Sid: My guest is red hot for the Messiah; her name is Lonnie Lane she’s the International Prayer co-Coordinator for Messianic Vision. I am so excited about how God the creator of the universe reached down to reveal Himself to this Jewish woman, and her entire house, her entire Jewish family coming to know the Messiah. We found out on yesterday’s broadcast she has quite a Jewish heritage. In her family are rabbis and Levites, and of course from the Levites came the Cohens, the high priest of Israel, all teachers. She is a tremendous Bible teacher today. She reached a point where she thought God was irrelevant. However one day her 6 year old son some people called him a “Christ killer.” She decided I’ve got to reinforce his Jewishness, not his Godliness, but his Jewishness. So she joined a Reform synagogue, and the rabbi actually called her mishugah, that’s a Hebrew word that mean crazy, when she asked the question “Why doesn’t God speak to us anymore, only mishugah, only crazy people here from God. Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob… give me a break rabbi.” So she goes to a tour of Israel, her first trip to Israel, she literally sees something a destiny, a pulling to this land. Out of the blue if the rabbi thought she was mishugah because she said “How come God doesn’t speak to us today?” Imagine what the rabbi must of thought when she keeps thinking, she just can’t stop thinking in the land of Israel about Yeshua, that’s Hebrew for Jesus. Where did this come from Lonnie?
Lonnie: It must have come from God Himself because there wasn’t anybody else talking to me about it. I just sensed His presence. Actually I sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which I didn’t understand what that was until many years later when I got saved.
Sid: It was like God’s presence was coming on you.
Lonnie: His presence was so thick upon me that I almost melted. I just felt as if Yeshua was following me around. I kept turning around to look to see if somebody was following me because…
Sid: He was.
Lonnie: He was. I just felt Him there, and I just started thinking about Him and questioning things.
Sid: So you get home and you decide well I’ve got to learn more about God. So you go to Temple University.
Lonnie: I went and took some graduate courses; I took some courses in comparative religion at Temple University…
Sid: That’s a good way to get God squeezed out of you.
Lonnie: Well and there’s a lot of… they have a whole Jewish studies program, but of course you can’t learn about Jesus in a Jewish studies program. Always learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth, but about that time I got an idea in my head that I should go work in a hospital. I didn’t really need to work in a hospital, I didn’t need to work at all. I used to be a medical technician and I just felt I needed to go to this particular hospital and ask for a job. So I went in and asked them for a job and they said “Oh are you answering the ad in the paper?” I said “Okay I’ll be the answer…” because I didn’t know that there was one. That’s where I met my first born again Christian who began to share Yeshua with me.
Sid: Did she make sense? Did it… what went on inside of your Jewish qap, your head?
Lonnie: She started telling me all these things, and I was… because I was a religion major I thought it was okay for me to listen to these kind of things. Then she gave me…
Sid: Very analytical.
Lonnie: Very analytical. As long as you approach it intellectually it’s okay, which is how my husband felt. As long as it was intellectual then that kind of pursuit was okay. She gave me a book called “The God Who is There” by Francis Shaeffer. I had been plagued with so many questions along with this Yeshua, this Jesus, following me around; about our society, and why it was the way it was; why did art go to the way it was from art that looked like what exact replication of what things were to this modern minimalist; where’s the chaos that happened? He answered all these kinds of questions where society gets further and further away from God they get further away from what truth is. It just plugged in so many questions. So when I asked Nancy how did she pick out this book for me in a book store she said “God told me which book.” I said “God talks to you? He doesn’t talk to my rabbi and he didn’t talk to anybody else I knew, but He talks to Nancy.” She said “Oh yeah He told me which one.” That’s when I said “Can we do lunch?” So Nancy started to share the Lord with me on a more serious level, and it made sense to me.
Sid: There’s a funny story that I have in my notes here that you had a very interesting conversation with a famous piece of art by Rodin.
Lonnie: By Rodin (Laughing). When I was trying to process all of this information, I was a sculptor, and I often would go down to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia where I lived at the time. I just found solace in being among these pieces. Then I started going to the art museum and just sitting in this little 15th century representative chapel that had nothing in it but a cross and little pews. For some reason I just kept feeling peace when I was drawn to there, couldn’t make any sense of it. Then I went to the Rodin Museum and there’s a life size statue of John the Baptist and he’s walking, striding, so he’s got right hand up in the air as if he’s speaking. No one was in the museum when went there and I just kept walking around him. Finally I just slipped my hand into his upheld hand and it was as if we were holding hands, suddenly I’m holding hands with John the Baptist.
Sid: (Laughing)
Lonnie: He was life size, so his hand was the same size of my hand…
Sid: Now did you know by this point what John the Baptist admonition was?
Lonnie: All I knew was that he was Jewish and he told a lot of Jews about Jesus, that’s all I knew. Cecil B. DeMille probably had given me that much information just watching television and movies.
Sid: Right.
Lonnie: I just whispered to this statute which was really a prayer to God “Would you take me to the one you know” because I didn’t know how to get there to Him. Then I just walked out of the museum and God heard the prayer for this because I knew I had to find Him.
Sid: You prayed to talk to someone living that was Jewish that believes Jesus is the Messiah. Did God answer that prayer?
Lonnie: Oh He certainly did. I said “I have to hear this from somebody Jewish” I had told Nancy. So they got me to someone named Marianne Rosenthal who had been a believer for a number of years, and we went and talked in her kitchen. She was trying to plug all the prophecies in the Old Testament into the New Testament, and it still wasn’t making sense to me. As we spoke I heard a voice, male voice, in my right ear as if He had leaned down to say something to me. He just said one word “Listen.” I knew I heard the voice of God. It also sounded like the voice of a 30 year old man, and I knew I had heard God. When He said “Listen” to me, a peace came over me such as I had never known before; I’ve never know that quite like that since. It was as if Sid all of life is pushing through waist high water. As you walk you have to push, but this moment was just completely peace as if I was exactly I was always meant to be in the presence of God. So I just got quiet, and when they asked me “So would you like to accept Jesus as your Messiah?” At that moment I knew that this was what I had been waiting for and I said “Yes” even though I was embarrassed because I didn’t know how to pray. They led me in a sinner’s prayer. Inside of myself I just like chains were snapping, breaking; I started to cry and I felt so released inside, and I just knew that I had found the One who my people had been waiting for thousands of years.
Sid: Lonnie how did people like your rabbi react to this?
Lonnie: Oh well I didn’t tell him. My husband had asked me “Please don’t tell anybody anything…
Sid: How did your husband react?
Lonnie: Well his first reaction was “I envy your faith.”
Sid: Hmm.
Lonnie: His greatest difficulty was being raised in a very difficult childhood and saying “I just can’t imagine that kind of love being there.” It was hard for him to trust that kind of love. The rabbi found out because I was baptized in a church on a Sunday night…
Sid: The rabbi came?
Lonnie: No, but the word got out in the community. Somebody must have been in the church who lived next door to somebody that was in the synagogue. He said his phone was ringing off the hook from 6:30 in the morning. He called me early in the morning and said “I’m just going to ask you one question” now let just preface this by saying he had been at our house for dinner, my husband had asked me not to say anything. He found a book in my bookcase like His Christianity is Jewish something like that. So he knew something was going on, and said “I have only one question to ask you, were you or were you not baptized in a church last night?” I said “Yes I was.” He started saying “I won’t take responsibility for this, I won’t take responsibility for this.” I didn’t mean to be flip I meant what only seemed reasonable; I said “You can’t only God can.” That wasn’t a satisfactory answer to him and we did spend a couple of conversations in trying to get me to change my mind, but of course…
Sid: It was too late. You know once… if someone says a prayer with Billy they may go on, or they may not. Statistics say most don’t go on with the Lord, but when someone has an encounter with the Living God, there’s nothing anyone can say to anyone because the people that are trying to talk you out of your encounter with the Living God they never had an encounter themselves. They can’t even relate to what you had. All over the world this is God’s precise moment, there’s been certain times in history, even in modern times, in which there’s been a move of God’s Spirit on Jewish people. Lonnie Lane is one such Jewish person because a little over 30 years ago there was SWISH a move of God’s Spirit on Jewish people, and I came in and Lonnie came in, and Lonnie’s entire family came in, and my entire family came in. But over the last 30 years there has not been a move of God’s Spirit on Jewish people beyond Russian Jews, and they only came in because they were given freedom for the first time and they weren’t told you can’t be Jewish and believe in Jesus. They didn’t have that paradigm fortunately.
