October 2009

Shalom Dear Friends,

OVERWHELMED!!

We are experiencing a wonderful trial and problem at HaDavar’s School of Biblical and Jewish studies. We are being overwhelmed by the student response to our new classes. 147 students have enrolled in the Book of Daniel. Almost every seat in the morning class is filled, and we are in the overflow area during the evening class. We guessed that it would be a big class, but we had no idea how big! Chiara and Paul and Bob have been really hopping to get the class material ready for everyone. This is the largest class we have ever had. This is a great problem to cope with!

The class covering Messianic Prophecy is being well received too. We have already distributed all of the class material we produced for that class, and we are producing a few extra notebooks for the new arrivals as they dribble in.

Please pray for our student population: 1) That attendance would remain high with a minimum of dropouts in spite of crowded conditions, 2) that our instructors would be empowered by the Lord to clearly teach the material, 3) that our students would assimilate the Holy Word of God deep in their souls, and 4) that our students would then effectively share what they have learned – to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16).

We minister in an area of dense Jewish population. Most of our students have Jewish contacts at work, in their families, or in their neighborhoods. Most Jewish people come to faith through one-on-one conversations with their friends. Pray for an effective outreach through our students!

A prime example of what we are talking about is Malcolm's mother. I mentioned her in my Passover Report in the June newsletter. She is one of the Jewish people who attended Bob’s Passover Seders this year. Malcolm’s mother came to our Passover Seder and enjoyed it. Malcolm picked up a copy of our Passover Seder on DVD and gave it to her. Through attending a Messianic Passover Seder in person, and then by reviewing the Seder on DVD, she has come to faith in her Messiah.

Incidentally, to emphasize the fact that our supporters are truly a part of our ministry team, I want to point out that the DVD Malcolm’s mother watched was filmed by Powell Butte Christian Church during one of my Messianic Passover Seders. We edited the raw footage into one streamlined DVD and reproduced it. It was one of those DVD’s that Malcolm’s mom watched and led to her salvation. Thanks PBCC for your contribution to her salvation.

UCI BOOK TABLE

When you receive this newsletter, we will be well into the fall quarter setting up our Bible book table on the campus of University of California Irvine. However, I want to backtrack for a moment and tell you that we had an exciting conclusion to summer quarter. On Friday August 21, 2009, we set up our tables and canopy. We had hardly gotten set up and two young girl students came up, and we engaged them in conversation. Before too long they had both accepted Jesus as their Savior. We were overjoyed and commented on what a great start to the day that was! But God was not through with us just yet. Before noon had rolled around, two more young men had been led to the Lord as well. We were amazed. Four professions of faith in less than two hours! There is fruit to be harvested on the UCI campus! Please continue to pray for our ongoing UCI outreach.

INTERNET OUTREACH

It has been quite a while since I mentioned our Internet outreach. We are currently attempting to redesign and update our website. Statistically, over the past year our website experienced 41,690 visits. We are no competition for Amazon.com, but our humble website is reaching people all over the world. Please pray that we would be able to update and expand out Internet outreach, especially into foreign languages. We want to have our website available in the major Jewish languages of the day: English, Hebrew, Spanish, and Russian, as well as in other languages spoken by the far-flung worldwide Jewish community.

THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES

The Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) is celebrated from Friday October 2, 2009 until Saturday October 10, 2009. Send your Jewish friends a greeting card. They will appreciate it, and you might get to tell them about the Messiahship of Jesus (Yeshua).

Thanks for being part of our ministry team.