Morning

August 28

Ezra 4:1-3 ¹When the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the exiles were building a temple for the LORD, the God of Israel, ²they came to Zerubbabel and to the heads of the families and said, "Let us help you build because, like you, we seek your God and have been sacrificing to him since the time of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here." ³But Zerubbabel, Jeshua and the rest of the heads of the families of Israel answered, "You have no part with us in building a temple to our God. We alone will build it for the LORD, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus, the king of Persia, commanded us."

When the people of God get serious about worshiping God, the enemy of our soul always incites our enemies to try and distract us. We see the same statements today. "We all worship the same god. All religions basically teach the same thing. Let us help you." It may be possible to work together on some social issue, but when it comes to the temple of God, we have nothing in common. We do not serve the same God! We do not teach the same thing! The temple must be holy. That was the problem that brought about the captivity. The worship of Jehovah was mixed with religions of the nations they had displaced. We must be honest about the differences in our faith. If we believe Jesus is the only way to God, we should not be bashful about it, but instead have a loving boldness to share the truth for the sake of their eternal destiny.

Some pastors are not concerned if all the staff knows the Lord as Savior. They believe everyone has a natural gift and can use those gifts for the church. That idea ignores the spirit of this passage. When it comes to building the temple, we need sanctified servants of God, or we will find the work is corrupted and compromised by the enemy.

Once they were told that they could not help, they hired advisors to do two things. The first was to discourage. The second was to cause fear. That is the enemy's tactic to this day. If he can't directly get in, he will try to cause discouragement and fear. Those are attitude problems. Don't give in to them for a moment.

Encouragement: Be strong in the LORD and in the power of His might and build!