Art's Testimony - Part 5

How can you be one with those who have so long oppressed your own kind? And in the midst of all of that wealth of voices, the one voice that said, I'll in no wise cast out any man who comes unto me. And somehow, by the grace of God, in that moment, I was able to choke and splurt out the name of Jesus. I wouldn't even call it a prayer.

It was a gasp. It was a mercy. It was a grace to get that name out of my mouth.

And the moment that it issued out of my lips, something happened. I felt something go out of me that was dark, the spirit of the world. I was instantly loosed, relieved of the whole inheritance of a life of sin, darkness.

And in came the Ruach HaKodesh. I was born again by the Spirit in that moment. Something very quietly entered me, and instantly I was changed.

My speech changed. I couldn't curse. I couldn't blaspheme.

That was my moment of salvation. And from that time forth, it's been an extraordinary history and walk with the God who saved me 35, 37 years ago. And I'm enormously grateful.

When I came back from Jerusalem as a saved man, I returned to the same teaching district. I, who had been the leading faculty radical, whose last public statement with a fist on the desk at a staff meeting was, We need a revolution, came back with the Bible under my arm, lamb-like, and losing all my friends my first night back in a homecoming party made for me where I found myself having to explain the strange thing to which I had come. So it was quite a revelation that the people who formerly esteemed me so highly now despised me as a believer were indignant at my salvation.

Well, about some months had passed, maybe three. I was invited to share my testimony. I didn't know what a testimony was.

I'm one of the local churches of that community, and shared my story. And a woman came up to me at the end of the meeting, a nice roly-poly, innocuous, gentile woman, nothing special to look at. She said, You don't know me, Brother Katz, but you had my daughter in your history class.

She came home from school in the afternoons, weeping over you knowing that you were a radical and an atheist. Since that time, she said, both my daughter and I have been praying over you. In that moment, the Lord virtually gave me a poke in the ribs and said, She's the woman whose prayers have entered you into the kingdom of heaven.

So I was astonished that a woman who had never laid eyes on me but moved by the Spirit was able, in the fervency of her prayer, to release the Lord to be the hound of heaven that would pursue me for 14 months and not let me go until I surrendered to his love. And I think in that we have a paradigm and a statement of God's intention and use of the church that does not even require a personal contact with Jews, but just the prayer, the heartfelt, fervent, earnest prayer of righteous men and women is heard of God and avails. My mother, who came to the Lord only some months ago and 10 days before her own death in her 95th year, was saved, I believe, in exactly that same way because I had been making mention of my mother in my preaching all over the world for the last 37 years and 10 days before her death.

After 37 years of resisting the Lord and her stubborn insistence about preserving her Jewishness, she became the Jew of Jews in the twilight of her last days because of the prayer of earnest saints all over the world on her behalf. So I'm grateful for this remarkable mystery of the relationship between a Gentile church and an unbelieving jury that we would come to the knowledge of Him through their sacrificial prayer, devotion, and witness. I myself am a living statement of that salvation and what have I been doing for these past 37 years but traveling through the Gentile nations and bringing to them dimensions of blessing, insight, and depth that maybe could only essentially be brought by a Jew who am myself a foretaste of what Israel will mean in her own redemption to the nations when she will bless all the families of the earth.

I am blessing all the families of the earth and every place where God brings me as He has just brought me from Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and not long before, Russia, Poland, Europe, many nations, and every place bringing a dimension of understanding and power that is ours because we are grafted back into our own root. I've come into a priestly dimension of service for the Lord and I tell the congregations, if you're blessed by me, what will it mean when a whole nation shall come into its calling as a nation of priests and a likeness of the world for the world is living beneath the intention of God waiting for us Jews to fulfill our destiny to the nations so that your prayer, your investment, and your sacrifice will redound to your good when we who are the recipients of the grace extended through you will in turn come and bring a measure of blessing to your nations as a nation of priests and a likeness of the world to teach the nations the difference between the profane and the sacred. And so God will have fulfilled the great mystery of the relationship between Israel and the nations of which Paul himself was a foreshadowing in his apostolate to the Gentiles and in which now I myself am a foreshadowing in my own ministry in the nations.

Amen.