Bad News
(Ps.112:7)
During Lent I have been preaching on various verses with each one having its own powerful truth: “my times are in your hand” (Ps.31:15); our God is a consuming fire (Heb.12:29); and now this morning verse 7 from Psalm 112:
He is not afraid of evil tidings; his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.
That verse always catches my attention because if there’s anything that can turn my heart to Jell-O quickly it’s bad news (evil tidings). A call from the police late at night saying your son has been in an accident is at the hospital with no explanation of what is wrong; the doctor calling you back about the lab results you had done and now they want to do more test because some of the blood counts are too high or too low; there have been rumors of a plant shut down or layoffs and the boss wants to see you in his office at the end of the day. Even the simple suggestion from a friend: “Well Mary I have some good news to tell you and some bad news which do you want to hear first?
All of a sudden that once firm and confident heart I thought I had turns into a march mellow of fear and anxiety as I wonder what next. And here’s this Psalmist saying:
“He is not afraid of bad news; his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.”
It’s easy to say but like one pastor who called me this week said after being out of pastoral work for more than a year after leaving his last charge: “I’m really frustrated and find my self questioning and doubting God.”
It got me to thinking where in the Bible (outside of Jesus) is a good example of someone who gets bad news and doesn’t “freak out” as we say or better yet has and can maintain a strong and healthy faith. One example that came to mind was Esther.
Here was a young girl in her 20s who had recently won the Miss America contest in Persia, the greatest empire of the world at that time. Out of a whole group of contestants and a year’s worth
of beauty treatments and preparation, she had been selected by the King to be his new queen--
no simple feat, indeed a real accomplishment. She had been in her new position as queen
for less than a year when like a terrible smack in the face you got the bad news. All of her people, the Jews, were to be destroyed in 6 months. Esther’s initial reaction was tremendous fear with the hope that it would not be discovered in the palace that she was Jewish.
At this point she does not appear as a very good example of our verse because her heart is not firm but terrified. As it is often the case when bad news comes, we don’t have a lot of choices, and Esther is told by her surrogate father, Mordecai, at great risk to her life—to go see the King and persuade him to stop the coming holocaust.
Usually when we run into problems or bad news we have our own 3 step approach:
First, I will take care of the problem myself……
Second, I will call a friend or family member and talk it over..
Third, I will pray and ask God for help
The point is it’s almost always in that order with God taking a distant third, but when the bad news is really bad, like this time, step number three can become step number one very quickly out of desperation and helplessness. And here is where the character and faith of Esther begin
to prove themselves. After a day or two when the truth of how grave the situation is and what
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has to be done begins to sink in, Esther sends word back to Mordecai: Gather all the Jews to be found in Susa and hold a fast on my behalf and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish. (Esther 4:16)
For a young lady hardly into her 20s her decision to approach the king uncalled for is what we might call today “stepping up to the plate”; instead of just sitting in her bedroom crying and despondent telling herself: I don’t know what to do or I’m too afraid; Esther has enough
courage to step forward and risk her life. In this example she is successful, the King does agree to see her and she executes a plan to win the King over to her side and as the story concludes, the King agrees to help her and her people are saved. But whether she was successful or not, the real point I am after this morning is how did Esther have the courage to face up to this bad news, how was she able to come up with a plan that won the king over to her side when she was in such a panic-stricken situation?
The answer, although not spelled out in the text, is that along the way, Esther had developed a faith in God that even in this dangerous and frightful situation enabled her to naturally turn to
the Lord as her hope and Savior: hold a fast she said for three days and nights.
The compliment to fasting is praying and I am sure she did a lot of that in those 3 days; in fact, the whole Jewish community joined her and there is nothing more powerful in the world then
the community of believers united in a penitent and prayerful petition to God.
What happens with so many people today is that they do not take the time and make the effort to develop a faith that is real and close to Jesus Christ. As each day passes in its routine
and there are no real crises, Jesus Christ is kept at arm’s length- after all the only time you bother with God is on Sunday or when you are in trouble. But that was not the case with Esther,
she had learned to take her faith seriously; she had learned to pray and worship God regularly;
she had gone through her good days with a daily inward turning to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in praise and thanks for the blessings of life received each day. And now when real trouble was to break lose around her, the heavenly presence of her Lord that she had dail nurtured was to come forward not just to sustain her but to give her a plan of action and the courage to carry out that plan.
Jesus said on one occasion (John 10:27):
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal
life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.
And so it was for Esther, in that time of prayer and fasting, she heard her Master’s voice as she was given a plan to win the King’s heart to her side and no one would snatch her out of God’s almighty hand where before and now and in the future she would abide.
No doubt she was fearful and shaky, but she went forward only to find that what the Psalmist
had said was true: her heart did become firm, trusting in the Lord.
I mentioned earlier that one of the compliments to fasting is prayer and no doubt Esther prayed a lot in those three days of fasting; but there is another element often associated with fasting and that is repentance. During fasting our physical body is weakened by a lack of food and /or water
and in such a weakened condition a person is more inclined toward a penitent attitude and was it not David who prayed in Psalm 51:17: “the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou will not despise.” Prayer and fasting make possible
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an environment within ourselves where we feel more penitent and find our self having a broken and contrite heart. Such a humble condition is favored by our Lord because we are less likely then to depend on our self and more likely to turn to Him in faith and love.
You may recall during the ministry of Jesus the scribes and Pharisees questioned Jesus about how to handle bad news. In Luke 13 they reminded Jesus about an incident in which Pilate had allowed certain men to attack and kill some Galileans and then to mingle the blood of these non-believers with sacrifices at the Temple- to a religious Jew is was a horribly offensive act of murder and sacrilege. And rather than point the finger of blame and accusation at Pilate or any other group, Jesus said to his religious questioners: “…unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” And then Jesus went on to talk about another bad news event of the day when a large tower under construction fell over and killed a number of the workers. Rather than turning the bad news into a debating event about the nature or responsibility of God, once again Jesus
said: “…unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” In other words instead of getting hung up on why did this happen or who is responsible, the real issue Jesus kept coming back to
was the individual and did he or she have a penitent attitude that leads to humility before God.
That’s what makes the example of Esther a meaningful one for us today; she did not go into a long and tiresome debate or query with God as to why was this coming holocaust going to happen, and if He were God why would He allow such a decree be written against His own people and hadn’t they already suffered enough and what had they done to deserve this after everything else they had gone through; and didn’t God know she was only one woman who had no real power in the king’s court- all of that kind of questioning and debate and frustrating anger were absent in the presence of a humble and contrite young woman who had called for the fasting and prayers of her people as she herself in a penitent spirit sought out the will and way of her Lord in the midst of a frightful and dangerous situation.
Esther’s example reminds us that the words of the Psalmist are neither empty nor meaningless, but offer to each one of us who are willing to walk in daily surrender with our Lord the hope and confidence of a heart that is firm in the midst of evil tidings. It is no easy task and should not be when you consider the divine reward. So may we each grow in our faith to that time when we too can say:
I am not afraid of evil tidings; my heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.
