There are many days when we can despair as we look at events swirling around us. Reading the opening verse of the book of Ezra, though, re-centres our hearts and minds on what is really true.
“In the first year of 
Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom.”
When Cyrus broke onto the historical scene, I assume, he believed it was simply the result of his cunning and smarts. The biblical writers ‘interpret’ the situation differently. It is not Cyrus who was in charge. It was God.
One commentator put it this way: “In its quiet way, however, Ezra 1:1 shows not only that this mighty king was subject, whether he knew it or not, to the promptings of God (who “stirred up his spirit”), but also that God had brought him to pre-eminence for the very purpose of the salvation of his people.”
Now we all know that. Yet, we can be easily blindsided by an event that happens and causes us to be late for a meeting, postpone a translation workshop, or seemingly place a roadblock in ‘completing’ the hand off of ministry in a particular place. What oozes out of our hearts, at that moment, is not trust and confidence in our great God, but discouragement at having to ‘figure out what to do now’. We exchange the truth that God is in charge for the belief that we are in charge and must do something to figure out how to solve this new problem.
Read that verse again. Its simple, yet straightforward message is something I struggle to hold on to each day. However, it is clear about WHO is really in charge.
Filed under: Sovereignty, Worldview | Leave a comment »
Lisa corrected a misstatement in my previous post. I had written: “Up to this point, I have not found ‘humility’ as one of the assessment categories on an annual evaluation.” However, there was such a category in our old Annual Ministry Review form.
as we consciously affirm that this is God’s work, not ours.
Years ago, David Bryant wrote the book, 
“1. Prayer: Prayer has been fundamental to every Church Planting Movement we have observed. Prayer typically provides the first pillar in a strategy coordinator’s master plan for reaching his or her people group. However, it is the vitality of prayer in the missionary’s personal life that leads to its imitation in the life of the new church and its leaders. By revealing from the beginning the source of his power in prayer, the missionary effectively gives away the greatest resource he brings to the assignment. This sharing of the power source is critical to the transfer of vision and momentum from the missionary to the new local Christian leadership.”
ome back again to that question. As I thought more about that slogan, I remembered a good friend from seminary (a New Zealander) who used to ask me a similar question every time we met for coffee. We would sit down at Friendly’s (an ancient version of Starbucks) over a cup of American ‘coffee’ and he would start out by asking: who is your man? Or later on, the question morphed to: how is it going with your man?
