Today as I was looking back at my life, I remembered the only dream I had when I was a boy—to live to be 20. I didn’t think I would make it that long. I had a speech impediment. I had an ulcer. I was afraid of everything. My dad abused me horribly. I didn’t see any hope for the future. My classmates at school laughed at me when I said that my dream was to be 20, but I meant it…I just never thought it would come true.
I was 11 years old the night I tried to defend my mother from my father’s abuse. In response, he strangled me and left me for dead in our home. That was the night everything changed in my life…that was the night I saw the Lord face to face.
I saw those amazing eyes, smiling, with every color of the rainbow in them. And I could see eternity through those eyes. I saw the nail scars—not in the palms, but high in the wrist. And I heard the most amazing words I had never heard in my life before. The first one was, “Son.” My father never called me that. The second one was, “I love you.” My father never told me that. And the third one was, “I have a great plan for your life.”
From that moment on, I have dreamed, not of surviving, but of fulfilling God’s purpose for my life. And I want you to know how grateful I am to Him for bringing you into my life and for you being part of the amazing work to defend Israel that is the Jerusalem Prayer Team.
You are my family. I don’t know if you truly realize how much I mean that, but I do with all my heart. Everything God has done through me and this ministry He has been done also through you, my beloved partner.
Today God has directed me to speak His Word over your life regarding your dreams. I’ve got a jar of mustard seeds on my desk right now that came from Israel. Mustard seeds are amazing—really small—and Jesus said that just that tiny amount of faith would be able to move mountains.
What are you dreaming about today? Does the world tell you your dream is impossible? Do sincere friends tell you it can’t happen? Are you about to give up?
DON’T STOP DREAMING!
DON’T EVER GIVE UP
ON YOUR DREAMS!
Nothing is impossible with God. No disease is incurable. No relationship is beyond healing. No financial need is insurmountable. No child or grandchild is beyond God’s deliverance. No dream that God places in your heart is over as long as you live.
I could fill a book with stories, but let me share just one with you to show you how God can bring dreams to reality. In July of 1980, I met with Prime Minister Menachem Begin in his office in Jerusalem. The meeting itself was a miracle. There was no reason for the leader of the Jewish state to meet with an unknown Gospel minister from America. But God opened the door, and the meeting happened.
He asked me, “Why did you come?” three times in a half hour. I repeated the question instead of answering it. When he insisted, I finally said, “I don’t know. I know God sent me, but He didn’t tell me why.” Mr. Begin laughed and said, “You’re an honest man. You believe God sent you but you don’t know why. Shake my hand. I finally met an honest man. When God tells you why come back and tell me.” That was on my birthday, June 30, 1980.
By the time I left Israel to come home, I had met Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time on July 4th, 1980, told him that he would one day be Prime Minister of Israel (he laughed because he wasn’t in politics back then) and on July 5th, I asked Mr. Begin to give Benjamin Netanyahu his first position in the government, which he did.
That day I also told the Prime Minister that God wanted me to build a bridge between Bible-believing Christians and Jews and the world headquarters would be in Jerusalem—a place where true Christian love could be shown to the whole House of Israel in an unmistakable way. Many years passed, and though that dream never left my heart, it didn’t seem like it was getting any closer to becoming reality.
I never gave up on that dream though. Jesus told me when I was 11, “I have a great plan for your life,” and I knew Israel was that plan. My call is to pastor the nation of Israel.
But God was working in his timing, and in 2012, He opened the door for us to purchase the building that is now home to the Friends of Zion Museum, and the first building on what became our Friends of Zion Center campus. This wonderful facility, located just 600 meters from the Temple Mount, is a lighthouse of Christian love brighter than anything since the first century. It is an embassy where the nation of Israel and the nations of the world gather.
I knew that for the Friends of Zion Center to reach its full potential, we would need to establish credibility with the people of Israel. God laid it on my heart to reach out to Shimon Peres, the ninth president of Israel and ask him to serve as our international chairman.
I’ll never forget what he told me. “Mike, my staff didn’t want me to work with you, so they investigated you. One of the things they found out that you were named after your great-grandfather, Rabbi Michael Katz-Nelson. But here’s what you don’t know. My hero in everything, I did in my life was my grandfather, Rabbi Metzner. He was my Talmud teacher before we moved to Israel.”
“He was my hero…but he also had a hero—and it was your great-grandfather! He was the cantor in the synagogue where your great-grandfather was the rabbi. Both of them were burnt to death with 2,000 other Jews locked in the wooden synagogue in Vishnef, Belarus. You and I are family. We both go back to that wooden synagogue. We are partners.”
I had the privilege of working with President Peres until he passed away. That was a miracle that could only have happened because God scripted it and made it happen. And He did that so that the dream He had placed in my heart decades before could come to life. Twenty-five world leaders have now received the Friends of Zion Award that Shimon Peres commissioned, including President Trump when I presented it to him in the Oval Office.
Now God is opening a new door for us—the fulfillment of a dream. When we opened the Friends of Zion Center in 2015, on the wall was the name Ambassador Institute. We’ve been pursuing that dream through setbacks and delays, through COVID and wars, and now God is bringing it to pass!
