One weekend in March 2012, I met with a small group eager to seek what God wanted to show us through Elijah’s life and times. None of us has been able to articulate what God did that weekend. The intensity of his Presence astonished us. The Lord himself demonstrated how deeply it pleases him when we seek to live before his face as Elijah did, with an undivided heart.
One night in June that same year, God spoke to me about writing ebooks on “E-blessings.” I knew immediately the focus for two books: the blessings we see in the lives of Esther and Elijah. I wasn’t sure which to tackle first.
A spirit/soul battle within me
Esther seemed the obvious choice. For years, God had been showing me insights into her story that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I’d taught those insights over time, the teaching growing and shifting as God showed me more and more. For years, I’d wanted to put what I was learning into a book. Now, finally, I had the Lord’s go-ahead to do it.
The insights into Elijah – and into Ahab and Jezebel, who ruled when Elijah lived – were so new I didn’t know how well I could put them into words. Surely they needed to marinate for a while.
And yet, Elijah’s cry kept resounding deep within me, along with a strong sense of being compelled to warn how deceptively and destructively Ahab and Jezebel are at work in our midst.1
Only when I talked with a book designer about my tentative writing plans did it become clear: The Esther or Elijah question revealed a spirit/soul battle within me. Writing about Esther felt better (less scary) and seemed more logical, so my soul was voting to take that route. But my spirit recognized the voice of God’s Spirit, telling me, “No, Elijah’s story needs to come first.”
And so it did. My ebook, The Esther Blessing: Grace to Reign in Life, was written and published in 2013. Yet, contrary to what I had thought practical or even possible, The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart, went live October 4, 2012, the same day I published the original version of this post.
Once my heart was undivided on the matter, God gave me grace to complete and send out the message in less than five months.
My prayer for each new year
Still today, here’s my prayer for each new year in your life and mine:
Lord our Lord, may we your people learn to walk in the blessing Queen Esther shows us. Freely and fully, may we receive, conduct and release your amazing grace – and so reign in life.
Yet also, Lord, we ask a further blessing, and one that, in a sense, needs to come first, for it opens us your grace. Freely, fully, may we walk in the blessing Elijah’s life shows us – the blessing of an undivided heart.
The Lord is still teaching me! In 2017, I revised The Esther Blessing and added a softcover version. Then, in 2023, I began revising The Elijah Blessing. I published the updated ebook in October 2025. What do you think? Should I press in to publish a hard copy of that one too?
Image by Pixource from Pixabay
Footnote
- I’ve written several posts about King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. But the signature attitudes and tactics that expose the Ahab-Jezebel dynamic in the church do not fit neatly into a single post. They appear throughout The Elijah Blessing and especially in chapters 4-5. ↩︎
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Thank you for sharing about your motivation for writing “The Elijah Blessing”. I acquired it immediately for use on my Kindle Fire. The questions you raised about ” his heartcry to those in covenant with the Lord” are quite similar to questions I’ve entertained about our current generation and since so many are going about singing “these are the days of Elijah” I could hardly ignore the relevance of your effort.