Sid: In the studio I have Lonnie Lane who is the International Prayer co-Coordinator of the Messianic Vision. She comes from a Jewish background, and she can say every member of immediate knows Yeshua, Hebrew for Jesus. I’m Jewish, I come from a traditional background and I can say every member of my Jewish family boldly proclaims Yeshua is the Messiah. In fact, my Jewish sister and brother in-law their boldly proclaiming Yeshua is the Messiah in Israel right now because they made Aliyah. They immigrated to Israel. Now Lonnie tell me a bit about your background I find this fascinating. I wasn’t aware of it, but from a heritage viewpoint, I mean here you are a writer, you do our Shomer Newsletter which is for our intercessors; you do wonderful articles on the web about the One New Man; house congregations, but your whole heritage is writing. Explain that.
Lonnie: Well my father’s family are Levites. I was surprised he told me that after we all became believers. I said “Well how did you know that dad?” He said “His grandfather who was a rabbi told him, and his grandfather told him, etcetera” and it goes all the way back. The fascinating thing is when I looked at the family tree…
Sid: Hmm, hmm.
Lonnie: Almost everybody is a teacher in some way. We have university professors, 2 Bible teachers and math teachers, and Russian teachers, and…
Sid: So that anointing passed on from generation to generation.
Lonnie: The fascinating thing is that it appears that the gifts are without repentance. You know God gives the callings and the gifts to… even to Israel from way back and they seem to maintain. Most of the people are writers and the writers are scribes.
Sid: What are your fondest memories as a young girl of Judaism or feasts?
Lonnie: Oh, well growing up in my grandmother’s house, this would be on my mother’s side. She was an Orthodox woman who came from Russia, and she loved God with all her heart. I was always particularly fascinated with being to be with her while she was lighting the candles on Friday nights. She would whisper; she would put a little shmotel on her head, a cloth on her head, and she would whisper as she waved her hands over the candles. I was sure she knew God well enough to have this intimate conversation with Him.
Sid: Yeah, but at age 11 you determine there is no God. How did you go from that to there is no God?
Lonnie: Because I was so unhappy, I had so much confusion. There was problems in my family, my dad was having a very difficult time and I… somehow equated happiness with God. Because I was so unhappy I thought he was sort of like the tooth fairy, you have to put Him away with Santa Claus, and…
Sid: And yet a lot of non-Jews don’t understand this, but a Jewish person could say “I’m an atheist” or “I don’t believe there is a God.” Yet, we still want to be Jewish, isn’t that an amazing phenomena?
Lonnie: Oh I’m Jewish and I think the fact that I decided that there was no God was because I had such a hunger for God, and a need for God. That when there was this big hole what I thought He should have filled wasn’t filled; I decided that He probably didn’t exist. So it didn’t take away from the fact that I was culturally Jewish. I mean everything I did was Jewish; I thought like a Jew, I ate like a Jew, and you know, didn’t have any friends that weren’t Jewish.
Sid: So you married a Jewish man.
Lonnie: I married a Jewish man.
Sid: You had a child, you had several children…
Lonnie: I had 3.
Sid: But your 6 year old son came home crying one day what happened?
Lonnie: He came home crying one day, and he said “They called me a Christ killer. I don’t even know what a Christ is, and I never killed anybody.” Well this was heartbreaking because I thought we could just live our lives sort of… you know I’m a Jew, but I wasn’t really involved in it, but they made us determine that this child needed to know what Jew was, and who he really was and be in touch with his Jewish identity, if the world was going to bring this upon him.
Sid: So what type of synagogue did you join?
Lonnie: We joined a reformed synagogue.
Sid: My father used to say “Reformed that’s not even Jewish.” Then when I became a believer in Jesus he said “Reformed looks pretty good to me.” (Laughing)
Lonnie: (Laughing) My rabbi was actually Orthodox. He had been raised in strict Orthodoxy with the peyos, the long coats the whole thing. He had left it because didn’t find any reality of God in it either, but he strayed only far enough to become a rabbi, in a reformed setting.
Sid: I don’t know why Lonnie, but I’m thinking about my Orthodox rabbi that I went into the home for the aged to visit one time, and I was witnessing to him. He literally took his hand up in the air and started cursing God. I mean it was unbelievable, not Jesus, he started cursing God. He said “I’ve served you all these years and I ended up with my leg amputated” in this horrible state he was so angry with God. I don’t know why that thought crossed my mind, but I’ll never forget that if he only understood that we serve a God of love, but he didn’t understand that.
Lonnie: God is so good, but people describe the horrors to God when He is the only goodness in the world.
Sid: Did you ever have any discussions with your rabbi about God?
Lonnie: Oh we had numerous discussions about God. For one thing, he thought of God as an abstract possibility. He wasn’t sure that…
Sid: I just took a drink of water don’t do that I’m liable to choke on my water, but go ahead. (Laughing)
Lonnie: He was a wonderful man…
Sid: But the rabbi thought this. (Laughing)
Lonnie: He was highly intellectual, and just a wonderful man, but he had never had an experience with God. So when I was asking him questions like “Why can’t we hear from God?” I would go to services every Friday afternoon, I mean evening, but I would always feel this loneliness for God. I loved the Jewishness, I loved all the cultural things, and the holidays and the feasts, and all the, what we call Yiddishkite, but where was God in all of this? I was the secretary of the religious committee and we talked about educating the children, but we never discussed how they should know God. So I brought that question up once to the class, and they looked at me for a minute as if I said something really strange and then went on as if that didn’t have any significance. So God just wasn’t a part of it, but I had this longing to know why God doesn’t speak to us anymore. He spoke to Abraham, He spoke to Moses, He spoke to…
Sid: You had a great question. In my situation, I just felt God wasn’t relevant. It didn’t even dawn on me that God could even speak to us, you at least asked that question. Did you ask your rabbi?
Lonnie: I did. I figured if God is, by this time I figured that God was. He that I was mishugah, he said “That’s crazy. It’s one thing Lonnie for us to talk to God, but for us to expect God to talk to us that’s crazy.” He suggested I see a shrink because I had this abnormal desire to hear God’s voice.
Sid: Okay, so the rabbi decides to go to Israel. Was this your first trip to Israel?
Lonnie: This was my first trip to Israel.
Sid: What was going on inside of Lonnie Lane at her first trip to Israel? I know my first trip to Israel was after I became a believer in the Messiah, but what about you?
Lonnie: Well I just couldn’t wait to get there. I had a peace while I was there that I ordinarily didn’t have. As we went to all these different places it just felt like I was home, like these are my roots. As the Arab tour guide would share all these different places it wasn’t about people that used to be, or that were distant or unrelated to me. I felt as if he were talking about my very own ancestors, my very own great-grandparents. It was mine. Then I started to feel the presence of Yeshua being there…
Sid: Wait a second! Were a lot of Christians at this point coming up to you… your whole life witnessing to you about Jesus?
Lonnie: Not a one.
Sid: Not a one!
Lonnie: Not a one.
Sid: In Christian America?
Lonnie: Hmm, Christian…Well… I had known someone who had been Jewish and she had become a believer, but it never occurred to her to share with anybody else, but her peace used to draw me, I was curious.
Sid: So where did this thinking about Jesus even come from?!
Lonnie: Well we were at these different places, we went on the tour; we were Jews who went from a synagogue; I was with a rabbi from the synagogue. So went to some of the Christian places…
Sid: I tell you what hold that thought and we’ll pick up here on tomorrow’s broadcast.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth