Telling the Truth

Guest (Male): One of the devil's main schemes is to discourage us, to make us lose hearts and lose hope. But as Jill shares in today's teaching, our God is a God of encouragement. He gives you courage and restores our hope. You don't want to miss this message coming up in a moment. Everyone experiences disappointments in life. And when those thoughts are left unattended, they can lead you to despair and cause you to miss out on the abundant life Jesus promises. That's why we want to help you win the battle against feelings of discouragement by sending you Stuart and Jill Briscoe's five message series, Hope for the Disheartened.

The Hope for the Disheartened series is our thanks for your gift to help more people experience life through the teaching and resources of Telling the Truth. So request your copy when you give today. 1-800-889-5388. That's 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now let's get into today's message from Jill.

Jill Briscoe: The theme is encouragement, and that's an easy theme because the biggest need in the church and in mission today is encouragement. Encouragement, en courage, is putting heart, courage, it's a French word, into you. And what I want to do is encourage you, put courage into you. Talk about the things that I know very well are in your life that perhaps you've brought with you today. If you have your Bibles, I'm going to be in the book of Esther. And I'm going to do profiles of people that were profoundly discouraged for probably bigger reasons than you and I will, please God, ever experience in our life.

And what happened? When we think of courage and we're going to talk about needing courage, finding courage, and then how to encourage others. In 2 Corinthians chapter 1, we read about encouragement, a statement that I want to begin with. 2 Corinthians chapter 1 because it says in verse 3, Praise be to the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of compassion and the God of all comfort or encouragement. God is the God of encouragement. That's what he's made of. He cannot help but encourage us because he is made up of compassion for those who are discouraged and of comfort that we need.

So he is the father of encouragement. Number two. He will encourage us for one reason. And guess what? It's not to encourage us. It is in order that we figure out how to get our comfort from God, get back on track for whatever reason in order that we comfort others. So God does not bless you to bless you. He blesses you in order that through you he will bless others. How? With the comfort you learn to receive because there is an art, a spiritual art to receiving the comfort of God. And if you are a servant of the Lord Jesus, then you are servants of others.

And so the idea is for the comfort that you learn to receive from God who is the father of all comfort and cannot help but comfort you, then the next thing you learn to do is let it flow right through you. And what I love about being an encourager and the church needs the gift of encouragement more than any other gift at this point, at this time in biblical history. And everybody can do it. This is not a gift in the sense of a specific spiritual gift. This is a necessity that all of us engage in a ministry of encouragement.

You know, in a sense all the teaching that we've had on gifts has sort of worked against us because I have women say to me, um that's not my gift. You know, there is the gift of giving. Oh, thank the Lord, I don't have that. But doesn't the Bible teach all must give? And somebody say, well, I don't have the gift of mercy. I'm so glad I don't have the gift of mercy. But are not all of us to be merciful? Or well, I I don't have the gift of an evangelist, so I'm so glad.

But are not all of us to be witnesses? And so there are things if you're a disciple of Jesus, a follower of him, that all of us must engage in on a daily basis, a lifestyle. And of course, witnessing, for example, all of us must every day be saying, Lord, who is in my life? Make me Philip. Meeting that Ethiopian, whoever they are. Keep my eyes open. You can expect that to happen in order that you might share Christ. God is short of workers. So he's going to use you and he's going to use me.

He doesn't have too much to choose from. And so here we are. All of us must be ready to share our faith, but some obviously have the gift of an evangelist, right? And so that takes all the excuses away. And if God gives us and we presume he'll need to, and therefore he will, he wants to, the encouragement to have hope again, to have life again, to be useful again. He is not doing that just for you. It is in order that you might be a blessing. He blesses you in order that you might be a blessing.

And that's the second thing. God is the God of all comfort and encouragement. Secondly, it is in order that we should become an encourager. A Barnabas, that's his name, the son of encouragement. And if you read the story of Barnabas in the Acts of the Apostles, you will see how Barnabas, the son of encouragement, saved two of the major people for the church of Jesus Christ. Mark, who wrote the first Gospel, he saved through being an encourager. And Saul, how could I forget? So he saved Paul, Saul, and Mark who wrote the first Gospel. How did he do that?

Well, Paul got disillusioned with young Mark, if you remember in the story of the Gospels, because he quit. He ran away on a very important missionary journey. He just got frightened out of his mind and he ran back to his mother. And so when he and Barnabas came back minus Mark, time went on and it was time to go on another missionary journey. Barnabas said, well, let's get young Mark. And Paul said, over my dead body, he's not going with me again. And the argument between them was so sharp that Paul and Barnabas parted company over this young man who blew it.

But you see, Barnabas was the son of encouragement. And so he took Mark. And he and Mark went on into ministry. And Barnabas saved that young man who became the writer of the first Gospel.

Guest (Male): More powerful teaching from the Briscoes is headed your way, so don't go anywhere. We've made a wide array of resources and content available to you online for free at tellingthetruth.org and on the Telling the Truth app. There you can listen, read, and watch powerful teaching from Stuart and Jill on relevant topics like the sovereignty of God, the importance of the church, and how to grow closer with Jesus Christ. You can also request this month's featured resource as thanks for your gift of support to help share the abundant life Jesus offers with more people around the world.

Visit us online or download the app today and experience life with Telling the Truth. Now let's get back to Jill.

Jill Briscoe: Do you know that if you're reaching a new tribe anywhere in the world that's never heard of God, that the Gospel you use is the Gospel of Mark because it is the most complete and different reasons that the Gospel of Mark is the first Bible book to be translated in the language of the people. Think about that. And all it needed was a man to say, come on, Paul. Give him another chance. Paul wouldn't give that second chance because he hadn't got the fact that he should have been that encourager himself. Barnabas saved him. And right in his old age, you can read in one of the epistles, Paul is in prison.

And he's cold and he's old and he's facing his execution. And he writes and he says, Send me Mark. He's profitable to me. Tell him to bring my cloak. Tell him to bring my manuscripts so that he can help me with my writing. And in his old age, Paul reaches out to Mark who becomes his encourager. It's a wonderful story. And I want to be a Barnabas, and we should want to be Barnabas's sons of encouragement. And then the other guy he saved was Paul because when Paul got saved and he hit the church like a tornado, the church said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

This man was the one that was killing us all. And who took him to the apostles because they wouldn't meet with him but Barnabas? He says, it's true. He's He's really been saved. You can't tell me that guy's been saved. And Barnabas spoke up for him and came and presented him to the apostles. Think about it. You wouldn't have half your New Testament. At that point, we could have lost Paul. But you see Barnabas, son of encouragement, was able to encourage him. And especially with our young people, especially with our college age, especially with this next generation, we should be encouragers.

And I think women by God are nurturers. You know, this is a generalization, but it's generally true. The God has made us nurturers, encouragers. And what a gift in our femininity, in our work with our own kids and with other people's children. That what they need in this generation more than any other generation, and I've worked for God for 50 years, they need encouragement. That's what they need. They need encouragement. And so I look for examples of this in the scriptures. But let's get to what I was supposed to be talking about, which is Esther.

And I want to do a brief history of the world, so just buckle yourself in. And I'm just going to put this in context for you. This is a short history of the world, okay, up to Esther. Okay, creation, fall, expulsion from the garden. And the race spreads outwards. Until we get to Genesis 6, pivotal passage. In Genesis chapter 6, God looks down and sees only evil all the time in the minds of men. And what comes from that happening in action? And the saddest verse I think in the Bible is in Genesis chapter 6.

And when God saw that, he was sorry that he made us. And his heart was filled with pain. We broke his heart, folks. Human race broke the heart of God. In Genesis 6, we've only just begun. The chance, the second chance has only just started to be there. And God says, I'm going to going to destroy. I'm going to start all over again. I'm just going to crunch up the world and start another universe, etc., etc. But marvelous person Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. When you get to heaven, go find Noah.

It's the reason we're here. If there hadn't been one man, and there was only one man, his grandfather of course, Enoch, walked with God. This is the grandson, Noah. And so by the time God is ready to destroy the human race, start again, we have Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. And for that reason God said, all right, I start again. God is the God of beginnings. God is the God of new creations. And so he started again with one man and his family. So we have expansion of the race from Noah.

The rainbow of promise. We have Abraham and the call that through you all the nations of the world are going to be blessed. We have Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Egypt, slavery, deliverance, Moses, Joshua, conquest, promised land, Israel rebels against God, judges, Ruth, Kings, Chronicles, and then prophets, godly remnant, etc. The false prophets were on the day Israel rejects the Lord, worships Baal, judgment, 70 years, Esther. That's the context. That's where she is in biblical narrative. Okay. And so she lived in the judgment period when God from Noah to Israel's rejection of the Lord and the rejection of the prophets message of hope and reconciliation.

And let's start again, again, again. The false prophets are listened to and God says, that's it. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, comes 70 years. And somewhere as Jerusalem is sacked and raised to the ground and the temple is destroyed was a little girl called Esther. And her mommy and daddy were murdered. How we're not told. And we probably don't want to know. But she was chained up with the rest of them behind the chariots. And Mordecai took his little cousin, they believe, and adopted her as his own on the long trek into servitude. We don't know where they ended up.

Initially it could have been by the river Chebar. You can read about that in Psalm 137 where the Babylonians were just torturing them into making these cities for Pharaoh. And they were crying out. And the Babylonians were tormenting them. Go on, sing us one of you little happy clappy songs from Zion. What's the matter with you? Let's have a hymn. And they said, how can we sing a song in a foreign land? And they hung up their harps on the weeping willow tree. They hung up their joy. They lost all hope, lost all hope. We don't think that Mordecai and Esther ended up in that particular camp.

What most people believe, or maybe they started there, they ended up in Persia because on the world scene in this narrative the Babylonians were fading and Persia was rising. And eventually Persia took over the world and Nebuchadnezzar was gone. Babylon was gone. But they certainly meet us in the scriptures in the capital city of Persia under Xerxes who was the king of Persia and at that point the king of the world. So the world has changed and now Persia rules that world. And the some of the Jews were either taken or were permitted to spread and go to other places.

And Mordecai and Esther ended up in the capital city and Mordecai ended up in the palace itself in the employ of King Xerxes. And that's how the story opens. And the story opens, and I'm sure you know the story of Esther. It's a fabulous story. Hollywood has not discovered it, although there is a Hollywood film that has been made by Christians out there. It's great to watch with your family called A Night with the King. Very, very good by Christian actors and people in Hollywood who made the story of Esther very absolutely accurate. Doesn't apply anything, but it's it's the story of Esther.

And so in chapter 1 the scene opens with this party because the king of Persia, who rules 127 provinces, which is the known world and has conquered them all, brings in his puppet leaders, the satraps they're called, for a party. And it lasts 187 days. I can't remember how many. I mean, that's months. Work it out. I needed a calculator to figure it out. And so the party begins and he's showing off like Solomon did. He's showing off all his wealth and his power to the leaders and the people he's put in place in all the dominion that he's conquered.

Now let me tell you about the characters in this book. There is Xerxes, who was one He was a monster. He was a sort of mixture of Stalin and Hitler all rolled up into one. He was horrible. But his wife measured up to him. And it is said in the ancient manuscripts that he was frightened of his wife. So you get a picture of Vashti and the sort of lady Well, you can't call her a lady that she was. So you have Xerxes and you have Vashti. And so all the time this 187 days or whatever was going on with with his party, she threw one for the women and there was drink and drink and drink and all of this.

And in the middle towards the end of this when he added everybody in the palace and threw them a bash and everybody's drunk and of course he has all the men. He gets this wonderful idea of inviting Vashti to come and undress. And the phrase is dance like a monkey for the men. And so he sends his chamberlain and another couple of guys to tell her to come and show off her a believe beautiful body. And she says, not on your life. Pivotal point in the Old Testament. Now queen had ever said not in your life to a king Xerxes before this that she was a match.

She not in your life. Can you imagine the shame of that for the king? Can you imagine the chamberlains coming and say, your majesty I mean Well, immediately his counselors come round and say, well, you need to divorce her on the spot, which he did. And sir, you need to show some sort of punishment because our wives might say not on your life if you don't. And so he was absolutely furious. In fact, again the word is he snorted like a wild bull. Gives you the idea. He was not pleased. Not pleased. So Vashti is gone and he gets over.

He has these fits of rage. And of course he's sorry after a few weeks that Vashti is gone. And so the counselors say, don't worry. We'll find you another. And so this beauty pageant begins and they go out into the city and they're right under their nose. There's a little slave girl called Esther. Absolutely gorgeous, inside and out. And she along with many many many other women were brought into the eunuchs and put in the harem. And it says and it's so poignant to me that Mordecai walked every day past the harem to see how she was.

Think about that. Absolutely frightened out of his mind, absolutely devastated that Esther had been taken into this situation never to walk out of it again. And so one of the things you have to realize is that God's name is never mentioned in this book in the Bible. In fact, there was huge controversy about putting it in the scriptures and has been. And And when they had all the councils of the early church, it always came up. Why would we put this historical story, a true story, because God is never mentioned? But you know what I love about the book of Acts?

He is all over it. And when you are discouraged, remember this, he is in the shadows. God is in the shadows. God is in the circumstances. God is in the scriptures. God is in the subconscious. Even though his name, the obvious is never there. That's encouraging. And what you have to do when you are living in the dark as she was most of her life, what you have to do is look for him. You have to look for him in the circumstances. You have to look for him in the shadows. You have to look for him in the scriptures.

And you'll find him there. How can you see God in the atrocities of nature that happen and are allowed to happen by the God of all creation? How can you see God in the shadows, in the darkness? That's what the book of Esther's about. I have a theory and the older I get I think I'm right is you can only see the will of God in retrospect. So one of the only good things about growing old is that you have history. In fact, I have more history than future. And one good thing about that is you can look back.

Guest (Male): Thanks for joining us today here on Telling the Truth. We pray today's message has helped you to experience life in all its fullness through Jesus Christ. Everyone experiences disappointments in life. And when things don't go the way we expect or desire, either tragically or in similar ways, discouragement can become entrenched as we begin to believe destructive thoughts like it's always going to be this way or I'll never overcome this. And when those thoughts are left unattended, they can lead you to despair and cause you to miss out on the abundant life Jesus promises. That 's why we want to help you win the battle against feelings of discouragement by sending you Stuart and Jill Briscoe's five message series, Hope for the Disheartened.

In it Stuart and Jill help you discover why your hope must be tied to trusting God and reliant on his strength and timing. You'll learn that even in trouble times you have a God who loves you and gives you every reason to look forward with unspeakable peace, hope, and joy. The Hope for the Disheartened series is our thanks for your gift to help more people experience life through the teaching and resources of Telling the Truth. So request your copy when you give today. 1-800-889-5388. That's 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Thanks for tuning in today.

We hope you'll come back soon for more encouraging truth from God's word. Experience life here on Telling the Truth.