Nehemiah 9:30-38
Nehemiah was a special person. He was Jewish, but he had chosen to stay in Susa rather than return to Jerusalem with the other exiles once they were given the go ahead. Perhaps that’s partly because as cup bearer to the King of Persia, he held what we might consider a really cushy job.
Basically, he not only ate with the king, but he ate before the king to make sure that the food was safe to eat. Just imagine having a royal feast set down before you! Ah, that smells good! You grab a knife and fork, if they had those back then, and dig in before anybody else, because you are supposed to! That’s your job. MM-mm! (This is really good!) And the king is keeping his eye on you to make sure you are having a good time! Because if you have a really good time and don’t get sick, it will soon be the King’s turn to enjoy the same feast, with you. I could enjoy being well paid for such a job! It reminds me of Pastor Don Van Dyke’s pastoral reports, “managed to gain even more weight at various benefit dinners during the year.”
That’s what Nehemiah got to do. He was the one who served the king after he had taste tested the food himself, not only to ensure that it was palatable, but also safe. Now, I’m sure you can see that there is one slight drawback to a job like this. If the food was poisoned, your job was over, and, your life was probably over too, but, in the meantime, you were fed and treated very well. The king would want to treat you very kindly so that he would stay on your good side too. He needed to be able to trust you, so he could believe you wouldn’t slip the poison in after you had enjoyed yourself. It was an interesting relationship, no doubt, with mutual benefits for both. Certainly, that life would be preferred to living in the burned out ghost town with no conveniences that Jerusalem had become.
Well, as you may have read last week, Nehemiah had a change of heart when his brother Hanani came for a visit and told him about all the hardship being suffered and endured by the Jewish people who had chosen to return to the homeland. He offered himself in, what we have to see, truly was a sacrifice, a drastic change in his lifestyle, to go back to Jerusalem and help encourage and organize the people to begin to rebuild. And he magnified his sacrifice by not taking advantage of the people he was governing. He refused to live like a king in Jerusalem, as other governors before him had done.
He also endured the pain and suffering of much opposition and ridicule from some of the enemies of his people, but, eventually, he was successful. The wall was built. They finished the 2.5-mile structure, including 34 watch towers and 7 main gates, in just 52 days! So, of course the people had a huge celebration and rededication service to mark the event.
Nehemiah also rejoiced when he learned that the people wanted to listen to the reading of the Law, or what we would think of as the first five books of the Bible. Do you realize that for some, maybe even most of them, that would have been the first time they had ever heard it all the way through? The people listened closely as the priest, Ezra, read about how God had chosen Abraham, their ancestor and how they had become slaves in Egypt, but God set them free and how God had given them rules to live by. Then, they were moved to tears when they realized how far short they had fallen as God’s chosen people.
As a result, Nehemiah was able to get them to pledge to do better than their forefathers had done. He convinced them to agree, in writing, to honor the Sabbath, keep their marriages pure and take care of the temple and priests and Levites through their tithes, offerings and other sacrifices. They put it in writing. They signed a covenant. That was a public declaration about how they were going to live together from here on out, obeying all that God commanded.
Emotion was high in those days! Everybody felt very strongly that they would do better this time. They had learned their lesson. They believed that God did indeed mean what He said when he said he would punish those who were disobedient. They didn’t want to live through another exile. They wanted to be the people of God!! And, in the moment, they really meant it!
So, how did they do? Well, soon after finishing the work in 444 BC, Nehemiah had returned to his cushy job for the king, according to the plan. But he must have had that same question in his own mind, how are they doing? 12 years later, in 432 BC he got permission to leave once again, to go back to Jerusalem and check things out for himself. Sadly, during those twelve years things went south again. We find out about it in Nehemiah 13.
Nehemiah found Tobiah, one of the enemies who opposed the work and had been taunting and mocking the Jewish people as they built the wall, was now living in a room in the temple! Nehemiah found people treating the Sabbath just the same as any other day of the week, with open markets all over the place. Instead of being careful in marriage, the people were again marrying those who followed foreign gods, as their predecessors had done. In addition, the children of such marriages couldn’t even speak the Hebrew language so that they could learn about God. Why, even one of the priests, himself had a foreigner for a wife, which was a big “No-No” at the time. So, Nehemiah had to force him to leave the priesthood altogether! How had everything fallen apart so quickly?
What went wrong? Well, I can’t say for sure, but I believe, knowing people as we all do, what went wrong may have been something like this. The people relied on an emotional commitment. They had experienced an event, rather than committed to a daily walk with their God. Satan knew that the people had had a glorious time, worshiping God and making all sorts of commitments to Him. Satan, bided his time. He waited for the emotional fervor to fade, as he knew it would. It always does. He maintained his prowl, his vigilance. He could afford to do so.
Soon, all that emotional stuff would just be a fond memory. He watched as the people went back to their routine lives, lives that had never been disciplined to maintain a personal quiet time for God, time to read God’s Word, time for prayer, for being still and knowing that God is God. Satan knew that they had had a moment, and to him, that was okay, because he also knew that they were choosing not to feed their souls. He could wait while they slowly starved themselves and then, he would simply move in and resume his position as overseer.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all made New Year’s resolutions, started new weight loss programs, new exercise routines. “This time,” we tell ourselves, “This time it will work! This approach suits me really well! I like this new approach to reading the Bible! I can handle this one! I’m going to do it this time!” However, without some resolve or commitment to make ourselves do what we need to do every day, we soon fall behind and, often stop trying altogether.
The emotion is gone, and the commitment isn’t as fun or easy without the emotion. Or, we say, “Well, I’ve been doing really good for a week, one day off won’t hurt.” Soon, the one day becomes many days and soon, we’ve lost the fervor altogether because emotions were never intended to keep us committed, they were always only intended for the moment. That’s why they can’t be trusted! Oh, and I know what I am talking about from my own personal experience. It took me years, even as a pastor, to really develop the personal discipline of spending time in God’s word every day.
The whole scene reminds me also of the spiritual fervor and events surrounding the attack on our World Trade Center. Suddenly the churches were filled with people praying for safety, praying for God’s help, turning to the Lord and recommitting to serving him better. Soon though, the politicians responded, the war in Iraq was launched. No more attacks on US soil, all seemed well, and church attendance dropped off again, back to where it was before.
Satan knows how much we rely on our emotions and our emotional experiences to keep our commitments. When Disney tells us to, “Trust our hearts,” satan smiles. He knows what God says about the human heart. In Jeremiah 17:9, God says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” Satan knows, that for the most part, humans don’t believe that. We do want to trust our hearts. He also knows how much we don’t like discipline. He knows we struggle to follow Christ because satan makes it hard and he knows how easily we can fail at it. So, he knows that when we do trust our deceitful hearts, we’ll usually end up doing things his way.
I say this as a caution. I know that we had a good conversation at our seminar two weeks ago. That may have been an emotional moment and now we’re going to start a Leadership Essentials Bible study and practice real discipleship. That’s a good commitment! And we’re going to do whatever it takes to find a future for this ministry. Emotionally, we know we’ve got to do something! But, it won’t be easy. It is hard to keep pressing on. Some of it will be uncomfortable and some of it will be downright scary. We’re dealing with change. We’re dealing with letting go. We’re dealing with new beginnings. We need to make our commitment based on faith in God, not emotional energy. We will need to trust in God’s Word and stay close to God, always.
Have you seen those films of the wildebeest herds that are running along and there is always a lion or a tiger off in the distance, just waiting to make his move? Does he head toward the center of the pack to go for prime rib? No, he stays on the outskirts, looking for a straggler. He targets the weakling. Satan is the same way with us. Now think about it, how does a wildebeest become weak? Is there any likeness to how we become weak? Perhaps illness causes the animal to stop eating and drinking. But in our case, we just stop eating and drinking! We seem to think that we can survive from mountain top experience to mountain top experience on the fumes of our emotional fervor.
The mountain tops are nice, but our Christian walk is daily. To get from one mountain top to the next we have to go through the valley and sometimes that’s the valley of the shadow of death. To survive that trek we need to stick together, and we need daily nourishment. Our most important food is the bread of life, God’s Word! It is daily choosing to set aside time to be in His word and commune with Him, to take in that spiritual nourishment that feeds our souls to keep us strong against Satan’s schemes. This is why the beatitude says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” God wants us to have a good appetite for what he offers us in Christ!
Where you really start is with faith in Jesus. Reading the Bible may lead you to faith. That’s great. Faith comes by hearing, hearing the real message in what you are reading or listening to! When you hear and believe the gospel message that Jesus is the only way, the only truth and the only life there is to live, when you put your faith and trust in him and let him fill you with His Holy Spirit so that you are born again, then you are found in Christ. Now your hunger and thirst for the bread of life should really come alive!
When we are in Christ, satan isn’t just dealing with a religious person relying on emotions to keep them going to church. When we are a Spirit filled Christian, we’re a different kind of human, who is no longer enslaved by desire. When you are in Christ, satan is not really dealing with you anymore. He now has to deal with Jesus, the one who set you free, the One who has already won the victory over him. If we are in Christ, we step into that victory as well and we do not need our emotions to compel us to be with God because we long to be with Him as often as we can. If you find nourishing your soul a drag, could it be that, perhaps you are not filled with the Spirit. I can guarantee you that, if you are filled with the spirit, the Spirit longs to commune with the rest of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit in you longs to be in the Word that He Himself created! Prayer is His food just as you may enjoy feasting with your family!
For those of you who did read through the book of Nehemiah, did you happen to notice in chapter 3, when the wall was beginning to be built, that Nehemiah had the people work on the wall near their own homes? Now, why do you suppose that might be? Well, it’s just the human tendency to work harder when it’s your own interest involved. Working on the wall near your own home would mean that your own home would be safer. That same principle can apply here. If you are developing your spiritual life, the first person to benefit is YOU! You are making your part of this church, your part of this body more secure. You are investing in making the area around YOU safer because you are better rooted in Him. Your individual investment in the Kingdom of God is a significant contribution to the health of the whole body.
Did you also, perhaps notice the sacrifice of those in chapter 11 who chose to give up the more comfortable life of living in the villages, which were clear of debris and probably much nicer to live in? Everybody would rather live out in the country. But these folk were called to move into the city, like moving out of the suburbs of Chicago and into the run down inner city ghettoes, to fix them up. They were inspired by the Spirit to sacrifice all that comfort. They endured the necessary changes to stay in Jerusalem to keep the work that had been done secure. We are all called to some kind of sacrifice, not just our money, but ourselves to keep this ministry going. We can’t just let it be done by the few or by others. All of us need to step up. Each individual’s investment will make this an epic church. We need to be willing, not just in the emotional moment, but when the emotion fades. The commitment still needs to be there to keep gaps in our wall from appearing.
May he not find breaks in our wall. Instead, may he find us remaining vigilant! May he not find a weak straggling Christian among us that satan would devour, because we are all eating at the feast prepared for us in God’s Word! May God find us faithful at our posts and may satan not find a place to make a foot hold to come in and damage what God has begun. I’m calling all of you to action. Be of good courage! Be committed, not just with an emotional “YES!”, but with your feet on the floor and God’s word in your hand, with His praise on your lips and Christ leading all of us along the way to victory! Amen!
Nehemiah was a special person. He was Jewish, but he had chosen to stay in Susa rather than return to Jerusalem with the other exiles once they were given the go ahead. Perhaps that’s partly because as cup bearer to the King of Persia, he held what we might consider a really cushy job.
Basically, he not only ate with the king, but he ate before the king to make sure that the food was safe to eat. Just imagine having a royal feast set down before you! Ah, that smells good! You grab a knife and fork, if they had those back then, and dig in before anybody else, because you are supposed to! That’s your job. MM-mm! (This is really good!) And the king is keeping his eye on you to make sure you are having a good time! Because if you have a really good time and don’t get sick, it will soon be the King’s turn to enjoy the same feast, with you. I could enjoy being well paid for such a job! It reminds me of Pastor Don Van Dyke’s pastoral reports, “managed to gain even more weight at various benefit dinners during the year.”
That’s what Nehemiah got to do. He was the one who served the king after he had taste tested the food himself, not only to ensure that it was palatable, but also safe. Now, I’m sure you can see that there is one slight drawback to a job like this. If the food was poisoned, your job was over, and, your life was probably over too, but, in the meantime, you were fed and treated very well. The king would want to treat you very kindly so that he would stay on your good side too. He needed to be able to trust you, so he could believe you wouldn’t slip the poison in after you had enjoyed yourself. It was an interesting relationship, no doubt, with mutual benefits for both. Certainly, that life would be preferred to living in the burned out ghost town with no conveniences that Jerusalem had become.
Well, as you may have read last week, Nehemiah had a change of heart when his brother Hanani came for a visit and told him about all the hardship being suffered and endured by the Jewish people who had chosen to return to the homeland. He offered himself in, what we have to see, truly was a sacrifice, a drastic change in his lifestyle, to go back to Jerusalem and help encourage and organize the people to begin to rebuild. And he magnified his sacrifice by not taking advantage of the people he was governing. He refused to live like a king in Jerusalem, as other governors before him had done.
He also endured the pain and suffering of much opposition and ridicule from some of the enemies of his people, but, eventually, he was successful. The wall was built. They finished the 2.5-mile structure, including 34 watch towers and 7 main gates, in just 52 days! So, of course the people had a huge celebration and rededication service to mark the event.
Nehemiah also rejoiced when he learned that the people wanted to listen to the reading of the Law, or what we would think of as the first five books of the Bible. Do you realize that for some, maybe even most of them, that would have been the first time they had ever heard it all the way through? The people listened closely as the priest, Ezra, read about how God had chosen Abraham, their ancestor and how they had become slaves in Egypt, but God set them free and how God had given them rules to live by. Then, they were moved to tears when they realized how far short they had fallen as God’s chosen people.
As a result, Nehemiah was able to get them to pledge to do better than their forefathers had done. He convinced them to agree, in writing, to honor the Sabbath, keep their marriages pure and take care of the temple and priests and Levites through their tithes, offerings and other sacrifices. They put it in writing. They signed a covenant. That was a public declaration about how they were going to live together from here on out, obeying all that God commanded.
Emotion was high in those days! Everybody felt very strongly that they would do better this time. They had learned their lesson. They believed that God did indeed mean what He said when he said he would punish those who were disobedient. They didn’t want to live through another exile. They wanted to be the people of God!! And, in the moment, they really meant it!
So, how did they do? Well, soon after finishing the work in 444 BC, Nehemiah had returned to his cushy job for the king, according to the plan. But he must have had that same question in his own mind, how are they doing? 12 years later, in 432 BC he got permission to leave once again, to go back to Jerusalem and check things out for himself. Sadly, during those twelve years things went south again. We find out about it in Nehemiah 13.
Nehemiah found Tobiah, one of the enemies who opposed the work and had been taunting and mocking the Jewish people as they built the wall, was now living in a room in the temple! Nehemiah found people treating the Sabbath just the same as any other day of the week, with open markets all over the place. Instead of being careful in marriage, the people were again marrying those who followed foreign gods, as their predecessors had done. In addition, the children of such marriages couldn’t even speak the Hebrew language so that they could learn about God. Why, even one of the priests, himself had a foreigner for a wife, which was a big “No-No” at the time. So, Nehemiah had to force him to leave the priesthood altogether! How had everything fallen apart so quickly?
What went wrong? Well, I can’t say for sure, but I believe, knowing people as we all do, what went wrong may have been something like this. The people relied on an emotional commitment. They had experienced an event, rather than committed to a daily walk with their God. Satan knew that the people had had a glorious time, worshiping God and making all sorts of commitments to Him. Satan, bided his time. He waited for the emotional fervor to fade, as he knew it would. It always does. He maintained his prowl, his vigilance. He could afford to do so.
Soon, all that emotional stuff would just be a fond memory. He watched as the people went back to their routine lives, lives that had never been disciplined to maintain a personal quiet time for God, time to read God’s Word, time for prayer, for being still and knowing that God is God. Satan knew that they had had a moment, and to him, that was okay, because he also knew that they were choosing not to feed their souls. He could wait while they slowly starved themselves and then, he would simply move in and resume his position as overseer.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all made New Year’s resolutions, started new weight loss programs, new exercise routines. “This time,” we tell ourselves, “This time it will work! This approach suits me really well! I like this new approach to reading the Bible! I can handle this one! I’m going to do it this time!” However, without some resolve or commitment to make ourselves do what we need to do every day, we soon fall behind and, often stop trying altogether.
The emotion is gone, and the commitment isn’t as fun or easy without the emotion. Or, we say, “Well, I’ve been doing really good for a week, one day off won’t hurt.” Soon, the one day becomes many days and soon, we’ve lost the fervor altogether because emotions were never intended to keep us committed, they were always only intended for the moment. That’s why they can’t be trusted! Oh, and I know what I am talking about from my own personal experience. It took me years, even as a pastor, to really develop the personal discipline of spending time in God’s word every day.
The whole scene reminds me also of the spiritual fervor and events surrounding the attack on our World Trade Center. Suddenly the churches were filled with people praying for safety, praying for God’s help, turning to the Lord and recommitting to serving him better. Soon though, the politicians responded, the war in Iraq was launched. No more attacks on US soil, all seemed well, and church attendance dropped off again, back to where it was before.
Satan knows how much we rely on our emotions and our emotional experiences to keep our commitments. When Disney tells us to, “Trust our hearts,” satan smiles. He knows what God says about the human heart. In Jeremiah 17:9, God says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” Satan knows, that for the most part, humans don’t believe that. We do want to trust our hearts. He also knows how much we don’t like discipline. He knows we struggle to follow Christ because satan makes it hard and he knows how easily we can fail at it. So, he knows that when we do trust our deceitful hearts, we’ll usually end up doing things his way.
I say this as a caution. I know that we had a good conversation at our seminar two weeks ago. That may have been an emotional moment and now we’re going to start a Leadership Essentials Bible study and practice real discipleship. That’s a good commitment! And we’re going to do whatever it takes to find a future for this ministry. Emotionally, we know we’ve got to do something! But, it won’t be easy. It is hard to keep pressing on. Some of it will be uncomfortable and some of it will be downright scary. We’re dealing with change. We’re dealing with letting go. We’re dealing with new beginnings. We need to make our commitment based on faith in God, not emotional energy. We will need to trust in God’s Word and stay close to God, always.
Have you seen those films of the wildebeest herds that are running along and there is always a lion or a tiger off in the distance, just waiting to make his move? Does he head toward the center of the pack to go for prime rib? No, he stays on the outskirts, looking for a straggler. He targets the weakling. Satan is the same way with us. Now think about it, how does a wildebeest become weak? Is there any likeness to how we become weak? Perhaps illness causes the animal to stop eating and drinking. But in our case, we just stop eating and drinking! We seem to think that we can survive from mountain top experience to mountain top experience on the fumes of our emotional fervor.
The mountain tops are nice, but our Christian walk is daily. To get from one mountain top to the next we have to go through the valley and sometimes that’s the valley of the shadow of death. To survive that trek we need to stick together, and we need daily nourishment. Our most important food is the bread of life, God’s Word! It is daily choosing to set aside time to be in His word and commune with Him, to take in that spiritual nourishment that feeds our souls to keep us strong against Satan’s schemes. This is why the beatitude says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” God wants us to have a good appetite for what he offers us in Christ!
Where you really start is with faith in Jesus. Reading the Bible may lead you to faith. That’s great. Faith comes by hearing, hearing the real message in what you are reading or listening to! When you hear and believe the gospel message that Jesus is the only way, the only truth and the only life there is to live, when you put your faith and trust in him and let him fill you with His Holy Spirit so that you are born again, then you are found in Christ. Now your hunger and thirst for the bread of life should really come alive!
When we are in Christ, satan isn’t just dealing with a religious person relying on emotions to keep them going to church. When we are a Spirit filled Christian, we’re a different kind of human, who is no longer enslaved by desire. When you are in Christ, satan is not really dealing with you anymore. He now has to deal with Jesus, the one who set you free, the One who has already won the victory over him. If we are in Christ, we step into that victory as well and we do not need our emotions to compel us to be with God because we long to be with Him as often as we can. If you find nourishing your soul a drag, could it be that, perhaps you are not filled with the Spirit. I can guarantee you that, if you are filled with the spirit, the Spirit longs to commune with the rest of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit in you longs to be in the Word that He Himself created! Prayer is His food just as you may enjoy feasting with your family!
For those of you who did read through the book of Nehemiah, did you happen to notice in chapter 3, when the wall was beginning to be built, that Nehemiah had the people work on the wall near their own homes? Now, why do you suppose that might be? Well, it’s just the human tendency to work harder when it’s your own interest involved. Working on the wall near your own home would mean that your own home would be safer. That same principle can apply here. If you are developing your spiritual life, the first person to benefit is YOU! You are making your part of this church, your part of this body more secure. You are investing in making the area around YOU safer because you are better rooted in Him. Your individual investment in the Kingdom of God is a significant contribution to the health of the whole body.
Did you also, perhaps notice the sacrifice of those in chapter 11 who chose to give up the more comfortable life of living in the villages, which were clear of debris and probably much nicer to live in? Everybody would rather live out in the country. But these folk were called to move into the city, like moving out of the suburbs of Chicago and into the run down inner city ghettoes, to fix them up. They were inspired by the Spirit to sacrifice all that comfort. They endured the necessary changes to stay in Jerusalem to keep the work that had been done secure. We are all called to some kind of sacrifice, not just our money, but ourselves to keep this ministry going. We can’t just let it be done by the few or by others. All of us need to step up. Each individual’s investment will make this an epic church. We need to be willing, not just in the emotional moment, but when the emotion fades. The commitment still needs to be there to keep gaps in our wall from appearing.
May he not find breaks in our wall. Instead, may he find us remaining vigilant! May he not find a weak straggling Christian among us that satan would devour, because we are all eating at the feast prepared for us in God’s Word! May God find us faithful at our posts and may satan not find a place to make a foot hold to come in and damage what God has begun. I’m calling all of you to action. Be of good courage! Be committed, not just with an emotional “YES!”, but with your feet on the floor and God’s word in your hand, with His praise on your lips and Christ leading all of us along the way to victory! Amen!
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