If we want to be part of the bigger picture of life, we must be willing to do the same thing Esther did: we must be willing to renounce comfort as the ultimate value of our lives, and make God’s glory alone—our sole ambition.
Esther became a missionary:
Then Esther spoke to Hathach and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, “All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law—to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.” And they told Mordecai what Esther had said. Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:10-16 ESV)
When we think of the word missionary, we don’t think of a courageous queen in a Persian palace. We tend to picture someone preaching in a remote village with Islamic terrorists just around the bend, a Mother Teresa like figure sleeping in a mosquito-infested hut in India, building an orphanage in a ghetto, eating raw snake meat in the Amazon, or smuggling illegal Bibles into a hostile country. We think of sacrificing the comforts of friends and family, giving up the American Dream, and moving to a region far away. We think of cross-cultural barriers, social exclusion, persecution, and possibly martyrdom.
But the word missionary isn’t relegated to third world countries; it simply means this—one sent by God to a specific place at a specific time to live for God’s glory.
You are a missionary right where you are. You have been strategically positioned by God to live for his glory in this moment and in this specific place. The only thing holding you back is your own comfort.
David Livingstone, the missionary to Africa once wrote: For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.
Jim Elliot, the missionary martyr who lost his life in the late 1950’s trying to reach the Auca Indians of Ecuador wrote, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the ship captain tried to turn him back, saying, “You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages.” To that, Calvert replied, “We died before we came here.”
These are the words of people who understood that their lives were not their own. They were bought with a price. They were sent to a specific place in a specific time to live for God’s glory. They understood that the story of their lives wasn’t about them; they were merely caught up in a much larger story where Christ was the main character, not themselves. This is what got a hold of Esther. She already resolved that her life was as good as dead. Now she could be free to really live.
This is the only secret you need to unlock your greatest missionary potential to live an extraordinary life for God right now in the ordinary place where God has positioned you — you must renounce comfort as the ultimate value of your life and resolve to live for God’s glory alone.