Managing Finances And Rest Series

What's next, Lord? I think that's the question we need to ask ourselves regularly. What's next,

Lord? What are you going to do in my life next? But I think some people approach that kind of a

statement with fear and trepidation. You've heard the statement: Don't pray for patience because

God will send you trials. And so I think people have this attitude about life, “Well, what's next,

Lord?” as if they're afraid of what's next. But we must realize that God has next things for us that

are for our good, to grow us, to develop us, to help us to be stronger in our faith. The Christian

life is an adventure and the more we get to know God, the more we're able to apply His truths to

our lives. Great things happen as we get to know Him more.

That's what the Nehemiah believers were realizing as they're getting to know God. They read the

scriptures and they realize we need to make some changes in our lives. So the first changes that

they made (we saw a couple of weeks ago) was that they separated themselves from the world,

so to speak. They separated themselves from the culture and had their identity found in the

relationship with God. We also saw that they walked with the Lord. Now, the next thing that they

did was that they committed their lives, marriage and sex, and they made that a priority in their

lives. We talked about that last week.

What's next? You’ve got to ask the question, what's next? if you're committed to the Lord. Lord,

what are you going to do next in these believers in Nehemiah’s time? Well, what's next is that

God is going to work in their work, in their money, in their rest. He's going to put all these things

together in this next few verses. We're going to look at those today and we're going to gain some

principles that we can apply to our own lives no matter what you do. Whether you work or you

don't work, or you have a to-do list for the day, or maybe you're working at home or you're

retired, whatever it is, you have these things that you do and you manage your rest and your

work. Accordingly, we're going to take some principles from God's word today and we're going

to apply them to our work, our money, our rest, and see what God has to say. We're going to

walk with the Nehemiah believers as they are growing in their own faith and see how we might

apply some principles in ours.

Now when we look at God's word, we have to realize that some of the material we're studying is

very culturally bound. In other words, there's a lot of cultural things going on. Remember last

week we talked about arranged marriages. But we took some principles out of that and applied it

to our lives. Today, we're going to see something similar. We're going to see a lot of culture

involved. We're going to see people in a different theological time zone. We're going to see

cultural practices taking place that are different than ours. But we're going to dig into those and

we're going to find the principles, those timeless truths, and we're going to bring them over to our

lives. And then from there, they're going to scatter into the applications for each one of our lives.

The application that you go out of here with today might be different than the person sitting next

to you. Applications are many. There are a few principles. There's only one interpretation to

God's word, and that's understanding what it was meant at the time and in that place that it was

written.

So bear with me now as we go through this passage. I'm going to have you stand in a moment. I

want you to watch me read these nine verses. We're going to then look through the cultural stuff

that's there. We're going to identify some principles for our lives and apply them to rest, apply

them to our generosity, apply them to our personal lives in the area of work. Stand with me

please as I read these nine verses from Nehemiah 10.

This is right after they dedicated themselves in marriage, okay. Now they're saying – And if the

peoples of the land bring in goods or any grain on the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from

them on the Sabbath or on a holy day. We’re going to sanctify this day of rest, they said. And

we’re not going to let the merchants take over. And we will forego the crops of the seventh (that’s

the environmental protection plan that God had for the ground) and the exaction of every debt.