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About our speaker:
JOAN LIPIS grew up in a Jewish home. While her family wasn’t “religious,” they
identified themselves as Jews. Unlike
her family, Joan knew God existed, but didn’t know what she actually believed
about Him.
During her university years she began to attend various
churches, but it was more for social rather than for spiritual reasons. Finally she began to get serious about being
and living as a religious Jew. “I learned to keep a kosher home (maintaining
four sets of dishes) and studied about the many Jewish holidays.
By the time she was 40, Joan’s life was, in her words, “a
mess” including a failed marriage, broken relationships, and various career
changes. “I knew it was the bottom when
I entered the Mental Health Ward of a local hospital. ” There rage gave way to the pain she’d been
stuffing for years.
“It was then that I remembered Psalm 121. I challenged God with His own words. ‘Well, I’m Israel, and I’m here….where are
You?’”
God was there and heard her.
Within a year He’d sent a messenger, a business man dressed in a three
piece suit, to tell her about Jesus.
When she saw a reenactment of the crucifixion and heard the words of
Isaiah 53, she understood the Gospel.
Suddenly the Jewish holidays of Passover and Yom Kippur made sense. Jesus was the fulfillment of everything
Jewish.
Joan was born again April 20, 1986, baptized in August and
was graduated from Western Seminary in Portland Oregon four years later.
“As a believer and as a Jew, God’s call upon me is clear: fill
the earth with the knowledge of His glory – Jesus the Messiah.’”
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