"Finding Wins" – Ezra 8:31-36
This is the sermon from University Baptist Church, September 20, 2020.


In Ezra, there’s a little win tucked in a little pocket of scripture. It’s easy to miss, especially if we are trying to wrap our minds around this message of Yahweh as not only God of the Jewish people, but the God of history. That’s why it was so important in Ezra 1 to have God change Cyrus’ mind.
In Ezra 8.31, we are in a different part of the story, and Ezra finds a win.
These little pockets of scripture exist in the wider works. Within the Bible, we are familiar with the designation of the books. The 39 Hebrew and 27 New Testament books make up our Bibles. Within the books, we have chapters and verses. They weren’t written that way. Chapters weren’t widely accepted until the thirteenth century, and verses came in the sixteenth century. That’s one way the Bible is divided up.
In Ezra, we have a further division that might not jump out at first, unless you are reading it start to finish. If that’s your approach, you might notice a pronoun shift beginning in Ezra 7. It goes from “we” to “I”.
The Ezra Memoir, also as known as the Ezra Story, begins in Ezra 7.1 and goes through the end of the book and picks back up in Nehemiah 8. Some scholars argue that the Ezra Memoir was originally an independent story.
The Ezra Memoir tells the story in first person prose of King Artaxerxes of Persia commissioning Ezra to go to Jerusalem and teach the Israelites. The story culminates in Ezra’s discovery of the Israelites marrying foreigners. We will return to that text of terror next week.
Today, we climb inside Ezra’s Memoir to find a win as we seek to rebuild from the ruins. For Ezra, they were rebuilding after the Babylonian captivity.
For us, we’re facing all kinds of things. The smoke from the wildfires out West has reached the East Coast. Rain from Hurricane Sally drenched the Southeastern U.S. after tearing up the Gulf Coast. The pandemic continues. Political discord continues.
These major problems don’t even touch the personal storms in our lives. The woman with whom I was speaking was just one, but her concerns about her son probably eclipse pretty everything else.
In the midst of all of this, we could use a win.
In the Ezra memoir, he addresses good and bad actions as defined by the Hebrew law. In Ezra 9, we get into the problems he discovered, but before we do, we can focus narrowly on 8.31b. “Our God watched over us, and as we traveled along, God kept our enemies from ambushing us.”
It’s a microcosm of ‘count your blessings.’ Ezra was about to address something that he viewed as an abomination, and I’ll bet he was stressed about. Before we get to that, we read his acknowledgement of God’s presence and care as he traveled on his journey.
Ezra’s response is the opposite of saying a prayer for God’s protection and then being surprised when nothing bad happens. He says ‘thank you’ because he points to God as the author and originator of all that is good.



Helping others find God’s grace and presence is one of the best ways we can find it ourselves.