Over many years of studying what was going on with the apostle Paul between Acts 12 and 21, I have discovered that the apostle Paul also had to stay after the churches to keep their collection for the believers in Israel going. Paul had to write them not to be slack about it because it would ultimately turn to their benefit to bestow this gift upon the persecuted believers in Israel - to keep them going in their ministry to the people of Israel.
I believe this is a revelation hidden in nuggets of accounts in Acts and comments made by Paul in his letters to the churches. It is a hidden truth that is reserved for God to reveal in the times that Israel is being saved.
I also believe that this season of the salvation of the Jews is upon us, and even as progressively God is revealing the identity of the Messiah to more and more Jews, on a parallel level He is revealing to individual Christians that we are called to support the Israeli Jewish ministries laboring in Yeshua's harvest.
Probably not many on this mailing list, but many Christians would stop reading right there. Like every other significant revelation of God, there is great resistance to this understanding with long standing excuses why Christians don't accept the significance of the Israeli Body of Messiah in this hour. There are the excuses of those who say God no longer has special purposes within the modern nation of Israel and on the polar opposite side there are those who believe the modern nation of Israel is key to the last days but deny the significance of the fledgling Body of Messiah that exists within it.
Both are wrong, of course, regardless of how well built up the wall of denial is.
The 15,000-something Jewish believers in Israel are THE MOST significant sign that plan of God is nearing completion that there is in the world today.
Until the Church starts picking up all the "bread crumbs" that the apostle Paul dropped between the time frame of Acts 12 and 21, we are actually delaying the unfolding of powerful harvest blessings that will also be released on the Church by the fulfillment of blessing the Israeli Body of Messiah.
Paul set his face like flint to model this as the way the Gentile Church should relate to Body of Messiah in Israel. He was prophetically modeling it and perhaps more than he realized it was more for our day than even for his own day.
Paul's last trip to Israel to carry the donations that were made over a several years period to the BELIEVERS in Israel, was accompanied by ambassadors from each of the regional churches ...as well as prophetic warnings that Paul would lose his freedom by fulfilling his mission. He did it anyway.
It was that important. It was important for our day because this is season when the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled and the re-grafting of Israel into their own olive tree has commenced.
