Using the Unexpected

Deborah, Esther, Rahab, Ruth, Jonah, Noah, Moses, and Paul. These eight people were people that God ended up using at one point and they weren’t exactly people that you would expect to be used. 

1) Debroah ~ Judges 4:1-5:31

⚖️ She was a prophet and a judge of the Israelities

⚖️ She sent for a man named Barak because the Lord commanded him to “Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead them up to Mount Tabor. I will lead Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands” (Judges 4:6-7).

⚖️ Barak ended up not wanting to go unless Debroah went with him because he didn’t believe that he could do what God wanted if she wasn’t there with him. 

⚖️She ended up going with him and sure enough Barak went to battle on the day that she told him and the Lord routed the enemy like Debroah said would happen.

⚖️She stayed the course and deviate from it and in the end Sisera was killed by a woman whose name was Jael.

2) Esther ~ Esther 

👑 She was a Jew who later became Queen to King Xerxes 

👑She was brought into the palace of the king with a bunch of other young woman, all virgins, to basically be put through a test in order to be chosen to become the new Queen.

👑 Nobody knew that she was a Jew because her cousin Mordecai told her not to tell anyone

Temptation doesn’t mean that you sin

 

In Luke 4:1-13 it talks about how Jesus was tempted by the Devil for 40 days in the desert, but Jesus didn’t give in to the evil one. The way he didn’t give in was to quote Scripture whenever Satan told him to do something to prove that Jesus was the Son of God. Now you are probably saying to ourselves that Jesus was capable of that because he was Jesus and he didn’t do anything wrong. Here is the thing though: even us “ordinary” people have the means to say no to temptation. Temptation doesn’t automatically mean that we will sin. It’s something that is said for a wrong thing to be done, but it’s a choice that we have to make when it comes us. It’s easy to do the wrong thing and it can be hard to do the right thing, but we have to remember that doing the wrong thing will slowly pull us away from God while the right thing will draw us closer to Him. We have to have the courage and the fortitude to tell Satan no when he decides to talk to us into doing something that we aren’t supposed to do either by just outright telling him no and that he needs to leave us alone. Remember that God will be right there with us to provide a way out of the temptations that we face on the daily and He won’t let us go against it on our own. We have to call out to Him when we need the assistance to stand up for the right thing that we know will benefit us in the long run. We can do it because we have the means to not give into temptation plus we have God on our side to help us out.