Rabbi Schneider - Jesus Appeared in My Room. This Changed Everything!
How does a Jewish boy living in a Jewish neighborhood, attending a Jewish school end up being one of the most impactful preachers of Jesus to the world? Rabbi Schneider's messages reach millions of people through social media, television, radio, and on the ground festivals all over Israel, Africa, Brazil, Haiti, Ukraine, and more. Whether Rabbi is sharing with tens of thousands, praying for presidents and governmental leaders, or witnessing to just one on the streets of New York City, God's love and miraculous power is seen and experienced all around his life. Having one of the most unique perspectives on the gospel today, he has connected thousands to the roots of Christianity. But his journey to worldwide influence is not what many would expect. His vision of Jesus resulted in him being kidnapped, hospitalized, and rejected. It's a road paved with joy, pain, and adventure. Here is his story.
Well, I grew up in a very Jewish environment. My mom and dad are both Jewish. I was Bar Mitzvah in a conservative synagogue. So the environment that I grew up in was very Jewish. I always believed in God. From my earliest memory, I had a love for God. As a little boy, I mean, I just remembered God's presence in my life. But I never equated that to the Jewish religion. I had no Christian influence in my life growing up. And even in my later years, when my family moved to a more inclusive kind of area, I still found myself in a Jewish bubble, because all my close friends were Jews. As I started growing a little older, I started feeling insecure inside, I started realizing that there was a lot of things in the world that were dangerous, and that adults didn't have all the answers. And without realizing it, what I did was I buried myself in a sport where I was in control, because that allowed me to block out all the things in my life that made me uncomfortable.
And so as long as I focused in and zoned in on that, I felt great. But the problem was when wrestling ended, after I walked off the wrestling mat, that was after my last match in high school, suddenly, it was like the world was pulled out from underneath my feet. Even though I had a small scholarship to wrestle at the University of Tampa, I knew it didn't mean a thing anymore. Now it was up to me to begin to build a life and leave my family. My friends went away to different colleges. I was on my own now. And wrestling I realized was not really the reality that made me feel secure or that protected me anymore. So I went into my first year of college very, very much struggling and messed up. In fact, I spent as much time as I could sleeping just to try to escape the emotional torment I was in. I kept asking myself, "What can I do to give myself that sense of peace and contentment and just the bliss I felt when I was winning at wrestling"? I said, "What can I do to get that feeling back"? In desperation, I decided that maybe if I make a lot of money it'll help to ease some of the pain. So I dropped out of college to open up a discotheque.
Now this was in the 1970s. Disco was huge in America at the time. You know, it was the age of the crystal ball, and John Travolta and disco fever. And I know in Cleveland, when disco broke out, you go to the big discotheque and there would be like a line of people four blocks long just waiting to get in the door. So I said, "Wow, this is just taken off. If I build a discotheque in the right neighborhood, this is gonna be a home run". So my plan was to get friends of the family to invest in the discotheque, and then I would manage it and be part owner. But the first riddle that I needed to solve in that equation was finding the right location. And so finding the right location meant that I had to travel around the country. But the problem was I didn't have any money to travel around the country.
So I decided to raise some money. I would sell encyclopedias door to door. Eventually, I became a sales manager for P. F. Collier. I had my own team of guys that I trained. And things were going pretty well. I went to a meeting one night with the other sales managers and it turned out that this other sales manager and I were the first ones there and we were alone waiting for the others to arrive. And so we began to talk and he started telling me about a book he had been reading called Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. He told me about this Yogi that could levitate off the ground. He said there was a guy in the book three feet off the ground suspended in midair. Simply because he was thinking about God in this yoga state, he kind of transcended the material reality. And he said the same Yogi was able to beat up tigers with his bare hands.
And because I experienced such euphoria when I would win big wrestling matches, when I thought about this guy levitating off the ground, I said to myself, "That's the bliss that wrestling gave me. That's what I want to feel again". So I went out and bought the book. I started devouring the book. And about halfway through the book, I went to sleep one night, and that particular night, I had the worst headache I'd ever experienced in my life. In the middle of the night, that night, the Lord awoken me from my sleep. Suddenly, I became aware that I was aware. It was a supernatural awareness. My eyes were still closed but I realized something was going on. And then instantly, in color, Jesus appeared to me on the cross. I could see the ground that the cross was staked in. There was people in the distance looking at Him as He was on the cross.
And then a ray of red light from straight through the sky beamed down on Jesus' head. When I saw that ray of red light beam down in His head in this experience, I knew that the light was coming from God, since it was coming from straight through the heavens, from straight above, and I knew that the person on the cross was Jesus. As an American, no one had ever told me about Jesus. No one had ever witnessed to me. No one had ever shared the message of the gospel with me. All my friends growing up were Jewish. My closest friends were all Jewish. I knew nothing about Jesus. I never thought about Him. He was as far away to me as the man on the moon. Jesus, to me, it was like something that was just like unkosher and something you know, for Gentiles, something that I had no experience with, and no desire to be exposed to. But when God broke into my room that night, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had just encountered the Lord, and He was showing me that Jesus was the way to Him.
So in an instant, it lasted no more than two seconds tops, hope came into my heart. I knew in an instant that God was alive, that it was real, that He had just broken into my life, and that there was a way out of where I was. I looked at my clock radio right after the vision, it was 3:30 in the morning. I then went to the restroom, got back in my bed, fell back asleep. The next morning, I woke up, I was excited. I knew that I just found the way. I didn't even know what the way was. I didn't know doctrine. I didn't know about sin. I just knew that God had just revealed Himself to me that Jesus was the way and somehow I could have victory over everything in Him. So I was excited. I started telling my family about it. We had never talked about Jesus in my home. So I had no idea what I was about to run into as a Jew in a Jewish family in a Jewish neighborhood believing in Jesus. I was completely naive.
I told my parents, my brother, "I had a vision. Jesus appeared to me last night". They didn't react much at first. They probably thought it was a dream, we probably just shouldn't say anything about it. But I kept on talking about it. I kept on talking about. I started telling everybody that I knew about it. I knew a lot of people. I was a popular kid in high school. So eventually I told somebody that was a Gentile and it turns out he was a Christian, which I didn't know at the time. I told him about the experience. He said to me, "Well, you should go get a New Testament".
So I went to the store, I got a New Testament. I started devouring the Word of God. The words in the New Testament were like fire to me. And they were like coming off the pages of Scripture going into my soul. And I go up to my dad, I'd say, "Dad, look at this". I thought this was the coolest thing in the world. And he looked at me, like, you know, completely disengaged from the whole thing. And eventually, they became so concerned about me that I was going off the deep end that they hired the most famous deprogrammer in the world at the time. My dad set me up for this experience. He told me that we were going to look into a restaurant that were potentially going to be buying this restaurant, that we were going to be in business together.
So I get in the car with him when the day came for us to talk to the business people about buying the restaurant. We drove to a hotel for the supposed meeting. We went up into a regular hotel room, knock on the door, distinguished-looking man in a three-piece suit opens the door. He's got two big goons, two big bodyguards with them. I walk in, my parents walk in, one of the bodyguards closes the door behind me, and the head deprogrammer, Ted Patrick looks at me and he says, "Kirt, we're going to talk about cults". And they had a projector set up in there and a screen. They flipped on a film of the Hare Krishna's, and he said, "Do you see that little 3-year-old kid in that film? We can't do anything for that kid. That's all that kid has ever known his whole life. But you, you've been living for 20 years like a normal person and I'm going to snap you out of this". And he said, "You've been reading the most dangerous book in the world, the Bible, giving away all your money, going to church every day of the week".
I stood up, I said, "I'm not programmed. I just believe that Jesus is the Messiah". He said, "Well, you've got nothing to worry about then". I said, "Well, can I leave"? One of the bodyguards said, "Sit down"! So I knew I wasn't going anywhere. So I said, "Well, can I go use the restroom"? So they said, "Yeah, you can go in the restroom". So I walked into the restroom and I got down on my knees, and I just said, "Father, I don't know where this is going to take me, but I ask you to keep me through this". So I came out of the restroom, they continued their spiel about how they're going to snap me out of this, etc. Then they take me back to my home. The goon came with me to my home. He was basically there to physically restrain me and take me to California. I mean, I literally was abducted.
And the next day he and I, through no choice of my own, obviously, we get in my van, and we drive to their rehabilitation home in California. Basically, it was like a place where they took me to the beach in the day and the bar at night. And then after about two weeks or so, it was like, "What what's going on here"? I'm thinking to myself. "What is this about"? I mean, there's no assault coming at me. "You should". They just basically took me to the beach in the day, in the bars at night. And after several weeks, they took me to a Ted Patrick's home. And I said, "Can I leave now"? And he said, "Yeah, you can leave now".
Next day they gave me back my stuff and I drove back home. I actually felt bad for my parents, because I knew that that cost them a ton of money and I realized, you know, it didn't change anything. And I knew that they were hurting because they didn't know what was going on. They lost their son, they didn't know what the heck happened to him. And so I felt very bad about that. And I didn't hold that against them at the time at all. But I did try to be a little bit wiser in how I conducted myself. But there was so much zeal in me. My faith was so alive that it was still a huge upset for my family, my friends, all of them. They felt like they didn't know me anymore.
My parents then decided to take another move to try to get me out of wherever they thought I was. Number one, it was very shameful for my parents because to have a Jewish son in a Jewish neighborhood walking around talking about Jesus is as shameful as if your son or daughter was in jail. Jewish people associate Jesus and Christianity with the people that have persecuted them for thousands of years. Many times Jewish people look at Hitler and Jesus as being part of the same team, because when 6 million Jews were put to death under Nazi Germany, the churches had pictures of Hitler hanging on the walls. So Jewish people, to them, Jesus is... you know, He's not a friend. And so when I started walking around talking about Jesus, my parents were very embarrassed and very ashamed. Plus, they thought something was probably wrong with me because they knew that I was struggling after wrestling ended. They knew I was lost and searching for meaning and broken. And so all of a sudden, when I got Jesus, it's like, "He's gone crazy".
So what they did when the deprogramming didn't work, they found a Jewish psychiatrist. And I believe they found him with the agreed-upon mandate of getting me probated to the psychiatric ward of a famous Hospital in Cleveland called Mount Sinai so they could have a chance of once again, quote, "deprogramming me," or getting me back to what they thought was normal. But certainly, that would involve giving up Jesus. So one day this Jewish psychiatry comes over, we sit down at my kitchen table, and I was still fairly cooperative with my parents. I mean, I wasn't like combative, it's like it's an opportunity for me to tell this Jewish psychiatrist all that Jesus has done for me.
So I still remember like it was a week ago, we sit down at my kitchen table, he's sitting over here, I'm sitting down over here, and I just begin to tell this Jewish psychiatry what would have happened to me if Jesus hadn't saved me. I was starting to feel strong again. I was starting to feel a foundation under my feet again. And so I just let it all out and told him what Jesus had done for me. The conversation ended peacefully, he thanked me for sharing my story with him. I then left my home. So I went over to my Christian friends' house, and I was like elated. I had some pride in me. And I literally told my Christian friends, "I made minced meat out to the psychiatrist. I mean, I laid Jesus on him".
Meantime, a few days later, I come home and I walk in the door and I notice off to the side are suitcases that are all packed. And I look at the suitcases. My parents are standing there. He says, "Look out the window over there". And he points to the parking lot of the apartment complex we were in. He said, "You see that police car in the parking lot. You can either come with us peaceably to Mount Sinai Hospital, or the police are gonna come in here and forcibly take you".
And in those days on his own witness, without any other evidence, psychiatrists could go to the court system and say we need to probate this person. So my parents were successful through this psychiatrist of getting me probated to the psychiatric ward of Mount Sinai Hospital, hoping that after being there for two months, somehow I would come out delivered from this illusion and delusion of Jesus. But of course, that wasn't to be because I was supernaturally saved by the Lord. It was a very, very dark time, though, one of the darkest times of my life. I couldn't go anywhere. I was trapped in the psychiatric ward. I couldn't leave. There was a lot of people there that were really oppressed. It was a very dark place.
After two months, the law stated that anybody that had been probated there against their will would have an opportunity after two months to go before a board of psychiatrist and represent themselves. And so at two months, they brought me before a board of psychiatrist. I talked about who I was, about my journey, about where I was as a person, and they instantly released me saying, "You know, we don't have any right to hold him against his will". So, being released from the psychiatric ward, I went home. And it was difficult, getting out of the psychiatric ward and going back home. But my parents, meantime, by this point, they were just disgusted with me. They had tried everything. They wanted to get free from the shame that I was bringing them. And when nothing they had done worked, at this point I think my dad was just disgusted and angry at me. It ended up we got in a fight in my home, my dad and I, he threw me out of the home.
I got an apartment. I'm in the apartment, I'm working for an electrician, I go back to my apartment I've got no future job-wise. after work one day, and I said, "Lord, what am I doing in Cleveland anymore? I mean, I've got no friends here. My family has disowned me. What am I doing here, Lord? I just want to start over, with just is you and I. I've got no future job-wise here, so what am I doing here, Lord? I just want to start over, with just is you and I". I said, "Father, I'm going to take a map of the United States and I'm going to flip the quarter. And wherever that quarter lands, Lord, that's where I'm going to go. I'm just going to start a new life, just You and me together. Not even tell anybody where I'm going".
So I took that quarter, flipped it in the air, it landed on this little place called Park Rapids, Minnesota. It's so little. I don't even know why it was on the map. But the next day, I loaded up my orange AMC Gremlin, and I headed out towards Park Rapids, Minnesota, on the freeway with stars in my eyes, just imagining what the Lord and I were going to do together. And finally, I get to Park Rapids, Minnesota and it was like a ghost town. There was no jobs there. I said, "I gotta get out or I'm gonna run out of money soon. I've got no work, no job". So I said, "Where's the warmest place I can get to so when I run out of money, I'll be able to survive".
So I figured how many gallons of gas I could buy with the amount of money that I had. And then I took out a map and I figured that the warmest place I could get to was Corpus Christi, Texas. So I get in my car, start heading down to Corpus Christi. And I feel I have enough money for one last meal. So I stopped in Kansas City, Missouri and I went into the restaurant for my last meal. And after my last meal, it's like, "All right, that was it, my last meal. I'm excited. I'm on the last leg of the journey". I get in my car and the car wouldn't start. So it's like, "What am I going to do? I got to get my car fixed, but then I won't have enough money to get to Corpus Christi".
So I figured I need to get a job quick. So went across the street, went to a few restaurants there, I kept running into the same problem. I started filling out the application. And then it would come to "What's your phone number? And where are you living"? I would call the manager over, the assistant manager when I got to that section. I said, "I'm not going to be able to fill out where I'm living and the phone number because I'm living across the street in my car in the Sambo's parking lot". So after that happened a couple of times, I realized no one was going to hire me without an address and without a phone number. So I figured, "You know what? I got to come up with a new plan". So I went to the next stage of radicalness. I said Lord, "I'm turning it all over to you. I'm going to give away my car. I'm going to give away everything but the clothes on my back. I'm going to throw out my glasses".
And my eyes were so bad. I kid you not. If you're standing five feet in front of me. I would not have been able to see your eyes. I would look at your face and all I would see would be like a collage of color. But I said, "Lord, I'm going to trust you to heal me". I went to my waitress that had waited on me, I said, "Listen, my car's in the parking lot. I don't know exactly what's wrong with it, but I'd like to give you my car. Here's the keys". I gave her my car keys, and then I went to the freeway, I started hitchhiking. I was gonna hitchhike to California where I was gonna fast like Jesus for 40 days and 40 nights.
So I'm hitchhiking on the road towards California. First night, no one had picked me up. I literally slept on the side of the freeway in the weeds. Second day, no one picks me up. I literally slept that night on a plastic bench in an all-night sports coliseum by a bowling alley. Third day, start hitchhiking, somebody picks me up. This Shark Camaro pulls over. Guy opens a door and tells me to get in. I get in the car. And the guy tells me he's going to see his neighbor from Florida that had moved to Amarillo, Texas, and owns a restaurant there. And if I want to come with them, he said, he'll get me a job. So I figured it wasn't like I had a definite plan. I thought, "Well, maybe this is the Lord. Maybe this is what I'm supposed to do". So I said, "Okay".
So this guy's talking to me, he starts telling me about that he wants to be in the import-export business. And he says, "Maybe we'll be in business together". That was a nice enough guy it seemed. He bought me a meal. We made it to his friend's condominium in Amarillo. Friend put me up for the night, gave me a little money in advance, and walked to work from my little room and the YMCA to the restaurant. I don't know how long it took me. It was probably three miles. And I'm working in the restaurant as a line cook. But by line cook, I mean that there's a wheel where the tickets are and I was like, down 10 feet from the line.
So I'm working at the restaurant, I'm living at the YMCA, I've been there for about a week, two weeks. And all of a sudden I'm in my room at the YMCA waiting to go to work one day, and suddenly I hear these big thumping footsteps coming up the steps to the second floor where the rooms are. I opened my door to see what's going on. There's FBI agents storming down the hallway. Why? They were there to arrest this guy that picked me up in the Camaro that told me he was from Florida. He was wanted in Florida for armed robbery. So at any rate, I continue on at the restaurant. Eventually, my eyesight ran into a problem. I couldn't see the ticket. So the job wasn't going to work out. So I figured, "You know what? I should continue on to California".
So I call at an aunt in California. I said, "Hey, listen, you know, I'm in Amarillo, I want to get to California. Would you be comfortable with me living in your home for a little bit"? She said, "Yeah". So I had enough money to buy a bus ticket. Took the bus to California, got to Los Angeles, started working as a graveyard dishwasher in Los Angeles. My shifts at like three o'clock in the morning. I'm riding my little cousin's bicycle to work every night. And I was like 20 whatever years old and I'm really starting to feel like a failure now. I'm thinking like, "Man, I trusted God, I trusted Jesus with everything". And it's not like I'm after success, but I'm really starting to feel like kind of a loser.
Forgive me for saying it, but you know, being from a Jewish Home where education is so stressed and careers are so stressed and success is such a priority, and here I am. My brother's getting ready to graduate law school, my sister is in college, and here I am the oldest one riding my little baby cousin's bicycle to work as a graveyard dishwasher, and I'm just starting to feel bad about myself. And I'm just fighting this feeling. So after being in California for a little while, my dad called me in California, and he said, "Come back home". So I came back home. Unfortunately, as soon as I came back home, I could feel my dad's disapproval again. Shortly after returning home to Cleveland, I met Cynthia. Cynthia actually lived two doors down from me in our high school neighborhood. And Cynthia was one of the few Gentiles in our neighborhood. And frankly, I didn't even know her.
So we saw each other at the bus stop, but there was no interaction between us. But when I returned back to Cleveland after being in California, I ran into Cynthia one night, and I started sharing Jesus with her. And she couldn't believe that her Jewish friend was sharing with her who had been raised in the Lutheran Church about Jesus. Meantime, Cynthia had lost her way. She had a really pure heart growing up, she really had a love for God. But when she went away to school in Michigan, she started questioning whether she had been brainwashed because she started meeting Muslims and she started meeting people of other faiths and she started meeting people of different world religions. And she started wondering, "Well how do I know if really Jesus is the right way? I mean, maybe they're right. They seem to be just as convinced that they're right as I am that I'm right. So how do I know that I'm right"?
And she just began to question and doubt. And that questioning and doubting just kind of led her on a downward path. And she basically said, "Lord, I'm not going to be able to believe in you until you show me that Jesus is the way to You". But when I began to witness to her, she said it was like a bolt of light hit her soul. It was like something filled her in an instant. And God said to her, "I am the way, the truth, and the life". And from that point on it was like there was no turning back. So Cynthia and I started dating after that. We actually got married in a relatively quick amount of time. As soon as we got married, the next day, we headed out to Bible school in to Toccoa Falls, Georgia. Graduated Bible school, started pastoring. And after pastoring for several years, I was just at a place where I realized I had a lot of growing up to do. There were just some personal challenges in my own life that needed to be addressed.
And so I went into business. And I actually experienced a lot of success in business. Everything I did in business God gave me success with. But after being in business in sales, in management, in real estate, and as a motivational speaker for a number of years, I started asking the Lord, "What is the one topic that I'm uniquely qualified to speak about"? And I felt like the topic that I could speak about was courage. And the reason that I felt like that was because I was an unusually good salesperson and I had a lot of people around me in sales that were really quality people, and really did a great job demoing the product-and I always represented quality products with quality companies-but they weren't closing the deals. And the reason was they lacked courage.
My feeling was, "Listen, these people are going to buy from somebody. So if we're representing the right company, and have the right product, why not have them do business with us? I mean, close the deal". And I asked myself, "Well, why do I have the courage to close the deal". And instantly I knew the reason I had courage was because of my relationship with Jesus. And in an instant, when I had that realization, revelation, I knew that I needed to leave the business world and preach the gospel. And so very quickly God began to bless that decision. In a very short amount of time I was in full-time ministry. One thing led to another thing. I had no interest in being on television. I was asked to be on television several times before I even said, "Yes, I'll do it".
So the Lord just kind of move that process along. And then a national network picked up my program. I was not paying for it to be broadcast. But a Jewish man in California got saved basically from watching Discovering The Jewish Jesus, and he was so overwhelmed with how the Lord hit him when he watched Discovering The Jewish Jesus that he literally hunted me down. He calls me on my birthday, tells me what happened to him, how God used me in his life to bring him into peace. And he said, "What can I do for you"? And I said, "Well, I'd really like to take Discovering The Jewish Jesus and take responsibility for broadcasting, but I don't have any money to do that".
The next day, a significant check arrived in the mail from that man. And in a few months, he sent me another significant check. And it was through that financial seed of that Jewish man that the Lord was able to empower me financially, to give me the resources that I was able to begin to broadcast Discovering The Jewish Jesus internationally, all over the world. And here we are today all these years later, people getting saved on a daily basis through this ministry, Muslims, Jewish people, secular people, people that are witches, people coming out of homosexuality. Every single walk of life, God is saving people from every different culture through this ministry. And the goal is to represent Jesus so that He can be seen in His beauty.
I don't want anything of religion on me that's going to get in the way of people seeing the beautiful, natural Jesus. You know, the word that I preach is not complicated. It's simple and profound truth. And I believe that the deepest truths are the simplest truths. I want to continue to preach and teach God's word in the simplest way that a child can understand it. I believe there's a banner of breakthrough that the Lord has placed over my life. He literally said that to me. And I'm believing Abba, Father God through King Jesus to continue to give me and my staff breakthrough at Discovering The Jewish Jesus to release the revelation of Messiah Jesus into the earth during these last days, that multitudes of people will continue to be saved through this ministry.