Join God In His Work Series

We're studying the book of Nehemiah. Now Nehemiah is one of the three postexilic reformers.

These three reformers are coming into Jerusalem to rebuild. There's an order that they have here,

which I thought was very interesting as I looked at the order of the exilic reformers and I

compare our discipleship in our own lives. So let me just share with you what I realized this

week.

First, we have Zerubbabel. He comes in and he's the one who is rebuilding the temple,

establishing the spiritual center first. Then comes Ezra who's a teacher. That's what he is. He's a

teacher. He comes in and he's interested in the growth and the revival of the people, trying to

strengthen them. And then Nehemiah, the guy we're studying now, he comes in and does the

building of the walls. So I'm thinking that sounds a lot like the flow of discipleship.

Did you know there's a flow to the discipleship that we experience? Yes, there is. In fact, I kind

of laid it out in a similar fashion. The first thing you do when you become a disciple is you make

a decision to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. When you make that decision, it's a

decision that changes your life. If you have not made that decision yet, I invite you to make that

decision today and invite Jesus Christ to come into your life. And then you get baptized. Usually

those things come very closely together. But in our culture, sometimes people got saved later and

they didn't get baptized, or maybe they were baptized as a baby. That's not really the baptism

talked about in the Bible. That's really a dedication that your parents had (and thank God for that

in your life). But there's a believer baptism that's described here. That's that first establishing

Christ as the spiritual center of your life. Then once you do that, you look around. Where's a

church that I can be a member of? The church I was formerly a part of, our membership was very

kind of informal. We believed in membership, but we just said if you feel like you're a member

then you are one. At GraceWay there’s a specific plan for becoming a member and it's a strategic

plan. So you want to look at that.

I'm going to talk about membership in two weeks here at GraceWay Bible Church. In fact, if you

look in your bulletin, you'll see my name is in there because I'm applying for membership here at

this church. You'll learn more about that in two weeks. And this is a place where you grow. So

maybe you've been a part of a Grace Group. Or the summer electives for the summer are going

to be a really interesting, different kind. You have a flyer in your bulletin about that. And then

Grace Groups will start up again. It's where we're growing. But then we want to serve.

Nehemiah is all about the service part. So I want you to see the sermons that we're talking about

now have more to do with this last part – getting involved in service and outreach in the life of

our church. So that's where we are. That's where we're talking about. There are a lot of ministries

here at GraceWay. In fact, just like in the building of the walls, we're going to look at forty-seven

names today. And there’s probably forty-seven ministries at GraceWay, something like that. I

know you can't read this. And that's not important. I just want you to see that there's a big list of

them. You're going to learn more about those next Sunday during our Ministry Fair between the

services. So plan to stay a little bit longer next Sunday so you can go down to the Family Life

Center and see all of the tables for all the ministries. Maybe the Lord will do something in your

heart and you'd like to be a part of one of those. So we welcome you to do that.

Today as we look at Nehemiah 3 we're going to see a lot of names. I hope that as you listen to all

those names you think about the individuality of those people. As I was reading all of this and

I'm thinking about GraceWay and the work that we're doing here to build a lighthouse in this

church, I'm thinking, wow, there's a lot of ministries that we're a part of. We all have a part of the

wall, so to speak, like Nehemiah’s crew are building the wall. And so I thought about this New

Testament Bible verse that I want to read as our stand-up verse today. So if you would stand with