“Shavuot: The Power of God's Word & His Spirit – Rabbi Steve Weiler (05/23/2026)

We get the two greatest gifts, other than salvation, that God, I believe, has given.

One is His Word, and the other is His Spirit that resides in us, which makes all things possible, all things possible.

So God has this interesting calendar, interesting plan.

You know, He starts us off with Passover and the Passover lamb and, and, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and we, we, we see that this is a time of purity and holiness as, as Yeshua, uh, dies.

And, and then in Bikkurim, Yom Bikkurim, uh, HaBikkurim, the, uh, Feast of the First Fruits, and, and Yeshua rises, and, and, and we see that part of the plan.

And then God says, "Okay, now that you understand, let's wait a while." In this case, let's wait fifty days.

And what's supposed to happen in those fifty days is, I believe, in some ways a test.

With no, uh...

God is just allowing us to see, okay, we've gotten close to Him in Passover and Yom HaBikkurim, and now, now the days are beginning again, and we're back into the churn of things, and we're, we're moving along.

And are we keeping that desire to see Him do great signs and wonders and miracles? And so we count the Omer in, in expectation of what's going to happen.

So one of the similarities between Shavuot in the Hebrew scriptures and Shavuot in the New Covenant is that waiting.

Wait in Jerusalem.

And so we waited in the, in the Hebrew scriptures, and then there was Mount Sinai and the law, and, and, and the Word of God came to us.

And we waited in the New Covenant, and the Holy Spirit came to us.

And the lesson, the first lesson, there are so many lessons, is waiting is not bad.

[chuckles] Waiting doesn't mean God has left you.

Waiting means that He wants you to anticipate.

Because when you stop having hope, when you stop anticipating, you become lost.

And so God is saying, "Wait." And so sometimes when you and I pray for something, and we say, "Why haven't we seen the results of that yet?" God is saying, "Wait.

Just wait.

Wait." So our purpose in counting the Omer was to draw closer to God, to certainly be obedient to His Word, to expect that our faith level would be stronger each day, to anticipate what God's going to do when that time is up, in this case, it was fifty days, and develop our hope for God to pour out His Spirit so that we would have greater strength and we would be revitalized, not only personally, but the body, the body of believers.