From the Publisher
This has been our biggest title with over 400,000 copies in print including English and Russian versions. Will soon be printed in Hebrew, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Spanish. An excellent book to give to a Jewish person who is searching for spiritual truth.


About the Author
Sid Roth is a former account executive for Merril Lynch. He was raised in a traditional Jewish home, but when his life hit bottom in 1972, religious tradition had no answers to give him. With his life out of control and his mind and marriage in shambles, he was miraculously freed from demonic oppression through a supernatural encounter with the risen Messiah. His marriage and life restored, Sid began boldly proclaiming Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. In 1977 he started Messianic Vision which has grown to include nationally syndicated radio and television broadcasts as well as conferences and literature.


Excerpted from They Thought for Themselves by Sid Roth. Copyright © 1996. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
(chapter 1, part 1 of 5) Paralyzed ... "Learn to Live With It!" by David Yaniv I was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to parents who immigrated from Germany. My parents kept up tradition, celebrating Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and other holidays, but they were never really religious. After the Second World War, when my father found out that two of his sisters and one brother and their families had been killed in Nazi Germany, he took every Bible and everything in our home that was even remotely religious and threw it out. "Where was God?" he would ask. "How could God allow such a thing to happen?" From then on, I was raised in an atheistic home. My father even resisted my having a bar mitzvah. Although he finally allowed it, he refused to set foot in the synagogue. In 1960 I married a South African girl named Sheila, whom I met when she and her mother came to Israel as tourists. At the time, I was a guide and a bus driver. Her mother, who took two tours with me, one day said, "My baby is waiting for me in Haifa. I want you to meet her." I thought it was funny that this elderly woman would have a baby. But when I reached Haifa and I saw her "baby," I realized she was a match maker. Sheila and I went to South Africa on our honeymoon to visit her family-and stayed twelve and one-half years. I'm a refrigeration and air-conditioning engineer by trade. I did quite well in business in South Africa for a time. Then I undertook a project to air condition a large building. The quantity surveyor I hired to estimate the cost of the job made a mistake and I lost all my money. My lawyer told me it was useless to sue the surveyor because he wasn't insured. And even though I was bankrupt, I had to finish the job because I had signed a contract. The Mistake Paralyzed Me for Life Afterward, I decided to return to Israel. Moving back was very difficult for my wife, but she realized it was best for us and our two sons, who were 11 and 8 years old. At the time, I spoke Hebrew, but my family did not. We decided to live on a moshav, which is an agricultural commune similar to a kibbutz. I thought we would stay there for a short time to allow my family to learn Hebrew and then I would find work in my trade. But when the time came and I said, "All right, let's move to the big town," they didn't want to go. They had come to love life on the moshav. Even if they had agreed, however, it would have been difficult to leave. You can't build up any savings there because you only receive a small monthly allowance to buy food and supplies. But, if we stayed at the moshav, we were set for life. The first year on the moshav we had to work in different jobs to allow everyone to get to know us and for us to get to know them. Toward the end of that year I was assigned to milk the cows. I enjoyed it because it was something new and because I knew it was just a temporary assignment. One day in the cow shed I slipped on a wet spot on the floor and fell flat on my back. My back was in so much pain I went to the hospital to have it checked. The hospital technicians didn't find anything serious on the x-rays. They said, "You just got a good knock there. Go home, rest, take some pain killers and it will be all right within two weeks." Instead of getting better, the pain got worse. The second time I went to the hospital, they x-rayed me again, and again sent me home saying there was nothing wrong. I rested for another two weeks and by that time the pain was excruciating. I had never experienced such pain. The pain killers helped initially, but after a while they lost their effect. I kept increasing the dosage until I was taking 50 pills a day for three years. I reached a point where every morning when I got out of bed my feet would go numb. I knew something was seriously wrong, but I also knew I couldn't go back to that same hospital again. Because of the bureaucracy in Israel it took some connections to be allowed to go to another hospital, but through friends who knew somebody who knew somebody, it was arranged for me to visit another hospital in Tel Aviv. The doctors there did a special x-ray called a mylogram. After the x-ray, the head of the neurosurgical department himself came to me and said, "You've got two slipped discs, one of which is completely compressed and the other one is missing a piece." He was amazed I had waited so long to get help. When I asked for his prognosis, he replied, "Well, we'll have to operate." "What does that entail?" I asked, cautiously. "Oh, it's nothing," he said. "Ten days and you're back home as good as new." That sounded wonderful to me, so I said, "Let's do it." When I woke up from the anesthetic in the evening after the operation, I had no feeling from my waist down, so I called for a doctor. The doctor on the evening shift said, "I can't tell you anything. You will have to wait until the morning when all the surgeons come in for the day shift." The next morning the doctor who operated on me came to me and said, "David, I'm terribly sorry. I've got some bad news for you."