Read Esther 2:12--18

God does not mock us with the things He includes in His Word. He isn't in the business of making His people squirm under some unrealistic expectation that they can never attain---something that is totally unique to one person but remains for everyone else a frustrating and unreachable challenge. But I must quickly add, you cannot become these things by taking your cues from the world. That only brings defeat and frustration. You, as an individual, have your own pressures, your own difficulties, your own unique circumstances, but God offers ways to handle them and become His special person. The question is how?

First, ask God. Ask Him to cultivate character within you. Ask Him to give you a discontent for the superficial and a deeper desire for the spiritual. Make yourself available to His strength, His reproofs. Seek His counsel for the things you lack. Allow Him to help you set reasonable goals. Record them in your journal so you will have a written account of your prayer to Him.

Ask God to give you that kind of authenticity. To place more emphasis on what's happening deep within your heart and less emphasis on the externals, the superficial, the temporary.

Second, trust God. Trust Him to control the circumstances around you---those very circumstances that you perhaps are using as an excuse for not being the woman you want to be. Don't wait for your circumstances to be perfect. Remember Esther. At the height of competition, surrounded by sensual, greedy, superficial women, Esther stood alone. And, amazingly, God gave her favor in others' eyes!

Ask God. Trust God. We are completely dependent on Him for eternal life, for forgiveness, for character, for security. His light in our lives gives us a growing disgust for things that merely satisfy the flesh. It shows us the importance of character, the incredible change that can come by standing alone on the things of God. He alone can give us grace and winsomeness and keep us from becoming squint-eyed, cranky Christians. It is His working in our lives that uses us even in the harems of life to make a difference and to model a charm and a beauty, a dignity and an elegance that cannot help but cause people's attention to be drawn to Him and His power. Ask. Trust.

Key Passage: Matthew 7:12

Topic: Christian Living

"So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 7:12, ESV)

The Law: Ten commandments plus a multitude of other divine revelations which express God's will for the life and behavior of people.

The Prophets: Men who heard directly from God, who led and taught and warned God's people. There were many of these men who, year after year, generation after generation, spoke God's words to God's people. Great men like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Samuel, whose stories are included in the Bible.

Jesus summed all that past knowledge and instruction up, all those experiences and the commandments into this one verse. We call it the Golden Rule: "Do unto others whatever you would like them to do to you."

It's not simple. It's not easy to do. When we've been hurt by a coworker, when a church member has lied about us, when a car cuts in front of us in traffic, in all those experiences, it takes Jesus living in us to react to "others" as we'd like them to treat us.

But that's what we're called to do.

Read 2 Kings 2:1--14

Self-denial does not come naturally. It is a learned virtue (often hard-learned), encouraged by few and modeled by even fewer, especially among those who are what we've come to know as Type A personalities. Prophets are notorious for exhibiting this temperament, which makes Elijah all the more remarkable. Without hedging in heroism, he was as soft clay in his Master's hands. As we saw earlier, he did his best work "under the shadow of the Almighty." His was a life of power, because he had come to the place where he welcomed the death of his own desires, even if it meant the greatest display of God's glory.

The place of beginning, the place of the prayer, the place of battle, the place of death. We, too, have such places in our lives.

First, there's a place of beginning. That's home base---the very beginning of our Christian experience when we are born anew. That's our place of new beginning. At our own Gilgal, we become brand new.

For some of us, that place of beginning, that home base, is far in the past. Search your memory. Can you remember when you took your first few baby steps? You tottered a little, and those who loved and mentored you helped steady you on your feet. And you learned the basics of life: how to get into the Word; how to pray; how to have time with God; how to share your faith.

And then comes the place of prayer. Remember? You first began to learn what it was to sacrifice, to surrender things dear and precious to you. For some it was a miscarriage or the loss of a child. For some it was the loss of a husband or wife. Perhaps for you it was the loss of a job, your own business, or a lifelong dream never to be realized. Coming all alone to your own Bethel, you learned to pray.

God did a real work in your life as He carried you from that place of communion to the next stage He planned for you. And because you'd learned the value of prayer, you built your altar, and you learned even more at His feet. Search back in time. Remember?

Self-denial is hard to learn, but it's worth the effort.

Key Passage: Matthew 5:27-30

Topic: Sin

"And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell." (Matthew 5:30, ESV)

These are the words of Jesus and remember, He is God. Reading them we get an idea just how seriously God takes our wrongdoing.

Jesus goes on to tell His listeners that it's better to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

Hell is not a place we think about a lot. We're so busy with life "at the moment" that we don't even consider life after death. And yet life here and now is like the blink of an eye compared to "forever."

It's true that we have an enemy, Satan, who makes sin look glamorous and pleasurable to us. But compared to an eternity of pain in hell, it loses its attraction.

Consider this: If God who loves us would rather see us go through life without a limb or without vision rather than spend eternity in hell, how terrible, unendingly terrible, that place will be!

These are shockingly strong words from a loving Savior, a warning we need to heed now from a God of love.