Do you remember where you were when you first heard about the terrorist attacks on 9-11?
Furthermore, do you remember how you felt?
Most Americans felt a lot of sorrow, anger and heartache, not only for the victims of the terrorist attacks and their families, but also for our entire nation, because we saw a raw example of how some people on this planet want to see nothing less than the annihilation of America.
Think of how we felt on 9-11 as a small indication of how Esther and her people, the Jews, felt in ancient Persia about four or five years after she became queen.
We’re in the series "Divine Destiny, How God is at Work in My Life."
Last time in this series we learned that lovely Esther, who was as beautiful on the inside as she was outside, became the new Queen of ancient Persia. You might mistake what happened to Esther as a Cinderella ending, if that were indeed the end of the story. Turns out it was only the beginning.
As is the case in all of our lives, the sun doesn’t shine every day. The storm clouds that begin to appear on the horizon in chapter 3 of Esther look very ominous for her and her people the Jews. A wicked officer in the court of King Xerxes named Haman becomes upset with Mordecai, Esther’s adoptive father, because Mordecai won’t kneel down and pay honor to him.
Haman had bribed and blustered his way into the king’s favor and had become a V.I.P. in Persia. But it was mostly smoke and mirrors. He was an insecure man who needed constant affirmation, even if it meant the king passing a law that called for everyone to bow down to him.
Nothing wrong with receiving affirmation every once in a while but when you need constant affirmation it’s a sure sign of serious insecurity. You need to get help. Haman needed help. But instead of asking for help, he sought approval in the wrong way.
Haman’s mantra was, "Every time I walk by I want everyone to bow down to me!"
As a conscientious Jew, Mordecai refused to bow to Haman. He refused to play his silly game. Consequently, Haman hated Mordecai. Then, when he found out about Mordecai being Jewish his hate-filled mind and heart decides to plot, not only for Mordecai’s death, but also for the death of all the Jews in the Persian Empire. We pick up the story in chapter 3 of Esther.
8 Then Haman said to King Xerxes, "There is a certain group of people scattered among the other people in all the states of your kingdom. Their customs are different from those of all the other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws. It is not right for you to allow them to continue living in your kingdom. 9 If it pleases the king, let an order be given to destroy those people. Then I will pay seven hundred fifty thousand pounds of silver to those who do the king’s business, and they will put it into the royal treasury." Esther 3:8-9 (NCV)
King Xerxes, so easily manipulated by money and baseless argument, agrees to Haman’s wicked plan. He didn’t even investigate Haman¡¦s claims. He didn’t even try to understand the other side of the story.
10 So the king took his signet ring off and gave it to Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of the Jewish people.11 Then the king said to Haman, "The money and the people are yours. Do with them as you please."
12 On the thirteenth day of the first month, the royal secretaries were called, and they wrote out all of Haman’s orders. They wrote to the king’s governors and to the captains of the soldiers in each state and to the important men of each group of people. The orders were written in the writing of each state and in the language of each people. They were written in the name of King Xerxes and sealed with his signet ring. 13 Letters were sent by messengers to all the king’s empire ordering them to destroy, kill, and completely wipe out all the Jewish people. That meant young and old, women and little children, too. It was to happen on a single day - the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which was Adar. And they could take everything the Jewish people owned. 14 A copy of the order was given out as a law in every state so all the people would be ready for that day.
15 The messengers set out, hurried by the king’s command, as soon as the order was given in the palace at Susa. The king and Haman sat down to drink, but the city of Susa was in confusion. Esther 3:10-15 (NCV)
Long before there was a Hitler there was a Haman. If you have a grasp of how evil Hitler was, or how evil the terrorists of 9-11 were, you get an idea of Haman’s disposition. His evil plan saw to it that every single Jew - man, woman and child throughout the entire Persian Empire - was to be killed on the same day.
Messengers crisscross the empire to publish the news and a collective gasp can be heard throughout the land.
1 When Mordecai heard about all that had been done, he tore his clothes, put on rough cloth and ashes, and went out into the city crying loudly and painfully. 2 But Mordecai went only as far as the king’s gate, because no one was allowed to enter that gate dressed in rough cloth. 3 As the king’s order reached every area, there was great sadness and loud crying among the Jewish people. They fasted and cried out loud, and many of them lay down on rough cloth and ashes to show how sad they were. Esther 4:1-3 (NCV)
What do you do when your heart aches so badly that you can’t even eat and barely want to move?
The bad news is all of us are going to face heartache sooner or later. In fact, most of us already know the bitterness of heartache.
The good news is that we don’t have to be afraid of it if we’re walking with God. The high point in the story of Esther is how she and the Jewish people respond to this threat against their very existence!
What is it that makes you feel threatened? What do you fear? What breaks your heart?
Whatever it is - God is bigger and there are ways for you to effectively work with God as He heals your heartaches.
HELPS for Healing Heartache
1. Reject the diagnosis of fear and get a second opinion from God!
This is a recurring biblical theme, so you¡¦ve heard me teach on this before from other parts of the Bible. There are a lot of places in the Bible where we’re told that the Christ follower does not need to live in fear. Fear shouldn’t dominate us. Fear is one of Satan’s biggest tools to rob us of the healing God has for heartaches.
I don’t say this because I think that fear dominated Mordecai. On the contrary. If it had, he would have gone into hiding. Instead he publicly showed his displeasure with Haman¡¦s wicked plot and began a period of fasting and crying out to God for help.
Whatever it is that threatens your spiritual, emotional, relational, mental or physical wellbeing, you’ve got to reject the diagnosis of fear. Don’t give your problems so much credit. Sometimes our heartaches are magnified because we inflate our fears instead of deflating them. Overcoming your fear is the first step to healing. Here’s a true story that illustrates the foolishness of inflating our fears.
During his reign of terror between 1875 and 1883, Black Bart was credited with stealing the valuables and the breath away from twenty-nine different Wells Fargo stagecoach crews. In journals from San Francisco to New York, his name became synonymous with danger on the frontier.
What’s most remarkable is that this professional thief accomplished his escapades without ever firing a shot!
His weapon was his reputation. His ammunition was intimidation. A hood hid his face. No victim ever saw him. No artist ever sketched his features. No sheriff could ever track his trail. He never took a hostage. He didn’t have to. His presence was enough to paralyze.
Black Bart. A hooded bandit armed with a deadly weapon. What was that weapon? One word - FEAR!
As it turned out, he really wasn’t anyone to be afraid of. When the authorities finally tracked him down, they didn’t find a bloodthirsty bandit from Death Valley. They found a mild-mannered druggist from Decatur, Illinois. The man the papers pictured storming through the mountains on horseback was, in reality, so afraid of horses he rode to and from his robberies in a buggy. He was Charles E. Boles - the bandit, who never once fired a shot, because he never even loaded his gun!
Who or what is the bandit without a loaded gun in your life? What fear are you giving more credit to than God?
Haman’s wicked plot to murder all the Jews was indeed cause for concern. But there’s no way God was going to let that happen. God had made promises to the Jewish people. He was going to bless all the nations of the earth through them. (Genesis 12) Through the Jews we have the written Word of God, the Bible. And through them we have the Living Word of God, Jesus, who said,
28And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; but rather be afraid of Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29Are not two little sparrows sold for a penny? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s leave (consent) and notice. Jesus, Matthew 10:28 (NCV)
We need to be more concerned about the condemnation of God than the death sentence of human beings. Furthermore, Jesus insists that there is no detail of our lives, no matter how small, of which He is not aware!
We need to give our fears less credit and give God more! Reject the diagnosis of fear and get a second opinion from God.
Here’s another help for heartache from the book of Esther.
2. Re-examine our attitude about testing.
What does the doctor do when we go to him or her for aches and pains? The doctor puts us through an appropriate barrage of tests.
Life is like that. We’re going to be tested spiritually. The key is to expect testing as a part of the healing process.
Again we look to Jesus for our attitude about trouble and heartache.
"I told you these things so that you can have peace in me. In this world you will have trouble, but be brave! I have defeated the world." John 16:33 (NCV)
We can expect to run into people like Haman. Why did Haman hate the Jews so much that he longed for their extinction?
The Bible says that Haman was an "Agagite." (Esther 3:10) That probably means that he was a descendant of Agag, King of the Amelikites. The Amelikites were the group of people that attacked the Jews after their Exodus from Egypt. The Jews were exhausted, they were trudging through unknown territory and the opportunistic Amelikites attack the Israelites from behind. (See Numbers 14:45; 1 Samuel 15:2) That¡¦s just like the devil and his henchmen. They hit you when and where you’re the most vulnerable!
However, the Amelikites didn’t know with whom they were messing! God declared war on the Amelikites and the Israelites defeated them with God’s help. [This is also probably why Mordecai would not bow to Haman. He knew that Haman was God’s enemy.]
Haman most likely grew up hearing the story of how the Israelites had whipped his ancestors. His formative years were most likely spent nursing a grudge against the Jews because his parents and their parents before them made derogatory and inflammatory comments about Jewish people. Now, forgetting the hand of God, he takes it upon himself to engage in payback.
Bitterness and bias and prejudice are cancerous. They eat away at the insides of a person. Haman was eaten up with hatred for what had happened generations before him. How irrational, yet how normal for the human heart without the healing hand of God.
You and I can expect to run into people like Haman. They will resent our devotion to the Lord. They’re nursing wounds that don¡¦t have anything to do with us.
A few days ago we had some of the coldest days of the winter here in the south and so the weather people told us every night what we needed to do about taking care of our homes, and pets, etc. Nothing wrong with that. It caused me to remember an incident shortly after Deb and I were married and we were ministering to a church in northern Indiana. The first winter we were there I heard the weatherman give precautions but I didn’t do anything about it. Consequently our pipes froze. That wasn¡¦t any fun at all! If I had known how harsh the cold could be I would have paid more attention and saved myself some headaches.
When I live for Christ I need to be aware that there will be opposition. Now remember our first help ¡V we don’t have to accept fear’s diagnosis - especially fear of opposition - but we do need to be aware of it. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. I’m prepared when I have sense enough to know what’s coming. You can bet the following winters in northern Indiana that I took precautions in cold weather. And so we didn’t have any more frozen pipes. We were prepared for cold weather.
A big part of our dealing with our headaches and heartaches is ATTITUDE. It’s psychological. Instead of having a "woe is me" attitude we can say, "That’s all right. I knew there were going to be heartaches and I’m ready."
If I follow Christ and His teachings it’s not going to tickle everybody around me.
Expect testing. If and when you do you will be less threatened by it. You will realize that it’s normal. It’s part of the healing process. Don’t fear it. Just expect it and don’t take it personal.
3. Follow God’s prescription of personal involvement.
When word reached Esther of Haman’s fiendish plot to kill all Jews it was through a communication from Mordecai to ask her to plead to the king for mercy. Esther’s reply to Mordecai showed hesitancy. She said,
"All the royal officers and people of the royal states know that no man or woman may go to the king in the inner courtyard without being called. There is only one law about this: Anyone who enters must be put to death unless the king holds out his gold scepter. Then that person may live. And I have not been called to go to the king for thirty days." Esther 4:11 (NCV)
Sometimes people go to the doctor with a severe illness and the doctor prescribes life-threatening surgery. In other words the surgery may save their life or take their life. The patient has to sign forms saying they realize the risks they’re taking. I think this is the decision that Esther was weighing.
On the other hand, Mordecai’s reply is confident and firm. His words have come down through history as a classic response to all of us when we face heartache and need reassurance and a little kick in the seat of our britches.
"Just because you live in the king’s palace, don’t think that out of all the Jewish people you alone will escape. 14 If you keep quiet at this time, someone else will help and save the Jewish people, but you and your father’s family will all die. And who knows, you may have been chosen queen for just such a time as this." Esther 4:13b-14 (NCV)
Remember how we said last week that timing is a key to good decision making? Well now it was time for Esther to speak up and make a plea to the king for her people the Jews. There is a time to keep our mouth shut and there’s a time to open it. This was a time to open it.
Mordecai was reminding her that the risk was not lessened because she was in the palace. Either she spoke up and risked being killed by the king now - or she kept quiet and was killed later on the set day of genocide. There are just some problems that procrastination can’t solve.
When our hearts are aching its easy to justify complacency. It’s easy to rationalize compromise. We feel smug in our do-nothing posture. There’s a time to wait on God and then there’s a time to get cracking. There’s a time for sticking our neck out for God, for others, and for what’s right.
Our part is to trust God and get involved! We need to believe that He has a plan for us no matter what heartaches and setbacks have beset us. He has a plan for our relationships - even if past relationships have gone awry God still has a plan. He has a plan for our finances. He has a plan for our jobs. He has a plan for every area of our lives!
God is a planning God! He always has a plan!
My part is to plug into that plan! God put Esther in the palace in order to be a part of His plan to save the Jews!
God has put you where you are "for such a time as this."
