"God Waits" Esther 5 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Esther chapter 5.

Esther 5 · chapter mention

Perhaps you're familiar with Thomas Chalmers.

He was a minister in the Church of Scotland, a Puritan minister in the early 1800s.

He was ordained in the ministry before he was a believer, which was actually surprisingly not that uncommon back then.

The ministry was something people went into if they didn't have the work ethic to get a real job.

I think of John Barridge, whose dad told him that he was too soft for farming, he should try pastoring.

Well, Thomas Chalmers had a similar encounter.

He was too soft for the real world, and so he went into pastoral ministry indained in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and actually rose in leadership there, and he wrote advice to other pastors in his area of influence.

He told them, after faithfully discharging your duties on the Lord's Day, meaning Sunday, you should feel free to take the next five days, and this is his exact quotes, enjoy five days of interrupted leisure for the prosecution of any science in which your taste may dispose you to engage and which is profitable.

And this is back when theology was considered a science.

So what's if you read through those lines, what he is saying is that after you do your ministry on Sunday, you should spend Monday through Friday actually putting your mind to something profitable, like a different kind of science.

It was clear that he was not a man of high faith.

He was single through much of this time, and he proposed to a woman who said yes, and the Lord got his intention when she broke off the engagement.

Apparently he was too soft for marriage as well.

And then he watched his brothers and sisters die from disease and the plague one at a time.

He himself was stricken with an illness that killed the rest of his family, and this is what drove him to saving faith in Christ.

He was meditating on Psalm 39, a passage about eternity, verses four through six, that arrested his attention.

And so he developed two mottos that he would live by for the rest of his life.

He rewrote to other pastors and he told them he live by these two things.

First, that time is of the essence.

Life is short, and eternity is long.

That was his first motto.

Time is of the essence.

You must take every day seriously.

Second, you will live forever.

And this is the way he began signing his letters.

You will live forever and you are not forever.

And those are the two pillars that he became known for.

And I just want to say them together so you get their contrast.

You will live forever, and life is not forever.

You are a temporal being and you're an eternal being.

You have brief moments under the sun, and yet you go into eternity.

He challenged pastors repeatedly in his writing to take deliberate steps to ensure that your lives are lived for the glory of God within his will.

Walk not as fools, but as wives, Paul told the Ephesians, another one of his favorite verses.

He kept telling congregants, life is serious business, but not as serious as eternity.

He wanted to plant in people's hearts this pull in two different directions.

That you need to live for the here and now while recognizing the here and now doesn't matter.

What you do in life echoes into eternity.

I've heard that said before.

But from that you get the concept that life is short, life is brief, eternity is forever.

These are the two tensions that we find in Esther chapter 5.

Esther 5 · chapter mention

You need to act now and you need to act in an urgent way, and you also need to take a step back and recognize that God is in sovereign control of history.

I think many people view God as a watchmaker.

He's wound up the world and lets it tick and steps his way back.

That's the deist view of God.

And we understand that that's not true.

God has exercised sovereign control over the world, but he exercises that sovereign control sometimes through interjecting himself and through the miracles and the miraculous, and sometimes through letting providence take its place and just play out.

And we see both of those tonight.

I want to give you a brief outline as we look at Esther chapter 5 tonight.

Esther 5 · chapter mention

Two opposite ways, two opposite ways that God works, two opposite ways God works.

In Esther chapter 5, we see bold action and bravery, and we also see courage in waiting.

Esther 5 · chapter mention

We see a sense of urgency with Esther, and we also see a sense of detachment for Esther.

We see a sense in her in which she says, like Thomas Chalmers, we must act now, for the day is short.

And then we see a sense in which she acts like Thomas Chalmers and saying, Let's take a step back and let time go by.

Esther chapter five, let's look at the first of these two ways.

God is at work in our acting.

We see this in verses one through eight.

On the third day, Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the king's palace in front of the king's quarters, while the king was sitting on his royal throne inside the throne room, opposite the entrance to the palace.

So remember, there is this long marble causeway here that leads into the king's palace, and that's where the king is seated.

It is a capital crime to come into the king's presence uninvited.

You could you could be executed.

Esther became queen for something similar to this.

Remember, the the process of becoming queen was the beauty pageant, and nobody could be adopted by the king, nobody could be chosen by the king unless the king called for her by name.

And the way the author says that in chapter two, it makes it sound like that was a bit of a complex problem there.

He had to remember the woman's name to summon her, because nobody could come otherwise.

And now in chapter five, it says, on the third day, Esther arrives unannounced.

On the third day, it's three days after chapter four, where she tells Mordecai, I will go see the king.

And if I perish, I perish.

Chapter 4, if you remember the context here in the book of Esther, the Jews have been decreed for annihilation.

The king has signed their death edict and said that all the Jews can be slaughtered on a certain day.

That day is almost a year from then.

It's as far away as it could be by the casting of the lots.

And so the countdown has begun.

The race is on.

Is there a way to rescue the Jews before their scheduled annihilation?

And Mordecai pleads with Esther.

Mordecai, one of the king's counselors who's Jewish, begs Esther, his adopted daughter.

He raised her, who's now the queen, and begs her and says, You need to be have courage.

You need to go act.

You need to go into the king and beg for the life of the Jews.

And in chapter 4, remember, Esther says, I can't just go into the king.

He hasn't called for me in a month.

Esther's saying it's almost as if he's forgotten my name now.

He doesn't know me.

I don't have that kind of authority.

I can't, I don't know how you think the royal palace works, but it definitely doesn't work that way.

It's like you have a friend who works at the White House and you tell him, Can't you just go tell President Trump?

No, that's not the way it works.

That's a good way to get shot, is what that is.

Well, Esther is in a more ramped up, secure environment than even the White House.

Let me just give you an analogy here.

A story from a few years earlier.

This isn't a biblical story.

It's told through secular historians for the battle that King Artaxerxes was on his way to, the Peloponnesian War.

He went to Lydia, the same Lydia that we find in the New Testament and in Acts.

And while there, a woman came to him and begged for the life of her oldest son.

She said she had five sons, four of them have gone off to fight for King Artaxerces in the war, against the Greeks, by the way.

So this woman had people that had really crossed from their own people group to fight for Artaxerxes, and she just wanted to have her oldest son back.

Because she approached the king without an invitation.

Art Xerxes called for her oldest son, and the military brought him to him.

He had him cut in half, and then half of him on each side outside the city, the army marched through on their way off to war.

That was the visual punishment for approaching the king and asking for something uninvited.

That story went throughout the Persian Empire.

Everybody knew that story.

The last woman who walked into his presence and asked for a favor saw her oldest son sliced in half and the army paraded through the middle.

This is what Esther was asked to do.

And so I find it a little noteworthy, chapter 5, verse 1, on the third day.

She took three days planning.

She took three days trying to figure this out.

Perhaps she was praying.

Perhaps she was summoning the courage and the boldness.

The text doesn't say.

There's a lot of white space there.

It just said that three days went by.

But then after three days, she acts.

And this takes a tremendous amount of courage.

It says she puts on her royal robes.

She stands in the inner court of the king's palace in front of the king's quarters while the king was on his royal throne.

I mean, this is the no-no, and she did it.

She walks in in her queenly appearance.

Understand that God uses means to accomplish his will.

This is an example in Esther.

This is really the first example in the whole book of Esther where you have somebody acting with courage of conviction to do what is right.

To this point in the book of Esther, we have not seen that.

But now we see it.

Esther is bold.

She has courage.

And God honors her courage.

She comes in before the king.

The king sees her.

Verse 2.

The king saw Queen Esther standing in the court, and she won favor in his sight.

And you can just, if you're reading this for the first time, you kind of breathe a sigh of relief there.

She's not cut in half.

He held out to Esther the golden scepter that was in his hands.

And Esther approached and touched the tip of his scepter.

This is the boldness of Esther.

There's a verse in the New Testament that comes to mind when I think of this, 1 Corinthians 16, 13.

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.

That's a demonstration of courage, where Paul describes as acting like a man.

What's noteworthy, you see that same phrase in the Old Testament with Joshua, who says he will be strong and courageous.

It's the same phrase that he's going to act like a man as he leads the Israelites into battle.

And you know the next time you see somebody acting courageous in the book of Joshua is Rahab, where she says, Our hearts melted at the news of the Jews.

Our hearts melted when we heard what had happened to their enemies in the wilderness, but she found the courage.

And it says, She sent the spies out with courage in her.

Esther willing to sacrifice her own life.

If I perish, I perish, she says, chapter 4, verse 16.

And now the king has extended this favor to her.

What is it, verse 3?

What is your request?

And it shall be given to you, even half of my kingdom, which is kind of an expression, right?

What do you want?

One of my daughters might ask him for something.

Dad, can I ask you a favor?

Yes, and I say this.

Yes, up to my half of my kingdom.

One of these days they will get old enough to understand what half of my kingdom is to the dollar.

And I'll need to change that idiom.

What's interesting here is that Esther is about to ask for something that will likely cost him half of his kingdom.

He doesn't know that yet, and Esther doesn't even disclose it today.

But do you remember the massive dollar amount associated with the annihilation of the Jews?

$10 trillion adjusted for inflation.

That's what she's going to ask him to give up.

A massive amount of money.

But she doesn't get there yet.

Instead, in verse 4, she says, if it pleases the king, let the king and Haman boo come today to a feast that I have prepared for the king.

So this is her plan, which is a very interesting and cunning plan because you remember how the book began with this king feasting and feasting and feasting.

So this is the king's love language.

She's read the love language book, this king's love language.

It's a massive feast, and so she's doing it.

Chapter five, verse five, chapter five, the king said, Bring Haman quickly so that we may do as Esther has asked.

I mean, this king is excited now.

It's like, yes, a feast.

Let's go.

So the king and Haman came to the feast that Esther had prepared.

And as they were drinking wine after the feast, a common theme in the book of Esther, the king said to Esther, What is your wish?

It'll be granted to you.

Because, I mean, the king is not dumb.

The wish was not just the feast.

Obviously, this is preparing him for something.

So, what is it, Esther?

What do you want?

Even half of my kingdom, he says it again, it shall be fulfilled.

Esther answers, This is my request.

If I have found favor in the sight of the king, and if it please the king to grant my wish and fulfill my request, let the king and Haman come to the feast that I will prepare for them, and tomorrow I will do as the king has said.

And so Esther here backs off.

She has the courage to act strongly, and then she backs off and says, Tomorrow I will ask you what I want.

Tomorrow.

We'll look at why God gives a pause for that in a second, but first I just want to note here that God is at work in our actions.

God honors Esther's boldness.

Esther is willing to sacrifice her life here, which was a very realistic outcome to this.

And she was willing to take this risk.

She did not know how this would play out.

She didn't know how the king would respond.

She didn't know how Haman would respond.

She didn't know if the king would go for the invitation for tomorrow either.

We don't know how much this was planned by Esther, but she acted boldly in a strategic way.

And before we move on to the waiting part, I just want to point out to you this is the same mode of operation Christians should have in the New Testament.

Matthew 10, verse 19, when they deliver you over, do not be anxious about what you are to speak or what you are to say.

Matthew 10:19

That will be given to you in that hour.

It is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

This one I think of bold action in the New Testament is the verse that comes to mind.

Jesus says, act boldly, evangelize boldly, don't be afraid of confrontation in your evangelism.

You may get in trouble.

You may even be arrested.

You may even be put in custody, Jesus says.

But do not panic about it because in your bold action, God is at work.

He even says, when you're speaking in that kind of situation, it's not even you who's speaking.

He's just talking about you answering when you are under opposition, and it is really the Lord who is working through you.

Notice the Lord uses means.

He uses your bold action, your assertiveness for Christ to speak through you.

And that's what we find in the book of Esther as well.

Well, Esther doesn't ask for the deliverance of the Jews.

She doesn't do what Mordecai told her to do.

She's got her own plan here.

The Bible does not give you insight into Esther's thinking.

So we don't know if she had a plan and she ejected at the last moment.

Like she sees how things are going, and maybe the king is not intoxicated enough or too intoxicated.

Maybe Haman is too close to him or too far away.

I don't know how she was strategizing this, but it seems, like looking at this, that things are not lined up right for the request, and so she abandons her course and says, let's try this again tomorrow.

But the narrator doesn't tell you that was the plan.

She doesn't tell the narrator doesn't tell you if Esther was wise or if Esther was wimpy, because that's not the point.

The point, though, is this that God is not only at work in the acting, but God is also at work in our waiting.

Because you're disappointed, right?

This is not, this would not make it past an editor.

Like one of the story editors who's editing a plot for a movie or a book would object at this.

Like you have everything going.

There's momentum, and she asks, and she's invited in, and now the king's drinking, and this is where it should happen.

And then the author says, and tomorrow we'll try this again.

Anticlimatic.

But God doesn't follow in the way he providentially orchestrates the world our own narrative arcs.

God is doing something different.

He is at work in Esther's patience.

Verse 9, the narrator follows everybody on their own ways.

Haman went out that day joyful and glad of heart, because remember what you know if plants feed on air and water and sunlight, Haman feeds on pride.

Haman's ego is what drives him, and now he thinks he couldn't be happier about this.

Haman saw Mordecai, he's just so excited about he was invited to the king's feast tomorrow.

But then Haman sees Mordecai at the king's gate.

Remember Mordecai, he's the source of all this problem.

Mordecai won't bow to Haman, and so Haman's going to annihilate all the Jews, but he has to wait eleven more months to do that.

He's got to deal with looking at non-bowing Mordecai for 11 months while he waits to kill the Jews.

He sees him in the king's gate.

Mordecai neither arose, didn't even tremble.

Notice that phrase.

Mordecai didn't even have the decency to act afraid.

And so Haman was filled with wrath against Mordecai.

Nevertheless, Haman restrained himself.

Oh, what self-control, Haman.

And he went home.

And he sent and brought his friends and his wife Suresh.

Haman is bringing his counselors around him and his wife, and Haman recounts to them all the splendor of his riches.

How would you like to be married to this guy?

Wife, could you come see me?

I would like to relay to you how glorious I am.

Because it really is glorious.

All the number of his sons.

Imagine just the how bombastic is that to recount to your wife how glorious you are because the number of sons you have.

She's probably aware.

He reiterates here in his t story of his life all the promotions with which the king had honored him.

I've had this guy's great at parties.

How he advanced him above all the officials and the servants of the king.

And then Haman says, Even Queen Esther, let no one but me come with the king to the feast she prepared.

And tomorrow I am invited together with the king.

It's all about me, is Haman's song.

Yet all this is worth nothing to me, Haman says, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the king's gate.

Can you imagine having that level of fame and notoriety and power and being upset at somebody that just doesn't bow before you makes everything seem pointless.

And it doesn't matter anymore.

His pride has destroyed his life to the point that he can't even rejoice because of this.

He can't even rejoice because of this.

It's worth nothing to him.

Verse 14, his wife Suresh and all his friends said to him, Let a gallows 50 cubits high be made.

It's like 70 feet or something ridiculous.

I mean, that's huge.

I mean, to the ceiling.

Remember, gallows are not what we think of rope hanging.

Gallows is a spear, a spike that comes out of the ground, and you impale a person on it, and you leave their body on the top of it, like a tooth, you know, a pineapple on top of a toothpick kind of thing.

Only it's 70 feet high, and they're gonna put a body on the top of it for everybody to see it.

That's the plan here.

This plan comes from his wife.

I mean, I guess they are a good match after all.

Premarital worked out for them.

She says, why don't you just build a giant gallows and have Mordecai hanged upon it?

You don't have to wait the full year.

Has that not occurred to you, Haman?

You don't have to wait the full year to kill all the Jews.

Just get this one.

You can picture the light bulb going off in Haman's mind.

Oh, why didn't I think of that?

You know I didn't think of that in chapter four, remember?

Sorry, chapter three, because he was so fixated in killing all of them.

Didn't occur to him to just take out the one.

And then his wife says, and then go joyfully to the king, to the king's feast.

After you kill your enemy on a 70-foot spike, then you can be happy when you go to dinner with the king.

Just cross that off your list.

You know, you're hard to enjoy things.

You have stuff on your to-do list.

Pay the cable bill, take out the trash, murder my enemy.

It adds up.

This idea pleased Haman, and so he had the gallows made.

This is a bit of a cliffhanger here, because we're not going to see tonight how this ends.

And if we're not allowed to meet for the next few weeks, then you'll just have to hang.

Hang on, don't cheat, okay?

If you don't know the book of Esther, don't cheat.

It's a big Bible.

Read the rest of it.

From this chapter, you come away with a couple different observations, though.

And I want to reiterate these for you.

This is something that's important in Christian convictions.

It's important from the early church.

The early church worked through this from the days of the book of Acts.

You need both these pillars in your mind.

It is not a sin to run from persecution and is not a sin to stay in persecution.

You just have to have both of those two pillars in your mind.

This is part of Christian ethics from the early church.

Some Christians when they're persecuted flee, some Christians when they're persecuted stay, and Christians have to be convinced in their mind that one is not necessarily better than the other.

The Christian who takes his family out of a persecuted nation to protect his family is not doing less than the Christian who stays and is persecuted.

God gives different people different amounts of grace for different times.

You think even of Athanasius, one of the church fathers, the bishop in Alexandria, who is legendary in church history.

His church was attacked by the Roman government looking for him.

They were going to execute him for heresy because he was preaching the Trinity, which was against the law at the time, the deity of Christ.

The guards came into his church.

They sliced their way through people in the church that wouldn't part for him.

And they smuggled him out and sent him to live with the monks for years.

It was not wrong for him to run.

It was not wrong for his congregants to stay.

God gives different people grace for different amounts of time.

So it's not wrong for Esther to be bold at the start of chapter five.

It's not wrong for her to back off at the end of chapter five.

God providentially works to the amount of grace he gives people.

That's the point.

Waiting in the Bible, though, is usually associated with God's people having a confident expectation that God will work, just not right now, the way I want him to.

Where you have a problem, a dilemma in front of you.

You have this is how God should fix it, and you're looking at the problem, and God's not fixing it, and there's nothing for you to do about it.

If there was something for you to do about it, that would be the first half of Vester chapter five.

You would act with boldness.

But the second half of chapter five is here also.

Not everything can be fixed by you.

Sometimes the right Christian response to a difficulty or to persecution is to wait.

It is to wait.

And the Bible teaches us over and over and over again.

And this is a spiritual discipline that American Christians are very bad at.

Very bad.

In our mind, waiting in patience is almost a character defect.

Why can't you just do it today?

Why don't you just fix your problem today?

Well, because some problems can't be fixed by you today.

Psalm 25, verse 5 describes this: lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation.

Psalms 25:5

For you I wait all day long.

Notice that.

Lead me, God.

This is coming from a psalmist.

These are kind of Christian platitudes, so you can lose what they mean.

You know, we sing songs, lead me.

We pray to God, lead me.

And we say, God, I'll wait for you.

Think about what that's actually meaning.

Don't they sound contradictory?

You're saying, God, I want to know where to go.

I want to know what to do.

I want to know what to do next, but I'm not getting an answer.

So I wait.

I wait.

In the Bible, waiting is resigning yourself to the idea that you cannot get the goal now.

There is no clear path forward out of persecution.

There is no clear path forward into glory.

So you are stuck waiting for God to show you what to do next.

What do you do while you're waiting?

Well, you trust God, you submit yourself to Him, and you wait for your next thing to do.

Lamentations 3, a very well-known passage about waiting, 326.

It is good that one should wait quietly for Yahweh's salvation.

A very well-known verse.

It is good that one should wait quietly for Yahweh's salvation.

But think for a second about the context in Lamentations.

Jerusalem has been burned.

There is no army coming to help the Israelites.

Jeremiah is there in his own.

His people are in exile.

The city is burned to the ground.

So Jeremiah says it's good to wait.

Well, what's option B, Jeremiah?

Is there a different choice?

So sometimes you have to wait out of desperation.

Often in these kinds of scenarios, we don't feel like we have a choice.

There's no bold action plan.

There's nothing you can do to fix your problem.

You must surrender yourself to God's will and wait for Him to act.

In my outline, I talk about the courage and boldness of acting, and I talk about waiting, but I don't mean to pit the two of them together.

Oftentimes it takes as much courage to wait as it does to act.

You say, I don't know how to move forward.

I'm not comfortable where I am, but I must wait for God to show me what to do.

Psalm 27 verse 14.

Psalms 27:14

Wait for Yahweh.

Be strong and let your heart take courage.

Wait for the Lord.

Have courage.

Notice that it ties, Psalm 27, verse 14, ties courage with waiting.

Psalms 27:14

It doesn't tie courage with acting.

It says, be strong, take courage, and wait.

This is the general idea that by waiting you are trusting.

You are showing a world that doesn't wait for God that you will.

You trust God to hear your prayers and to respond.

And this is why waiting in the Bible, listen, waiting in the Bible is so often eschatological.

What I mean by that, waiting in the Bible is so often fixed on the end times.

It's fixed on what comes next.

This also comes from the Old Testament, by the way, Zephaniah chapter 3.

Zephaniah 3 · chapter mention

Therefore, wait for me, declares Yahweh, for the day when I rise up to seize the prey.

For my decision is to gather the nations.

And notice what is here, God's decision, his decree, his sovereign will, which is timeless.

It's before time.

This is a window here into the covenant of redemption where God says, Part of what I'm going to do in the world is I will enter the world, I will gather the nations, I will judge them, I will seize them, I will assemble the kingdoms.

He's talking about the second coming of Christ here, where he establishes his kingdom on earth.

He says, I will do that.

In the meantime, you wait.

I will pour out my indignation on them, all of my burning anger, the fire of my jealousy on all the earth.

It will all be consumed.

This is repeated in the book of Revelation, is happening at the second coming of Christ.

He's going to come and radically invade the world.

That's still future.

So we wait.

We wait our whole life for this.

The world looks at our waiting and sees apathy.

The world looks at our waiting and says, What are you waiting for Jesus to come back?

We've been hearing that story for 2,000 years.

But it's a repeated theme in the New Testament.

1 Corinthians 1 verse 7, by the way.

1 Corinthians 1:7

Paul says, you're not lacking any spiritual gift as you wait.

What an interesting verse.

That you have the Holy Spirit who is using you to build up the church while you wait.

Like, what about the Great Commission?

What do you mean, wait?

We're supposed to go.

Can't we go and do stuff?

Yes, while you're going and doing stuff, while you're going and evangelizing the nations, you're also waiting for the Lord to return.

Titus 2, verse 13 says, We're waiting for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Titus 2:13

Some Christians flee persecution, some Christians run towards persecution.

Both honor the Lord when they're wise.

Esther had boldness in the first half of this chapter.

Esther had courage to wait in the second half of this chapter.

And God is at work.

And the fascinating thing about how chapter 5 ends is we don't know how God is at work.

But had Esther asked for her favor when she did, we don't know why she waited three days.

Had she only waited two, the book would have a different ending.

Had she waited four, the book would have a different ending.

In God's providence, she waited the right amount of time, and then even ejected.

Things didn't line up right.

She had the courage to wait one more day, which God honored and used providentially.

We will see how next time.

But in closing, I want you to flip over to the New Testament.

Second Peter chapter 3.

2 Peter 3 · chapter mention

All the way towards the end of the New Testament.

2 Peter chapter 3, if you're in one of the Pew Bibles, I saw some of you grab them off the table.

2 Peter 3 · chapter mention

That's sec that's page 1019, 2 Peter 3.

Just look at 2 Peter 2 Peter 3, verse 9.

2 Peter 3:9

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness.

Why doesn't God answer prayers right away?

Why does he wait?

Why did he make the Jews wait 12 months before their execution date and then wait 11 months and 29 days for their deliverance?

What's he doing?

It seems so slow to us.

But verse 9 says, He's not slow like you think of.

What he's doing is he doesn't wish any to perish.

He wants people to come to faith.

That's why he's taking his time.

Come to faith is a synonym here with repentance.

He wants people to repent from their sins.

But the day of the Lord will come.

We're waiting for it now.

It will come.

But look how it affects us.

Go down to verse 12.

We're waiting for and hastening.

Notice that.

Watching and acting.

They're pitted together here.

You're waiting.

You're also hurrying the day of the Lord by evangelizing the nations, by going out and doing things.

You're doing both.

You're doing all of Esther 5 here in verse 12.

You're waiting and you're acting for the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved.

This is Zechariah 3 again.

The heavenly bodies will melt as they burn.

According to His promise, we are waiting for new heavens, a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

We are still waiting for the new heavens and the new earth.

Therefore, verse 14.

Since you're waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without splot, spot, or blemish, and peace, and count the patience of our Lord as salvation.

Just as Paul wrote according to you, according to his wisdom.

So notice what this says.

Because you're waiting, get godly.

What are you supposed to do while you wait?

Get godly.

Purify yourself, cleanse your conscience, and live at peace with those around you.

And count God's patience as salvation.

The longer he waits, the more people will get saved.

Lord, we're grateful for this promise that you are at work even while we're waiting.

We know we pray to you and we ask for deliverance.

We ask for people we know to come to faith.

We ask for you to return.

Every time we say the Lord's Prayer, we we end it by begging you to return.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Yet you wait to answer that prayer.

You wait.

So I pray for this congregation.

I pray for those gathered here tonight.

I pray for those watching online that we would take your patience as a blessing.

We would take your patience as a sign that you still want to save more people.

Give us patience as we wait.

Give us patience if we are apart from meeting for a while.

Give us patience as we wait on your kindness.

As we wait on your salvation.

Who knows, Lord?

You may return for us this very week.

You may bring us home this week.

Or you may wait another thousand years.

We don't know.

But we submit ourselves to your will.

We work, we hasten your return, and we wait for your return.

Help us follow the model of Esther this week.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.