SID: Sid Roth here with Robert and Linda Heidler. Now Robert is a pastor and the Spirit of God has come on both him and his wife to the point where they can’t help themselves, even though they don’t believe in praying in tongues, separately, on the same day they start praying in an unknown language, the Spirit of God is on them, they are so excited and God begins to change in their life. The biggest change that occurred after that was a man of God came to them and gave a word from God to them, what was it Robert?
ROBERT: Well Chuck Pierce came to us at the beginning of 1997 I believe, and had a word, he said our church was supposed to celebrate three Biblical Feast that year, and I have a great respect for Chuck and so I began to study what the Biblical Feasts were and I remembered from seminary that there were feasts in the Bible, but I had never taken the time to study them and as I studied them I saw that they weren’t just holidays and they weren’t just rituals, but the Bible calls them appointed times, it’s literally appointments with God, times when God wanted to meet with His people over the course of every year and to accomplish some very specific transactions with them to bring them into a new level of blessing every year.
SID: Now did God show you that these feasts were requirements for say, righteousness, or your salvation or if you didn’t do it you were in trouble with God?
ROBERT: No, they were not, I don’t believe that there were, for Christians today that they are anything that’s required, or we won’t go to hell if we fail to do them, they were given to us as blessings, they were given as tools to lift us up to a higher level in Him, to draw us closer to Him. We live in a world that there are so many influences that try to draw us away from God, it’s very easy for people to drift away from God over the course of time, and the feast were put there every year to draw us back to Him, to keep us on track so that we move forward and really experience the blessing He has for us. SID: And you know I have another unpublished manuscript of yours which is so fascinating and it talks about the cycles of God, and it talks about there are cycles of blessing and cycles of cursing. It was kind of, in your manuscript you talk about the cycles of cursing, explain that.
ROBERT: Well there are cycles that people fall into in various ways that literally are cycles of curse that every year they are just taken down further and further into destruction. SID: In the history of my people we have something we call the ninth of Av, Av is a Jewish month in the calendar, it’s usually August and on the ninth of Av, it’s the most amazing thing, so many bad things have happened on that cycle, explain.
ROBERT: That’s a good example of a cycle of cursing; you know the ninth of Av traces back in Jewish tradition to the day when the spies came out of Israel, out of the promised land and they made the decision not to trust God and go in, they said, “We cannot go in and take the land,” and by tradition that was on the ninth of Av and that decision you know, they spent the forty years in the wilderness, the next generation did go in, but there was never full repentance for that, and so it put them in a cycle of curse and it’s almost as if every year Satan waits for that day because he knows that there is an opening there to release a curse against the Jewish people.
SID: Tell me a few things that happened on that day?
ROBERT: It was on the ninth of Av that the Babylonians came in and destroyed the Temple of Solomon, it was on the ninth of Av that the Romans came in and destroyed the second temple, it was on the ninth of Av that the Romans in 135 put down the Jewish revolt, it was on the ninth of Av in 1492 that the Jews were expelled from Spain, it was on the ninth of Av during World War Two that the deportation began from the Warsaw ghetto to the death camps, and just this last year it was on the ninth of Av was the final date before the troops went into Gaza and forced the Jews out of that land. So all down through history whenever the ninth of Av comes it’s like there is a curse that comes back and cycles around because there was never full repentance for the original sin.
SID: You know just as there are cycles of curses there are cycles of blessings, and Robert and Linda have found that as they observe the Biblical festivals in freedom there are many, many blessing that occur, Robert, what kind of blessings are there for observing the Biblical festivals, what cycle do you tap into?
ROBERT: Well there are all sorts of blessings because there are different things the feasts were designed to accomplish. One thing that has really impressed me, we have done a lot of deliverance ministry, we have ministered in that area, and as I have studied the feasts, so many of the principles we use in deliverance are built into the feasts.
SID: Linda, how do you react to this, you whole life now is revolved this cycle of the blessings of the feasts, how do you, do you really enjoy it or do you put up with it because you are married to Robert?
LINDA: Oh I love it, it’s a great blessing, and with each feast you find that God is doing something different in your life and a lot of times it is very practical things that you find that He is doing. For instance at Passover it says clean your house out, and just trough the course of the year sometimes we find things make their way into our homes that just shouldn’t be there. And once a year going through your home and looking at things and saying is this something I really want to keep in my home, is this the kind of thing that promotes the presence of God in my home, or is this something that would invite something else into my home. At Passover you find the instruction to clean your house, clean it out, and it begins to take out the things that would hinder the Spirit of God or would bring in negative influences into your home.
SID: Listen, I am so fascinated by what they found out and they put in this unpublished manuscript that we are going to make available to you, each of these Biblical festivals that God said to observe forever. They have got such insights into the future and such blessings that you are missing, the rhythm of life. Don’t go away, we’ll pick up right here.
