How do we reach out to our Jewish friends with the good news of the Gospel? Dr. Mitch Glaser gives us an answer:

“Number one, don’t be afraid of it. Jewish people are part of a culture that feels Christianity has tried to harm them. Real, authentic born-again Christians, of course, usually are not anti-Semitic and they’re not against the Jews, but historically it’s been a bad scene. You have the Inquisitions, you have the Holocaust, which Jewish people to this day think was perpetrated by a Christian country, and so Jewish people have a very negative feeling towards Christianity.”

“Therefore, if you try and and tell a Jewish person, ‘You need to consider whether or not Jesus is your messiah and believe in him,’ all of the sudden you get a negative reaction. So it’s really important to persevere through that first negative reaction because Jewish people are wired to be against Christianity.”

“I think that we need to be very patient. I think that it’s important to be able to give a Jewish person something that they can read or look at that bridges the gap and tries to accept tries to show that Jesus is Jewish.”

What if you’ve tried to talk to your Jewish friend about Jesus and they don’t want to hear it at all?

“It doesn’t mean that you brought it up and you never should have done that because now you have offended your friend and so on – that’s a loyal, Jewish response. In fact, in a sense, the Jewish ‘no’ to Jesus is viewed as a ‘yes’ to God.

So what can we do?

“It’s really powerful for a Jewish person to hear your personal testimony. You have to give your testimony to a Jewish person because they need to see that what they were raised to believe – that Christians are born Christians and Jews are born Jews – is not the truth. They need to see that anybody can remain who they are ethnically and nationally and have their lives transformed from the inside out.”

Loving our Jewish friends