Daily PresenceSample

Sometimes I enjoy putting things together and sometimes I don’t. I tend to love hooking up tech stuff but putting together a bookshelf is a little lower on my list. Truthfully, I fall into the category of someone who some days ignores the directions and some days reads them through. Some days I look at the whole document for 20 seconds and jump in. The reality though is this…. when I encounter problems, I find myself going back to the directions and checking through…. What did I skip? What did I list as piece B when it should have been piece C? It would be easy to look at today’s scripture (and this example) and say, “OK, I get it…. we should read God’s word because that’s the direction for our life. And if I read the directions then I won’t get myself into a lot of these messes.” If you came to that conclusion, you are correct. However, another interesting aspect to today’s reading involved a lot of people that weren’t following God. They wanted the king to stop the Israelites from building up the city again. So, they petitioned the king and told him to do research and see just how bad these people were and to see if the previous king had really allowed them to rebuild. To his credit, the king did just that: he searched archives and found a royal decree that gave God glory and further told of how no one should attempt to stop the rebuilding (Ezra 6:3-12). No more opposition. There was authority from the king. In fact, some of the very people who complained immediately made sure there were no more barriers to the rebuilding. There is a lot to unpack in that decree. Circumstance wise—it shows that when GOD is involved there is no stopping Him. It also shows us the power of going back to the source and realigning. It’s easy for us to make decisions and plans without seeking GOD. However, when we do seek Him, we can find that things we were thinking were not accurate when placed alongside God’s word. If a king has authority here on earth, then imagine the power and authority of our Father’s kingdom!