We come [to the King] and keep coming—daily in prayer, weekly in corporate worship. God’s Spirit gives us reverence with confidence, humility with boldness, awe with audacity. In light of God’s might, we approach him with holy fear; in light of his mercy, we come with expectant delight. In Christ, we enter not only assured that we already have the King’s favor but knowing that our Father’s kingdom far surpasses all others. And it is our Father’s good pleasure to give it all, with Christ, to his church.

He helps the soul to approach with confidence, and yet with reverence; with filial fear, and yet with an emboldened faith; with zeal and importunity, and yet with humble submission; with lively hope, and yet with self-denial.
—David Clarkson (1622–1686)

Imagine Esther. She stands at the door to the king’s inner court. She has not been invited into his presence. She hesitates, knowing the fateful step to follow.

She may wear the royal robes as a Persian queen, yet she is far more a prized possession than a beloved wife. In fact, the very circumstances of her ascent to the palace were designed to put queens, and all women in the empire, in their place.

Her predecessor had refused the king’s summons when he desired to show off her beauty at a royal feast. In response, the king deposed his queen and launched an empire-wide search for a new one. Esther, an orphaned Jew under the care of her uncle Mordecai, had “won” the pageant. She may be a queen, but she is far from his peer—and not even his only woman.

Esther now stands at a crossroads between one likely death or another. The king has been tricked into issuing an irreversible edict against the Jews, not knowing his new queen is Jewish. Her uncle has pled she help her people and warns she too may die if the decree endures.

At the same time, death may await if she approaches the king unbidden. Known by all, the royal dictate stipulates,

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.

That is, with one exception. Uninvited visitors will be assumed dead on arrival “except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live” (Esther 4:11).

Even though Esther questions whether she might not presently be in his good favor (“As for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days,” verse 11), she embraces the risk and puts her hand to the door, knowing, as she has said to her uncle, “If I perish, I perish” (verse 17).

She enters.

God’s Golden Scepter

Today, some 2,500 years later, we still celebrate Esther’s courage. Faced with such uncertainties and possible death on two sides, she took action that might rescue others, rather than waiting passively for her own fate.

But mark this: those who claim Christ do not stand in Esther’s uninvited, uncertain place when we dare to approach the inner court of heaven. Even though our King’s majesty far outstrips the Persian “king of kings” over 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia, we approach his throne to make our requests with a stunning confidence.

Esther was not wrong to proceed with caution, yet we draw near to a far higher throne and do so with boldness, knowing that, in Christ, the God of heaven already has extended to us his golden scepter.

Come with Awe

Christian prayer invites a striking mingling of the utmost reverence with the deepest confidence.

First, reverence—and nothing less than reverence—befits our drawing near to the very throne of heaven, the seat of God Almighty, the all-seeing, all-just, and all-powerful.

As for that Persian ruler, so-called “king of kings,” so great were “the riches of his royal glory and the splendor and pomp of his greatness” that he could make a show of them for 180 days (Esther 1:4). Known to history as Xerxes the Great, his majesty far outshone that of David and Solomon, and even Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus. He was the wealthiest and most powerful man alive, more so than any who had lived to that point in time, surpassing not only his peers but his predecessors.

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