Woe:

It is used to pronounce something as evil.

It is used to express severe calamity.

It is used to express great grief.

Matthew 23:13–14

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! (Literally means an actor under an assumed character) For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces.

Matthew 23:15

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!

Matthew 23:16

“Blind guides! What sorrow awaits you! For you say that it means nothing to swear ‘by God’s Temple,’ but that it is binding to swear ‘by the gold in the Temple.’

Matthew 23:23

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things.

Matthew 23:25

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy—full of greed and self-indulgence!

Matthew 23:27

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity.

Matthew 23:29

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you build tombs for the prophets your ancestors killed, and you decorate the monuments of the godly people your ancestors destroyed.”

What am I blind to?

Matthew 23:37

How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me.

Holy Discontent — This is where the reality we are living in moves from merely frustration and anger, and into a spiritual grieving and holy hunger for something more.

Preparation — Holy Discontent becomes so powerful we cannot tolerate the state of our lives, the church, the culture and we simply ask God to prepare our hearts.

Contending — the person who has been prepared by God, moves from a posture of consumption to one of contending for God’s presence and power in their life.

Spiritual Renewal begins with a change in our being, not our doing.

John 14:15

“If you love me (being), obey my commandments (doing).

Holy Patterns — Are where we reorient our lives around patterns that enable us to live and operate in God’s presence, living under the shelter of his wing, living in our new being.

Renewal — As God moves, new life flows into a person or people of God. New spiritual life breaks out and the person walks with God in a new presence with a new power.

Renewal happens when our new doing flows out of our new being.

Holy Patterns are about posture not work.

The relationship sought is one of total self-giving love whereby the two (God and humanity) belong to each other in a union so complete that to touch one is to touch the other. What the Spirit seeks is a relationship of love in which Christ reigns supreme without rival or competitor as Lord and Lover within the believer.

-- Dennis Kinlaw