Revelations of Jesus to a Jew

I was born in 1951 in a kibbutz in upper Galilee, Israel where people lived communally. My parents had their own place but I was in the children’s house in close proximity to theirs, within the confines of our small community.

Life on the kibbutz was good. It was secure and rich in cultural activity. We celebrated the Jewish festivals communally. Over the years the kibbutz became richer and wooden huts were replaced with houses of brick and mortar.

As an agricultural community we enjoyed the outdoor life with fields, fishponds and apple orchards. When I completed my schooling, I joined the army. Sadly, my generation was caught up in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and I lost two of my best friends. 

Meeting my husband and moving countries

My life changed forever when I saw a handsome young man walking down the path one day. Just then, the following sentence passed before my eyes: “This will be your husband,” but I soon forgot it. This young man was a cousin of one of the girls I was working with in the kibbutz dining room. He had come from England to visit his family on the kibbutz. Within a short time, I befriended him. Things worked out just perfectly. I always wanted to study English and planned to go to England to brush up my English. We ended up travelling to England together and within the year we were married and I studied English to become a teacher.

Once I started teaching, I found it extremely stressful due to lack of discipline among the pupils and a difficult headteacher. I believed that the stress was a contributory cause to me not being able to conceive, so decided to leave teaching after four years. Looking back, I know this was the time when God was ploughing me up, ready to meet my messiah, Jesus. This was a huge turning point in my life that catapulted me into faith, but the journey, though glorious, was not smooth. 

Receiving revelation

I am eternally grateful for what I would call the revelation of the cross, which I received during a dark time immediately after I left teaching. It was 1985 and I spent days quietly at home looking after a friend’s toddlers, walking along the Thames, weeping for the loss of Israel, the loss of my family and culture.

During that time, a carpenter came to do a job in my house. His name was Tom and he spoke to me plainly and boldly proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel. I had told him I got involved with transcendental meditation (TM) when I was working in Tel Aviv as a youth leader. I had thought it would help me to centre myself and be calm. He responded by saying that transcendental meditation was the work of the devil and better not practised.  

I thought: “It’s hard enough to believe in God, let alone the devil.” I dismissed Tom’s advice but his words continued to plague me and work in my heart potently. After five months I accepted his offer of prayer in his home. The revelation of Jesus dying on the cross for me happened just before I went for prayer with Tom and his wife Doreen. Many things happened at that time but that revelation was the most profound. 

On 16 March 1985 I finally went to see Tom and Doreen, which became the day I received Jesus into my heart. I have no idea why I said yes to Tom’s offer but, as soon as I did, a flame of joy entered my heart so brightly, leaping constantly inside me, providing a permanent delight.

From that point on, things began to change. I visited Tom and Doreen nine more times and received prayer for inner healing and deliverance. I agreed with Tom that if during prayer I realised TM was wrong I would abandon it and so he was happy to pray for me.

Jesus appeared in my memories during these meetings and I was delivered dramatically from my TM mantra. At the last prayer time I experienced the risen Christ. He stood before me in my spirit as a body of light with a crown on his head while Tom and Doreen were praying. I was lifted into his presence and, when they stopped praying, I didn’t want to leave. 

The single most amazing thing that happened thereafter was the revelation of God’s intimacy, his close proximity to my soul and the full expression of his mercy. He filled my heart with his love and my days with his constant tangible presence. I had been in a deep depression and he revealed to me the depth of his compassion for every wrongdoer. This insight was like gold to me, filling my heart with compassion for others.

Fully surrendered

What followed was a period in which I had to relinquish aspects of my old life and some of my deepest desires. My husband found my experience hard as he is not a believer. 

One day I walked into an open church in Reading, and it was there that Jesus appeared to me and lifted the burden of Israel and my family off my shoulders. I was now free to follow him. Later on in Brussels, where we moved in summer 1986, I surrendered to him my desire for a child, I relinquished my husband into God’s hands and I laid down my desire to become a writer. 

Oh, the wonder of surrender! Now I was able to follow him unencumbered and with greater ease. And every one of these things were given back to me later on.

My daughter, Sarah was born two years after we settled in Brussels, in 1988. God called me back to writing and he anointed me to minister to my family in Israel with each visit. They embraced it and the Lord helped me to lead them to receive Jesus into their hearts. It took each one of them, mother, father, brother and two sisters, a good few years to fully acknowledge Christ – apart from my brother who has not yet come fully to faith.

Now, I was ready for the honing and training that followed.

Following God’s lead 

One Good Friday, I entered the main Anglican church in the centre of Brussels looking for fellowship. I sat in one of the pews in a corner then I reached for a Bible and began to leaf through it. I opened Jeremiah 2:13: “My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and dug their own cisterns, broken cistern that cannot hold water.”

I knew this was about the Church. God’s burden for his people to walk intimately with him was laid on my heart and, with it, he started honing me in deep prayer and spiritual warfare.

My training in intercession started in Brussels but continued on my return to the UK. Yet the most rewarding gift was the experience of God’s presence on a daily basis, learning all the subtleties of his operations and his wisdom.

He filled my heart with his love and my days with his constant tangible presence

Alongside his spiritual training, the blessings have been many. My husband is still alongside me; we are blessed with two beautiful daughters, who we enjoyed raising together. My husband has not yet come to faith and, in fact, I have really been forged into a stronger faith through his opposition. I always prayed for him to allow me to continue serving God in the way he has called me to, but often I have had to be pretty low key. 

In my writing God has blessed me with a creative overflow in prose as well as in musical and songwriting. He is now establishing me as a coach after years of experience in coming alongside believers to be there for their detailed need, always moving in the Spirit in submission to God’s guidance.

Looking back at lessons learned

I have learned that in order to see God’s will accomplished in my life I had to submit to leadership – both church and my husband – even if I believed they were in the wrong. By submitting and then praying for God’s will to be done, I saw it come to pass.

With my husband, if he didn’t want me to go to a prayer group, I accepted it, prayed and then he changed his mind and let me go. With leadership, when God told me to deliver a prophetic word that they could not immediately accept, I just left it, went home to pray and, eventually, I heard the leader preach the very same word in church.

I have learned how to follow the Holy Spirit and allow him to lead me, rather than to do things in my own strength. This took many years of training by God to hear his voice, relinquish my desires and come to him first. Time and again, I have found that he has graciously also given me my desires when I have allowed his priorities before mine.

Did you know?

A kibbutz is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1910, was Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Yosef Baratz, Israeli politician, Zionist activist and one of the pioneers of the kibbutz movement, wrote a book about his experiences: ‘We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country—this old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them; anyway, we thought that there shouldn’t be employers and employed at all. There must be a better way.’ [Source: Wikipedia]