Messianic Leader Says Revival Breaking Out Among Jewish People

A Messianic evangelist believes revival is breaking out among Jewish communities in the U.S.

Sid Roth, founder of Georgia-based Messianic Vision and host of the It’s Supernatural television broadcast, said he has seen dozens of Jewish Americans profess faith in Christ in recent months during evangelistic events in New York and California.

Last summer in Brighton Beach, N.Y., nearly 400 Russian Jews reportedly attended an evangelistic meeting billed as a lecture on the paranormal. People were healed, Roth said, including a wheelchair-bound woman who had not been able to walk for five years.

“There was just a move of God’s Spirit, and almost the entire group stood up to make public professions of Messiah,” Roth told Charisma.

Later, at a similar meeting in California, roughly 30 Jews professed faith in Christ. “In my opinion this is unprecedented in America,” said Roth, who has ministered among Jewish communities in the Soviet Union for more than 15 years. “I’ve been in Jewish ministry over 35 years, and I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

During a trip to Israel last year, he said roughly 50 elderly Holocaust survivors professed faith in Christ during two meetings he led there. “Again, by Israeli standards, this is an unprecedented thing,” Roth said.

He believes the meetings mark a “change in the atmosphere” of Jewish evangelism. “I took those two meetings as signs that blindness was coming off the eyes of the Jewish people,” he said.

Because of his conviction, he launched a campaign late last year to mail copies of his book They Thought for Themselves to 1 million Jewish homes across the U.S. The book features the testimonies of 10 Jewish believers in Jesus, including former Brownsville revival leader Michael L. Brown and Messianic worship leader Batya Segal. The ministry will pray regularly for the salvation of every Jewish person who receives a book.

Since it was first published in 1996, the book has been translated into eight languages, and more than 600,000 copies have been distributed in the Soviet Union alone.

“Sure, a lot of [the books] will be torn up without even being read,” Roth said of the mailing campaign, “but the ones God is dealing with, they’re going to read this and they’re going to come to the Lord.”

He believes evangelizing the Jewish people carries prophetic significance.

“From a spiritual viewpoint, it’s going to cause an explosion,” he said. “Or I like the way Paul says it [in Romans 11:12], if it was a blessing when Jewish people rejected their Messiah, how much greater blessing when they receive their Messiah. It’ll be life from the dead, resurrection power. I think it’s going to release a resurrection power and miracle-working power in the church like we haven’t seen in our lifetime.”

Messianic Vision launched a Project 77 campaign to raise money for the evangelistic mailing. It asks for $77 donations to mail seven books to Jewish families. So far, Messianic Vision has raised enough money to mail 82,000 copies of the book, and someone recently made an anonymous $100,000 donation.

Roth said after the first million copies are mailed, he hopes to begin mailing another million.

He said bringing together Jews and gentiles as believers in Jesus would create the one new man Paul describes in Ephesians 2 and lead to the greatest revival the world has ever seen.

“Paul says the reason Jesus came was to break down the middle wall of separation between Jew and gentile [and] to form a new species of being that will be the dwelling place of God,” Roth said. “Well, I feel the church is incomplete without Jewish believers, and the church is incomplete without gentile believers. Each brings a special spiritual DNA to the table to make the complete dwelling place for God.

“When the Tabernacle of David, or as it says in Hebrew, the ‘family’ of David is restored, or the Jewish people, [Amos 9] describes the greatest gentile revival the world has ever seen,” he added. “So I see these Jewish people coming to the Lord, entering the church [and] forming the one new man to catapult the greatest gentile revival in history worldwide. That’s my vision. That’s what I believe.”