On the contrary, repentance is one of Judaism’s foundations! That’s why our own traditional literature from the Talmud to the Prayerbook to Maimonides to contemporary Jewish thinkers is filled with teaching on repentance and prayers of repentance.

Life is filled with choices! Studies report that we make more than 2,500 choices every day! Imagine just the first ten minutes of your day. What do you choose to think as soon as you wake and your eyes open? What do you choose to do as soon as your feet hit the floor?

There may be some confusion with our terms. Messianic Jews and Christians believe that we have fallen from the ideal state in which we were created, and now moral corruption is an inescapable part of our nature. We do not believe that people are totally and completely sinful, incapable of doing or choosing anything good. Rather, we believe that by nature we are hopelessly prone to sin and thoroughly entangled with sin.

I’ve been having a somewhat on-going conversation with someone who has been struggling with her flesh just refusing to die. She never seems to be able to be dead enough despite her trying to “die daily” as per Paul’s words in his letter to the Corinthians. I remember being there myself.

God sent me an angel this week. He came in the form of a furniture delivery man. OK, maybe not a real angel but certainly a messenger of comfort. I was feeling saddened by the incident of a man opening fire with a rifle in the Holocaust Museum this past week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his long anticipated speech at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University on Sunday night, June 14, to a local audience of mostly conservative Israelis, international diplomats, and journalists. In his nearly 30 minute speech, broadcast to a global audience, Netanyahu mentioned the word “peace” 43 times, hoping that the Palestinians and Arabs will eventually give peace a chance in the troubled Middle East.

As periodically happens, just as I’m writing an article someone sends me an email that speaks to the topic of the article. A precious woman I have become friends with wrote of an illness she was recently experiencing, saying that she had been told by a “prophetic friend” that the devil will attack your body as you’re ministering for the Lord as she was moving forward with a significant project for the Lord.

On July 31, 2008 while in Red Deer, Alberta Canada for a conference, the Lord took me into a very interesting and enlightening revelatory experience.

It seems to me that you misunderstand the biblical concept of salvation, be it ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish.’ You probably think of salvation in the Hebrew Bible in terms of earthly deliverance and preservation, whereas you understand salvation in the New Testament in totally spiritual terms, referring only to the salvation of the soul.

I regularly meet folks (a number through email) who are delighted to learn more of the Jewish roots of their faith, saying that it brings them closer to the Lord through a greater understanding of what Yeshua said or did. But some, I fear, sound like they are drifting into more of a focus on Torah than on Yeshua.