Being Strong In The Lord

Ezra 4:1-3---Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity builded the temple unto the LORD God of Israel; Then they came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither. But Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the LORD God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us.

When the people of God get serious about worshipping God, the Enemy always incites our enemies to try and distract us. We see the same statements today. "We all worship the same god. All religions basically teach the same thing. Let us help you." It may be possible to work together on some social issue, but when it comes to the temple of God, we have nothing in common. We do not serve the same God! We do not teach the same thing! The temple must be holy. That was the problem that brought about the captivity. The worship of Jehovah was mixed with the religions of the nations they had displaced. We must be honest about the differences in our faith. If we believe Jesus is the only way to God, we should not be bashful about it, but instead, have a loving boldness to share the truth for the sake of their eternal destiny. Some pastors are not concerned if all the staff knows the Lord as Savior. They believe everyone has a natural gift and can use those gifts for the church. That idea ignores the spirit of this passage. When it comes to building the temple, we need sanctified servants of God, or we will find the work is corrupted and compromised by the enemy. Once they were told that they could not help, they hired advisors to do two things. The first was to discourage them. The second was to make them afraid. That is the enemy's tactic to this day. If he can't get in directly, he will try to cause discouragement and fear. Those are attitude problems. Don't give in to them for a moment.