Marty Goetz: "JESUS isn't some dead guy on a cross! He's my MESSIAH!"
So where I grew up it was a - I would say - 90% Jewish neighborhood, 'Yemei hahanukkah, Hanukkat mikdashenu begil uvesimha memal-im et libenu, laila vaiom svivonenu yisov, sufganiyot nokhal bam larov.' It was great, but we were surrounded in Cleveland, Ohio, by non-Jewish people.
I remember on Christmas we would go into this place in Cleveland, it had the best Christmas lights of anybody, and my mom would say, there’s a lot of anti-Semites in this [neighborhood] and I didn’t know one Christian from another, but I knew that there were Christians and Jews, Gentiles and Jews, there was us and there was them.
So from Cleveland I went away to college - Carnegie Mellon University, and I auditioned for a show, and I remember my audition because my favorite song to play ‘Georgia on My Mind’ by Ray Charles. Well, I got the job, and went and did summer stock theater and caught the show business bug, and all through college, 'Bert and Marty' played in local clubs, local cabarets, everything was good, we were up in the Catskill mountains, the Borscht belt we won the best new act when we were up there the first year, we thought we were on our way.
And then Bert, who was a Methodist, decided he wanted a little deeper faith so he went to this church and when he came back (it was called The Rock Church), he said, “I am born again!” I had no idea what that was. I did know that Jimmy Carter was born again, but Bert now was a born again Christian. And after that, it just got terrible, because he was telling me all the time about Jesus.
He didn’t care about Bert and Marty anymore, he only cared about Jesus. And he began to preach to me and life got very irritating because Jews do not believe in Jesus.
I was a young guy, I was like 25 years old. I wanted to meet girls and I wanted to hang out late at night. And by this time I was smoking a little marijuana, and you know, I just wanted to be one of those cool guys in the late 70s just making my way in the world.
But I was provoked to a lot of anger about Bert believing in Jesus, because every time I’d see him that’s all he could talk about. He loved me, he cared about me, I cared about him, but he freaked me out.
I didn’t want to know about all those things, but he was praying for me, all his friends were praying for me. I knew that. They would even come to see me in my piano bars every once in a while, but it bothered me so much that I bought myself a Bible, and I said, 'I’m going to have to crack this code, and I started reading about it.' Didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but I need to know who is this Jesus and why do all these people believe in Him.
The more I thought about them, the angrier I got and the more frustrated I got, and I said, 'I’ve got to get away from them.' So I said, 'I’ve got to get out of New York, I’ve got go where people are normal.'
So I moved to Los Angeles, California, of course. And got to Los Angeles, still bothered by all this, but on the way I had picked up a big family Bible in my parents’ house in Cleveland, and I would go in the morning to try and peddle my songs that I was writing. And in the afternoon I’d open up that big Bible, and I’d open it up and I finally got the courage to open up to what’s called the New Testament.
And it says, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, and I thought, “That’s strange, that’s Jewish. I know about those people”. And I kept reading, and the more I read, the more I realized, Jesus is Jewish. As a matter of fact, the more I read about Him, He turned out to me more Jewish than I was, and He wasn’t ... He seemed to come alive off of those pages. He wasn’t like that dead Jesus on a cross at my friend Kevin’s house, or in the church - He was alive, and Ge was Jewish.
So living in Los Angeles, at the same time I had just moved there was Annie, Bert’s friend from the church he attended in New York. She was a born again Christian, she’d been praying for me for years ... We became friendly.
And one day I was visiting her she had to go to a Bible study, so she said, “Stay here, watch my apartment, while I go to this Bible study” And I said ok, and I’m thinking about all this stuff that’s going on, and I look out over her balcony, overlooking the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and there shining with this bright, bright, white light, was a cross, right through the window. And I just end up staring at it and thinking to myself, “Is Jesus after me?”
Annie returns, and tries to explain to me, “Yes, God is calling you, Marty!” And it was all too much for me, but Annie was persistent, so she said, “We’re going to go to the beach on Sunday, and we’re going to hear this guy preach”, I said ok. So the guy’s name was Hal Lindsey, and he preached a message, and people were sitting there on the beach, hands raised, singing songs to Jesus, and at the end of the message, Hal Lindsey says, “Brother Gideon, come on up here, we’re going to take communion together.”
So Gideon gets up there and he takes the bread and he says, “Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha Olam motze lechem min ha’aretz”. And he says over the wine, “...boray pri hagefen” and he says the Hebrew prayer over the bread and the wine and it was completely unsettling to me.
I did not expect the prayer I had learned when I was a little kid growing up in Cleveland to be said on the beach in Los Angeles in the name of Jesus… very upset. So I said to Annie, “I’ve gotta get out of here, please take me home”, and she said, “Ok, I’ll take you home,” because I was really unsettled by the whole thing.
And I remember I’m almost like in a fetal position curled up in the back of her car, freaking out, so shaken up by what I’m experiencing. And she says, “Marty, I’m sorry to tell you this, I can’t take you home because I gotta go to this other church, it’s called The Vineyard, and if I don’t go now I’ll be late”, so I said, “Ok, ok”.
By this time I didn’t know what to think so I said, “Take me, take me”, so she takes me there and they do another service, and people are singing, hands raised, just like at the beach. And at the end of the service I remember thinking, “You know what, I really believe that whoever this Jesus is, He is after me”, because they gave the invitation and I just said, “I give up, I surrender, I’m a sinner, I need a saviour. I need Jesus”.
When I first came to the Lord, it was just, "Is Jesus Jewish? Is he the Messiah? Or not?" Well, he showed me that he was. But over the years he’s also revealed to me many things in my own soul, in my own life that need to be pruned, need to be trimmed, that need to be submitted.
And I’m not the man I was when I first came to him. He’s taking away a lot of my self-centeredness, and my pride and my ego, and all through these years he’s… somebody said to me when I first became a believer, “Marty, he’s going to get better and better and better”.
And you know what I have found that, the older I get, the more I see how I did not deserve to be brought to Him. I didn’t deserve for him to come to me and give me his life for my life.
Source:
- Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. - (John 14:6).
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