SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/16/2011 8:19:11 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
“Ester’s
Petition”
Bible Reading
& Meditation Reference: Ester 8:3-6
Message of the verses: “3 Then
Esther spoke again to the king, fell at his feet, wept and implored him to
avert the evil scheme of Haman the Agagite and his plot which he had devised
against the Jews. 4 The king extended the golden scepter to Esther. So Esther
arose and stood before the king. 5 Then she said, "If it pleases the king
and if I have found favor before him and the matter seems proper to the king
and I am pleasing in his sight, let it be written to revoke the letters devised
by Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, which he wrote to destroy the Jews
who are in all the king’s provinces. 6 “For how can I endure to see the
calamity which will befall my people, and how can I endure to see the
destruction of my kindred?’”
There
are some mornings when I come in to my office to do my devotions that just seem
to be more alive than other mornings, and this is one of those mornings. There are sometimes when I read Warren
Wiersbe’s commentary and I am truly inspired and wish to just copy all that he
has written about the subject of that morning, and this is one of those
mornings. I must say that I enjoy
reading the Scriptures, but when I take the time to study the Scriptures they
become alive to me and open up new things that I cannot get from just reading
them, and today is one of those days.
Today’s devotion has different things in it that can be seen in these
three short verses. First we see a woman
who has just been given more riches than most people will earn in a life time,
and yet she is not concerned about those riches, but concerned about her
people. Ester is interceding for Israel
like others in the past have interceded for them and others in the future will
intercede for them. When Moses led the
children of Israel out of Egypt and went up on the mountain to receive the Ten
Commandments the people began to worship an idol because Moses took so long on
the Mountain. God was angry with them
and wanted to destroy all of them, but Moses interceded for them. He was even
willing to have his name blotted out of the book of life. Many years later when Paul was penning his
letter to the Romans he wrote: “1 I am telling the truth in Christ, I am
not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, 2 that I have
great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself
were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen
according to the flesh.” There were
others as we have seen in the lives of Nehemiah and Ezra, and Daniel was also
doing the same thing.
What
can as believers learn from this? Allow
me to go all the way back to the creation of the earth that is found at the
beginning of the Bible. God created all
that we see in six days and the last thing that He created was man as can be
found when reading Genesis chapter two.
God would state after certain parts of His creation that it was good,
and yet after man was created He stated it was very good. Why do you suppose that God waited until last
to create man? Well God took all of that
time creating His creation in preparation for the creation of man whom was made
in God’s image. Now let us think about
the end of the Scriptures when we find at the end of Revelations that God will
un-create all that He created and it will all be gone in a flash. (See 2 Peter
3:9) All will be gone with the exception
of man for man was created in the image of God.
Just think about this for a minute, and take a look at what Peter wrote
about this: “Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of
people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness.” (2Peter 3:11) Ester understood this for she did not care
about her gift from the king but only cared about the souls of her people and
went to the throne to intercede for them with tears and pleadings to the king. “It was
her interceding at the throne that saved the people of Israel from slaughter.”
As
believers we owe it all to a Jewish Carpenter who left the His heavenly home to
become a man in order to take our punishment on Him at the cross so that we can
one day go with Him to that home in heaven and serve Him throughout all of
eternity. We surely can learn from the
example of Ester.
In
his book “How to Obtain Fullness of Power
in Christian Life and Service” R. A. Torrey wrote “The Devil is perfectly
willing that the church should multiply its organizations and its
deftly-contrived machinery for the conquest of the world for Christ, if it will
only give up praying.”
The
most important thing that God created is people, and the most important thing
that believers can do is to pray that the Lord will bring you into contact with
those He is going to save, and this takes prayer and action. James says that we have not because we ask
not, and he also wrote that we should show our works that come out of our true
faith.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: When we began this study of Ester we saw
little evidence of the spirituality of both Mordecai and Ester, but now we see
people who have sacrificed much for the people of God. Dr. Wiersbe writes “attorney Jacob Stam
prayed ‘Lord, the only thing most of us know about sacrifice is how to spell
the word.” This is probably a true
statement in my life.
I can learn a lot from the lives
of Mordecai and Ester, and this section contains great examples for me to
follow.
My Steps of
Faith for Today:
1.
Have a heart for the lost.
2.
Pray that the Lord will lead me to those who are His
that I may tell them the Good News.
3.
Continue to learn contentment.
10/16/2011 9:12:39 AM
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