Sermon Transcript
When Mordecai learned of all that had been done, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the city wailing loudly and bitterly. But he went only as far as the king’s gate, because no one clothed in sackcloth was allowed to enter it. In every province to which the edict and order of the king came, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting, weeping, and wailing. Many lay in sackcloth and ashes. When Esther’s eunuchs and female attendants came and told her about Mordecai, she was in great distress.
She sent clothes for him to put on instead of his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. Then Esther summoned Hathach, one of the king’s eunuchs assigned to attend her, and ordered him to find out what was troubling Mordecai and why. So Hathach went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king’s gate. Mordecai told him everything that had happened to him, including the exact amount of money Haman had promised to pay into the royal treasury for the destruction of the Jews. He also gave him a copy of the text of the edict for their annihilation, which had been published in Susa, to show to Esther and explain it to her, and he told him to instruct her to go into the king’s presence to beg for mercy and plead with him for her people.
Hathach went back and reported to Esther what Mordecai had said. Then she instructed him to say to Mordecai, all the king’s officials and the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned, the king has but one law, that they be put to death unless the king extends the gold scepter to them and spares their lives. But 30 days have passed since I was called to go to the king. When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai, he sent back this answer: Do not think that because you are in the king’s house, you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish.
And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this. Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: Go gather together all the Jews who are in Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for 3 days, night or day, and I and my attendants will fast as you do. When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish. So Mordecai went away and carried out all of Esther’s instructions.
So a few of you have been telling me in recent months that you’ve noticed that Pastor Dan, a couple of times in his sermons, has broken into song. And you said, Steve, when are you going to do that? And if you haven’t— no, hold on, hold on here, hold on here. Have I been among you so long that you all do not know me? Right, in the words of Jesus himself.
No, I, I understand, uh, if you didn’t hear Pastor Dan singing at any point in time, you need to go back. Those things are archived. He even sang a Miley Cyrus song. I’m not kidding. If you missed that, it was outstanding.
I don’t feel like I need to do those things though to, to earn your approval or affirmation or anything. That’s good for him. He’s a young man. I’m a little bit older and So that kind of thing, I don’t, I don’t need to do that. But I was thinking this last week, and I had totally forgotten this.
I mean, totally forgotten this. When I, yours truly, was in 7th grade, I actually was in a youth musical at my church that was about Esther, and it was called Beauty and the Feast because the book of Esther is filled with stories about feasts. And I was narrator number I’m not joking. I hadn’t thought about this for years, and on Wednesday this last week, God reminded me. So I would like, if I could, to try to remember some of the things that as narrator number 2 that I communicated that one performance in 7th grade.
And I think I can do it, but I’m going to need a little bit of help, okay? First of all, I need to do this sort of dinner theater style, so I’m going to need a microphone. Style. When I introduce in my narration different characters from the story, I need you to cheer in the case of Mordecai and Esther and even the king, and then the choir when I mention them. And so you can give a loud hearty huzzah.
Okay, let’s try that right now on the count of 3. 1, 2, 3. Huzzah! It’s gonna have to be more than that. Okay, it just like— you can go nuts when introduce Mordecai, Esther, the king, and the choir.
Okay, when I introduce Haman, he’s the bad guy, you all are going to boo and hiss. Let’s try that together. Yeah, exactly. So that’s the first thing you need to do. Okay, the second thing is I need a— probably just to do this a little bit like The Music Man, I need to establish my pattern.
So we’re gonna clap together at the following tempo. Okay.
Keep it going.
I’m narrator number 2. This is from Beauty and the Beast. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am your host, and we’re gonna keep this evening moving right along. Our story is about a wise old man, Mordecai.
It is very beautiful, I do mean beautiful, cousin Esther.
A well-meaning king, Ahasuerus.
And a sinister minister in the government, Haman.
Don’t let up on Tell me, big finish. We’re all gonna be right here with all you lovely people tonight. We’re gonna sing. We’re gonna tell you about a beautiful queen who tried to do right. This then is the story of Esther, and at the very least, you just sit right back, come along with us, and listen to Beauty and the Feast.
I said you sit right back and come along with us and listen to Beauty and the Feast. There you go.
Huzzah! I’m telling you, I haven’t thought about that in years, and it’s amazing. Bob Les isn’t here right now, but I— you can tell her I got the part, right? Yeah, okay. Bob can confirm, Les can confirm, this was an actual musical, and it’s amazing how God can bring those things back to you.
And Pastor Dan’s not here to see it. So, 2 matinee performances this afternoon, 2 PM, 4 PM, you come back. If you’ve not been with us at any point during this sermon series on the book of Esther, we’ve learned that Esther is a surprising and a fascinating book. It’s really curious. The story is set, as I mentioned, over 100 years ago after the Babylonian exile, where the Israelites are taken away from their land.
And while some Jews after the exile did return back to Jerusalem— read the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, that’s what all about. Many Jews did not return back to Jerusalem. The book of Esther then is about a Jewish community living in a foreign land, living in Susa, the capital of the ancient Persian Empire. And as you heard just a moment ago, we’ve got 4 main characters in the story. You’ve got Mordecai, who is a relative of Esther who acted as a father figure to her since Esther had been orphaned as a child.
Then you have Esther herself, and then there’s the king of Persia Persia. Some translations say Xerxes, some, like the narration I just told you a little bit ago, is Ahasuerus, and who’s something of a drunken pushover in the story, more so than a well-meaning king. I don’t know who wrote that for the musical, a well-meaning king. He might have been well-meaning. He’s a little bit of a drunken pushover.
And then there’s the Persian official Haman, the cunning villain. The book opens, we saw a couple weeks ago, chapters 1 and 2, with the king of Persia throwing 2 2 elaborate feasts, banquets that lasted a total of 187 days. And it’s all for the grandiose purpose of parading and displaying his own greatness and splendor. And then on the last day of the feast, the king is really drunk and he demands that his wife, Queen Vashti, appear at the party. He wants to show her off to everybody.
She refuses. She refuses. And so, in a drunken rage, the king deposes the queen, Queen Vashti, and he makes the silly decree that all Persian men should now be the masters of their own homes. And then the king, believe it or not, holds a beauty pageant because he wants to find a new queen. Now, this obviously sounds like the seeds of a really, really bad soap opera, but it’s right here that we’re introduced to Esther and to Mordecai.
Esther is of Jewish descent, but she is told by Mordecai to hide her Jewish identity and to enter the beauty pageant. And lo and behold, Esther wins. And the king is so obsessed with Esther that he elevates her to become the new queen of Persia. Now, after this, and even more serendipitous, is the fact that Mordecai just so happens to overhear 2 royal guards plotting to murder the king. So Mordecai informs Esther, who then informs the king.
Mordecai gets credit for saving the king’s life, gets written down in a book, and you’ll find out about that soon. We’re next introduced to Haman, the sinister minister in the government. The king elevates Haman for some reason and then puts him in the highest position in the land and then demands that everybody kneel before Haman. Mordecai is not going to do that. When he sees Haman, he refuses to kneel before him, which of course fills Haman with rage.
And when he finds out that Mordecai is Jewish, Haman successfully persuades the king to enact another silly decree, this time to destroy all of the Jewish people— young, old, women, men, and, believe it or not, children. Haman even said he would finance this project out of his own pocket. And so, to decide the date of the Jews’ extermination, Haman rolls some dice. And according to the dice, 11 months later, on the 13th of Adar, all the Jews will die. Haman and the king have another drinking banquet to celebrate this really horrible decision.
So, the focus then turns to chapter 4, where we are today. You caught up now? Hopefully. Esther 4 is probably most famous for what comes at the end, as Casey read just a little bit ago. It’s the chapter with all of the good lines, and I don’t know why I got picked to do this one, but I’m grateful for it.
It’s got lines like, for such a time as this, and, if I perish, I perish. You know, looking back, we today know how the story turns out. We have the luxury of that. That, but these quotes really symbolized extremely important turning points in the moment that people didn’t fully understand the gravity of them in this particular story. And when faced with this defining moment in her life, what does Esther do?
She rises to the occasion and she concludes, I’m going to do the difficult thing that Mordecai is asking of me. I’m going to do what is right, and I will try to save my people. And if I die doing what is right and what is best for my people, then so be it. That’s how the chapter ends. But the question for us is, yeah, but how did we get there?
How did Esther reach that point? Verse 16, she gives such a bold declaration and courageous statement of resolve. If I perish, I perish. To this point, Esther hasn’t demonstrated in the story that type of courage and resolve, at least as far as we can tell from what— how the story is written. Maybe she’d always been heroic.
Maybe she’d always been a person of bravery and conviction. And so maybe her statement shouldn’t surprise us. We don’t know. But again, how did she get to that place? That’s really, really bold that she’s going to risk her life and go to the king to say this edict is wrong.
That dramatic defining moment is the climax of this whole story. So what we see here in chapter 4 is really a 3-act play, and I’m not gonna do any more acting for you people, but let’s, let’s look at the 3 acts together and pull out some applications here. Act number 1 is Haman’s atrocity. Haman’s atrocity. So we should start there.
Haman was the one who convinced the king to issue the bad decree to destroy the Jewish people, essentially He’s saying, these certain people— that’s a quote. He couldn’t even name them. He didn’t want to even say their name. These certain people in your kingdom are foreigners. Their laws are different from ours.
Their customs are different from ours. They don’t look like us. They don’t sound like us. And so, they should be treated differently than us. They are not welcome here.
And so, the decree then goes forth through couriers throughout all of the king’s 127 provinces. His subjects to annihilate every single last person of Jewish descent. So much at stake here, not only for God’s people back then in the moment, of course. I mean, that, that’s significant. Their lives were in grave danger.
We use our minds though today, and we can start putting some things together and understand, oh, there might have been a lot more at stake than anybody even had any idea of knowing back at that time. I mean, just Think about what was at stake here. What would have happened if Haman’s plan was to succeed in what we believe would have been about 475 BC, 475 before the birth of Christ? The Jewish people as a whole would have been completely destroyed, except in those parts that went back to Jerusalem. The majority of people were not living back in Jerusalem at that point.
The whole Jewish people would have been destroyed, and the story of God saving work through Abraham’s descendants would have either come to an end or at least to a grinding halt. But moreover, what would that have meant in terms of all the events that God arranged leading up to the birth of Jesus? Would the birth of the Christian church have been delayed in any way? There’s a lot at stake here. So, why did Haman do this?
Again, we saw in chapter 3 that it was all due, at least in part, to Mordecai. Mordecai’s slight of Haman, refusing to bow down to Haman or to pay him honor. And so instead of going to Mordecai to work out this issue, Haman decides his honor has been so impugned that only a total genocide of the Jewish people is going to satisfy his rage and his injustice. And so it seems that Haman’s slight was really a fuse that just lit the dynamite of Haman’s antisemitism. Haman’s pride and his vanity, as it for all of us.
Our pride and our vanity greatly affects our judgment, and it was greatly affecting Haman’s judgment, his, his vanity. And so someone had to pay. And the response of the Jews to this decree was the traditional one. We see them tearing their clothes, fasting, weeping, putting on sackcloth and ashes— a typical response not only for God’s people but for many people from the ancient Near East when they received calamity this news. That had been the response of the king of Nineveh, the capital of the old Assyrian Empire, centuries before when Jonah came and proclaimed that they were to be overthrown.
It was the response of the Persians themselves, the very ones in this story who just literally 3 or 4 years before this point had been defeated at the Battle of Salamis by the Greeks, who had been greatly outnumbered. This was a complete surprise in shock. And the Persians back then had done the things that we’re reading about in Esther 4— mourning and weeping and tearing on sackcloth. This was a widespread practice in the ancient world. And all of the Jews, it says here in the text, all of them throughout the Persian kingdom entered into this period of mourning and fasting, rending of their garments in response to this awful edict.
And when Esther, not really having a clue yet— she’s still not been told about this edict, hears about what Mordecai is doing. She’s embarrassed for him. Why are you walking around in these clothes and at the city gate wailing and mourning? What are you doing? So she sends some spare clothes through her attendants, and Mordecai refuses to take them, saying, you don’t know what’s happening here, Esther.
Haman’s atrocity has reached our hearing, and so what can we do but weep and wail and lament? But Mordecai says, there is something that you may be able to do, Esther. Brings us to the second part of this 3-act play, Mordecai’s argument. Mordecai’s argument, verses 4 to 14, contains this back-and-forth conversation between Mordecai and Esther’s trusted messengers. And Mordecai’s message to Esther through one of the king’s eunuchs that was assigned to attend Esther— essentially, Mordecai’s argument boils down to 3 sub-arguments.
Arguments as to why Esther needed to make this really difficult decision and risk her own life in going before the king. These 3 arguments. First argument, Mordecai says, Esther, you know what’s at stake here. That’s the point he makes in verses 7 and 8. He tells Esther the exact sum of money that Haman has agreed to pay, and he also gives Esther then a copy of the text of the edict so she believes him.
So Mordecai is saying, look, we’re not talking here about preferences, Esther. We’re not talking about creature comforts here. This is no small thing. We’re talking about the difference between life or death. And so you need to go and deal with this.
Argument number 2, Mordecai says, look, Esther, you’ve got to realize that you’re in trouble here either way. He says, Esther, I know I initially told you to hide your Jewish heritage, keep it secret from everyone. You can’t keep your Jewish identity hidden any longer. Esther. The time for secrets is over.
If this edict is carried out, someone is surely going to eventually ask you about your lineage. And then what? Even in the palace, Esther, there won’t be any exemptions for you. Your life might be in jeopardy if you go to the king uninvited. But if you do not go to the king and do this, your doom is certain.
And then Mordecai goes on to say, something really profound.
Look, Esther, if you don’t say anything and you don’t do what we’re asking you to do here, I want you to know this. He says, Deliverance from God is going to come either way.
It will come. It may not come through you, but it will nevertheless come, Mordecai says, from somewhere or someone else. God is going to do something to deliver his people. Esther, you didn’t plan to be in this royal position anyway, and so if God is able to use you, well, then he could use anybody. Anybody.
He could use anything to save his people. The question then is, Esther, do you want to play a part in God’s plan? If you don’t, it’s your loss.
Mordecai sounds really, really confident here and certain and unwavering and his belief that God’s people are going to be preserved one way or the other, somehow, someway. What was Mordecai basing his certainty and belief on? The same thing, the exact same thing that you and I have access to today, which is God’s character and God’s promises. In a world that changes every single day and all the moving parts in our world, God’s character and His promises are unchanging. Do you hear that?
God’s character and his promises never change, and Mordecai is banking on that. And once again, although God’s name isn’t specifically mentioned by Mordecai— and if you’ve missed any of the sermons, God’s name isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in this book— Mordecai still seems to be beginning to understand something: that all that had happened up to this point could not have just been sheer luck or mere coincidence. God’s fingerprints are over this whole thing. And Mordecai’s eyes are beginning to open to that— the fact that Esther was in this miraculous position to influence other people. That was Mordecai’s argument here.
God’s going to do something here, Esther. You have the opportunity to be a facilitator of that. If not, it’s your loss. But then Mordecai’s third argument, and this is the most famous of the 3 arguments— Mordecai says, who knows Who knows, Esther? Who knows?
But that you have come to your royal position in which you are, that you have come to this position for such a time as this. Who knows? He’s saying, you have to know, Esther, that you are where you are for a reason. And while you and I, Esther, may not have been completely aware of what God was doing, we’re actually quite surprised about the kings and Hamans God in no way is surprised. Like all things, God foreknew this edict.
And in His foreknowledge, God has made provision by specifically orchestrating all of these different events in chapters 1, 2, and 3 in order to place you, Esther, where He did, on the throne and in a position to influence the king. Well, what does this mean for us today? It means that we are It means— and I don’t know if you believe this or not, but I’m going to say it because I believe that it’s true— nothing today is out of control in our world. Nothing. God is in total, absolute control today of all things.
Back then, today, total control. He’s not pacing back and forth in heaven biting his fingernails wondering how the whole thing’s going to work out. He is right now— God, right now as we speak— in control of the whole universe. He’s right now in control of the physical world. He is right now in control of the affairs of all of the nations, including the ones that are at war right now.
He is right now in control of human destiny, including human successes and failures. And I love Proverbs 21:1, which says, even the heart of a king or a queen is in the hand of the Lord. You think He can’t turn that heart however He wants it to go? This is a God who spoke and creation happened. He is in complete control.
So, Esther, do you really think that this is all just a matter of fate and circumstance, that you are where you are? Nothing happens except through God and by His will. Nothing. I would ask you today, friends, the exact same thing. How do you know, in your current circumstance, how do you know that you haven’t been placed where you are and when you are and around whom you are for such a time as this?
How do you know that you haven’t been placed there by God? Think about all that God has given to you, to all of us— gifts, talents, experiences, opportunities. We like to pretend that we can take at least a little bit of credit for where we are. We are fooling ourselves. You can point to all of your hard work and your talent.
You didn’t earn that talent. It’s just given to you by God out of His grace. And the doors of opportunity that have opened for you aren’t something you produced all on your own. You didn’t get to where you are, friends. I didn’t get to where I am except by God’s grace.
Grace, period. And so God has made some of you good with money for a reason. God has given some of you an almost bottomless reservoir of compassion and empathy and mercy for a reason. God has made some of you good at working with children for a reason. God has made some of you good at working with the marginalized in our community for a reason.
God has made some of you smart and athletic or creative or administratively gifted or detail-oriented for a reason. He made some of you good with a pen. He made some of you good with a computer. He made some of you good with a voice. He made some of you good with cars or shingles or toilets for a reason.
And so, Mordecai says, Esther, you are where you are for a reason. And that brings us to the 3rd act in this 3-act play in this chapter. We have Haman’s atrocity, we have Mordecai’s argument, and we have Esther’s action. Esther’s action. Let’s sympathize with Esther.
I can sympathize with her. This was not an easy thing to ask of her. This was not an easy decision for her to make. In case Mordecai had completely forgotten, Esther felt compelled to remind him of all the basic royal protocol back then that everyone else in the empire seemed to know except for Mordecai. And that was this: even though she was the queen, her access to the king was restricted.
Haman had more access to the king than she did. Esther didn’t have that much unless the king granted her permission to come. And the penalty if you broke that protocol was death. And so apparently Esther doesn’t even expect to see the king anytime soon because, well, he hasn’t summoned her for at least 30 days to this point. Maybe the king’s desire is starting to sort of cool for her at that point.
She’s wondering, or given her mission, maybe she didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of the court by requesting an audience with him. We don’t know. I’d like to think I’d be as brave and as courageous and fearless as I— as she was if I were in her shoes, saying, bring it on, if I perish, I perish. But come on, who am I kidding?
We miss much smaller opportunities all the time that God puts in front of us, all because of fear or desire to play it safe, or because it’s inconvenient, or we’ll look silly or foolish or deficient in some ways. So we can forgive her that she’s wavering here when we waver for much, much less. You might have a situation even right now that God has put before you right now. Some of you are going through something right now that you’re hesitant to follow through on.
I think it’s much more likely that many of us here would be having arguments with ourselves. I mean, I’d like to help out, I really would. I, I’m no good to others if I’m dead, so let’s just wait, see how it all plays out. This isn’t what God wants me to do. What should be encouraging to us is that, like many of us, Esther’s obedience was not immediate, and courage And yet God still chose to work with her.
And so there’s hope for all of us. We can sympathize with Esther. She didn’t know what would happen if she did what Mordecai was asking. And not only was she unsure if she would live or die, she didn’t even know if it would make a difference. It’s one thing to know, okay, I’m gonna do the hard thing here.
I’m gonna go to this difficult place. I’m gonna say this. I’m gonna take a stand. I may have to suffer for it, but it’s all gonna matter in the end. Esther doesn’t even know that.
All she knows is she’s coming to the conclusion that this is the right and the necessary thing to do and that she cannot straddle the fence any longer. Similarly, friends, for all of us, at some point genuine private faith ultimately faces a public test. Did you catch that? Genuine Private faith will always face a public test sometime. Not nominal faith.
Nominal faith can shift and change and adapt and assimilate and hang out in the background. Nobody cares about nominal faith. Genuine private faith, meaning this is really your God, this is really what you believe in, you’re basing your life on this, you really believe in Jesus and in His ability to save and to forgive you of your sins. You really believe that there’s hope beyond this life for those who trust and follow Jesus. That kind of genuine private faith eventually, at some point, inevitably, in time, will result in a public test.
You can bank on it. The test might look different for each of us. There will be some public tests for our private faith. Okay, Esther, what are you made of? Who are you really?
Her action has 3 parts. First, Esther purposes. Esther purposes. She says, I’m going to go to the king. If it’s against the law, I understand that.
I’ll do it. I have to do it. And if I die, I die. She didn’t know what was going to happen, how it would turn out, but she purposed. In her heart through conviction that she just had to do this.
Second part of her action, she plans. She plans. For those of you who think you’re supposed to take these kinds of risks without counting the costs ahead of time or without having a plan, Esther did use her brain. She came up with a strategy, and you’ll hear about that next week, what her strategy was. But I hope that you’re not hearing today, if I perish, I perish means Christians be as dumb and careless as possible.
That’s bravery. I hope you’re not hearing that today.
Trusting does not mean that you don’t think about a plan and work on that with the brain that— and the wisdom and the counsel that God has provided for you. Once again though, Esther still doesn’t know if her plan is gonna work. Notice she received no message from heaven here. There’s no message from heaven. There’s no still small There’s no burning bush.
There’s no prophetic announcement. There’s no angelic visitation here. She comes to the biggest crossroads of her life, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for Esther to have said, um, can you give me anything here, God? A sign? Maybe a fleece of some kind?
What Mordecai says is, you’re here for a reason. You can do this. Can help, and this is the right thing to do. And she says, okay, I’ll do it. I don’t know if it’ll make a difference or if I’ll live to see another day, but I’ll do it.
She purposes, she plans, and third, she prays. She prays. Now, you might notice that the word prayer isn’t mentioned anywhere in this chapter, and you could argue that it’s— well, it’s not mentioned because that’s sort of how bumbling and careless and clueless that Mordecai and Esther are. And in the midst of this, they can’t even pray? I would argue that something opposite is actually happening here.
That the word prayer specifically isn’t here because it is everywhere implied and assumed. And because this entire story up until this point and after this point was intentionally written in such a way so that the fingerprints of God everywhere would not be described to us visibly. Why? Because that’s the way it is for us most of the time in our own lives. What we know from Scripture is that communal mourning with fasting and weeping and lamenting, wearing of sackcloth and ashes— this is no mere formality for them back then.
It was meant to express deep grief and terror such as would prompt humility and repentance and prayer before God. God. So we don’t have the word prayer in this chapter, it’s true, but we do have Esther’s request in verse 16 that all of her fellow Jews fast for her for 3 days. She’s calling them to do as her people had done for generations, to come before God in humility and dependence and to call upon the name of the Lord for him to intervene and to deliver them. There was no other hope.
So again, Again, the book of Esther was written this way without mentioning the name of God and all the things you would traditionally expect to be in a book like this. It was written this way. Why? In order to show the invisible hand of God. Because in our lives and throughout much of history, that’s what it looks like, the invisible hand of God.
We love the stories of the Bible where we get to see exactly what God is up to, pull back the curtain. And okay, I get it now. We love that. Most of the time, that’s not what happens. That’s not what our lives are like.
You and I are in the middle of the story.
You and I are like on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, and we sort of know how the very end of history is going to work out. I can’t even tell you how the end of this week is going to work out, or the end of this day. I, I can’t. Or the end of my life. So it’s possible that you’re searching and you’re searching and you can’t see the hand of God in your certain circumstance right now that you’re walking through, and you can’t see it.
What we have is Romans 8:28, which says that in all things God is working. God is working today. He works for the good of all those who love him and are called according to his purpose. If you’re part of God’s family, he is working for good on your behalf right now, even if you don’t see it. Here’s what we should walk away from Esther 4 with.
Esther 4 is reminding us that God’s purposes are greater than our own purposes, that God’s plans are greater than our own plans. We’ve got a plan. Good for you. I’ve got a plan. You’ve got a plan.
This is what my life should look like at age 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 80, whatever. Sometimes that plan stays on track for a while, and then usually it veers off and we never seem to be able to get it back anywhere close to what we had thought. Sometimes we’re in the middle of our plans. You’re in the middle of a plan right now, and in our lives, and we wonder, how in the world could this be part of God’s plan? You’ve got to remember again and again that Esther is teaching us that God’s purposes are bigger than our own purposes.
I think it’s okay for us to admit that it is very unlikely that any of us will ever find ourselves in the exact same type of defining moment that Esther finds herself in.
But every single one of us faces defining moments. We will. We have faced them. We will face them. Some of you could name those defining moments of your life right now, those crossroads.
I would argue that the most fundamental defining moment of our lives come when we first hear the message of the gospel, of what Jesus did for us. No other defining moment is more consequential than that. Who you’re going to marry, what you’re going to do— no. It’s whenever you first hear about what Jesus did for you and then decide, how am I going to respond to that message? Most defining of defining moments that you could possibly have.
The gospel message that Jesus, the Son of God, left heaven— no one had to twist his arm to do it like Esther’s arm is being twisted here by Mordecai. Nobody had to put pressure on Jesus to do this. He came down, he identified with us, lived as a human, God in the flesh, submitted himself to the will of his Heavenly Father, and he took on our condemnation by going the cross to die in our place. Jesus didn’t do this, friends, at the risk of his life. He did it at the cost of his life.
I once heard a Bible teacher say Jesus is different than Esther in that Jesus didn’t say, if I perish, I perish. Jesus said, when I perish, I perish. He knew he was coming to save people who would put their hope and trust in him. So Jesus went to the cross and was crushed for us. That message of the gospel is the most consequential thing that confronts us with the decision to either continue to live according to our own wisdom and moral goodness and try to do the best we can as a good little religious person and try to be more moral than the other person and hope that that is enough to get us into heaven, or for us to identify ourselves with Jesus as his disciple and follower for life, saying what Jesus did for me on the cross is sufficient for me, the only thing that could pay the penalty for my sin.
Friends, you have heard that message. I’ve just presented it to you. And if you don’t understand the crossroads of that moment, either having made a previous decision or right now being faced with a decision about, do I believe that about Jesus, that He would do that for me and that He’s able to rescue me and that good works and being a church attender and a generous person and a kind person and really having good intentions and good feelings and good desires, that those things are hopefully, fingers crossed, going to be enough. It’s not going to be enough. You need someone who has given his life for you, who was crushed for you.
And it is that message of the gospel that is the defining moment of our life. Everything hangs on that. However, it’s only the beginning of defining moment types of decisions we’re going to face, because you and I every day are going to face a continuous sequence of defining moments throughout your day, throughout your life, as you daily face decisions that demand that you choose either to identify yourselves publicly with Jesus, or you can identify yourself with the rest of the world in those moments and shrink back.
Maybe like Esther, you have been brought to a particular defining moment in your life by circumstances over which you had no control. Combined with flawed decisions perhaps that you made along the way, and maybe instead of living for God, you have so concealed your Christian faith that no one could even identify you as a Christian. Then suddenly you face dire circumstances, either in the circumstances of your life with others or just within your own inner emotional world. Regardless of the straits in which you find yourself, yourself today? Would you turn to God today?
Just know that God’s purposes are greater than yours. And who knows, maybe you are where you are today, in the pew that you’re in, or watching this online, or whatever. Perhaps you’ve come to that place for such a time as this, and God is speaking to you and inviting you to have a relationship with him, and you need to say yes to that. Or to renew your trust in him. Who knows?
But that you are where you are, going through what you’re going through, for such a time as this. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your word and a narrative like this that is an interesting story with high points and low points and good characters and bad characters. Lord, far more than that is the fact that you are speaking to us and saying, I’m in control of all things. Do you believe that?
And I pray that everyone here within the sound of my voice would confess that today, saying, God, you are in charge of my life. Use me for such a time as this. Do what you will in my life for such a time as this.
God, I pray that you would make us more like you every single day and cause us to trust You, that our private faith, when it’s tested, would reveal that we are following You, that we would show ourselves to be Your children. Thank You for what Jesus did for us on the cross. Pray all these things in Your Son’s name. Amen.
