Bible Study

Last year I completed my first Beth Moore Bible study.  It was awesome.  I did the Daniel study with some women at my church.  I have always liked the book of Daniel but through her study I really fell in love with it.  There is so much to be learned in those 12 chapters of the Bible.

After Christmas I purchased the Esther Bible study to do on my own at home.  I started last week and it is so good.  I am going to post what little treasures I gleam from the study.  Mainly for my future benefit, but I hope it blesses you in the process.

In the first chapter of the book of Esther we learn about the 180 day feast King Xerxes hosts.  It is basically a drunken free for all.  At the end of the 180 days there is another 7 day feast.  Queen Vashti is having her own feast for the women.  Xerxes decides to show off his beautiful Queen Vashti and sends for her.  Vashti refuses to come.  Big mistake.  She is banished as Queen and most historians believe she was executed.  One reason she is banished is because the other men are afraid that all women in the Persian empire will begin to take rank above their own husbands.  They wanted to make an example of Vashti for all women to see.

Two statments Beth makes during the week really spoke to me.  The first one is:

"God is never more present than when He seems strangely absent". 

That really blessed me.  There have been many times in my life when I have felt like He wasn't near.  He is always near!  I may have walked a few steps backwards, but He has not moved.  In the Daniel study I learned that sometimes God will allow you to be in a fire in order to set you free. 

The second one is the first statment about women:

"It's tough being a woman in another woman's shadow, but sometimes, there in the hiddeness, God builds a woman she'd never otherwise become."

Wow!  How often do we women compare ourselves to one another.  For me, I have done this my whole life.  I have always felt a little less than those around me.  It's a battle God is winning, but I still step back in the battle for myself at times.  That's when I begin to suffer defeat.  The battle is not mine....it is His.  I will win if I let Him fight for me.  So when we feel as though we are in 'her' shadow, let's vow to remember that God is building us into a woman that we would not be able to become if we were not in 'her' shadow.

Good stuff!!!