Episode 185: June 16, 2024 - Birdsong and Duckworth

Eternity Church PodCast

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Exploring the book of Esther, we’ve met people who risked their lives to speak up for themselves and others. In these pages, we’ve come face to face with marginalized foreigners like Mordecai and Esther, who miraculously found themselves with cultural capital to spend for the sake of others. We should ask ourselves: if we were in their place, would we risk our lives, our comfort, our place in society, for the sake of God’s people? Hopefully as we’ve spent this time with Esther and Mordecai, we’ve discovered, just as they did, that standing up for what is right is dangerous when we are immersed in a hostile world. We would be tempted to think that grasping at power is the answer. We think if we had the power we could walk righteously with the strong. But reading the book of Esther we see countless examples of those who walked with the strong, corrupted by the power they reached out to hold. No greater example can be found here than the life of Haman the Agagite. By the time we meet him, he is wealthy, affluent and influential, but he is also grotesquely deformed by his own craven hunger for power. It is that malformation that will sadly lead to his vicious end. As we prepare to sit down for dinner with Haman one last time, let’s heed the challenging words of Peter Hon Wan Lau: “When we reflect on our lives, we might find that we are sometimes like Haman. We are tempted to place pride in our possessions and achievements. We are tempted to seek honor from those around us.” Friends, as we prepare our hearts, let us follow Esther’s wisdom into our new lives in Christ. Where have we allowed the views of this world to deform our view of the life Jesus offers us (Galatians 1.6-12)? Where have we co-opted His good news and made it into a cultural possession for our own advancement (Philippians 1.15-18)? Beloved, where have we allowed pride to corrupt our minds, causing us to miss the blessing of transformation promised to us by the Father (Romans 12.1-2)?