Video: You're My Glory / Adon HaKavod אדון הכבוד

Hey friends, I recorded this just the other week. It's a old Messianic medley I just recently learned on the guitar. Enjoy!

My interview with Messianic apologist J.K. McKee

I had the genuine delight to be interviewed by J.K. McKee of MessianicApologetics.net. We talk about Messianic Judaism, Hebrew Roots Christianity, good and bad fruit in our movement, and we even snuck in some Star Trek nerd chatter! 

Here are some highlights from the interview:

• 4:00 My Messianic calling
• 6:24 Star Trek fun!
• 8:56 The good and bad of running Messianic blog
• 12:05 Heresy hunters in our faith community
• 14:18 A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing
• 15:53 The need for grace among Messianic believers
• 18:45 Messianic Judaism: the positives
• 27:04 Sidebar on subduing the earth: believers ought to embrace science, technology, medicine
• 30:15 Creationism and discussing science issues in our faith community
• 33:31 Messianic Judaism: the negatives
• 34:58 Messianic Judaism's disregard for non-Jews called to the movement
• 47:26 Advice for newcomers into the Messianic movement
• 50:23 Good fruit in the Hebrew Roots movement
• 57:34 ...and the bad fruit of Hebrew Roots
• 1:03:20 How conspiracy theories often devolve into anti-Semitism
• 1:07:30 What are the big things to communicate to Messianic believers?

J.K. McKee has been a huge influence on my life. He's the author of many must-have books for Messianic believers that helped shape my faith into a stable, committed walk with the Lord. I've used his books and his materials as the basis for many of my own teachings at my congregation. 

To say this interview, then, was an honor and joy would be to understate the matter by several orders of magnitude. 

In the interview, we tackle some difficult subjects ranging from Jew / Gentile equality in the body of Messiah, major issues facing our movement -- including Messianic Judaism and Hebrew Roots -- as well as what I see as good fruit. We close the interview with what I think every Messianic believer ought to apply to their own lives.

I hope you enjoy this interview, friends, and more importantly, that it helps your walk with the Lord.

What this world needs... (video)

...is for men to wash one another's feet.

Art Katz, the cynical Jewish atheist, deeply intellectual, vehement anti-religionist and anti-Christian was radically apprehended by a God whom he was not seeking.

In the video below, Art explains how it all went down -- his US army assignment to Germany, the place and people he despised for the Holocaust, his visiting the concentration camps, the people he met along the way that led him out of hatred and finally how God radically changed him. It's really an amazing story, please watch it or at least give it a listen. The video is low volume and poor quality; don't let that turn you off -- please give it a listen, I promise it will be worth your while.

"There's no way to describe what I was as a Jewish atheist and radical. I was not just mildly contemptuous of religion, I was an avid and vehement opponent of religion. And of all faiths, Christianity was the most abhorrent, because I equated Christianity with the Holocaust; it came out of and was issued from a Christian nation. So, any attempt to communicate [religion] with me was met with vehement refusal.

It took a crisis of my life being broken at its foundations to make me be void of my own clutter, my own vocabulary, my own convictions, my own categories, my own petty cause. It put me in a place to hear, for the first time, this still, small voice.

The first thing I did at the earliest Yom Kippur of my time in Germany was not to go to a synagogue -- an atheist does not attend a synagogue -- I went to Dachau. It took the enormity of the concentration camp -- the barbed wire, the barracks that yet remained and have since been removed, the place of annihilation, the place of cremation, the ovens -- to break something in me. I can remember leaning my hand on this smoke stack, and something broke. The magnitude of what I was touching was greater than my categories.

The cremation ovens at the Dachau Nazi concentration camp, which Art describes in the video above. Jews were hung from the rafters and burned in the ovens. God used this experience to break Art at his foundations, the first in a series of steps God used to bring Art, an adamant atheist, back to Him.

Please listen to this man's story; whether you're an atheist, Jew, or Christian, it's a moving story, and I think you'll be changed for the better.

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