Esther: A Heart to Serve

I was invited to speak at the Missouri Cumberland Presbyterian Women's Retreat last weekend in Branson. My mother and I went and had a wonderful time - the ladies are all so nice and the Keeter Center at College of the Ozarks is absolutely gorgeous! Several people have asked if the classes I taught were taped - well, no they weren't so I thought I would just blog it all! Their theme was "Esther: For Such a Time As This - Reaching Out to Serve".

Serving involves four things - let's take a look at each one. The first thing is Love - having a passionate love relationship with God. When we talk about having a heart for serving, we have to first come to a place where we understand how God feels about us and, in return, how we feel about Him. God describes our relationship with Him in many different ways - potter/clay; master/servant; father/child; each stage represents a growth in our maturity in Him. Most of us can easily handle the first two - potter/clay and master/servant - those descriptions require little personal involvement from us. In fact many of us spend the majority of our lives comforatble in these two beginning stages of our relationship with God. But God wishes that we take a few steps further. In the gospel of John, Jesus says He no longer calles us servants but now calls us His friends, which is even more intimate. But the most intimate relationship we can have with Jesus is when we can call Him our Bridegroom - our Fiance - like in the book of Hosea and Song of Solomon. It is then that we begin to realize how passionately He loves us and longs for intimacy with us. Now we come to apoint where we can return that same passionate love.

When we find this new passionate romance with the Lover of our Souls, we begin to see His hand in everything around us. Perhaps we see it played out before us in our favorite movies - Rose and Jack on the bow of the Titanic, Jo and the Professor in Little Women, Sam and Annie on the top of the Empire State Building in Sleepless in Seattle, or Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail (the last are two of my personal favorites). Maybe it's in the songs we hear on the radio listening to Delilah. It could be the beautiful sunsets or the smell in the air right before a rainstorm. Our senses are heightened to be aware of His presence and the wooing of our hearts. Darrel & my's relationship was not your typical romance. We met the year I graduated high school. We became good friends and spent a lot of time together. Very soon, Darrel began to move in a more serious direction. He was sure that I would be his wife. It took me a little longer to trust that - about 8 years longer! He stuck by me through all that time - time that God needed to heal my heart and show me what it meant to be pursued. I appreciate that so much - without it I would have never been able to see that God pursues me in the same way. I would never be able to understand it!

Have you ever noticed that women who are in love just seem to glow? My soon to be sister-in-law is a great example. She simply radiates with love. She is being pursued by the love of her life and it shows! When we find this passionate romance with God, our countenance changes, too!His words become alive to us - not just good sayings or wise teachings, but they beome life to us. Our worship deepens, our hearts soften, we become truly beautiful. And in this discovery of how deeply Jesus loves us, we discover that we also deeply love Him and those He has created.

The book of Esther tells us the story of a young Jewish girl named Hadassah, or Esther. She was raised by her cousin, Mordecai. Scripture says she was brought up to fear God and execute His commands. I believe she was raised to have a love relationship with God. Mordecai was a man who was full of love and passion for God, for life, and for his people. He played an important role in shaping the kind of woman Esther would become - a queen. Likewise many people have influenced us in our relationship with Christ. Think about those people - most likely the people who have influenced you the most are the people who have passionate love relationships with God. When we find this kind of relationship with Jesus, we begin to hear His heart - believe it or not, God's heart does not beat "duty" or "obligation" or "discipline" - His heart beats "people, people, people" and "love, love, love". All of a sudden, people begin to leap out at us. That checker we see every day at the store, the one who has such sad eyes - suddenly God shows you a glimpse of her heart. We begin to see more than just cute hairdo's or trendy clothes or crooked teeth and freckles. We see their hearts, their needs, their hurts.

Mordecai felt the plight of his people. Haman, a high-ranking official in the King's court, hated Mordecai because he would not bow to anyone but God. He decided that killing Mordecai wouldn't be enough - he would have to exterminate the entire race. Mordecai asked Esther, who had become Queen, to help in some way. He even suggested that she had been born for such a time as this. In compassion and out of a heart of love for her God, Esther risked her life to expose Haman's evil plot. This brings us to the next thing service involves - risk...being willing to lose what seems to be more important than God and others.

Loving God in this passionate way involves a certain amount of risk. Loving others involves risk as well. We have an enemy who would love to see us fail. He hates God, and although sometimes his voice seems all too friendly to us, we know that he hates us, too. We take the risk of spiritual attack from our enemy. In the same way, Esther, too, risked attack - even death - as she approached the king unsolicited. She risked having Haman find our who she really was, a Jew. She risked rejection from the king, her friends, her family, and her people. But her love for God and her people proved stronger than the love of her own life and reputation. Now few of us will have to risk our literal lives to serve and love others, although many across the world do lose their lives every day for the love of God. But maybe we will have to risk rejection from those around us or perhaps we will have to risk losing a certain amount of personal gain. People will think you are crazy when you begin to live from a heart of passion for God and for people. We have lost friends and family because of it. We've been "relieved" of ministry positions and conveniently and gradually pushed out of inner circles of leadership. But Jesus promises us in Matthew 19:29 "And anyone and everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for My name's sake will receive many [even a hundred] times more and will inherit eternal life." Now we know that eternal life doesn't mean heaven - no! Eternal life starts the minute we find this relationship with Jesus Christ - He's talking about finding true, eternal, abundant life - right now! Finding that place where we can risk it all energizes us!

Well, I don't want to promote eye strain or brain strain, so I will blog the second half in the next couple of days.