Give thanks to the Lord for this man’s searching and finding eternal life! How did you find Jesus? Leave a comment to tell your story.

… Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find…. (Mt 7:7)

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I was born and raised in Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, in a traditional Jewish family. We celebrated the Jewish holidays and were very proud of our Jewish identity. There were five synagogues near our house in Bat Yam, and I was constantly exposed to conversations about God and Judaism. But nothing really won my heart. I didn’t really care about God or religion; I found these concepts boring and dry.

My family loves sports. By age ten, I was playing on a professional soccer team. I pursued my dream of being a great soccer player, but I lived a very selfish, materialistic life.

When I was sixteen, a close cousin of mine, who was engaged to be married, was diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer. The doctor told him he would die soon. You can imagine what his parents were going through. They felt horribly hopeless and decided to ask a well-known rabbi to come and pray that their son would be healed. The rabbi asked for 50,000 shekels (about $14,000)! When I heard that, I was shocked. I didn’t know God, but I knew that if there was a god, that’s not the way he worked. The parents paid, the rabbi came, but my cousin still died.

As a result, my indifference toward Judaism shifted toward antagonism. This made me more open to other views.

When I was almost twenty, a few nominally Catholic Arab players joined our soccer team. During the season, we became good friends, and I often visited them in their homes. I really love history, and I didn’t know anything about Christianity. Since they were my friends, I wanted to know their beliefs. But I was too shy to ask them. And, as a Jew, it was understood that we don’t talk about Jesus and Christianity.

So, in the 21st century what do you do about it? You Google it! I looked for Christianity and found the New Testament in Hebrew. I expected an anti-Semitic book with stories about Santa Claus! But in the first book, the Gospel of Matthew, I read the genealogy of Jesus and saw all these Hebrew names. It felt so familiar. Then I realized that I was reading a book written by Jews about Jews, here in Israel. That really surprised me!

But what really made an impact was when I came across Jesus. No one on the entire spectrum of the human race, from the most spiritual to the atheist, can remain indifferent to him. You cannot help but like him – his wisdom, compassion, and love. Every time I read Jesus’ words and learned about his deeds, I wanted more. He was the Jesus I never knew….

Eventually, I decided to come back and read the New Testament. As I continued, I came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah of my people. But I didn’t personally know any other believers in Jesus, Jewish or Gentile, and I had no clue how I was supposed to live.

I kept at my same selfish, materialistic lifestyle…. The more my wallet and my body increased with money and pleasures, the more restless my heart became. I decided to do something about it. I remembered Jesus and that I had put him on pause for two years. I used Google again, but this time to look for a Bible-believing church in Tel Aviv. I found what sounded like a good one, and when I went there, I met true….

Jesus has now come to live inside my heart and is changing me from within, day by day. He is the Jesus I never knew. Would you like to know him also? (Excerpts from Sahar Sadlovsky article,  Jews For Jesus)

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