Blessing Israeli Believers January 2019

Dear Blessing Israeli Believers Friends and Partners In The Nations,

Happy New Year and praise King Messiah Yeshua (Jesus) our great Savior and Lord!
We so look forward to His grace and mercy that will overflow from you to our Israeli Believing partners and then to the precious souls here in the Promised Land! Last year was blessed and fruitful and we expectantly look for even more blessings and fruitfulness in this New Year!
In this letter we have an exciting testimony of the love of the gospel going out here in Israel. What special opportunities for the Jewish people, and many others, to hear the love of Abba Father in the good news of Messiah Yeshua!
Also, there is a special thanks to you, our BIB partners, from our Israeli Believing partners in the Golan Heights! This is just the beginning of what we trust will be a powerful Messiah Yeshua honoring year in Israel.

Remember, one of the best ways to bless Israel is to Bless Israeli Believers in Messiah Yeshua!

Dov Schwarz
Co Founder, Blessing Israeli Believers

Update from Ariel & Shayla, Haifa
Sometimes, evangelism is an exciting adventure of working together with God to find the lost and help them know their Savior. At other times, evangelism is having your heart broken over and over as you reach out to those in darkness and utter despair. Sometimes, it's a roller coaster of both.

Our team member, Ari G., worked as a journalist for Israel's most prestigious newspaper and its most-watched news channel. When he was caught in the snare of drugs, he thought he had no way out. But he finally was set free and discovered true freedom and meaning in Yeshua - Jesus.

Ari had never thought of himself as an evangelist. When he first joined our team, he worked on creative ideas for videos, writing scripts, and producing videos. One day, as we saw how so many Israelis were contacting us with questions about Yeshua, we asked if he could make phone calls to interested Israelis who left their numbers. He replied that it wasn't for him.

But a few days later after thinking and praying about it, he decided to go for it. We soon heard him even from down the hallway passionately sharing the Gospel with Orthodox Jews!

A similar thing happened when we asked if he could share with Israelis on Facebook - again he wasn't excited about it, but ultimately decided to go for it and has done a great job.

Then we asked him to go out and share the Gospel on the streets with us. And guess what? He felt that he didn't have a gift for that and it seemed like a strange thing to do. But then something quite amazing happened.

We were invited to go pray for a believer who was in the hospital, so Ari, Ahuvyah, and I got in the car to go. Then we found out the man was sleeping so there wasn't a point in coming, but I felt the Lord put it strongly on my heart to go anyway. So we went and started sharing the Gospel with people in the hospital and offering prayer.

We got to share the Gospel with a Muslim family; with Kiril, a young male nurse working there; and with a female officer in the IDF, Nofar, who came to visit her father who had a heart attack.

Ari found himself talking with someone else about how important it is to go out and share the Gospel on the streets, "because when you go out, things happen around you, and things happen inside of you."

I found myself amazed to see Ari's talent at connecting with people, helping them feel at ease, and asking really good questions to get to know them and their worldview (the journalist coming out!), then naturally sharing about God and Yeshua. As he put it afterwards, "Evangelism is just talking with people about life, because Yeshua is true life."

Update from Ezra & Shulamite, Golan Heights

Thank you to Blessings Israeli Believers Through your designated donations we were able to stand in the gap financially to carry Slava through. Slava has not been able to work for the past 2 months due to medical reasons as he waited for surgery. He was told he needed to wait another month, but through everyone's prayers he received his surgery this past Thursday a whole month early!