…for the people worked with all their heart. —Nehemiah 4:6 When I am doing a job I seek to put my heart into it and continue until it is done. Recently I was filling and grading the parking lot at our day care using a mini excavator. The little excavator did the job but took a whole lot longer than a bigger machine would have taken. I put my “heart” into the project and 12 hours later I finally walked into the house to clean up. Do I put “all my heart” into serving the Lord? Hmmmm…. Or not? Who am I truly serving— the Lord God Almighty or self?…

Next to him… —Nehemiah 3:17 Construction sites are interesting to observe as each person does their job. Road crews have their dirt workers filling and cutting, blasting and draining as they operate all kinds of earth moving equipment. Even before then you have the planners and surveyors. Then as you watch the actual work the area begins to be slowly transformed into a roadway. If may not appear to be such for quite some time, but as each worker does their part in building then the road is completed for people to drive on. That was only possible because of each person working side by side with his fellow worker…

And the king said to me, “Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart.” Then I was very much afraid. I said to the king, “Let the king live forever! Why should not my face be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ graves, lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me…

“The hand of our God is for good on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him.” —Ezra 8:22 If someone goes before a judge in the court of law, but has found to have not broken the law but kept it, good would be on him from the judge. But, for the person who goes before that judge as a murderer, thief or rapist, that person will experience the wrath of the judge as he wields his power to sentence the guilty person. How is it that many people would accept the judge’s actions in the above illustration, but those same…

And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” —Esther 4:14 “So the Jews accepted what they had started to do, and what Mordecai had written to them. For Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them, and had cast Pur (that is, cast lots), to crush and to destroy them. But when it came before the king, he gave orders in writing that his evil plan that he had devised against the Jews should return on his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged…

Letters were sent by couriers to all the king’s provinces with instruction to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day… Esther 3:13 Attempted genocide of the Jewish people is nothing new. “70 AD -Roman Army destroyed Jerusalem. Over 1 million Jews killed and 97,000 taken into slavery and captivity, many others scattered.” “132- The Bar Kochba Rebellion (Bar Kochba was a false Messiah), caused the deaths of 500,000 Jews; thousands were sold into slavery or taken into captivity. Judaism no longer recognized as a legal religion. Israel as a nation was totally destroyed. This was seen as a sign by…

These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace; do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the Lord.” —Zechariah 8:16-17 The headline reads NEW STUDY: ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE RISE IN EUROPE http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/05/27/new-study-anti-semitism-on-the-rise-in-europe/. “The eight European countries surveyed– Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Sweden and the United Kingdom– are home to 90% of the world’s Jewish population. This study, released just as tension and civil unrest in Ukraine started making headlines, finds that a majority of Jews living…

Thus says the Lord of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in our heart. But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder and stopped their ears that they might not hear. They made their hearts diamond-hard lest they should hear the law and the words that the Lord of hosts had sent by his Spirit through the former prophets. Therefore great anger came from the Lord of hosts. —Zechariah 7:9-12 Years ago I was taking out a pine tree stump in…

…clothed with filthy garments… “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.” —Zechariah: 3:3-4 Picture yourself out in public or maybe at some special event. You have been there for quite some time before you realize your white clothes have large ink spots on them in various and obvious places. Now picture someone coming to you with a change of new clean clothes. How grateful would you be? In the context of the verses above, Joshua the high priest is having his filthy sin garments removed and then is being…

YOUR ARE THE APPLE OF GOD’S EYE! …he who touches you touches the apple of his eye… —Zechariah 2:8 I was working in a flower garden one day and as I bent down to pick up some weeds a dry flower stalk stuck me in the eye. Immediately I thought it pierced my eye and I could not see because my eye was watering so profusely. And wouldn’t you know it, this was my good eye. If I lost sight in it then I would be legally blind. I was very concerned and asked the Lord for help and protection in this situation. I walked to a neighbor next to…