Seventh week Bible in 90 days "It's Our Heart, Stupid"

Bill Senyard, March 14, 2010
We are entitling our 'Olah experience this week The Battle: HOLY
The battle is in our heart, the battle between worldly sorrow and godly sorrow. Our "Hebrew" heart, composed of mind, emotion and will experiences worldly sorrow through conscience, addictions, our sinful nature and ignorance. Godly sorrow is the sorrow that our heart is so offensive to God. We need to change! We sing "Open my eyes, that I may see" knowing that our heart must change BUT we can't. Slowly, we realize that the battle is one between our internal, sinful nature struggling to access an external power, that of the Holy Spirit which will change our heart.

Our NEW heart will replace repression, ignorance, singul nature and conscience with the Cross, God's Love for me, His Law written on our hearts and most importantly, His Holy Spirit in us. We can lay all our disruptive experience at the foot of the Cross and present our 'Olah burnt offering to Him, leaving only our humanity, but with a new, free, moral Spirit.

At the prayer table, my wife and I came to God's minister, Weston, and told him that our prayers we prayed last week had been answered. Our daughter and new granddaughter fought a brave battle and were victorious! Both were blessed by God's grace and are well. We now ask for a prayer of Thanksgiving! However, we experienced great pain in the process as our son-in-law asked that we NOT be there for the battle, for reasons we didn't understand. Recall last week we learned that 'Olah, our burnt sacrifice, worships the bitter pain of disruption. We had "failed the test" by showing up at the hospital unsummoned. My wife experienced great worldly sorrow. Weston pointed out that this was exactly what the sermon was about: asking forgiveness from our son-in-law, since our hearts were so offensive to God, in His great battle for our daughter's life. He asked us to do this verbally, out loud. This offering, burnt and humbled, was led by the power of the Holy Spirit to strengthen us as we verbally asked for forgiveness from our son-in-law. We prayed, took the bread and wind and lit two candles, one for our daughter and one for our baby granddaughter. We left our offering of Thanksgiving and the battle was over, our 'Olah, complete. Thank you, Lord!