Ezra: Priest

Tonight (Wednesday, 2/08, 7:00 pm), gather with your Calvary Chapel family in the Holy Grounds Cafe’ or on our website (www.calvaryinv.com), Facebook, and Youtube (Calvary Inverness) as we continue with our three-year journey through the Bible (Ezra 7-10).
Last week we read (Ezra 1-6) that, after seventy years in captivity, Cyrus, in the first year after defeating the Babylonians, made the decree to allow the Jews to return home. Furthermore, he authorized their ability to collect and gather finances and resources to aid them in rebuilding the Temple. So, a group of fifty thousand led by Zerubbabel, who had been made Governor of Judea, and the High Priest, Joshua, made their difficult and dangerous journey to their homeland.
Chapters seven through ten take place almost sixty years after the completion of the Second Temple (aka Zerubbabel’s Temple). King Artaxerxes favored the Priest Ezra by making a decree, allowing him to receive funds and resources and recruiting those Jews who desired to expatriate to Jerusalem. Almost five thousand of them made the months-long nine-hundred-mile journey.
Ezra states his reason and purpose for coming to Jerusalem. He writes that he “had prepared his heart to seek the Law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel” (7:10). He made it his ambition to know God, His law, to obey it, and to teach others. What followed was a much-needed spiritual reformation in God’s people’s hearts that overflowed into their marriages.
Please pray that this three-year journey through the Word of God will be received by open hearts that long to grow in the Grace and Knowledge of Jesus. Moreover, He would do deep and abiding work in and through us for a world in desperate need of a Savior.
In His Strong Love,
Pastor