Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 231 · August 19
Prepared His Heart
“For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.”
"For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments." There are four things in that verse, and they come in a particular order. The order is the point.
"Prepared" comes first, and it means more than a mood. The same verb appears about a king who went wrong: "he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the LORD." It appears again when a prophet tells King Jehoshaphat, "there are good things found in thee, in that thou hast taken away the groves out of the land, and hast prepared thine heart to seek God." To prepare the heart is to fix it and set it, to decide well before the day that will test it.
After that come seek, then do, then teach, and teach is last. That is surprising, because four verses earlier Ezra is introduced as "a ready scribe in the law of Moses." Teaching the law was his trade, so he had every reason to put teaching first. Yet the chapter keeps telling us something else about him: he came "according to the good hand of his God upon him." He arrived carrying a letter from King Artaxerxes that gave him power to appoint magistrates and judges, and to punish lawbreakers "unto death, or to banishment, or to confiscation of goods." The sentence that explains the man mentions none of that power.
These four things are short enough to hold up against your own week, and most of us have the order backwards somewhere. We teach what we have not done. We do things without first seeking what God's word says about them. We seek with a heart that was never settled before the search began. So start with whichever of the four went missing, and let the one you are already good at wait. Ezra did not get there quickly either, since the chapter gives him four months on the road. The same good hand of God that was on him along that road will be on you as you begin.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 231 is Flourishing Like Palm Trees (Psalm 92:12-14).