shared the gospel with me and spoke of things that Casey never spoke of like sin and the need to repent. I was open enough at that point to give it consideration and eventually coming to faith as well. It was just so interesting that the way it happened with through this sort of non-biblical very eastern type of thinking. I was investigating lots of eastern things at that point as a lot of the Jewish people have and still continue to do.

(Charles)
Fred, you have something to add?

(Fred)
Interestingly my testimony is similar. We had a Jewish believers testimony night at church years ago, I don’t know if you were part of that way back when, but we had five people who were Jewish believers and four of them had come through a New Age or a cultic type experience. And I just wanted to say that when you have friends who are involved in all these things we as Christians know that these things aren’t of God. On the other hand I think we can go to that person and say let me show you what the real key to spiritual understanding is and it’s found in Jesus. I think often we can approach people like that who are hungry and looking for something and searching and they might be a little bit more open to investigating the New Testament.

(Charles)
If you are listening right now and you are Jewish and you don’t really know what to think about Christianity and you've wondered about it, you’ve wondered who Jesus is. Well we have a little pamphlet for you. It is a courtesy of Jews for Jesus and it’s called Yeshua; Let’s Clear Things Up. We will give you our phone number a little bit later and we would like to offer that booklet to you for free. We also have a book called Witnessing to Jews; Practical ways to relate the love of Jesus; that’s buy Mush Rosen of Jews for Jesus.

I want you guys in a moment just to share with Christians all over the world who might be listening right now just a little bit about what your ministries do. Fred, do you want to take off and give us the web address and then in 60 seconds tell us what Chaim does.

(Fred)
You can find us on the web at www.chaim.org. We go out and educate churches, put on Passover presentations, and Sunday school classes. We educate the church and we also go out directly and evangelize Jewish people by various different means; going out in the street sometimes or home Bible studies and different special programs.

(Charles)
And of course Fred you wear those amazing T-shirts when you go out in the streets in your home area. Rich in San Francisco tell us about Jews for Jesus and also give us your web address.

(Rich)
Our website address it is simply www.jewsforjesus.org (spell out the “for” in the middle) I guess I can sum things up best with our mission statement which is simply this; to make the Messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to our Jewish people worldwide. Essentially all of our front-line missionaries or frontline workers are Jewish and collectively were out there making the statement visibly and in public that you can be Jewish and believe in Jesus. We are probably best known for is our street ministry. We conduct any number of street evangelism campaigns every year. We've been doing this in New York City since about 1974 whereby we go out and wear T-shirts that say Jews for Jesus or sometimes Jesus Made Me Kosher or for the Gentile volunteer who might join us Goinm for Jesus even for Gentiles and we had out tracks. We engage people in conversations and we will place ads in the media, billboards, whatever we can do to raise the issue and keep the issue in front of the Jewish community that Jesus is the Messiah and can be Jewish and believe in Jesus and you should. As I’m speaking right now one thing that has us particularly excited is that we are about halfway through a five-year outreach that were calling “Operation Behold Your God” that comes from a verse in Isaiah the prophet Isaiah chapter 40. What we are doing is going to every city in the world that has 25,000 or more Jewish people and conducting a street witnessing campaign that runs anywhere from two weeks to a month. Once again handing out literature, talking to people, getting names and addresses of those who are interested, those who want to know more and then having a follow-up mechanism in place whereby we're going to partner with those in the area churches and other Jewish ministries to do the follow-up. We rejoice when a ministry like Fred’s is happening in a city like Philadelphia. We've never had a branch in Philadelphia even though we are international. There are so many Jewish people in so many places throughout the world that the more of us involved in Jewish evangelism the better.

(Charles)
One of the interesting things that you have told me before Rich is that Jews for Jesus leads a lot of Gentiles to faith as well.

(Rich)
Statistically we end up leading more Gentiles to the Lord each year than Jewish people. Someone said to our founder Moishe Rosen; “You’re a Jewish ministry, what are you doing leading so many Gentiles to the Lord?” Moishe looked at them and said, “What are we suppose to do, throw them back?”

(Charles)
(laughing) It has been great having you both on the program with us, Rich Robinson with Jews for Jesus up in San Francisco, and coming to us from Philadelphia Fred Klett of the Chaim Ministry. Fred I'd like to ask you to close our time together with prayer for people listening right now who may not know Jesus as their Savior.

(Fred)
Yes I would, let's pray: Father I thank you that you have sent the Messiah to make payment for the sins of all who believe. I thank you Lord that you didn't leave us in our sins but you provided a way back to you. Father we pray that many people would respond to this and would understand that you have offered your love you have offered forgiveness you have offered a complete reconciliation with you in a wiping away of all sin through what the Messiah has done on the cross. Father we pray that you would bless the Word going out through Jews for Jesus through our ministry Chaim through the Haven radio show through the Rock of Israel congregation in Philadelphia through all those engaged in Jewish ministry. Lord through those listening here who would share with their Jewish friends as most Jewish people come through the witness of a friend who's a Christian. Father we commit this to you and pray for the revival of the Jewish people that they might be grafted back into their own tree of faith and find the one who is their king and their Redeemer and Savior Jesus our Messiah. We pray in His name, Amen.

Song: Hear the Voice
Sung by: Steve Ragsdale

Steve Ragsdale ministering to us together here on Haven Today of part two of a program called Sharing Jesus with Jews. If you missed part one you can go to our website haventoday.org and you'll see under the “going deeper” section and listen to the program.
I started our program today as well as yesterday saying if you're Jewish and not a believer in Yeshua, Jesus Christ, I wanted to thank you for listening and I invited you to stay with us. We have a free booklet for you that's called Yeshua; Let's Get Things Cleared Up. It is actually produced by Jews for Jesus and it is available on our website at haventoday.org. If you are already a believer in Yeshua or use the name Jesus Christ like I do, we have a book called Witnessing to Jews and it's written by Moishe Rosen. Moishe and Ceil Rosen are the founders of Jews for Jesus. This is a practical way to relate the love of Jesus to someone who's Jewish and it has wonderful pointers for sharing the gospel with anybody as well. You can find that at haventoday.org or if you'd like you could call at 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-654-2836. If you make a gift today for the Witnessing to Jews book we will also give you the free booklet Yeshua; Let’s Get Things Cleared Up. I just want to remind you that we are a listener supported ministry and if you have a prayer request we would love to pray for you. When you get in contact with us would you please give us the call letters of the radio station that you listen to Haven on? Our mailing address is: Haven Today, P.O. Box 79997, Riverside, CA 92513 and in Canada: Haven Today, Box 6800, Vancouver, BC V6B 4C9. I’m Charles Morris and thank you for joining us today. Please come back again tomorrow when we tell The Great Story; that’s all about Jesus together here on Haven Today.