I have been studying Ezra for Sunday and I am just blown away by how God took impossible situations and worked tremendous good out of them.
A pagan king gives God glory and decides to send God’s people home. He gives them provisions for the trip. He even gives them articles that had been long lost as they had been stolen from the temple before it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587BC. Not only that, their foreign neighbors in Persia also heaped blessings on them as they walked out the door to go back to the promised land.
The Jewish people in exile couldn’t have planned this. They couldn’t have orchestrated this. It was all grace…unmerited favor. Grace is at its best when God provides for us in ways that are impossible for us to provide for ourselves.
Jesus Christ is God’s ultimate gift of grace. He gives us two things (actually far more) that we could never provide ourselves – forgiveness of sins and the promise of resurrection. Without the grace of God we would be lost in sin and have no hope of resurrection.
How can you and I go throughout our week looking to grace someone? How can we provide what others cannot provide for themselves? It might be a good deed we do in Jesus’ name…it might be sharing the gospel with them to bring them closer to full life in Christ!
Let us go throughout our week and world with our eyes open to see the limitless opportunities to show grace to those around us – we might just give someone something they could have never attained on their own!
