President of synagogue accepts Yeshua

As president of a Jewish synagogue, Steven decided to divorce his wife when she started attending a Christian church. But later he did some soul-searching to find the truth and made a surprising discovery.

Steven’s first encounter with Christianity as a Jewish boy growing up on the East Coast was when his grade school friend leveled a malicious accusation: “You killed Jesus!”

“What are you talking about?” Steven responded, on a One for Israel video. (His last name was not provided.)

For centuries, American and nominal European “Christians” have perpetuated anti-Semitism by calling Jews “Christ killers” when in fact Jesus willingly laid down his life to pay the penalty for everyone’s sins.

In college, a musician friend introduced Steven to drugs. The sensation induced was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.

“What is this stuff?” he said at the time. “It was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever felt.”

He decided to become a musician and left his Jewish faith behind.

While performing at a club one night, he noticed a really cute girl in the attached cafe, and he asked her out. It didn’t take long for him to decide he wanted to marry Monica.

Steven got into the scrap metal business with a couple named Sam and Louise.

Louise “started talking about the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua,” he remembers. “She was like, ‘You’ve gotta hear about this, it’s changed my life. You’ve never heard of Yeshua?’ I said no, and she said, ‘I bet you’ve heard of him as Jesus.’”

“Stop right there,” he cut her off. “I’m Jewish. I don’t believe in Jesus.”

Nevertheless, she had piqued his curiosity.

“I was intrigued about this Yeshua guy, but this Jesus is a no, no, it’s not for me.”

During the next decade, Steven continued to use drugs. After his father passed away at the age of 52 from cancer, Steven felt intense pain and began to abuse drugs even more.

While driving home one day after taking himself to the emergency room, he decided to commit suicide. He knew that the stretch of highway was frequented at that time by heavy trucks, so he decided to spontaneously swerve in front of one and die.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I’m history. I just wanted to kill the pain.” Read the rest: President of synagogue accepts Yeshua.

How an Iranian Muslim went from Israel-hater to born-again Christian who loves Jews

Every morning in school, Darwish shouted the customary class-wide chant repeated like the pledge of allegiance in America: “Death to Israel!”

As a Muslim in anti-Semitic Iran, Darwish hated the Jews but never knew why.

He graduated military school and became a commander in the Iranian army. He was moving up the ranks, but he acquired a nasty drug habit. “I became addicted,” he says on a One For Israel video on YouTube.

When he was discharged from the army, he got a fabulous job with great compensation.

But he wanted even more success, so he decided to go abroad where opportunities were greater. He made the dangerous journey from Istanbul to Bosnia and finally to England, where he applied for asylum.

On his application, he justified his need for asylum by stating he was a persecuted Christian.

This was a lie, only a ploy to increase his chances of being granted legal status in the West, where he enjoyed freedom and prosperity.

He realized that eventually he would be called to account for his version, so he decided to arm himself with knowledge of Christianity. Dutifully, he went to church. He filled his mind with the basic doctrines of Christianity.

Still, he felt no compulsion to accept Jesus as his Savior.

“My brain was full of information,” Darwish says. “But my heart was still dark.”

On the day of his interview, he asked his pastor to go with him, but his pastor refused.

“You are not a Christian,” the pastor told him. “It is all a lie (on your application). Yeshua asked you to stand on truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Darwish was outraged by the pastor’s refusal to support him. Why wouldn’t his pastor help him? He was now in very real jeopardy of being deported to Iran.

That night alone at home, he cried out to God. “If there is any God,” he prayed desperately, “show yourself to me because I can’t continue anymore.

Then something remarkable happened. God revealed Himself to Darwish. “In that moment, He healed me completely of drugs. He touched my heart.”

Darwish was born again, filled with resurrection power by the Holy Spirit. “That was a power just working in my heart,” he remembers. “I tried several times before to give up the drugs, but I couldn’t. But that time I asked Yeshua to start a new life, and He did.”

The next day, he confessed his lies on the application to the immigration official. His status change request was, naturally, denied.

But Darwish wasn’t completely without resources or hope. Most importantly, he had finally started a legitimate relationship with Christ. Embarking on a new life, he also was given a new legal strategy, one based on truth.

He appealed the summary denial of his visa application and was granted a court hearing.

By the ironic sovereignty of God, he wound up in a Messianic congregation. Darwish, the man who grew up hating Jews without knowing why, suddenly found himself in a body of completed Jews.

He even became part of the worship team.

When his court date came, the judge asked him what he had done the day before.

He had led worship. He had been reading Psalm 96, and he recited it to the judge and the court. Read the rest of Iranians hate Israel.

650 scientific articles, 120 patents, 7 companies, several academic degrees, 1 Jewish Messiah

James Tour obtained his PhD in organic chemistry, did post doctorate work at Stanford, was voted one of the 50 most influential minds in world, is a visiting scholar at Harvard University, has 650 published scholarly articles, has 120 patents and seven companies with products from everything from medicine to material science, electronics and computer memory.

“But more than that, what means the most to me is that I am a Jew who believes that Jesus is the Messiah,” Dr. Tour says on a One For Israel video.

He grew up outside New York City in a neighborhood so Jewish that he didn’t know there was anything else.

He wasn’t interested in religion. “Once I tried to talk to a rabbi. He just brushed me off. There was very little explanation for me.”

In college he began to meet people who called themselves born-again Christians.

“That was a kind of an odd term,” he remembers thinking. “What’s ‘born-again?’ What do you mean ‘born-again?'”

It began to make sense when, in a laundromat, a man asked to show him an illustration, something of a chasm separating man from God. He labeled the chasm “sin.”

Dr. Tour recoiled somewhat. “I looked at him and said, ‘I’m not a sinner. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never robbed a bank. How could I be a sinner?'”

The man encouraged him to read Romans 3:23: For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Modern Judaism never talks about sin, Dr. Tour says. “I don’t remember ever talking about sin in my home.”

Then the man led Dr. Tour to the passage where Jesus warns that whoever lusts after a woman has already committed adultery in his heart.

“Pow!” Dr. Tour says. “I felt as if I’d been punched right in the chest.”

Secretly, he’d been looking at pornography in magazines — enough to call himself an “addict.”

“All of a sudden, something that’s written in the Bible, somebody who lived 2,000 years ago was calling me out of it, and suddenly I felt convicted and I realized I was a sinner,” he remembers. “When I read the Scriptures, I knew I was a sinner. How would I get to God?”

As he poured over the Bible, he realized that there is no forgiveness of sin without shedding blood. In the Old Testament, animal sacrifice was stipulated. In the New Testament, Jesus was humanity’s Passover Lamb. Isaiah 53 described graphically how the Messiah would be punished for the sin of the world. He would bear it on the cross.

“The Perfect God comes and gives Himself for us. He is the one that gives Himself for us. I started to realize how Jewish the New Testament is.”

On Nov. 7 1977, alone is his room, he realized Yeshua was the Messiah.

“I said, ‘Lord, I am a sinner. Forgive me. Come into my life,'” he recalls. “Then all of a sudden, someone was in my room. I was on my knees. I opened my eyes. Who was in my room? That man, Jesus Christ, stood in my room. This amazing sense of God, Jesus was in my room. I wasn’t scared. I was just weeping. The presence was so glorious because He was there in my room. I didn’t want to get up. This amazing sense of forgiveness just started to come upon me. That was Him.”

Eventually he stood up. He didn’t know what to do, who to tell.

When he told his cousins, they were shocked. “’How could you do that? You’re Jewish,’” they said. “Telling my mother how I had invited Jesus into my life, she didn’t say much. She was weeping. She told my father. They weren’t happy at all.” So what happened to his family? Read the rest: Jewish scientist James Tour accepts Jesus as Messiah.