Esther - Choices

We're starting a brand new series this morning.

And before I get into the specifics of it, I have a question for you.

I want to know, just out of curiosity, how many of us get tired of making decisions?

Like at the end of the day, you're done.

Even if it's just a bunch of inconsequential decisions.

You know this because as a as a married person, if you're married, one of the most strange and stressful conversations happens when your spouse says, What would you like for dinner tonight?

Right?

And it's a strange thing because you'll be like, No, no, you choose.

And then your spouse will say, No, please, you pick.

If it's a restaurant, it becomes really stressful because you're in the car, you're passing other restaurants, and you're like, you pick, no, you pick, you please pick.

And if you're single and you see a married couple doing that, you assume, well, they're really considerate of one another.

They really care that they get to eat at the place the other person wants, and that is not it.

We're just tired of making decisions.

We don't care where the, we just don't want to pick.

We we're done.

Choices sometimes can overload us.

And even if there are a lot of little inconsequential choices throughout a day, we can be spent.

And then there are those choices that are not inconsequential at all, right?

They're huge decisions.

And they weigh on us greatly because they have a lot of gravity.

They're important decisions, they're significant.

And so even if it's just one decision, we can think about it for days and for weeks, and we can weigh our options, we can get stressed out.

Sometimes one choice can almost break us.

One of the most significant decisions that my wife and I have made recently is uh is what to name our daughter.

We had a little girl seven months ago.

And oh guys, oh my gosh, this girl.

I'm sure all of our children are cute to us, but I just feel like there's something special about this girl, okay?

You gotta bear with me because I'm her dad.

Uh, this is my daughter, my daughter right here.

You'll see a picture of her.

Um so here's the thing that scares me.

She has an adorable smile.

There's another picture you'll see.

She has an incredible smile.

And I think she knows it.

Because if you pull out a phone or a camera, she just cheeses it up.

And that's scary to me because it affects me.

When I see her smile, I my will kind of breaks down a little bit.

And 12 years from now, I have to look at that smile and say things like, no, you cannot go to that party.

And it's gonna be really hard.

So pray for me, because in 12 years, if I don't figure that out, I'm in a lot of trouble.

When we found out we were having a girl, we had to decide, okay, what are we gonna name her?

And that is a significant decision, right?

That's one that you should weigh heavily because somehow, some way, children have an interesting ability to live up to their names, because our names have meaning.

And there's a lot of factors to consider.

Things like, is this a name that can be easily made fun of?

Many of us experience that in elementary school.

We have that.

We're stronger because of it, but it still wasn't fun.

Is it a name that is really unique?

That can be really good if you have an incredibly unique name.

No one else is named that, but then when you go to those shops that sell the little license plates with names on them, you're never gonna find yours.

Ever.

But we don't want to have a name that's too trendy.

Many of us have trendy names.

When you were born, everybody named their kid that that year.

My name's Justin.

I was born in 1983.

I don't even want to know how many Justins were born in 1983.

I know that every time I moved and I went to a new school, which happened all the time, I was never the first Justin in my class.

So I got to be Justin M.

And I didn't want to be Justin M.

I wanted to be Justin, but some other Justin got there first.

How do you spell your name?

That's a huge thing, right?

If you have a name that has more than two accepted spellings, your name has been misspelled your whole life.

Is anyone in the room, I really want to know, named Caitlin.

Do we have any Caitlin's this morning?

Caitlin's, anyone?

Okay, good.

Poor Caitlin's.

There's 500 ways to spell the name Caitlin, right?

Sometimes there's a K, a C, A I, A T E, L-I-N, L-Y-N, L-Y-N-N-E when people want to get really fancy.

And I've had a lot of Caitlin's serve here at the church and I email them and I'm just like, I'm sorry.

I'm not gonna go on Facebook and research.

I just don't, I can't.

There's too many Caitlyns.

And so when it came time to choose our little girl's name, the most important factor, more than any of those things, was the meaning of her name.

And we chose the name Lily.

Lily means innocent, beautiful, and pure.

That's a really good name for a girl to have.

I will remind every boy that ever so much as looks at her that her name is innocent, pure, and beautiful.

I'll come after you.

Um but see, I'm not even gonna have to come after him.

That's the great thing.

I have a boy.

He's four.

His name is Liam.

His name means strong-willed warrior.

Whenever we were researching names, I saw that and I said, Yes, that's awesome.

I want my son to be a strong-willed warrior.

Now, four years later, I'm like, was there a name that meant compliant listener?

Why didn't we look for that one?

Because he is exactly that.

He is a strong-willed warrior.

He knows what he wants, he is not afraid to fight for it.

That is gonna serve him very well one day.

It does not serve me well most of the time.

But I chose the name, so it's on me.

We have this ability to live up to our names.

My daughter's middle name is really important to me.

It's Esther.

And uh, and I love that name.

The meaning of Esther is star, and she's definitely a little star in my world.

But it's the namesake that's more important to me than the meaning of that name.

It's it's who that name represents.

If you know scripture, there's a woman in the Bible named Esther, and she is amazing.

She's one of the greatest heroes of our faith.

She's incredible, she is bold, she is brave, and we're gonna spend the next few weeks studying the book of Esther.

I am so excited about this.

If you're in a home group, you are gonna love going through the book of Esther and talking about it, dissecting it, looking into it, asking questions.

So, again, if you're not in a home group, I encourage you to because it's gonna make the story come to life so much more.

It's a book worth studying, by the way.

It's got an incredible story.

There's a lot of history there.

On our website, if you go to the His Hands Church website and go to our current series link, we'll give you some links to resources you can get to study it in more detail if you like.

But this is an incredible story.

Ladies, you're gonna love it.

You're gonna have no problem rooting for Esther.

Identifying with Esther.

She is a woman that is fixing a problem that a bunch of men created.

Have you experienced that?

Esther's amazing.

Guys, I hope that we can all be man enough to admire a woman.

Because we have to understand a few things.

Number one, we were the first draft, okay?

The next time your wife or a sister or mom is mad at you if you're young, if it's your mom, you know, or old, sometimes that happens.

You can just say, hey, well, before you get mad, I'm the rough draft, okay?

You can't hold me to the same standard.

God made you.

You're you're like the improvement, you're the upgrade.

Use that.

I'm serious, use that.

Sometimes church gets a bad rap for being chauvinistic.

And there have definitely been churches and people that have have gone that way and taken things out of context.

And it's really dumb because here's the thing the church should look a lot like Jesus, right?

I mean, we have his namesake, we are Christians.

So we should look a lot like Jesus as a church.

And Jesus recognized the importance and the value of women.

The very first person Jesus ever said, I am the Messiah to, was a woman.

The very first person he entrusted with the news that he was risen was a woman.

The men were actually terrified, locked in a room, and the women were brave enough to go see Jesus.

I just say that because we we have to recognize that in church sometimes that happens and it's ridiculous.

God said that both male and female, I have created them in my image.

And I want you to know that if you're new to his hands, we value women in leadership very much.

It's an important, important part of who we are.

Women tell me what to do every single day.

And I try to do it.

But but Esther's just incredible.

I mean, she's so bold, she's so brave.

If you're a guy that likes action movies, they always have these amazing one-liners, these statements in the movies that you just go, yeah, like it's Clint Eastwood, go ahead and make my day.

Anybody?

Any guys like the movie Tombstone?

It's kind of one of those movies that a few guys, but if you like it, you probably love it.

Anyone love tombstone?

Yes, man, I like you.

So if someone says, I'm your huckleberry, if you've never seen Tombstone, you don't know what that means.

But if you've seen it and you're with a group of people and somebody says, I'm your huckleberry, something's about to go down.

Okay?

There's probably bad things in tombstone, so I'd say go watch it, but I'm the worst at remembering what you should see or whatnot.

But but how about this one?

If I die, I die.

That's Esther, actually.

If I die, I die.

In Esther 4.16, she says, if I must die, so be it.

I must die.

Like, that's awesome.

So we're gonna study this book together.

There's so much in it for us.

I do want to say, as kind of a disclaimer, I guess, that this is not a children's story.

It can be edited down to be a children's story.

I taught children for years, and I remember many times I'd be like, oh, I'm gonna teach them the story from the Bible.

It's one of my favorites.

And then I'd read it in detail.

I'd be like, oh no, what have I done?

I gotta like avoid that.

Because the great thing about the Bible is this it does not shy away from telling us what actually happened.

The Bible is not the story of great men and women doing amazing things for God.

It's the story of a great God doing amazing things through broken and flawed people.

So it doesn't whitewash the history.

We get the good and we get some of the unpleasant details.

I appreciate that because you don't even get that in history books most times.

That should give a lot of us hope because if you're here this morning and you're broken and flawed, guess what?

God is God.

And so take advantage of his kids in the garden if you haven't taken your children there.

That they'll love it, just so you know.

My child asks me every day if it's church day, and when I say no, he gets mad at me.

This is not a problem I anticipated as a parent, right?

Take advantage of that because we're gonna look into some of those details.

We have to to really understand what's going on in the story.

But you need to understand a few things about what this story means.

For first, for first, yeah.

First of all, it's the story of the providence of God.

God's people are in a lot of trouble, and God does not seem to be doing much about it.

Sometimes that happens in our lives, and and we can take issue with that.

But we have to understand that God is always working.

God likes to work behind the scenes.

And when he decides not to work behind the scenes and he gets right up in front of people, you notice it.

But he is perfectly at home working behind the scenes.

We're gonna see that through the story of Esther.

There's gonna be all these things happening, all these little details working together that are so amazing and so perfect, we know God has a hand in it.

But ultimately, Esther is the story about the power of choice, about the power of our choices, the fact that our decisions matter.

I hope we understand how much our decisions matter.

My son was recently introduced by uh by someone, this is me, uh, to the Star Wars movies.

Terrible decision that I made.

I didn't realize how much merchandise there exists, right?

These movies were made 30 years ago, and there's a whole aisle at Walmart dedicated to them.

I know they've been updated and stuff, but come on.

So I showed him Star Wars, and he and we're watching it, the old ones, and there's Darth Vader, who he calls Darth Vader, which makes sense, Dark with a K.

And we get to that part where Darth says, Luke, I'm your father.

That's one of the most iconic scenes in film history.

And my son just looks at me like, What?

I'm like, I know.

His mind was blown.

How could this be?

Exactly what they wanted to happen when they filmed the movie.

He's he goes to Megan, my wife, and he says, Mom, did you know that Dark Vader is Luke's dad?

And Meghan played along and said, Really?

Well, how did he become Darth Vader?

And Liam just stopped to think for a second and said, I don't know, I think he made some bad choices.

And I love that.

He gets the power of choices.

We're gonna be looking at this story through the lens of understanding the power of our decisions.

Because in this story, God's people are incredibly, incredibly at risk.

They are in immense danger.

They're actually in more danger than they've ever been before.

But God does not show up and do some big special effects type of miracle.

Fire does not come down from the sky, the sea does not part.

And yet, his people are in more trouble than they have ever been in.

But but just to spoil the story for you, I want you to know that it turns out okay.

Because God accomplishes a miraculous result through the choices of his people.

Does anybody in here need a miraculous result in your life this morning?

Can we look at areas of our life, at our marriages, our finances, our health, relationships that we have, our careers, our education?

And can we look at those things and say, I need some things to change?

I need some miraculous results.

We might say, I need a miracle.

And miracles are amazing.

They happen all the time.

I've seen miracles happen.

I really have.

My son was in the ICU his first two weeks on this earth, and it was very scary.

And the doctors did test after test after test, and every time they did a test, it came back negative.

But all that meant is that it must be something more serious because that's how they go.

They process of elimination, the most likely things first.

And God healed him.

There was no treatment given to him, there was no medicine given to him.

He is 100% healthy, and it happened in an instant.

I'd never seen anything like it.

And here's the thing, and I want you to understand what I'm saying when I communicate this.

I am so glad God performed a miracle.

I thought I needed a miracle.

But at the end of the day, what I really needed was not the miracle itself, I needed the results of the miracle.

I needed a miraculous result.

And had God chosen to use medicine, had God chosen to use a doctor to bring that result, I would have given him just as much glory.

We've got to be really careful as his followers, not to just give him glory when he chooses miraculous means to work in this world.

We've got to give him glory when the results are miraculous.

When we get a raise one day that we don't expect, we have to say, Thank you, God.

I give you credit for that.

Because that's how he is, that's how he works.

With my son, I needed him to be healed.

I needed the results.

If you need miraculous results in your life right now, in one area of life, you can look at and say, Yeah, I need a change.

This story is for you.

If you look at your life and say, No, I don't need any miraculous results, I'm good.

I need to start hanging out with you.

I need to know some things.

You need to tell me what's going on and what you're doing.

But in all seriousness, I know that you know someone who needs miraculous results.

So bring them.

Because we have more chairs now.

I'm excited.

Well, we have the same number of chairs.

We have two services.

Math.

So we have room.

So invite people that you know need something.

Because as a church, we're not a place that's asking for you to give something.

Yeah, we give, we pitch in, but but we exist so people can get something, so they can get Jesus in their life because he produces miraculous results.

And oftentimes, he does it through our decisions.

The story of Esther takes place in ancient Persia 2,500 years ago.

There's a man named King Xerxes, who we're gonna get to know really, really well.

He's a tyrant, he's a dictator, he's a king, he is he's awful, he's violent, he's crazy, he has a temper that you can't even imagine, he's egotistical.

And Esther gets to marry him.

And she doesn't have a choice, by the way.

Yay! And you might go, well, hey, that's good.

She becomes the queen, but here's the thing: there's been another queen.

And it did not work out well for her.

Her name was Vashti.

We're gonna meet her next week.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant that's new and it's opened in a location that a previous restaurant did not succeed?

When that happens, this is how I am.

I want people to succeed greatly.

So I see that and I'm like, God, please let these people succeed.

I'm sure having a restaurant's an incredibly difficult thing to do.

But at the same time, there's always this like nervousness, right?

Because you're like, oh man, seen this before.

This did not work out so well for the last one.

I hope it goes okay, but I'm not so sure.

And that has to be what people were thinking about Esther.

Because she becomes the queen and there's a big parade, and everyone's like, yay, this isn't gonna go well.

This is bad.

Being queen was not a blessing if you were married to Xerxes.

He's actually been portrayed recently in movies like 300, which none of us have seen because we're Christians, and um, you know, he's never shown as the kind of guy that you'd want to be around.

You never see him portrayed in anything and go, he seems like a lot of fun.

He's dangerous.

There's another man named Haman that's Xerxes' best friend.

He's second in charge of all of all of Persia.

And if you think Xerxes is bad, wait till we meet Haman in a few weeks.

Oh my goodness, this guy is evil.

He is conniving, he is deceptive.

And I'm not exaggerating, he shows us this later in Esther.

His fantasy for life is to have a parade thrown in his honor in which everyone bows down.

That's his fantasy.

So, ladies, you know that that guy that your boyfriend or your husband is really good friends with, and you hate the guy, you can't stand him.

We all know that guy exists, right?

It could be so much worse.

So say, thank you, God, that my husband is friends with that guy and not a guy like Haman, because this guy is something else.

Haman ends up having an issue with a man named Mordecai, it's crazy.

Haman walks into a room one day and Mordecai doesn't bow down.

I know.

And so Haman decides, I gotta kill Mordecai.

He's so insecure, he becomes obsessed with Mordecai, and he finds out that Mordecai is Jewish.

About 20% of the population in Persia was Jewish.

But the Persians did not hold the Israelites in high regard.

The Israelites were conquered by the Babylonians, and Persia conquered the Babylonians.

So the Israelites were the people that were conquered by the people they conquered, and they didn't respect them very much.

Mordecai has hidden his heritage most of his life.

He's risen to a pretty prominent place in the government, but no one really knows that he's Jewish.

Haman finds out.

Mordecai lets it slip.

So Haman has this incredible idea.

He goes, I know what we'll do.

I'm gonna get a law passed that says that on a certain day, everyone who is Jewish in this country can be killed.

And anyone who kills them gets to keep their stuff.

And so Haman is evil enough and deceptive enough and powerful enough to get this passed as a law.

He gets Xerxes to sign it.

But here's what neither Haman nor Xerxes know: Esther is Jewish.

His own queen is Jewish.

He doesn't realize that because he's so self-absorbed, he probably never even said, Hey, where are you from?

And Haman doesn't know, neither does Xerxes that Mordecai is Esther's uncle.

Because they've kept their heritage a secret.

So you can sort of see that there are some situations being set up that are pretty interesting.

Some dynamics that are gonna be a lot of fun to unpack.

And what we really see here is God's providence.

He is putting the pieces on the board.

But it is up to Esther, it is up to Mordecai to make the moves.

That is our life so much of the time.

Esther is going to have to make a choice.

And it's an incredibly difficult choice.

It's a risky choice.

She's got to choose to take a stand for her people, but in taking that stand, she is risking everything.

And those kind of choices, I mean, if we think naming our children is a significant choice, what is that like?

In Deuteronomy 30, Moses is pleaing with the nation of Israel to follow God.

And he says this to them in verse 15 Now listen, today I'm giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster.

For I command you this day to love the Lord your God and to keep his commands, decrees, and regulations by walking in his ways.

If you do this, you will live and multiply.

And the Lord your God will bless you and the land you're about to enter and occupy.

But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you're drawn away to serve and worship other gods, then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed.

You will not live a long, good life in the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy.

Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses.

Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make.

Oh, that you would choose life so that you and you and your descendants might live.

You can make this choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him.

This is the key to your life.

Our decisions are the keys to our lives.

Our decisions matter.

They matter greatly.

This choice that Esther is gonna have to make, trust me, we'll find out.

She's weighing the pros and cons.

And there's a lot of cons.

There's a lot of things at stake for Esther.

And Mordecai, her uncle, senses that she's hesitant, and he comes to her and he shares with her one of the most powerful statements in all of Scripture, probably the most famous verse in all of Esther.

It's Esther chapter 4.

Esther 4 · chapter mention

We see it in verses 13 and 14.

Mordecai says, Don't think for a moment that because you're in the palace, you will escape when all the other Jews are killed.

If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place.

But you and your dis and your relatives will die.

Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?

There's two tendencies that Mordecai is getting at here.

And they're tendencies that affect all of us.

We all exhibit this behavior in our lives sometimes.

The first tendency is our ability to minimize the importance of our decisions for ourselves.

For ourselves, right?

It's easy sometimes to point to outside circumstances, things completely out of our control, and say that those things affect who we are greatly, the economy, the decisions of others, and absolutely those things that we have no control over, they do affect us.

But sometimes when we do that, we minimize how much our life is the result of our choices.

We minimize how greatly our own decisions have impacted us and how our lives are the results of our decisions in so many ways.

We want to sort of pass the buck and pass it off on someone else.

Esther could have done that.

She could have said, Why me?

Why me?

Why am I in this position?

I didn't choose this, I didn't choose to be queen.

This wasn't something I was given freedom in.

I was brought into this, and why me?

Why do I have to do this?

Can't someone else make the choice?

Can't the responsibility be someone else's?

I don't want to accept the responsibility of my choice.

But we cannot live life that way because it doesn't work.

Harry Truman was president of the United States during one of the most difficult times in human history.

And he had to make a decision that may be the most difficult and weighty decision a human being not named Jesus has had to make.

He had to decide whether or not we were going to drop the atom bomb to end World War II.

And it would have been so easy for Truman to say, why me?

I didn't want to be here in this situation.

Truman wasn't even supposed to be at that desk.

He was the vice president.

Roosevelt died suddenly and unexpectedly.

But Truman didn't say no, why me?

Truman actually had a very different mentality.

He had a plaque on his desk.

It's very famous.

Anyone know what it says?

The buck stops here.

He said, no, I'm not going to pass the buck.

The buck stops here.

He's saying, look, I accept my decisions.

I choose to own my decisions.

I choose to be the one that takes full responsibility for my decisions.

And so when Truman made that decision, you will never read him saying, Oh, well, I was really forced to, I didn't want to, or anything like that.

Not that he wanted to do something like that.

But he said, I made a decision.

And I stand by it.

He was an appointed man for an appointed time.

Our decisions affect us greatly.

And we have to choose to own our decisions.

That's what Mordecai is telling Esther.

You've got to own your choice.

Take a stand.

You need to own this.

But he's also addressing a second tendency, and that is the tendency to devalue how much our decisions affect other people.

Because it's so easy for us to say, well, well, who does this really affect?

How many people can I really help?

How important am I?

How important are you, really?

How many times have you woken up and looked in the mirror?

I'm being serious, looked in the mirror and said, wow, that guy's important.

That girl, there's something about that girl.

That girl can do something.

That girl can make things happen.

That girl can accomplish great things.

How many of us wake up in the mornings, look in the mirror, and think those things about ourselves?

I saw a hand go up, but it was someone brushing their hair, so I wouldn't have been mad at you if you had.

Kind of hope more people do.

So let me ask another question.

How many of us that have children have looked at our children and thought, there's something about that one?

That one can do great things.

That one can accomplish much.

I believe in that one.

That one's important.

That one can affect people, that one can do great things.

Why is it that we can look at our children and we see all this potential and we see all this amazing ability, but in our own selves we don't see it?

And I'll tell you why, it's the perspective of a parent.

Through the eyes of a parent, everything changes, and we do see how important our children are.

We do see that their decisions carry great weight.

We may not see it in ourselves, but how does God see you?

Through the eyes of a father.

So when God looks at you, and I want you to know this, because this is true.

When God looks at you, he says there's something about that one.

There's something special about that one.

That one can do great things.

That one can make things happen.

That one can accomplish much.

That one can change a lot of people's lives.

You are important and your decisions matter.

They carry great weight.

And Mordecai's telling Esther, you were created for such a time as this.

You are in this position to do something.

Do we realize that we sit next to the people that we sit next to at work for such a time as this?

Do we realize sometimes that when we're when we're stuck in a line that we don't want to be in?

That we just might be standing next to someone who needs something that we have.

That we're in that line for just such a time as this.

If we believe that God has a plan and if we believe that he cares about it, and if we believe that he allows us to play a part, which he does, we have to have that perspective.

You are important, your decisions matter.

Our decisions can produce miraculous results.

I've seen it happen.

Megan and I's first year of marriage was not fun.

We romanticized marriage.

We started dating when I was 18, she was 17.

And we thought that getting married would solve our problems.

We really did.

We used to say things to each other when we first started dating, like, you're so perfect.

One time, and I'm being serious, Megan looked at me, I was 18 years old, and she said these words, I can't find anything wrong with you.

I haven't heard that in a decade.

We were 21 and 20 whenever we got married, and that first year was rough.

Our honeymoon ended before our honeymoon ended.

Does that make sense?

We just fought.

We fought so much.

We lived in this really tiny apartment.

It was so small, and it was a studio, so we had a bathroom and a little galley kitchen and one room, and our bed was in one corner pressed against a wall, and then our couch was right next to the bed with this very small space that you could kind of like turn and get through to walk past the bed and the couch to get to the rest of the apartment, and there wasn't much to the rest anyway.

And one night early in our marriage, Megan got mad at me.

I said something I shouldn't have said, I'm sure.

And she's laying in bed, okay?

She was laying against the wall, that's the side of the bed she had.

I'm laying on the side of the bed next to the couch.

She said, I'm not sleeping in bed with you.

So she got out of bed, crawled over me to lay on the couch.

But she was just as close to me on the couch as she was to me on the bed.

And it was so odd because we're talking no differently than if she was in bed, but she's like, I'm not sleeping next to you tonight.

I'm like, Well, you are?

You kind of are.

Might as well come back.

And I actually love to laugh about those things now, but they weren't very funny back then.

And a year into our marriage, at 22 and 21 respectively, we had a really serious discussion.

We had both thought it, we didn't want to say it, but it came up, and we we sat down a year into our marriage and said, are we gonna get divorced?

And we were serious about it.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, there were a lot of positives.

We didn't have kids yet, so the collateral damage would be pretty low.

That's what we said.

Her parents live in Georgia here.

That's why I live here, because you can't take a girl away from the South.

It doesn't work.

I'm from Missouri.

My parents are up in Missouri, so we could have said, hey, let's just cut our ties.

You'll go to Georgia, I'll stay here.

We'll cut our losses.

We got a lot of life left ahead of us, plenty of time to meet somebody else, plenty of time to fall in love and get it right the second time.

We had a serious discussion about that, and we were both very, very seriously considering getting a divorce.

And let me just say this.

I know many of us in the room have been divorced.

You should not feel ashamed.

Our God is the God of second chances and third chances, and I'm guessing that if you've been divorced and remarried, you really, really want your marriage to work.

You know God values marriage.

As a church, we're gonna be for each other, we're gonna be for each other's marriages.

Sometimes there's abuse in a marriage, should never exist.

And if a marriage is a dangerous place, something has to change.

Sometimes vows are broken that are so so deep that they can't really be repaired, it seems.

So I'm not judging divorce, I'm just saying that I believe very much God is for our marriages.

Jesus made that clear.

And even though Megan and I both knew that, we sat there together and said, should we get divorced?

And we weighed that.

And see, at the time I thought we needed a miracle because we couldn't go a day without having a fight.

And so I'd wake up and I'd just ask God, will you, will you like zap me?

Or I was probably praying for him to zap her, but you know.

Do something, just miraculously make us get along, miraculously make us care about one another more and be interested in serving each other, miraculously make us more in love and more passionate, whatever.

Just do it.

And that never happened.

I never got my miracle, but I'm telling you, I got a miraculous result.

Because we decided to stay married that day.

We chose marriage.

We chose to work on our marriage, we chose marriage counseling, we chose to just fight more to get it better, and our marriage is better today than I could have ever dreamed of.

I love being married to Megan.

And I'm telling you, the result of that choice in my life has been miraculous.

I'll show you two miracles.

One is a strong-willed warrior named Liam, the other is a beautiful, innocent, pure girl named Lily.

And I'm not doing this just for the cute factor, although come on, right?

Those two children would not exist if Megan and I had made a different choice.

Your decisions matter.

Your choices matter because you are important.

Ephesians 3, I think.

Is it 3, 2?

Somewhere in Ephesians.

The Bible's 2.

There it is.

The Bible says that we are God's masterpiece.

He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.

In other words, you're important.

Your decisions matter.

Worship team, if you'll come back up.

I pray this morning that we decide as a church to be people who choose.

To be people who can have Esther's mentality and say, if I die, I die.

To literally say, I will do the right thing, I will make the right choice, and I'm gonna trust God with it.

Here's what I love about that statement she makes.

If I die, I die.

Moses said, if we choose God, what are we choosing?

Life.

I pray that we are people who choose.

That we're a church who chooses.

Because as a church, as a family, if we choose to do what is right, if we choose to be generous and support our community, this community will change.

And it's gonna take a lot of churches doing that together.

Because more people keep moving here.

Have you been on 92 lately?

I mean, come on.

Our choices matter.

I believe there are some of us in the room right now that have made a choice in our minds and we haven't followed through with it yet, and it is by the grace of God that we're here this morning.

So that we can choose not to follow through with that choice.

Or to stop following through with that choice, to think about what it could do to our families, what it could do to our reputation, who we are.

I believe there's some of us in the room that need to choose to ask forgiveness and to own up to previous choices.

To not excuse it away or deflate the importance of it, but to say, yeah, I'm gonna own my choices.

The buck stops here.

To say that we're sorry.

I pray that we as a church, as people, choose to be like Esther.

To know that our decisions matter and to make important decisions, even when it's difficult.

I pray that many of us choose Jesus.

Revelation 3.

That's where I got it.

There's the three.

Look, this is Jesus talking.

I stand at the door and knock.

If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in.

And we will share a meal together as friends.

I believe some of us came in the room alone today.

We don't have to leave alone.

We may have come in as a person, we can leave as a people, as part of a family.

And it all comes from choosing Jesus.

You may not realize this, he's chosen you.

And you can say, I'm all in.

I am all in.

And we can go all in in a lot of different ways.

Sometimes we think we have to know all these details before we go all in.

Do you know how much the disciples knew about Jesus when they decided to follow him?

Like nothing.

They were in for so many surprises.

And I hope there's some of us this morning that say, you know what?

I don't even know what I'm getting into.

But I feel his presence and I believe he's real, so I'm all in with Jesus.

I choose Jesus.

Let's be a group of people that choose.

And over the next few weeks, we're gonna look at this story of Esther and we're gonna look at these choices we can make that have significant results on our lives, significant impact on the lives around us.

Do we want to be a church that has significant impact?

I do.

And it happens when we choose to be.

So let's pray.

Let's worship Jesus and let's make that choice now together.

Jesus, we choose to be your church.

Jesus, we choose to be your people.

We choose to consider your will.

We choose to consider your heart.

And we choose to make decisions that line up with it.

We love you so much, Jesus.

You have chosen us.

You've already made a choice we couldn't make if we wanted to.

So give us the courage and the boldness and the strength, the humility to learn from Esther and to learn from all of your word how to choose the life that you have for us, because it is ours for the choosing.

And we ask all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.