I’ll never forget the first day I walked through the door. For the first time, I heard, in person, words that for months I had heard online from listening in on live streaming services of Messianic congregations: “Shabbat shalom.” For some of you who may have attended a synagogue or shul regularly before, this is nothing more than a common weekly greeting you hear from fellow congregants at service, something you would take for granted. But you need to understand that up until this point, I had never attended a synagogue or temple (unless it was one of my third cousins’ bar mitzvahs), be it rabbinic or Messianic. With the exception of lighting the Chanukiah (sp?) at Chanukah, my parents never taught me anything about my Jewish heritage. We never attended any synagogue or temple. It wouldn’t be until I was 26 years old, that the Lord would start me on this long journey of a natural olive branch being grafted back into its tree.

It was when I was a missionary in South Korea, that the Lord Himself revealed the Jewish roots of the Christian faith to me. Sure, I had brushed over this fact many times before, being conditioned in Christianity to believe that since the Jews had rejected Jesus as the Messiah, they were no longer God’s chosen people, just another nation among the rest of the world. Of course I knew that “Jesus was a Jew”, but again, it was something I simply brushed over. I only knew that in order to fulfill Bible prophecy, He had to be Jewish. At that point, if the prophets had said that Jesus had to be African, Asian, or whatever other nationality, I would have believed it, said ok, and left it at that. It wouldn’t be until a little after I started sharing this new revelation from the Lord with people from my church, that I really realized the awesome significance of this fact, that Jesus, (now known to me by His Hebrew Name Yeshua) was Jewish.

I started telling them the revelation the Lord gave me, through studying the book of Revelation (Wow, a revelation from the book of Revelation! What a concept!) about the festivals of the Lord, such as Passover, Shavuot, Yom Teruah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. Most people, when they receive this revelation about the festivals, are convicted more on a strictly legal level, that they sense a calling from the Lord, be they Jewish or Gentile, to observe these festivals, because He commanded it, and to abandon Christian festivals because they were never commanded by Yeshua or the apostles.  I, on the other hand, was convicted on simply a practical level. I saw the profound impact that the festivals could have on my children in communicating the plan of salvation to them. This was the only approach I used in telling this revelation to the people from my church, and they reacted in such rage that I had never heretofore sensed from them. Their accusation against me was, “If you keep the feasts, you deny Christ!! They only pointed forward to His coming. If you keep the feasts, you are saying He hasn’t come yet!” I knew, from my own study, that these arguments were far from factual, but more than that, I was amazed at the rage with which they communicated these false accusations. In my mind, I thought, “But Yeshua was Jewish! HE kept these festivals! Did He deny that He came in keeping these festivals?” I then went over that argument again: “Yeshua was Jewish. He kept the festivals...” Hold on a minute. Yeshua was Jewish. He kept the festivals. I’M Jewish! If I’m Jewish, then I have just as much a right, no, a calling, to keep the festivals as did Yeshua. Then it dawned on me further: Yeshua was Jewish!! (No, this is not redundancy!) Yeshua, the Savior of the world, is a part of MY family!!! I’m related to Him!!! What an awesome honor!!

That began my journey of discovering not only my Jewish roots, but also discovering that there are thousands of believers in Yeshua, Jew and Gentile, who worship God in the same manner as He and His talmidim (disciples) did. I started listening online to live streaming services of Messianic congregations, listened to online streaming Messianic music, and went into Messianic chatrooms with people also discovering the Jewish roots of the faith for about two years, while continuing to attend the same church, (and remaining quiet about my observance of the festivals). Then one day, I went to an online Messianic directory, and as always, expected that the Messianic congregations would be states on the opposite coast of the USA, or in the nation’s mid-section. Much to my surprise, I came across Beit Simcha’s website stating its location, which was only a 30 minute drive from my house. I checked out the site, and saw that it didn’t agree with all my beliefs at the time, so, disappointed, I laid Beit Simcha to the side.

Part 2 to follow soon…