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CAST YOUR BURDEN ON THE LORD AND HE SHALL SUSTAIN YOU

PSALM 55:22

SEVENIA SALLIE (GIRL PROPHETESS)

“Oh, hi,” I said hesitantly as I walked into my dad’s studio. Oscar Olney was sitting alone, looking at his phone.

“Oh, hey Sevenia, how are ya?” he responded cheerfully as he arose from a chair and walked toward me. “Come on in, your dad should be back anytime now.”

“But he’s not here?” I asked with a quiver in my voice. “Please don’t come any closer.”

His chubby face fell. “What’s wrong?”

“My dad told you to stay at least ten feet away from me, remember?”

“He was joking,” he said with a forced smile and chuckle. He took another step toward me.

“Well, I’m not joking,” I said sternly. I whipped out a can of mace from my purse and pointed it at Oscar’s eyes.

“Hey now, little girl,” he said in full east coast bravado. “You got me all wrong.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, moving the mace a little closer to his face.

“Now listen…”

But then I quickly pulled out a container of canned air I had tucked into the back of my denim skirt and sprayed Oscar’s face with a blast of harmless air.

“AHHHHHHH,” he shrieked as his hands flew to his eyes. Several seconds later, he pulled his hands slowly away from his face and looked at them with a baffled expression. Then he gazed at my father and me falling over each other with laughter.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Olney,” I said, still laughing and wiping a tear from my eye. “Your old pal, Seven Sallie, my dad, put me up me up to this.”

“Why you…” Oscar said, gritting his teeth and shaking a fist at my dad. Then he burst out laughing. “You got me. You got me good. Now I owe you, pal.”

“No, we’re even now,” my dad said. “Remember the smoke bomb you put under my car seconds after I climbed in and started it?”

Oscar started laughing. “How could I forget? I recall how bad your hands were trembling when I stopped you from calling 911. So scared your precious car was burning up.”

“Listen, buster,” my dad barked.

“Buster?” Oscar interrupted. “Watch your language, your daughter’s present.”

“She can handle it,” my dad responded with dead pan seriousness. “She’s eighteen.”

Oscar looked at my dad as if he had two heads. “You don’t seriously think buster is a bad word? Man, you are a religious freak.”

My dad started laughing, and I joined him.

“Alright, alright,” Oscar snorted, as he waved his hands. “How am I supposed to know? Last time we hung out, you resembled Johnny Depp. Now you’re like Mr. Rogers, only without the cardigan sweater.”

It was the third day that my dad’s old friend from his old radio show, ‘The Seven Sallie Showdown,’ had stayed with us. The day before, my dad and Oscar had attended two funerals of two more old friends from ‘The Showdown.’ The two people who perished had been involved in an illicit affair. They had been returning from a secret tryst when they hit a semi head on.

Now, Oscar was hanging around our neck of the woods for an indefinite period. It seemed he and my father were going to be working on a collaboration that was to become a segment of my dad’s current podcast. I had overheard Oscar say he was going to get a room at an extended stay hotel.

Just to be clear, I didn’t find Oscar creepy. I had watched numerous YouTube videos of my dad’s former show, and I found Oscar to be an odd contradiction. His public persona was brash and sarcastic, not unlike the way my father was on ‘The Showdown.’ But being around him over the last couple days, I discovered he had a sweet, mellow, vulnerable side.

I was actually anxious to get him alone to pick his brain about my dad and their time to together doing ‘The Seven Sallie Showdown.’ My dad was reluctant to talk much about it. He always claimed he wasn’t one to look in the rearview mirror. Yet that didn’t seem to be the case as I witnessed him and Oscar reminisce about old times.

 It turned out, I didn’t have to wait long. It also seemed that Mr. Olney wanted to illicit some information from me as well.

“Okay,” my dad sighed. “I need to go pick Zella up at Willa’s house.”

“You bore false witness,” Oscar accused my father. “I believe that would be the ninth commandment, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Huh?” my dad responded with arched eyebrows. “What do mean?”

“You know, lie,” Oscar explained. “You, oh righteous one, lied to me.”

“I did no such thing,” my dad replied with hands on his hips.

“Did you or did you not tell me you were going after your wife?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, where is she? You told me, you were going after your wife, when in reality, you intended to play a prank on me.”

My dad looked at me, and I shrugged.

“Well, I’m going now. I never specified a time, ya know,” my dad defended.

Oscar looked at me, and I shrugged.

“Okay, I suppose you didn’t. I’ll let you off the hook this time,” Oscar said. Then he did an imitation from a really old TV show that my dad loved called ‘The Honeymooners.’ He did a perfect voice cover of one of the actors, Jackie Gleason. “But Norton, I’m watchin you. Next time, pow, right in the kissa!”

My dad and I both laughed heartily. Then I saw a warm sentiment come into my father’s eyes. It was a look that came when he was with people he truly loved. My dad left, and he didn’t hesitate in leaving me alone with Oscar, which didn’t surprise me in the least.

“So tell me…” Oscar and I both said at the same time.

“Go ahead,” we both said and laughed.

“Well at least we’re in sync,” Oscar said, and then continued. “Ladies first, you go ahead.”

I asked him what my dad was like back during their time on ‘The Showdown.’ I told Oscar that I was experiencing teenage angst during that period and had refused to have a relationship with my father, due to lies my mother had told me about him. In a nutshell, she had blamed him for their divorce and dividing our family. Then on her death bed, she confessed it was serial adultery on her part that caused the demise of their marriage.

However, there was only one thing Oscar told me that I hadn’t already known through my own investigations.

“Your dad used to stay at the studio longer than anybody,” Oscar told me. “Except maybe for Stacey. It seemed like those two were in a competition when it came to staying late. Anyhow, this one time I left my phone and went back for it. I saw Seven sitting alone in a recording booth. His head was down, and he was sobbing so hard his whole body shook. Laid out in front of him were a half dozen pictures of you.

“Now Seven wasn’t the type to wear his emotions on his sleeve. As a matter of fact, I barely even knew he had a daughter back then. But boy I sure knew it on our trip to Missouri the other day. Honey, that man thinks the world of you.”

I fought hard against tears. First because of how I broke my dad’s heart over a several year period, and then being made more aware than I already was that, not only did he love me, but that he was pleased with me as well.

“I understand that you’re known as a prophetess,” Oscar said hesitantly.

I shrugged. “I don’t really see myself that way. I’m simply a student of the Bible, and by the grace of God, He’s given me a pretty keen understanding of the Scriptures.”

“I’m a pretty keen student of human behavior,” Oscar said with a smirk.

“Is that right?” I replied, as I raised my eyebrows.

“Yes, and you said I don’t really, instead of just plain, I don’t see myself that way.”

I shrugged and felt a growing unease. “I have had some pretty, um, enlightening dreams, I guess.”

“You guess? Your dad told me you had a dream about some runaway girls, and that you and a couple other people rescued them.”

“Yes, but glory be to God, I just surrender myself to Him. He gave me the dream and pushed my will to act upon it.”

Oscar studied me intently and chewed on his lower lip. I felt a growing discomfort under his gaze. I groped for something to say, but thankfully Oscar spoke. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe, I need a yes or no.”

I felt my toes curl. Was he going to tell me something like he raped or murdered someone? “I suppose.”

“No suppose, yes or no?”

I looked into his eyes. They looked fearful, rather than guilty. I felt the compulsion to help him if I could. “Yes.”

“Alright then,” he said as he sighed and ran a hand threw curly, thin, salt and pepper hair. “I’m on the run from a witch, a voodoo witch.”

(DESTINY’S BIBLE STUDY NOTES AND QUOTES)

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH: LUTHER’S SEPARATION FROM ROME (Part 2 of 2)

Said Luther, a few years after the start of the reformation: “God does not guide me, He pushes me forward. He carries me away. I am not a master of myself. I desire to live in repose; but I am thrown into the midst of tumults and revolutions.” (D’Aubingne, b 5, ch.2)

He was now about to be thrown into the contest.

The official appointed to conduct the sale of “indulgences” in Germany—Tetzel by name—had been convicted of the basest offenses against society and against the law of God.

As Tetzel entered a town, a messenger went before him, announcing: “The grace of God and the holy father is at your gates.” (D’Aubingne, b. 3, ch. 1). And the people welcomed the blasphemous pretender as if he were God Himself come down from heaven to them.

Tetzel declared by virtue of his certificates, the pardon all the sins which the purchaser should afterward desire to commit would be forgiven him, and that not even repentance was necessary! (Ibid, b. 3 ch.1)

Luther, though still a papist of the straightest sort, was filled with horror at the blasphemous assumptions of the indulgence mongers.

Luther refused them absolution, and warned them that unless they should repent and reform their lives, they must perish in their sins. In great perplexity they repaired to Tetzel with the complaint that their confessor had refused his certificates; and some boldly demanded their money be returned to them. The friar (Tetzel) was filled with rage.

In Wittenberg, during the festival of All Saints, Luther posted on a door of the church ninety-five propositions against the doctrine of indulgences. He declared his willingness to defend these the next day at the university, against all who should see fit to attack them.

His propositions attracted universal attention. By these it was shown that the power to grant the pardon of sin, and to remit its penalty, had never been committed to the pope or to any other man.

It was also clearly shown that the gospel of Christ is the most valuable treasure of the church, and that the grace of God, therein revealed, is freely bestowed upon all who seek it by repentance and faith.

After the papists threatened Luther to retract, he had, by the grace of God, reacted courageously.

Luther trembled as he looked upon himself—one man opposed to the mightiest powers on earth. He sometimes doubted whether he had indeed been led of God to set himself against the authority of the church. “Who was I,” he wrote, “to oppose the majesty of the pope before whom the kings of the earth and the whole world trembled?”

To a friend of the reformation Luther wrote: “We cannot attain to the understanding of Scripture either by study or by the intellect. Your first duty is to begin by prayer. Entreat the Lord grant you, of His great mercy, the true understanding of His word.

In the conflict with the powers of evil there is need of something more than strength of intellect and human wisdom.

God had a work for Luther to do, and angels of heaven were sent to protect him. Many, however, who had received from Luther the precious light were made the objects of Satan’s wrath for the truth’s sake, they fearlessly suffered torture and death.

Everywhere there was awakening a desire for spiritual progress. Everywhere was such a hungering and thirsting after righteousness as had not been known for ages. The eyes of the people, so long directed to human rites and earthly mediators, were now turning in penitence and faith to Christ and Him crucified.

As for my soul, they cannot take that. He who desires to proclaim the word of Christ to the world, must expect death at every moment. (Ibid, b.4 ch.4)

Luther also said: “What is about to happen I know not, nor do I care to know… Let the blow light where it may, I am without fear. Not so much as a leaf falls without the will of our Father. How much rather will He care for us! It is a light thing to die for the Word since the Word which was made flesh hath Himself died. If we die for Him, we shall live with Him, and passing through that which He has passed through before us, we shall be where He is and dwell with Him forever.

Truth is no more desired by the majority than it was by the papists who opposed Luther.

The great controversy between truth and error, between Christ and Satan, is to increase in intensity to the close of this world’s history.