SID: Alright Sid Roth here with Lonnie Lane, Lonnie you are talking to this, your first really born-again Christian who is tell you all about Jesus and sin, and you are already kind of curious about this Jesus, and she gets you a book that she tells you God Himself wanted you to read, what effect did this book have on you?
LONNIE: Well the book answered questions to me about art and literature, I was an artist and I had often observed the fact that art had degenerated, in my opinion, from very realistic representations to minimalistic or abstract, it just seemed as if there was philosophical part to that, and then a certain chaos had entered into of what people’s perceptions of what reality was, and this book, called “The God Who Was There,” by Frances Schaffer, answered the questions, it is without God, the further away from God that we get the less life and the world makes sense.
SID: Now you were a sculptor, you went to a world-renowned museum with a world-renowned piece of art, a stature of John the Baptist.
LONNIE: John the Baptist, it was done by Rodan, and it was one of my favorite pieces I liked, I used to enjoy going down to this museum but this particular life-sized, it’s a life size statue of John the Baptist, and he is striding, like this, he is walking as if he is talking to people, and the only thing I knew about John the Baptist was that he was Jewish and that he told other Jews about the Messiah who was Jesus, and so he was the only “person” that I knew who knew Jesus, and so I found myself in the museum, just walking around him and looking, and no one else was in the museum at this time and I, cause his hand was like this, I was able to slip my hand into his, and now I’m holding hands with John the Baptist, which was life-sized, and I just whispered to him, can you take me to the one you know? And then I just walked out of the museum but I guess God heard my longing, He heard the prayer, because at this point having the experience in Israel of His presence, and then Nancy’s book and her life and hearing the voice, you know, she says she hears from Him, this was too many pieces and I had to find out who He was.
SID: And then you meet a Jewish person that believes in Jesus as the Messiah, did this person help you?
LONNIE: Oh yes, I had asked, I said I’ve got to hear of this from somebody Jewish because I didn’t trust anybody else, I was sitting in the kitchen with this Marion Rosenthal, and she had been a believer for some twenty years, and she is telling me all the answers, looking at the Old Testament and how Jesus, Yeshua, fulfilled in the New, and it is not exactly going together for me because I’m saying, an argument is going on in my mind, but I’m a Zionist through and through, how could I believe in Jesus, who when I can, and she said no, He’s Jewish, all of His disciples were Jewish, somehow I missed the fact all my life that all his disciples were Jewish, and she began to show me how He was the Jewish Messiah and how Jewish He is, and how Jewish the Bible is, and as we are discussing all these things I suddenly heard God’s voice in my right ear.
SID: You are the one that said to the Rabbi, can you hear God’s voice, and your rabbi said no, I can’t even hear God’s voice, and then Lonnie, you hear God’s voice!
LONNIE: Isn’t it wonderful, God gave me the desire of my heart.
SID: What did He say?
LONNIE: He just said one word to me; He said, “Listen.” Later I looked that up in Hebrew, and it’s the word “shama” Hear oh Israel the Lord our God, and it is a, it is like to listen so as to understand, but I didn’t have all that intellectual consciousness of it at the time, all I know is I audibly heard this voice, and it was God, and with it came a sense of the person that was more power and authority than I could ever imagine that was conveyed to me in His one word, at the same time deep comfort, deep sense of tenderness as if He was saying, it is all going to be okay, and I have the power to be able to make it that way. And with this came a peace such as I have never known before, I compare it to when you walk through life, do you know what it is like to walk through water, like pushing the ocean, it’s like all of life is like pushing through water like that, but this was as if we were meant to be.
SID: Natural.
LONNIE: Natural, exactly, and with, “ahad” “together”, one with God.
SID: Okay, you do what this John the Baptist said, in the Bible anyway, and that is you repent, and you go through the Jewish Mitpah, the baptism, the immersion, and then all of a sudden you get a call from your rabbi.
LONNIE: I got a call from my rabbi at six o’clock in the morning or something like that.
SID: Six o’clock in the morning!
LONNIE: He said I am just going to ask you one question, he said my phone has been ringing off the hooks since daybreak or something, and he said, apparently somebody had been next door, I was in a church, I had gotten in a mitphah, and somebody told somebody else and somebody had called him well apparently a lot of people called him and he said I’m just going to ask you one question, were you or were you not baptized last night in a congregational church? And I said yes I was. And he said I am not going to take responsibility for this, I will not take responsibility. And I said what only seemed reasonable to me, only God could take responsibility for that.
SID: Hold that thought, I’m sure it didn’t go over too well, but we will be right back and we will find out what Lonnie’s Jewish father had to say about this, don’t go away.
