Saved from Death and All

When I was a young believer, like many others around me, I was struggling with my faith. I wasn’t struggling with what I believed; my commitment to what I believed was rock solid. I didn’t come to faith in Yeshua easily – on a whim and a prayer. I had studied and prayed for more than nine months until I was absolutely convinced that He was, in fact, the promised Messiah.

My struggle wasn’t about whether Yeshua was the real Messiah or not. My struggle was really whether I was going to choose to live my life as if I truly believed He was the Messiah. Or, whether I was going to become what Yeshua called a “whitewashed sepulcher.”

You see, when I determined that Yeshua was the Messiah, I was unbelievably excited. I had found the Pearl of Great Price. I had found the One whom my people had been longing for, waiting for, and dreaming about for thousands of years. I was on an emotional high stronger than anything I had ever felt in my life. I felt a deep love for all things G-D, wanted to study His Word, and worship Him with all my heart. I couldn’t wait to get off work so that I could run to a Bible study or worship service.

But the truth is, while I was a true believer in Yeshua as my Messiah, and I had been immersed and Spirit-filled, I was still carrying the weight and burdens of my life with me everywhere I went. Those burdens were standing between me and Yeshua in a way that kept me from being free.

At that time, I was only 19 years old, and I dragged behind me, not only my own hurts, but also the hurts of my people since the days of Abraham.

To provide a little clarity: as a child, up until my Bar Mitzvah, I attended Hebrew school which basically taught me three things: first, that I was a Jew; second, the language and liturgy of my people; and third, the history of the persecution of my people simply for being Jewish. We learned about Egyptian slavery, Babylonian captivity, the Roman occupation, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and, of course, the Russian pogroms and the Nazi Final Solution.

When you add the painful history of my people to my own painful history—which included the death of my grandfather when I was very young, the death of my father when I was seven, and my time in the Navy (which I had planned to make a lifelong career but was cut short because of a wrongly diagnosed illness resulting in my eardrum rupturing, my removal from flight status, an honorable discharge, and the complete destruction of my plans for my life)—you can understand the weight I carried.

So there I was, caught between my newly acquired and genuine love for G-D in my heart and the intense brokenness in my mind.

At first, I tried to just pray it away. But, because my prayers were more like complaint sessions directed at G-D, that really didn’t help. I spoke to the leaders of my congregation, but they either didn’t seem to understand, or they simply couldn’t understand what I was trying to convey to them. Their answers seemed to be things like, “You just have to stop thinking about the past and start living in the present,” or, “I know it’s tough, but you just need to fake it until you make it.”

So, being a young believer, I tried to follow their advice. I tried to stop thinking about those things in my mind that were very real and very deep hurts, but the more I tried not to think about them, the more I thought about them. Clearly, that wasn’t working for me at all.

So I tried the “fake it until you make it” strategy, which honestly made me feel like I was being advised to pretend that I believed what I didn’t truly believe, in the hope that by pretending long enough and hard enough, it would somehow become real.

Then one morning, I was listening to the radio, and a song came on by Michael and Stormie Omartian titled Dr. Jesus. These are the lyrics to the song:

Dr. Jesus, it hurts so bad right here, 

Would you be so kind 

To check here deep inside my heart 

And just below my mind.

Yes, I've had this pain for quite awhile, 

A lifetime I believe. 

I've tried everything I know of, 

And it never seems to leave.

I've heard you're the only specialist 

Who ever had the cure. 

The others only cover up 

A wound that's always there.

You come highly recommended; 

In fact, millions of people say 

If you want to be saved from death and all, 

You've got the only way.

The words seemed to penetrate my heart in a way nothing else had been able to do. The song felt personal, and as I considered the words, I noticed several things I had never thought of before.

The person in the song believed in Yeshua and was praying, yet he still had a lifetime full of wounds that others could only tell him how to cover up while the wounds themselves remained. This was the prayer I wanted to cry out, but I didn’t know it was available to me.

But the part that truly drove the message home to me was the line that said Yeshua didn’t just save from death—Yeshua could save from “all.”

Up until the moment I heard those words, I believed that Yeshua came to save me from sin and death, which was true, but incomplete. Yeshua didn’t want to just save me from death; He wanted to save me from all.

As I heard the words to that song, I realized that while I had asked Yeshua to forgive me of my sins and save me from death and Hell, I had never asked Him to perform surgery on my heart and mind—to heal or remove all the hurts I had been carrying on my shoulders.

I would love to say that once I heard that song and prayed that prayer, I was instantly healed of every hurt and wound, but that isn’t true. Over the years, I have had to go back often for more supernatural surgeries as I discovered old wounds I didn’t realize were still there.

But I will say this: every time I have found a new old wound or a new new wound and made an appointment with the Doctor, He has always healed my heart.

I think the Psalmist understood this concept when he wrote the words we read in Psalm 51:12:

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, 

and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”