Maranatha Grace Church

Brothers and Sisters,

Please read Job 8 - 10. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Job 5:7, "Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward", reminds me of the book by M. Scott Peck,The Road Less Traveled. The book starts with the following pronouncement: Life is difficult. This is the great truth, one of the greatest truths—it is a great truth because once we see this truth, we transcend it. But does life has to be as described by Mr. Peck and the friend of Job, difficult? What about what Jesus told us in John 10:10 that he has come so his followers may have life, and have it to the full? Don't forget that Jesus also says that it will be done to you according to your faith. So let us make sure that we have right beliefs.

Please read Job 5 -7. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Only a total trust in the goodness of God can free us from fear. Job was a righteous man, but he was living in fear.  Are you living in fear? The Bible tells us love is what takes away our fears.

What I feared has come upon me;
    what I dreaded has happened to me.(Job 3:25)

Please read Job 2 - 4. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

²⁹ The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law. ( Deuteronomy 29:29)

Job lost everything while he was a righteous man. A lot of our questions will not be answered  on this side of life, but one day we will know and understand everything.

Please read Esther 9 - Job 1. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Let us pray for the peace of Jerusalem. The Lord said to Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3)

Haman was fighting the wrong battle, he was fighting against the people of God. 

¹¹ So Haman got the robe and the horse. He robed Mordecai, and led him on horseback through the city streets, proclaiming before him, “This is what is done for the man the king delights to honor!” 

¹² Afterward Mordecai returned to the king’s gate. But Haman rushed home, with his head covered in grief, ¹³ and told Zeresh his wife and all his friends everything that had happened to him. His advisers and his wife Zeresh said to him, “Since Mordecai, before whom your downfall has started, is of Jewish origin, you cannot stand against him—you will surely come to ruin!” (Esther 6)

Please read Esther 6 - 8. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

We need to always remember why we are successful. The Christian is blessed with success in other to help the less fortunate. There is no reason to be prideful..  ^"And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work. (2 Corinthian 9:8).

We should remind ourselves or someone should remind us what Mordecai said to Esther, "¹³ And Mordecai told them to answer Esther: “Do not think in your heart that you will escape in the king’s palace any more than all the other Jews. ¹⁴ For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” 

Please read Esther 3 - 5. And Listen. 

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

⁹ Queen Vashti also gave a banquet for the women in the royal palace of King Xerxes.

¹⁰ On the seventh day, when King Xerxes was in high spirits from wine, he commanded the seven eunuchs who served him—Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, Abagtha, Zethar and Karkas— ¹¹ to bring before him Queen Vashti, wearing her royal crown, in order to display her beauty to the people and nobles, for she was lovely to look at. ¹² But when the attendants delivered the king’s command, Queen Vashti refused to come. Then the king became furious and burned with anger. (Esther 1)

³ Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. ⁴ Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, ⁵ to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God. (Titus 2)

Please read Nehemiah 11 - Esther 2. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Since there is time for fasting and prayer, I think our time now is one of these times. The people of the Lord must come together in fasting and prayer for blessings and protection of our loved ones, our church, our community, our country, and the whole world.

Now in the twenty and fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, and with sackclothes, and earth upon them. (Nehemiah 9:1) 

Please read Nehemiah 8 - 10. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Be very selective of whom you listen to during this Coronavirus pandemic. A lot of people are providing false information about the virus just because they would want to intimidate and control you. Please stay in the Bible, read the word and meditate on it. Most importantly, don't be afraid even of death because Christ is your life.

¹² I realized that God had not sent him, but that he had prophesied against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. ¹³ He had been hired to intimidate me so that I would commit a sin by doing this, and then they would give me a bad name to discredit me.

¹⁴ Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, my God, because of what they have done; remember also the prophet Noadiah and how she and the rest of the prophets have been trying to intimidate me. ¹⁵ So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days. (Nehemiah 6)

Please read Nehemia 5 - 7. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Do you work alone, or do you work in team? I count the expression "next to" twenty one times in Nehemiah.3. So many repetitions of those two words convey a profound truth: "When it comes to the work of the Lord, the lone-ranger approach of working does not work. We need someone next to us to advance the work."

¹⁷ Next to him, the repairs were made by the Levites under Rehum son of Bani. Beside him, Hashabiah, ruler of half the district of Keilah, carried out repairs for his district. ¹⁸ Next to him, the repairs were made by their fellow Levites under Binnui^[f] son of Henadad, ruler of the other half-district of Keilah. ¹⁹ Next to him, Ezer son of Jeshua, ruler of Mizpah, repaired another section, from a point facing the ascent to the armory as far as the angle of the wall. ²⁰ Next to him, Baruch son of Zabbai zealously repaired another section, from the angle to the entrance of the house of Eliashib the high priest. ²¹ Next to him, Meremoth son of Uriah, the son of Hakkoz, repaired another section, from the entrance of Eliashib’s house to the end of it. (Nehemiah 3)

Please read Nehemiah 2 -4. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

One of the greatest fears that a servant of God may have is for unbelievers to question the goodness of God toward his servants. Ezra said that he was ashamed to ask the king for protection, so he fasted and prayed. When we are not sure what to do, the best course of action is to fast and to pray.

²¹ There, by the Ahava Canal, I proclaimed a fast, so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us and our children, with all our possessions. ²² I was ashamed to ask the king for soldiers and horsemen to protect us from enemies on the road, because we had told the king, “The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger is against all who forsake him.” ²³ So we fasted and petitioned our God about this, and he answered our prayer. (Ezra 8)

Please read Ezra 8 - Nehemiah 2. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

We read in Proverbs 16:7, "When the LORD takes pleasure in anyone's way, he causes their enemies to make peace with them." The same people who were complaining about the rebuilding in Ezra 5, are the ones that will need to support the building of the temple with money and sacrificial animals in Ezra 6. God can turn your enemies into your helpers.

⁸ Moreover, I hereby decree what you are to do for these elders of the Jews in the construction of this house of God:

Their expenses are to be fully paid out of the royal treasury, from the revenues of Trans-Euphrates, so that the work will not stop. ⁹ Whatever is needed—young bulls, rams, male lambs for burnt offerings to the God of heaven, and wheat, salt, wine and olive oil, as requested by the priests in Jerusalem—must be given them daily without fail, ¹⁰ so that they may offer sacrifices pleasing to the God of heaven and pray for the well-being of the king and his sons. (Ezra 6)

Please read Ezra 6 - 8. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

Are you crying over the past or are you rejoicing over the future? We many not have any control over events of our lives, but we can always chose our reactions to them. Our attitude matters.

With praise and thanksgiving they sang to the Lord:

“He is good;
    his love toward Israel endures forever.”

And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. ¹² But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while many others shouted for joy. ¹³ No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping, because the people made so much noise. And the sound was heard far away.

Please read Ezra 1 - 5. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

God is a faithful God. The story of the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity is a testimony of the faithfulness of God. After seventy years of exile in Babylon, the Jews were allowed to come back to Jerusalem exactly as was prophesied  by the prophet Jeremiah.

²² In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing:

²³ “This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

“‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go up, and may the Lord their God be with them.’” (2 Chronicles 36)

Please read 2 Chronicles 34 - 36. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless you!

Brothers and Sisters,

²⁰ This is what Hezekiah did throughout Judah, doing what was good and right and faithful before the Lord his God. ²¹ In everything that he undertook in the service of God’s temple and in obedience to the law and the commands, he sought his God and worked wholeheartedly. And so he prospered. (2 Chronicles 31)

Please read 2 Chronicles 31 - 33. And Listen.

May the Lord richly bless!