For Such a Time as This: Esther’s Courage and Our Identity in God

In this sermon, Pastor Kirt Anderson walks through Esther chapter 4, where a young queen decides to risk her life for her people with the words, “If I die, I die.” He shows that Esther’s courage and faith did not come out of nowhere. They came from knowing who she belonged to, and that same identity in God can give us a steadiness that fear and change cannot take away.

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What does “for such a time as this” mean in the book of Esther?

The phrase comes from a message Mordecai sends to his younger cousin, Queen Esther, after a decree goes out calling for the death of all Jews. He tells her not to assume the palace will keep her safe, and he wonders whether she was made queen for exactly this moment. Pastor Kirt describes Esther as a woman set apart by God and placed in a special position, one who was willing to risk her life for her people.

Why is God never mentioned in the book of Esther?

Pastor Kirt points out that the book never refers to God. It simply tells the story. Yet the reality of God is there in the background: the people fast and pray, and somehow they know things are going to work out. As he puts it, they had been so deeply nurtured in the faith that they did not need to call on it by name. They were simply living it.

Where does my identity come from?

“That is where we get our identity. We get it from God,” Pastor Kirt says. It does not come from our feelings or from a party affiliation. God defines us, God gave us life, God is with us every moment of our lives, and one day God will take us to himself.

The Answer: We Belong to God

A queen with everything to lose

Esther was a Jewish orphan raised by her much older cousin, Mordecai. She became queen to Xerxes, a king whose territory stretched all the way to Ethiopia. When Haman, the king’s second in command, set in motion a decree to destroy the Jews, Mordecai put on burlap and ashes and mourned at the palace gate. Then he sent word to Esther, asking her to go to the king and plead for her people.

There was a problem. Anyone who approached the king without being invited could be put to death unless he held out his gold scepter, and Esther had not been called for in thirty days. Her answer was to ask the Jews of Susa to fast with her for three days. After that she would go, even though it was against the law. “If I die, I die.”

Pastor Kirt notes that living in the palace did not mean Esther had shed her identity. She took her faith with her. “Such courage,” he says. This is what being men and women of faith is all about, in any setting and at any time in history.

A faith deep enough to hold steady

The Jewish people in ancient Persia were known because of their faith. Tell them to bow down to a king or to any other god, Pastor Kirt says, and they would refuse, because God alone is God. His hope is that God’s people today would have a faith that deeply embedded, so that through all the changes constantly happening around us we would keep that same stability.

This message came during the week of the third anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, and Pastor Kirt described Esther as the story of the first effort to annihilate the Jewish people. He reminded the congregation that God’s covenant with the Jewish people has not been set aside because of the church. We have been grafted into that covenant. He quoted Pope John Paul’s description of the Jewish people as “our older brothers in the faith.”

Courage that shows up

Pastor Kirt opened the morning by recognizing this year’s Honor Flight veterans, two of whom served in World War II. Later he returned to that generation. We rightly remember people like Karl Barth, Martin Niemöller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke out against the Nazi regime while much of the German church caved in to the pressures around it. Bonhoeffer went back to Germany from New York, was arrested, and was hanged shortly before the camp he was held in was liberated. But Pastor Kirt reminded us that these men were virtually unknown at the time. The people who made the difference, he said, were “our dads, our moms, our grandparents, our great-grandparents,” who actually went, knowing they might not come home.

His own father was one of them. He and his Jeep driver were the first into Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp liberated from the west. What he saw there marked him deeply. He could describe it, but he could never fully take it in. Later, deep in Germany and certain he would not survive the war, he found himself pinned down one stormy night in a partially demolished building. He knelt to pray. For no apparent reason, he felt a tremendous sense of relief and knew everything was going to be all right. He wrote a short poem about that night, about crying out to God in the gloom, about God answering him even there, and about going on with God by his side.

“That’s one GI,” Pastor Kirt said. “Multiply that by many thousands.”

That is what it means to live by faith. As the Apostle Paul says, to die is gain. But until then, we live, we laugh, and we live this life to the full.

Scripture Focus

Anchor verse: Esther 4:14 (paraphrased from the NLT)
If you stay silent now, relief and rescue for the Jews will come from somewhere else, but you and your family will be lost. And who can say whether you became queen for exactly this moment? Read Esther 4:14 on Bible Gateway

Also referenced:

• Esther 4:1-17 (the full passage read in this sermon)
• Esther 4:16
• Philippians 1:21