〈The
Life of the
Self〉
〈Applause〉
So she's going to share about that and I don't know whether it's about walking back to happiness
or pressing forward into salvation but either way on.
God bless you Helen, you're up.
〈Applause〉
I hope this mic is okay for sound.
They said would I know how to pin it on.
I said I've used them once or twice before.
〈Baruch Hashem〉
Greetings in the name of Yeshua.
Woo this is very high up here.
However it's a joy, it's a joy to be here today and to hear Lance and to praise and worship with all of God's people.
People have asked me to give my testimony before and I have had the honor to do that in quite a few places now but never one as grand as this.
And it's always difficult to know how to begin, where to begin, but I'll try this.
I come from a little village in the east end of London called Hackney.
Now some of you might know it, it is of course one of the most salubrious parts of the city.
I was brought up in a traditional, loving, warm, caring, musical Jewish home
in the heart of what was then the Jewish community in the borough of Hackney around the Stanford Hill area, clapped in to be a little more precise.
I believe it's become quite yuppified these days. I know somebody who lives there.
By traditional Jewish home I don't really mean we weren't, I would say, strictly observant to every letter of the law.
In fact we didn't observe most of them but what we did do was celebrate the holy days, the festivals, Pesach Passover of course,
to a lesser extent Sukkot and of course we would go to shul, to synagogue on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement,
and observe Rosh Hashanah, the new year and things like that.
We would light the candles on Shabbat evening, every Friday night, and to that extent,
and with a sort of a smattering of biblical knowledge, I was very aware of my Jewish heritage.
I didn't know why I was Jewish, I didn't actually suss out why I was Jewish, what it meant to be Jewish.
All I did know from listening to the wireless, yeah, for those babies among you, I do refer of course to the radio,
our wireless was a large piece of furniture in the corner of the room,
I noticed that they always refer to things to do with the church and Christmas and Easter and stuff like that,
I never understand why we never got a look in.
Why didn't they ever mention Pesach or things to do with the Jewishness?
And a little later on when we got our little 9 inch television screen, the same thing happened.
It was then that it was pointed out to me that we are a minority in this country,
I believe there aren't more than about 300,000 of us I think in this country,
and that in fact we do live in a Christian country.
So I took that at face value in those days at a very young age and didn't think a great deal more about it.
I knew I was a Jew, I liked it, I enjoyed it, it was very nice, and I liked the food as well, that was another good point.
As far as my spiritual background was concerned, like all good Jewish children I was brought up to believe in God,
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but I didn't have more than a vague concept of Him.
If I thought about Him at all it was of this far away sort of power somewhere,
possibly with a big stick, who didn't have a great bearing on my daily life.
As for this Jesus, well, I would see on these radio programs and television programs
the pictures of this blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan God hanging on a cross,
a golden cross in a church somewhere, and I knew that they said that He was the Messiah,
and it didn't look like a Messiah to me.
I'd never actually heard of Him until I got to the age of six years old, to be honest.
I didn't know who He was. I was six years old, I was in the playground at school, minding my own business,
and another little girl about the same age ran up to me in tears and she screamed at me,
I killed Jesus Christ. What? I was in tears. I'd never been accused of such a thing before.
Who was this Jesus Christ? What a funny name. I'd never killed anybody.
I rushed home and I told my parents. I don't actually remember what they told me,
but it's funny how the incident has stayed in my mind from six years old.
I'm glad it never really colored my opinion of people who said these things,
or certainly of Christians or of the church, but I'm glad that stayed in my mind.
I guess it stayed in my mind so that I could tell you about it today.
And I grew up not thinking a great deal about spiritual things, really.
Life was too exciting. I was growing up. I went into show business, you know.
I was fortunate enough to have hit songs and I was very blessed.
God gave me a gift of music. I always knew that. That's a funny thing.
I always knew that I had a gift from God, the music. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with it,
but I did what I thought was right at the time. I sang pop songs and I sang jazz.
And I had ups and downs in my career and I didn't think a great deal about God, I suppose,
until possibly one of the down times. That's usually when you start thinking about things like that.
Around the, towards the late 60s, and I started to question things.
Mind you, in the late 60s everybody was questioning things.
They were all searching for the meaning of life, man.
In my case, I mean, I thought, well, there must be more to this. There must be more than this.
If this is it, this is very depressing. There's got to be more.
My search took me to reading books on spiritualism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and psychicism.
Thisism, thatism, you name it. I was interested in it. I read about it.
I even went so far as to visit mediums, media, I don't know what you call them, clairvoyance and the like,
you know, to like, to make contact with the dead. To find out my fortune.
I have my palm read, my tea leaves done, you name it. It's a crazy thing.
We were all going through a lot of that in those days. I remember that.
And I thought it was fine. I thought it was a very benign, harmless, good thing to do.
I didn't know at that time that what I was doing was an abomination to God.
I had no idea. Like most people who are involved in that kind of thing with the New Age and all these things,
as long as you're not actively worshipping the devil, God forbid, then it must be all right.
I didn't realize that these seemingly harmless things that I was getting into there were just as much the occult as anything else.
But in my ignorance, all this stuff satisfied me. It answered a spiritual need in my life.
And it was great. Oh, there's life after death. Fantastic. Maybe there's reincarnation.
Maybe there isn't. I'll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that one, and it's all very nice.
This kept me going for a long while until I reached the age of 40.
Now, I'd heard horror stories about being 40.
There's a lot of you still yet to have that pleasure.
I knew that it was supposed to be a big watershed in your life.
And I wasn't quite sure what to do about it, but I actually got to and passed my 40th birthday relatively unscathed, or so I thought.
It's funny, by the way, about 40, isn't it? The significance of 40 in the Bible.
A few of my ancestors were wandering around in a wilderness for 40 years.
The roses fasted on top of a mountain for 40 days and 49s.
I believe the flood was 40 days and 49s.
The Lord Yeshua himself was tempted by the devil for 40 days and 49s.
It seems to be a testing time. I don't know. I'm not the expert on that.
But anyway, I got about four to six months into my 41st year,
and all of a sudden, really all of a sudden, all these things that I believed in, all these isms that had comforted me for so long, crumbled.
For no apparent reason. All these... they're just like crumbled, like idols of clay.
It's the only way I can put it now, looking back. And try as I might, I couldn't believe any of it anymore.
And I tried. Oh, I tried. I couldn't understand why. I couldn't believe it. I know now why.
But it was that sudden. I just didn't believe it anymore. At the same time, at that period of my life,
I also became increasingly aware of how much my career had grown in importance in my life.
The priority it had over all other things, even at that age, I thought this cannot be right.
My ambition, my longing to show them that I can still do it, and I want to be in the next big hit show, and do all these kind of things.
My career was more important to me than anything. I thought this cannot be right at this time of my life.
So that coupled with the other thing, brought me pretty low, I have to tell you.
This is like six months after my 40th birthday. Now nobody was aware of this. Nobody.
John, my lovely husband, whom I love very much. He wasn't my husband then.
He didn't know all this that was going on, this soul searching. My musical director, Bob Cranham, and his wife, they knew nothing about it.
The reason I mention them is that Bob's been my MD for musical director, that is, for about 12, 13 years or something like that.
And he's been a Christian, he and his wife, for quite a few years. They had never shoved it down the throat,
they had never given me a heavy time about it. I'd actually done some backing vocals on a couple of gospel albums that Bob produced.
And they had occasionally told me about something the Lord, the Lord, had done for them, the Lord, this Lord of theirs.
Which were actually, when you think about it, they were miracles. But it didn't get into my head at that time.
I thought, well that's very nice, that's nice for them. That's very nice for them and I hope they're very happy. It's fine for Gentiles.
I'm a Jew, Jews don't believe in Jesus. But that's fine.
Now at this time I was going through all this stuff, this soul searching. They knew nothing.
But it just so happened that I had to go around to Bob's place to pick up some music.
And he said to me that day that he was thinking of giving up the music, professionally certainly, and maybe altogether, I don't know.
I can't remember now. And I was bemused, I said, why? He said, well I feel that God wants me to be a preacher.
Wow, really? But surely God gave you the gift of music. He said, yeah. But if he wants me to stop, I'll stop it.
He said, what, just like that? He said, yeah. That impressed me. That impressed me terribly.
I went back to John, I remember, and I said, I don't know what it is that Bob's got but I envy him, his faith.
Looking back of course I know that that's exactly what it was supposed to do.
Isn't it written somewhere?
Because I know how important the music is to me and I know how important it is to him.
That started me thinking a little bit about this Jesus, this faith that these people have that could make them do such things.
Especially as I was going through this kind of uncertain time in my life.
Thinking about this Jesus culminated in me lying on my bed one night.
This is all about three and a half years ago and saying, all right then, like you do.
All right then you, this Jesus, funny name.
They say you're the Messiah. You say you're the Messiah. If you're the Messiah, show me. Prove it to me.
I don't know what I expected to happen but nothing did that moment.
But I'll tell you what, in the ensuing days I couldn't walk anywhere without coming into contact with things and people connected with or relating to this Jesus.
Like Christians. I was tripping over them.
And churches. I kept coming bang, face to face with cathedrals.
I do a lot of work, traveling in my work.
I would walk around a corner and there would be like Winchester Cathedral.
I'd come in and have a look. I've always been interested in church architecture anyway.
Nice old buildings, bit cold, bit dusty, bit damp, but very nice.
I would be drawn to go and sit in a churchyard or something, a country church.
I'd sit under a tree and feel really peaceful. All this kindness, I couldn't understand it.
This finally led to us coming home one day from a gig. That's a concert.
In Germany. We flew home, the band and myself to Gatwick Airport.
And we were saying our goodbye's to you next time when Bob, this same Bob, put in my hands a book.
Now in all the years that I'd known him and all the years that I'd known that he'd been a believer, which at that time was about seven years,
never given me anything, never tried to put tracts or anything like that upon me. But he put into my hand this book.
I looked at it and there on the front cover was a menorah.
For those of you who don't know what a menorah is, it is a seven branch lampstand, candelabra, whatever you want to call it,
the eternal Jewish symbol, older than any other, stars of David or anything like that.
That which was in the tabernacle and the temple. Otherwise he gave me a Jewish book.
I looked closer and I saw the title betrayed by Stan Telchin.
Oh, I looked a little more. What would you do, it said, if you were a 50 year old successful Jewish businessman
and your daughter one day told you that she believed in Jesus. I went, oing.
You what? What is this? Because you see, I've been going through all this stuff with this Jesus thing going on the last few days.
I thought, here he's given me a book about somebody Jewish believing in this person.
I was actually quite excited about it. I was quite cool. I said, what's all this? What's he giving me?
I thought you might be interested. It turns out that they had had this book for about a year
and never felt right about giving it to me, ever. But that day that Bob handed me this book was the exact moment that I was ready to receive it.
So I took it home. I thought I've got to read it. I mean, I'd heard about Jewish people believing in Jesus.
I always thought they were weirdos, you know. True, I did. I even met one once and I still thought they were weirdos.
I got home. I had the place to myself at that time.
By the way, I've got to tell you, just to digress, I've always had a problem about this, what I call Christians becoming Christians.
You know?
It's just that when Bob became this Christian, I always thought, but you're already a Christian.
It's that strange thing in the Jewish mindset that says you're either a Jew or you're a Christian. Yeah?
Like a generic term, a nice identity and a nice label. If you're not a Jew, you're a Christian.
Like in the Lebanon when they say the Muslims are fighting the Christians and the Christians are fighting...
You know they're not all Christians. I remember the time when Cliff Richard in 1966 said, I'm a Christian.
I always had a great problem with that. It's only in recent years that I've got it together.
But that aside, I went home and I opened this book and I devoured it in two hours.
And it impressed me. Yes, it was about... most of you have probably read it.
But for those of you who haven't, yes, it's about this guy whose daughter told him this shock news.
And when he recovered from the shock, he set out to prove her wrong through the Scriptures.
And in doing so, in the end, became a believer himself, along with every member of his family in different directions.
Now that impressed me, yeah. But what really impressed me was what I had never seen before.
And that was in the pages of his book, he had reproduced many of the Messianic prophecies.
Now, I was familiar with the hit stories of the Bible. I knew Genesis and Exodus.
I knew about Moses and King David and Solomon and, you know, the kings and a little bit about the exile.
Bits and pieces like that. And like every good Jew, I knew that the Mashiach was going to come sometime, whoever he was.
But that it was something good that was going to come for the Jewish people.
What I didn't know was that it was all written there, prophesied, in the Bible.
And I'd never actually seen the prophecies. You know, it made such an impression upon me.
First of all, Jeremiah 31, talking about a new covenant.
What is it he said? The days are coming, says the Lord, when I make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
Not like the covenant I made with you when I brought you out of Egypt, which you blew.
Even though I was a husband to you. No, in this new covenant I write my law in your inward parts, on my heart.
So you won't have to go around telling everybody, know the Lord, because they shall all know me.
From the least of them to the greatest of them. For I'll forgive their sins and remember their iniquities no more.
That made a big impression on me. I like the idea of not having to learn laws, but having it all written inside.
And then Isaiah, Isaiah 9, unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
I always thought that that was in the New Testament.
Because I'd only ever seen it on Christmas cards. That's the truth.
But there it was in Isaiah, one of ours.
I was yet to find out that there's plenty of ours in the New Testament as well.
There I was reading that, Isaiah 9. And the government shall be upon his shoulders.
And he shall be called Wonderful Council, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
This was Messianic stuff. I tell you it made a big impression on me. This even talked about him being God.
I went on, Isaiah 7. And the virgin shall be with child and she'll give birth to a son and she'll call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.
Why so specific? Then across him Micah, but thou Bethlehem, Bethlehem, city of David, Bethlehem, house of bread,
a frater out of you shall come one for me who's going forth, a vold from eternity.
Actually said where he was going to be born. I didn't know. I didn't know.
But in the book of Daniel, Daniel 9 spoke of when he was going to walk the earth and how the anointed one would be cut off but not for himself.
And then the prince of this world should come and Jerusalem, the temple should be destroyed, etc.
Of course the temple was destroyed in 70 AD. And as Stan Talchin pointed out in his book,
how was this Messiah going to prove his genealogy if his genealogies were destroyed in the temple?
In verse 22, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And then further on, they have pierced my hands and my feet.
They've cast lots for my clothing, divided it among themselves.
I was getting touched greatly by this. I never knew.
I didn't know that this was all there in what we call now the Old Testament and the Tanakh.
So specifically the testimonies, the prophecies about the one who was to come.
And then the jewel in the crown of Messianic prophecy, Isaiah 53,
which spoke of one who was to come and take our sins upon himself and our diseases and all our rottenness
and take our punishment that was due to us and be bruised and afflicted
because we all like sheep have gone astray. Each has turned to his own way
and the Lord has caused to fall upon him the iniquity of us all.
And this time I was burning. I thought I've got to do something about this
because I can't let this stand. I can't read this book and not do anything about it.
It challenges me. I never knew all this stuff. Why didn't any rabbi ever tell me?
Why didn't anybody ever tell me? Why didn't some Christian come and tell me?
I thought I've got to get a Bible. So where do you go when you want to buy a Bible?
W.H. Smiths, of course. Who knew from Christian book shops?
I'd tell you if I knew I wouldn't go in one anyway. Not then.
I walked into W.H. Smiths in Bishop's Stalford. Cheers from the Great Eastern Fellowship.
And I walked into their religious department, you should pardon the expression.
And you know what? There were row upon row upon row of Bibles.
I've never seen so many Bibles in my life. I didn't know there were so many Bibles.
All different shapes and sizes with all different titles. It was even a Masonic Bible.
Yeah. And such a thing.
There was the Jerusalem Bible, the Good News Bible, the relatively good news Bible,
the Living Bible, the Holy Bible, the Holy Bible, the Holy Bible, the Holy Bible.
They all said this, the Holy Bible. I thought I'm not going to get a Bible that says Holy Bible.
Because that is the word that the Christians use all the time and I'm not going to be misled.
So I bought a book. I bought a Bible called The Bible.
Oh yes, snow flies on me. So I... It was a revised standard version.
And it was in fact the only one that was just called The Bible.
It had lots of stuff at the bottom of each page whereby you could cross refer backwards and forwards.
And it was like a, I suppose in miniature, a study Bible. And it had pictures.
I took this home and I opened up a Genesis and I started to read.
I got about, as far as Genesis 26, I thought this is going to take a year.
And I knew some of that stuff anyway. I thought, okay, in for a penny, in for a pound.
I opened up at the New Testament for the first time in my life.
With I have to say a certain amount of trepidation.
I didn't know what to expect. I half expected, possibly more than half, an anti-Semitic diatribe.
Why? Because people who called themselves Christians down through the centuries,
from Constantine through the Crusaders via the Inquisition, etc., etc., etc.,
had murdered, tortured, persecuted, hounded the Jewish people in the name of this Christ,
this Christianity, this Jesus. So we naturally assume they got it out of their book.
So I wasn't sure what to expect. And you know what?
I opened up that first book and what greeted my eyes was the most Jewish thing I'd ever seen outside of the Old Testament.
The genealogy of Jesus.
Now I knew somewhere along the line that Jesus was a Jew. I knew that, even though he had this funny name.
But I never realized the ins and outs of it.
Because I didn't know before about the lineage that you had to be of the line of David, etc.
And there it was through Zerubbabel and via King David and famous, familiar names,
right through to the patriarch Abraham. That made me feel a little more comforted.
So I started to read in the book of Matthew.
There's another thing. Sorry, I go off like this occasionally.
I just got to tell you that I always thought, years ago now I'm talking,
you know in the Old Testament you've got Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon and David and Ezekiel
and Hosea and Joel and Zechariah and Zedekiah and all these Ayahs, Jeremiah and all the rest of them.
Wonderful big strong names.
And then in the New Testament you've got Matthew
and Philip
and John
and James.
And it always was a puzzle to me. How come? Before I knew anything about it,
I thought, how come in their New Testament they've got all these English people?
The New Testament
was obviously written by English people.
It was much later that I found out in fact that these people were of course all Jews
and that they had Hebrew names and they spoke Hebrew
and they did everything that the guys did in the Old Testament.
But somehow it got garbled in the translation.
The names that came down to us via the Greek to the English,
Matiyahu, Matthew,
John,
Miriam, Mary,
get this, Yaakov, James.
That's another little puzzle. Now I travel around like I said and I pick up the Gideon Bible in hotels
and they've usually got various translations
and I've noticed that in the Dutch and in the German and in the French,
Yaakov never comes down to us as James but as Yaakobus,
Jacob, Jacques. Only in the English translation
does he become James.
Is this anything to do with King James one asks oneself?
One day we will know.
Anyway apropos of nothing at all,
I started to read the book of Matiyahu
about Yeshua.
And I was totally taken with this person, how he was born.
You know it wasn't a fairy story like you see on Christmas cards.
It wasn't some pretty little thing about lots of pretty animals in a stable
looking at a pretty blonde baby.
This was meat and potatoes.
This was the real stuff. I mean this was to me a revelation.
This was people in the land
that I could relate to.
I read about him, how he was born, how he grew up,
that these people were Jews.
About what he did, what he said, the sermon on the mount for instance,
the restating of the mosaic law and onwards,
how he healed just the way he spoke and just
I was just taken with him.
And then of course how he died,
how he was buried, how he rose again.
I read on all the time backwards and forwards into the Old Testament,
checking out the prophecies where they were made,
where they were fulfilled.
I got about halfway through Mark, I thought, oh, hold on.
I am possibly being misled here.
It's all too perfect.
This Old Testament, this revised standard version
was written by Christians of course, translated by Christians.
They're going to slant it that way to make it look good for them.
I'd better go and buy a Hebrew Bible, just to play safe.
So I went to a little shop in Ilford called the Blue and White Shop
in Beehive Lane, if ever you want to go there,
which stocks Judaica, that's what it is,
religious Jewish books and artifacts.
I walked in, bold as brass.
I said, I'd like an Old Testament please.
Laughter
He looked at me, he said, how old?
Laughter
I felt such a fool.
Laughter
This guy was a bit of a joker, as I have found out subsequently.
I thought, no, of course, what a silly thing to do,
to go into a Jewish shop and ask for an Old Testament.
No such thing as an Old Testament,
because there's no such thing as a New Testament.
I said, you know what I mean.
He said, yeah.
He reaches out to a top shelf, gets hold of a book and hands it to me.
I look at the title of the book, what does it say on the front?
The Holy Scriptures.
Laughter
That was my first encounter with God's sense of humor.
Laughter
The first of many, I'm thankful to say, at my expense of course.
So, suitably armed with my tanaq,
I went home and I opened up and started to compare
with the Old Testament in this revised tanaq version, my Hebrew Bible.
Official Jewish publication society, Masoretic text had to be right.
And you know what?
It was the same.
Laughter
Applause
And I was so pleased, truly.
I wanted it to be the same.
I didn't want to be disappointed because I got that far.
I was already hooked, you know what I mean.
I was being reeled in.
Laughter
It just came to me then.
So, suitably comforted.
The next two months I spent reading again, back and forwards
and looking at things, checking out with the Stantelchens book as well.
I read the four gospels.
It's another word I always had a little problem with
until I found out it means good news.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
I read them.
These four different tellings of the story of the coming of the Messiah
from different angles, but all melding together.
There was a lot I didn't understand.
But by the end of reading the book of John,
I came to the intellectual conclusion that this had to be so.
This Jesus had to be the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies.
It had to be.
And if that was the case, what do I do about it?
So I phoned Bob and Penny.
I said, help.
I'm on the verge of becoming a believer.
What do I do?
They said, come over.
So I went around to their house.
This was August 26, 1987.
And I spent two hours peppering them with questions.
There was a lot.
There were so many questions that I had to ask.
So much I wanted to know.
For instance, all this occult stuff that I'd been into before.
Where did that kind of fit into the whole scheme of God and everything?
And they said, it doesn't.
That was where I first learned.
When God says you and your diviners, your astrologers,
your mediums and your spiritists, they are hateful to me.
They're an abomination.
So I learned something that night.
Another question was, OK, fine.
Jesus, Yeshua died on a cross, was buried, rose again.
I believe that.
I believe it.
I don't know why, but I believe it.
How does that save me?
I didn't quite suss it out.
I hadn't quite got it together.
I'm asking Gentiles how this saves me.
They pointed me to the book of Hebrews.
And there it is, the fulfillment of the sacrificial system.
And that night I learned.
I learned a lot.
I learned that no longer does the high priest, the descendant of Aaron,
have to go into the most holy place, the holy of holies,
in trembling and fear, with the blood of bulls and goats,
hoping that God isn't going to kill him,
to sprinkle, to make atonement for Israel for another year.
No longer does he have to do that.
Because when Jesus died on the cross,
the temple curtain was torn in two.
It opened the way for us all to go through,
to follow him, the ultimate once and for all sacrifice.
And as in every sacrifice and every covenant, blood has to be shed.
And that his was the blood shed, and that if we follow him,
then we are atoned for.
But not just for a year, but for always.
That's what I learned.
Applause
And the other beautiful thing about that was it wasn't just for Israel anymore,
but for everybody.
And that's the beauty of it too.
I learned that last night. Last night.
It seems like last night.
I learned that that night, along with many other things,
that I am still learning.
Robin Penny said, would you like to say a prayer,
ask Jesus to come into your life?
I said, oh, that's how you do it.
I don't know. Maybe assign a form or something.
Laughter
And that's another thing I learned.
Oh yeah, I was learning a lot.
And it's all in there, I tell you.
I learned that you can believe and believe and believe and believe and believe in Jesus.
You can believe that he is the Messiah, the Son of God.
Salvation.
And you can go to church and go to church and go to church.
But until you make that decision of your will to invite him in to your life,
to be the Lord of your life,
you stay outside.
So we prayed.
And I said, Jesus, come into my life.
Be Lord of my life.
Take over the reins by your Holy Spirit.
Forgive my sins.
Come let us reason together.
Forgive my sins. Wash me clean.
Be in my life.
And he came into my life.
No thunderbolts, no lightning, no visitations.
But I just knew. I just, and that was it.
And I was glad I had done it. We sat back.
Penny said, well, you're a Christian.
I went, oh.
Laughter
There's still that little irrational something in there.
I'm a what?
Never.
There was still that thing of, that word Christian.
What does this mean? I'm not a Jew anymore?
For a moment it kind of hit me. I thought, no, hold on.
And I remembered the letter I'd had from Stan Telchin.
Good old Stan. He must be getting so many royalties from his book
since I came on the scene.
Praise the Lord.
We'd been in correspondence.
When I was nearing the end of reading the Gospels,
I had actually written to him to say, look, this is looking serious here.
Whoever you are, what's happened?
Does it mean if I become a believer in Jesus,
does it mean I'm not Jewish anymore?
He wrote back very kindly and said to me, don't be daft.
Not in those words. Americans don't say that.
You, as a Jew, when you believe in Jesus,
you don't change to something new.
You return to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Applause
What is more, your Jewishness is fulfilled and is completed.
Just as the New Covenant, the New Testament, fulfills the Old.
You can't have home without the other.
So that is with you. You're born a Jew, you die a Jew.
Only God can make that happen.
So don't let anybody tell you anything different,
either the church or the rabbis. That's what it is.
Now I want to tell you, when you make this decision,
you'll find a place called the London Messianic Congregation.
This is from America. In northwest London, go.
But this night, this was before I actually committed myself,
that I wrote this letter.
So, driving home, August the 26th, 1987, 10.30 p.m.
I was in two minds, which is not a good thing,
according to the Book of Yaakov, but that's something else.
Remember him.
I was elated, but I was a little worried. What have I done?
What have I done? How am I going to tell people?
How am I going to tell the family and the community?
You know, there are not many of us,
and when we throw up the odd celebrity here and there,
we tend to claim them, and you know,
what am I going to tell the community?
But you know, it didn't make me change my mind.
It didn't make me want to turn around and go back.
I had made the decision, and I was glad of it.
I was glad of it.
And nothing made me change my mind.
Two days later, I went with Bob and Penny.
They said, come to a church with us.
Church? I went.
I'd never been in a church before, except to a wedding
or to like a charity thing.
Certainly never to worship.
It was a Church of England church, modern.
I thought it was going to be, you know,
like you see on songs of praise or something.
I walked in.
It was full of loonies waving their arms about.
That was the first impression.
I thought, oh, this reminds me of these black gospel churches
in America that you see where they're really getting it on
and praising God, you know, none of this, you know.
I thought, this is interesting.
There was a band up front playing, you know, nice stuff.
There was a guy who got up and gave a sermon,
and it was interesting.
This was a new experience for me.
I didn't realize such places existed.
And that night, for the first time,
I had what they call Holy Communion.
To me, it was the bread and the wine.
I'd had bread and wine before, of course,
and the Passover Seder, of which that was the fulfillment.
I'd had, when Jesus took the third cup, was it,
the cup after supper, which we know is the cup of redemption,
He added Himself to it, saying,
this is the blood of the new covenant given for you.
I'd never had that.
You know, I'd had just the regular,
the cup of redemption as part of the Seder,
coming out of Egypt, all that.
And I'd had the matzah, the unleavened bread,
the afikoma.
You know, the lovely thing is that when Jesus,
when Yeshua was presiding over that last Seder,
He fulfilled the whole Seder as it went along,
and He kept it, traditionally, He just added Himself to it
and broke up the matzah and handed it around,
this is my body given for you.
But I had never been involved
in this kind of Lord's Supper thing.
I didn't, again, know what to expect.
It was the Church of England church,
so you went down the front,
and you knelt at an altar rail.
He said, put your hands out like this.
I thought it was going to give me a little round wafer thing.
Put on your tongue like you see the Pope do, you know.
But no, there was a guy who came with a lump of bread
and put it in my hand, and he blessed me.
It was real bread, and it was nice.
And what was even better, it was real wine.
He gave me this wine, and he blessed me,
and I looked up and it was a nice man.
He had a beard and everything, it made me feel at home.
I don't mean to make light of it.
It was a very moving thing for me,
because, you know, I turned around, I got up,
I turned around to go back to my seat.
People were praising, I'm worshiping, I'm singing.
There was a wonderful atmosphere in there.
As I went back to my seat, the Lord went, ding.
I broke down and wept.
I was in a state.
I was joyful, but there was a sadness too.
I didn't know what was happening to me.
Obviously the Lord touched me with His Holy Spirit,
with His Ruach HaKodesh.
And I was just saying, Lord, save my people.
He gave me a burden for my own people,
which of course I've had ever since.
He just put it in my heart there and then.
And, you know, I wasn't self-conscious about crying
and knowing people were looking,
because actually I knew they weren't,
because they were all involved themselves
in what they were doing with the Lord.
But that's the night that it went from my head to my heart.
And that's where I really made the commitment,
Lord, I am Yours forever, and I fell in love with Jesus.
And I'm not going to take up too much more time, I hope,
because I've been going a fair bit.
I do have a tendency to waffle on, as I have been told,
on many occasions.
I try to keep it brief, but to sum up by saying this,
that my career is now in its proper place
in the order of priorities, way down the list.
The amazing thing is that since I've become a believer,
I've never been busier.
I keep getting all this work.
But the beauty of it is that a lot of it is something new,
and that is Gospel concerts,
which we started doing last September,
we being a set of musicians, myself,
with the help of others around me.
God did give me a gift, a gift of music,
but now He's coaxing me to use it for His glory.
And you know, these things are going so well.
It's still very new, but I praise the Lord for it.
And while I'm about it, I'll get a little plug in.
We just finished recording the album, actually,
a couple of days ago, and so we're hoping
that that's going to be out July, August, God willing.
It's called The Pearl, after one of the songs that we sing.
But I've been going out and giving my testimony.
And in response to Stan Telchin,
a few days after going to this church in Essex,
I went looking for this London Messianic congregation.
Where's the rest of them? There must be others.
I found them in Bridge Lane in Golders Green.
There's a few of them here today.
And there was what was then a smallish group meeting.
They welcomed me.
I walked in there.
There were Jews and Gentiles worshipping
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
through the Messiah of Israel.
And I was at home.
I became a member there, I've been a member ever since.
I have to tell you that it has blossomed and been blessed,
many of you would already know, since that time,
especially since Chuck Snow came along,
Chuck and Ruth from the States,
and took over the reins there.
And we've moved to Hendon School now,
if anybody wants to come along every Friday night,
Erev Shabbat, 8 o'clock, don't be late, we always are.
Laughter
Applause
Oh dear, no, no, no.
It's a wonderful thing what the Lord has done.
He has blessed me with that congregation.
But you know, I said, I phoned Bob one day,
I said, you know, this is great, and I go every Friday night,
and it's lovely, but I live 40 miles away,
I need to have somewhere where I can have some daily contact
with believers.
I'll get onto it, says he.
A couple of days later I get a call,
yeah, guess what, you see, I live in the middle of nowhere.
It's all little villages in North Essex,
tiny little villages, each one with their pretty old fashioned
parish church, you know what I mean?
I have to say, I'm afraid not a lot going on.
Bob says to me, there's a church in a place called Sybil Headingham,
such a name, and they've planted out about four or five different
smaller groups in different places,
and one of them meets, guess where, in your village hall.
This is a wonderful group of spirit-filled Christians
with a heart for Israel and the Jews.
And there they were on my doorstep at Great Eastern,
and I love them very much too, and you see,
he's blessed me in that way too.
I don't know what to add.
One final thing I'm going to add for those of you with any problems
like I had, he has blessed me in many ways, many, many ways.
My mother became a believer six months after me,
and my husband six months after that,
and we're working on the rest of the family.
But I've got to tell you of one very tangible way before I close
of how the Lord has blessed me.
He didn't have to do it. I was his already.
I used to be a professional smoker.
This isn't to say I got paid for doing it,
but I was good at it.
At my worst, I was up to 60 a day.
Don't tell me none of you ever smoked.
By the time I became a believer,
I had got it down to a manageable 20 in an evening,
having gone without during the day.
But oh, I couldn't wait until 7 o'clock came, I tell you.
And every November, don't ask me why November,
I would cut back by five.
So come six months or so after I accepted the Lord Jesus into my life,
I was worshipping over at Sybil Headingham, actually.
It was February.
And I got a very strong thought feeling
that God wanted me to stop smoking sooner rather than later.
I was putting, you know, it was going to be November.
Do you know what I mean?
He said, no, now.
I thought, oh, the Lord, if this is really you,
if it is from you, give me a sign.
Give me a target date.
I'll make a deal with you.
Only a Jew would make a deal with God.
And maybe get away with it.
I don't know.
Give me a target date and I'll do it.
A couple of days later, I'm walking into a shop,
a tobacco shop actually,
and there on the window was a poster,
National No Smoking Day, March the 9th.
I said, had to be so soon.
But there it was, in black and white,
and red and blue and green.
I said, okay, you're on.
It comes March the 8th.
I had the place to myself.
I'm sitting there with about 20 fags going.
Putting off the awful moment.
It came midnight.
Scrunched up the packet and all the paraphernalia.
Went into the kitchen, threw it in the bin,
went back into the living room, got on my knees.
I had told everybody that I knew.
Pray for me.
Pray for all this.
It's very important.
I had also decided that even if God didn't help me,
I was going to do it anyway.
I got on my knees and I said, well, Lord, this is it.
The time has come.
Here I am.
I made the first move.
I said, Lord, I promise you that I'm never going to smoke
another cigarette again as long as I live.
The first move.
As I finished saying that, right there in the pit of my stomach,
the most hideous nausea beset me.
I'd never had anything like it before or since, thank goodness.
And it was really nasty feeling.
And it started to rise.
I'm frightened out of my life.
I was crawling around, crawling to the bathroom.
Help, I've heard about these things.
Praise the Lord.
I said, praise the Lord.
I didn't throw up.
This thing just rose and rose and rose, this nausea,
rose and rose and rose and just finally left me.
It just went.
And from that moment to this, which is two years and three months ago,
I not only have not had a cigarette,
but I've not had the slightest craving for one.
Only God can do that.
I've got to tell you because I have tried in the past to do it.
I had tried on two or three big occasions to give it up in my own strength.
And it was not nice, to say the least.
It was murderous.
It was rotten.
This was something else. I had prayed, God, make it like I've never smoked before.
And that's what He did.
And I'm a pain now.
I'm one of those people you hate if you're a smoker.
Well, that's what happens.
But I praise Him and thank Him because I thought,
well, did He do this because I'm a singer?
Did He do it for this reason?
No.
He just did it because He loved me.
He didn't have to do it.
It was icing on the cake.
I thank Him.
I just want to finish by saying I praise Him and thank Him for calling me to Him,
for giving me the gifts that He has given me, and for it being in these days,
especially in these days when we hear what Lance has been telling us
and what we're hearing around the world,
and to be part of a vibrant, growing movement.
The messianic movement is growing apace in the world.
We have the Messianic Congregation in London. That is growing.
We have it up in Manchester with Moshe Nan, and in Leeds, and in Brighton,
and of course what is going on in Israel, and in the States, and everywhere.
This is obviously a move of God's Spirit.
I've had people try and tell me that Messianic Congregations are wrong.
They are wrong. It is not divisive. This is the bridge.
I just wanted to put my two pence worth in on that score,
and to say my prayer is that the Lord might use me to go out
and witness to Jewish people about their Messiah,
so that it can come to pass what He says, that they will look up and say,
Baruch haba v'shem Adonai. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Thank you.