While flying to Israel for the first time last year, I wondered what the country was really like. My daily dose of cable and network news made me think I was about to encounter some unfriendly people. But nothing could have been further from the truth. What the church needs to know about Israel can't be found in a nightly newscast; it can be found in the Words of the Person who created it. Let's open our Bibles and get to reading. Watch the video below. read more
5:07PM EST 1/22/2010

Missiles are fired from Gaza into southern Israel. Iran is steadily marching toward the production of nuclear weapons. And Hezbollah and Hamas are smuggling and stockpiling arms. Welcome to 2010. This may be a new year, but Israel's problems remain largely the same as last year's, and the year before.

The persistence of Israel's problems can tempt us toward two equally troubling reactions. The first reaction is to grow weary. There are no quick fixes in Israel. No easy answers. Who knew that standing with Israel would be so hard and take so long? read more

11:25AM EST 1/21/2010

When I was in a concentration camp during World War II, we had to stand every day for two or three hours for roll call, often in the icy-cold wind. Once a woman guard used these hours to demonstrate her cruelty. I could hardly bear to see and hear what happened in front of me.

Suddenly a skylark started to sing high in the sky. We all looked up, and when I looked to the sky and listened to its song, I looked still higher and thought of Psalm 103:11: “For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him” (RSV). read more

5:29PM EST 1/19/2010

In the early 1970s, a significant number of Jews committed their lives to Yeshua and came to the conviction that they should call themselves Messianic Jews rather than Christians. There were several reasons for this. One was the history of institutional Christianity and its impact on the Jewish people.

From a Jewish perspective, Christianity was a movement of semi-paganism, oppression and anti-Semitism. We wanted to project ourselves in such a way that the Jewish people would take another look at Yeshua without the barriers of their pre-formed perceptions of Christianity. read more

4:51PM EST 1/19/2010

We have led many tours to Israel, and sometimes people are hesitant to go because they are fearful of terrorists and possible war in Israel. When they express those fears, Tom and I always share that we feel safer walking the streets of Jerusalem than we do walking the streets of Atlanta. There is a sense of God's peace and presence in Israel that supersedes the threat of war and terrorism. read more

3:57PM EST 1/19/2010