How to Celebrate Purim this Year

Joel C. Rosenberg

Happy Purim! This is the Jewish holiday that celebrates the remarkable story of how the Lord used two faithful believers, Mordechai and Esther, and a movement of prayer and fasting to save the Jewish people from an evil Persian regime determined to annihilate them. The Bible tells believers throughout the ages to celebrate this important holiday. Here are four ways you can celebrate this year:

1. Learn - Jewish families around the world read the Book of Esther as a family to remember all the details of this amazing story, and Christians should too.  Read the Book of Esther online.
2. Pray - We are to praise the God of Israel that He is the Redeemer of the Jewish people. We are also to thank Him that He also saved so many Persian people who turned to the Living God at the end of the story (many people miss this part). And especially this year we should follow Mordechai and Esther's example by praying and fasting for the redemption of the Jewish people amidst this current showdown with an evil Persian regime that wants to annihilate them, and praying for the Persian people to be saved as well.
3. Give - The Lord encourages us to give food and other gifts to the poor. As we read in Esther 9:20-22, "Then Mordecai recorded these events, and he sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, obliging them to celebrate the fourteenth day of the month Adar, and the fifteenth day of the same month, annually, because on those days the Jews rid themselves of their enemies, and it was a month which was turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and rejoicing and sending portions of food to one another and gifts to the poor."
4. Go - If you'd like to learn more modern day lessons from the Book of Esther, and/or give to a ministry that is providing food and other gifts to the poor and needy in the Land of Israel, discover how you can be involved in the work the Lord is doing through The Joshua Fund. 

May the Lord bless you, and all of Israel, and all of the Persian people this Purim season.

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