It's Supernatural

Sid:  We want everyone everywhere to walk in the blessings of God. We’re living in very very strategic times in the destiny of planet earth. If you haven’t noticed Israel is front and center stage. Jewish people are coming to know the Messiah in record numbers. Gentile churches are having a pull if you will, a drawing if you will, to go back the Biblical roots of the faith as opposed to many of the other things that have evolved over centuries. A few weeks ago I interviewed Pastor Robert Heidler, pastor of Glory of Zion Outreach Center. We discussed his unpublished manuscript which we then made available to you called the “Messianic Church.” If you didn’t get this yet, shame on you, you are missing some important pieces of the puzzle. Then I found out about his latest unpublished manuscript and it’s called the “Cycles of God.” He has hit some bull’s eyes that very few people have ever put together. Those of you who have a Jewish heart, you don’t even know why, but there is just a drawing towards the Biblical festivals, and you have a lot of questions about it because this is not commonly taught in churches. If anything, it’s discouraged, but something is changing. It is God’s appointed time for change. So I have Pastor Robert Heidler on the telephone. Robert how did you get started in actually wanting to, within a Gentile church, fulfilling the Biblical festivals?

Robert:  Well Sid it really began with a prophetic word. Chuck Pierce prophesied to me in 1997 that in that year we needed to celebrate 3 Biblical feasts.

Sid:   Now did this just come out of the blue, or did you say “Chuck I’m really leaning towards doing these things?”

Robert:  This was just out of the blue. I had studied some about the feasts in seminary, but I hadn’t really taken the time to look at them. I had assumed that they were something for the Old Testament, or something for Jews, but not something that Christians should pay any attention to.

Sid:   Alright you got a prophetic word from someone you respected. So what did you do?

Robert:  Well for the first time in my life I really I opened the word and began to study the feasts. Sid I was amazed because what I saw was a lot of the word was devoted to them, and that God had given His people a detailed yearly cycle of events. It was really a Biblical calendar. They weren’t just holidays, they weren’t just rituals, but the word calls them appointed times. They are appointments with God, set times that God said “I want to meet with My people to accomplish some specific spiritual transactions in their lives.” He promised great blessings to His people if they would do these.

Sid:   Now a number of years later after you and your congregation have been celebrating these festivals, what is your spin?

Robert:  Well it has been one of the greatest blessings.  It’s very interesting, we’ve been do them every year now; we do it differently every time we don’t try to fall into a ritual with it. Invariably, every time we celebrate it since the previous year we’ll say “This was incredible, why haven’t we done these things before, why didn’t we know about this?” I find that almost everyone that comes into the experience of God’s cycle of blessing, the Biblical feasts, comes away saying “This is a tremendous blessing from God.”

Sid:   You know what I find very interesting is the way you have taught this in your book about this… even using the word cycles and God’s purposes, the blessings, there’s cycles of God’s blessings, there’s cycles of destruction, there’s cycles of creation, there’s cycles of curses. As far as I’m concerned I want to be in the cycles of blessing. [Laughing]

Robert:  [Laughing]

Sid:   But explain this, explain what you mean by cycles.

Robert:  Well it was back in 1994 God began to speak to me about cycles. What was happening there was a large hurricane heading towards Florida, I don’t remember if it was Ivan or Jean, one of those. So I get up in the morning and check the news on the internet and this picture of this huge monstrous storm was filling the screen. After reading about that I switched over to an astronomy website that I check every day, has a lot of pictures from the Hubble telescope. The screen immediately filled with a picture that looked almost identical. It was this huge swirling mass, it was a spiral galaxy. God began to speak to me about the cycles that he has put into creation that there are some cycle that are cycles of destruction, but there are some cycles that are the cycles of creation that display His beauty. He said “He works in that same way in our lives.” There are cycles we can fall into, addiction, poverty, unbelief, sin and death that will just take us lower and lower and lower. But there are other cycles that He wants to link us into that will just lift us higher and higher and higher. Each time we go through that cycle we take a step closer to His goal for us. I really that the yearly cycle of feasts is part of His cycle of blessing in our life.

Sid:   Obviously He can bless us without celebrating the feasts. Why do you feel He really wants us to do this?

Robert:  Well He can and He does bless us. The feasts is not a legalistic, you know we won’t go to the Hell if we fail to do that. What I see is living in this world it’s almost like being on an escalator going down. The natural cycle of this world is to draw us away from God. If we don’t do anything we just tend to drift further and further away. Most people that end up far from God don’t do it because they decide I want to be far from God. It just drifts over the course of time.

Sid: Little by little, how did we drift away from God’s cycles, or God’s Biblical feasts to the point where people say “Oh you’re under the law” if you observe the Biblical feasts?

Robert:  Well that’s an interesting study. Really until about the 4^th century it was the normal thing for Christians to celebrate Biblical feasts. Those were the Christian feasts as well as, Jewish feasts. It was really in the 4^th century when paganism came into the church that the church switched from a Biblical calendar to a Roman calendar, and began to celebrate a whole different set of feasts than the Biblical ones. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for a Christian to celebrate those, but if we don’t see God’s calendar, if we don’t see what God is doing I think we miss out on a lot of the blessings He has for us. His calendar is designed every year as we go through it to draw us; it’s like putting us on an escalator going upward where we’re drawing closer and closer to God.

Sid:   Now you say the appointed times, which comes from Leviticus chapter 23. Are there specific transactions to take place between God and His people, explain?

Robert:  Well as I studied the feasts Sid it’s very interesting… I really see if someone is plugged into that cycle and is going through that not just as a ritual or a holiday, but as a real time to meet with God. That God does some very interesting things through that in our lives. One of the areas we minister to a lot is in deliverance. One of the books I’ve published is called “Set Yourself Free.” It’s a deliverance manual that a lot of deliverance ministers around the country use. As I studied through the feasts I realized there are a lot of things in the feasts that if you really observe them will tend to keep you from the enemy’s oppression. One of the things in “Set Yourself Free” I have people take a spiritual inventory. They ask God “Lord show me any sin in my life you want me to confess.” It’s a powerful thing when someone walks through that process and comes out knowing there’s no un-confessed sin there’s nothing to hinder their walk with God. Well in the feasts that’s built into the process, that’s supposed to happen every year in the Day of Atonement.

Sid:   So what you’re saying to me God says “Jewish people are supposed to observe the feasts” it’s very clear in Leviticus. Then in the New Covenant Gentiles are grafted in to the Jewish Olive tree, so there’s still the connection. What is the difference between “should observe,” and “want to observe?”

Robert: I don’t see the feasts as a legalistic thing, I don’t see it’s something that… I see it’s a blessing that God offers us to enter into. I see in the New Testament it was the norm. Paul he references the feasts over and over again in the epistles, even writing to Gentile churches he assumes he is writing to people that are celebrating the feasts.

Sid:   Now when you made this transition in your church did you lose any people over it?

Robert:  Oh no! Part of it is that we didn’t… you know some people when they come into the feasts they get very legalistic, they start saying “You can’t put up a Christmas tree, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.” Legalism will always turn off people and I don’t think that’s what God is saying; He’s saying “I want you to enter into a blessing.” So we’ve never preached against people celebrating Christmas or anything like that. What we found is as people begin to celebrate the Biblical feasts and see the blessing there, then those traditional holidays just become very unimportant because they’re just very shallow in comparison to the depths and the richness that God has it.