I recently received a book designed to reach Jewish people for the Lord Jesus Christ. After the body of the book ended, there was a closing chapter entitled, “What Jesus Has Done for Jewish Lives.” It includes forty-six reports by Jewish people about how they came to identify themselves as both Jewish and Christian. To be fair, these are not called testimonies of how people came to faith in Christ. But that is the point of these reports.
The first was by an ex-rabbi. I was very encouraged because he mentioned believing in Jesus and His promise of everlasting life: “His promise of forgiveness and eternal life to those who believe in him drew me until one day I put my trust in him, and I accepted him as my personal Savior from my sins.”i He includes the three elements found in John 3:16 as well as in Jesus’ consistent evangelistic message as recorded in the Gospel of John: believing, Jesus, and everlasting life.
The second testimony was unclear. The person prayed and sought God, and “God reached down and touched me with the fullness of his presence through his Son, the Messiah…I found that I did not have to give up my Jewish heritage in order to accept the Messiah” (p. 108). Nothing was said about believing or everlasting life.
The third testimony simply said that “one day I discovered the Messiah’s love for me. My life changed…” (p. 108). No mention of believing or everlasting life.
After that, almost none of the testimonies mention the promise of everlasting life or believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.ii
One of the testimonies that particularly bothered me was by a medical doctor who read through the Torah and on into the prophets. Isaiah 53 bothered her. Then one day, “the love of the Messiah touched [her] heart.” She then says, “without understanding any theology, I believed and turned my heart over to Messiah” (p. 110, italics added). One is not born again by turning one’s heart over to Messiah. What did she believe? Evidently, she believed that Jesus is the Messiah and that He loves her. While true, there is no hint that she believed that by faith in Jesus she has everlasting life that cannot be lost. She appears to think that commitment to serve Him is required, but not believing any theological teaching.
The common element in all the testimonies is belief that Jesus is the Messiah. Unfortunately, in most of these testimonies, Messiah does not mean what Martha meant when she used the term in John 11:27 (see also John 20:31; 1 John 5:1). In the Johannine sense, to believe that Jesus is the Messiah is to believe that He guarantees everlasting life that cannot be lost to all who believe in Him (cf. John 11:26; 20:31). While that comes through in a handful of the forty-six testimonies, it is strikingly absent from over 90% of them.
Of course, it is terrific that someone comes to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah. Once a person believes that Jesus is the Messiah sent by God, he can then come to believe in His promise of everlasting life (i.e., believing that Jesus is the Christ in the Johannine sense). Hopefully, that happened with these people. Unfortunately, there are many professing Christians who have not yet believed in Jesus for everlasting life, though they do believe that He is the Messiah sent by God.
Keep grace in focus and you will share a focused testimony.
i Jesus Was a Jew, p. 107.
ii See, however, p. 110, where the person says, “I discovered that God had sent Jesus as my Messiah in order to give me eternal life.”
