A Messianic evangelist believes revival is breaking out
among Jewish communities in the U.S.
Sid Roth, founder of Georgia-based Messianic Vision and host of the It’s Supernatural television broadcast, said he
has seen dozens of Jewish Americans profess faith in Christ in recent months
during evangelistic events in New York and California.
Last summer in Brighton Beach, N.Y., nearly 400 Russian Jews
reportedly attended an evangelistic meeting billed as a lecture on the
paranormal. People were healed, Roth said, including a wheelchair-bound woman
who had not been able to walk for five years.
“There was just a move of God’s Spirit, and almost the
entire group stood up to make public professions of Messiah,” Roth told Charisma.
Later, at a similar meeting in California, roughly 30 Jews
professed faith in Christ. “In my opinion this is unprecedented in America,”
said Roth, who has ministered among Jewish communities in the Soviet Union for
more than 15 years. “I’ve been in Jewish ministry over 35 years, and I’ve never
heard of anything like this before.”
During a trip to Israel last year, he said roughly 50
elderly Holocaust survivors professed faith in Christ during two meetings he
led there. “Again, by Israeli standards, this is an unprecedented thing,” Roth
said.
He believes the meetings mark a “change in the atmosphere”
of Jewish evangelism. “I took those two meetings as signs that blindness was
coming off the eyes of the Jewish people,” he said.
Because of his conviction, he launched a campaign late last
year to mail copies of his book They Thought for Themselves to 1 million
Jewish homes across the U.S. The book features the testimonies of 10 Jewish
believers in Jesus, including former Brownsville revival leader Michael L.
Brown and Messianic worship leader Batya Segal. The ministry will pray regularly for the salvation of every Jewish person who receives a
book.
Since it was first published in 1996, the book has been
translated into eight languages, and more than 600,000 copies have been
distributed in the Soviet Union alone.
“Sure, a lot of [the books] will be torn up without even
being read,” Roth said of the mailing campaign, “but the ones God is dealing
with, they’re going to read this and they’re going to come to the Lord.”
He believes evangelizing the Jewish people carries prophetic
significance.
“From a spiritual viewpoint, it’s going to cause an
explosion,” he said. “Or I like the way Paul says it [in Romans 11:12], if it
was a blessing when Jewish people rejected their Messiah, how much greater
blessing when they receive their Messiah. It’ll be life from the dead, resurrection
power. I think it’s going to release a resurrection power and miracle-working
power in the church like we haven’t seen in our lifetime.”
Messianic Vision launched a Project 77 campaign to raise
money for the evangelistic mailing. It asks for $77 donations to mail seven
books to Jewish families. So far, Messianic Vision has raised enough money to
mail 82,000 copies of the book, and someone recently made an anonymous $100,000
donation.
Roth said after the first million copies are mailed, he
hopes to begin mailing another million.
He said bringing together Jews and gentiles as believers in
Jesus would create the one new man Paul describes in Ephesians 2 and lead to
the greatest revival the world has ever seen.
“Paul says the reason
Jesus came was to break down the middle wall of separation between Jew and
gentile [and] to form a new species of being that will be the dwelling place of
God,” Roth said. “Well, I feel the church is incomplete without Jewish
believers, and the church is incomplete without gentile believers. Each brings
a special spiritual DNA to the table to make the complete dwelling place for
God.
“When the Tabernacle of David, or as it says in
Hebrew, the ‘family’
of David
is restored, or the Jewish people, [Amos 9] describes the greatest gentile
revival the world has ever seen,” he added. “So I see these Jewish people
coming to the Lord, entering the church [and] forming the one new man to
catapult the greatest gentile revival in history worldwide. That’s my vision.
That’s what I believe.”
