WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS

WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS

                We are amazed and overwhelmed at the outpouring of love that our Messianic congregation has heaped upon us as we prepare to follow God’s lead to Tennessee. Rabbi and Ellie brought us up to the front and said many wonderful things way above our pay grade. Ellie gave Bonnie a beautiful bouquet of red roses and our refrigerator is now festooned with dozens of cards. In truth we have never found such love as we have found at Rehoboth.

                When we came to visit this Messianic congregation several years ago, we decided that we wanted to come to serve rather than to be served. For most of our marriage we had attended big churches where we could come and go largely unnoticed. We enjoyed the worship and the uplifting sermons in the big popular churches that had everything, but our hearts just weren’t in it. Something was missing.

                But right from the start the messianic worship and its people seemed different. For the most part people don’t just happen by a Messianic place of worship.  For one thing it meets on Shabbat and for another, the beautiful worship and the dances are more like traditional Jewish expressions and the worship music reflects a Jewish flavor as well. People that come here are perhaps like me, searching for the roots of our faith peeling back all the layers of Gentile tradition to get back to what Christianity started out to be in the first century.

                To be honest, one must admit that 2000 years Gentile abuse and pagan infiltration and doctrinal watering down has left us with something that the first Christians would not have recognized. So from the start I saw something of the prophetic significance for why God has raised up the Messianic movement at this exact time in history. I believe that our purpose is to remind the church of its Jewish roots as well as to present a Jewish Messiah (Yeshua) to the Jews.

                Some people tend to think that this represents a return to legalism, but as I have said numerous times, it is more like going back to the DNA from which the church was born… to see how far we have drifted from the foundations upon which Yeshua built His church. We need to remember that the first church was of Jewish birth, with a Jewish Messiah, fulfilling Jewish promises and a Message being carried by Jewish disciples and apostles. And if we take a serious look at Romans eleven we will see that according to Paul, the church did not replace the Jews, as many teach, but rather we were grafted in. So in spite of all that popes and prelates have done to distance us from our roots, Christianity is still a Jewish religion worshipping a Jewish Messiah and basing all of our faith upon a Jewish Bible.

                This is critical, because not only have traditions replaced truth in many areas, but now even the Gospel is being compromised and set aside in many of the emergent churches. As far as I can tell, many Christians are lining up to worship the Beast, because they no longer have a clear framework of solid truth on which to take their stand.

                Well, all of that said and having a divine sense of purpose, Bonnie and I decided to serve the Lord in this congregation and when a kitchen job opened up we took it.

                Now, kitchen work can be something of a task, taking in all the food, keeping the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold and setting up everything for about a hundred people, and then there is the cleanup afterwards and it can be a real chore. But right from the beginning as Bonnie would say, the kitchen became like an open heaven for us. And in spite of the sign on the door that said “Kitchen Staff only”, we were blessed with a constant stream of people, young and old, who began coming by for hugs and prayers and questions and encouragement. So the kitchen became ministry central for us.

                Do you have any idea how many people come to church lonely and searching and then leave lonely and searching simply because nobody greeted them or gave them a hug, or shared with them the concepts that I have just written above? In far less words than I just gave, I have had dozens of opportunities to express to visitors my vision of why God has raised up the Messianic movement at this time in history. People need a vision… a sense of purpose… a reason for becoming a part of something. But even simpler than that people started flocking by to get their “Bonnie hug” and she would never let anyone go by without knowing that they were loved.

                It is so simple really… and for all the years that I have been involved in elaborate programs and musical performances and evangelistic meetings, to me, the key to winning the world to Yeshua is to love and serve on the most basic of levels. If church members would look around them with the intent of making those around them glad they came… if they would look for those divine appointments to give a hug or to pray for someone on the spot, there are thousands… millions of people who would not leave church lonely and still searching. To the world we are Yeshua and if we ignore people then for them God apparently doesn’t care.

                What an awesome responsibility we have to represent our Savior to the world and yet we fritter these opportunities away in selfishness, focusing on mundane things like, the air conditioning is too cold, or the heat too hot, or the music too loud or too soft, or the preacher offended me today. We go our self- righteous ways having no idea that in the judgment, our Lord might point out to us the dozens of lives we could have changed with the simplest of hellos or an encouraging word.

                From what Bonnie and I have experienced in these last few years people keep on dreaming of some great call of God to some ministry somewhere when in fact they are surrounded with the lost and dying. Many discouraged people visit a church as a last ditch effort to find meaning. So if we look at them sideways wondering why they came to church looking like that, or simply ignoring them because we don’t know them, what will be the eternal loss?

                We have learned so much at Rehoboth… so much about love… about the Jewish roots of our faith… about the true foundations upon which the church has been built. In experiencing the Feast Days of the Lord, we learn that God is a social God. He could have mapped out His agenda with dead traditions, but instead He made them into joyful celebrations… times to get together and to celebrate the great acts of God through time.

                God, who dwells outside of time has set up these appointed times based upon the sun, moon and stars so that we could know when to meet with Him. He gave us a weekly time to rest and to spend time with Him. So why do we insist on changing everything to match up with pagan events? Isn’t that a form of idolatry?

                And so I think that God is restoring knowledge of things that have been lost to tradition. And instead of celebrating these things in anticipation of what Yeshua will do, we now celebrate them in joy for what He has done. But don’t forget this one important fact. The Fall Feasts are yet to be fulfilled at His second coming. They are still in play and we need to learn everything we can about what they are teaching us. We are in the last days and the last day prophecies are all couched in Fall Feast day language. We desperately need to understand how end time prophecy is framed according to the Feasts.

                Surely our understanding of these things as God has outlined them will protect us from the great delusions that if possible will deceive even the very elect. How can we even for a moment believe that His patterns are unimportant? His Moedim, His appointed times are of paramount importance and I hunger to understand them at an even deeper level than I do right now. I still believe there are breakthroughs to be made in this area and not nearly enough people are studying these things from a prophetic point of view.

                There are concepts introduced in the Bible that make my heart leap and I long to understand them better. One of these concepts concerns Romans 11 and the times of the Gentiles. What it states there is that the time of the Gentiles will end at some point as God turns to deal with the Jews again in what we know to be the “Time of Jacob’s Trouble.” What does this mean exactly and how will it look in real time?

                I have good scholarly friends that believe this represents the resurrection and catching away        (AKA the rapture)of the Gentile church as Israel’s time clock starts ticking again for the final 7 years of the tribulation, or the 70^th week of Daniel 9. Some people are very critical of this view of course, but neither have they come up with a good explanation and so they simply ignore it. We need to do better than that.

                Well, I have vented enough here and so I want to end with a note of thankfulness to God for all that He has taught Bonnie and Me during these past few years at Rehoboth and how much we will cherish the eternal friendships that we have made in this blessed place. Words cannot express the half of it. Shalom my friends.