Opposition To Godly Things

Satan’s #1 tool to oppose us and to defeat us is the various forms of opposition that come

at us in everyday life and especially when we are attempting something great for God. In

those times of ministry, outreach and evangelism - Satan will pull out all of the stops to

knock us off course, to discourage us and to defeat us. But I have great news for you this

morning, we have already obtained the victory. God has already won the battles that we

will face, if we only allow Him to work and to control our lives, if we are obedient to

Him and to His Son, Jesus Christ. God works all of the opposition, all of the harassment

and all of the trash that comes at us for good.

Now before we get started, I do want to say that at times, I think that we give way too

much credit to Satan, or Ole Scumbag, as I like to call him. You see we have a tendency

automatically to assume all opposition is from Satan and I don’t think that it is. I believe

that there are times that the opposition that we come against is simply either consequences

of our choices or may even be a character builder or a true obstacle put there by God.

Maybe we can talk about that in a future time tighter, so today, I would like to

concentrate on some focal passages from Acts 4 and also from Nehemiah 4 - 6.

Read Acts 4:1-4 and outline/explain.

To gain additional from God’s Word, I want to focus the rest of our time this morning on

Nehemiah, the great builder that we find in the book of the Bible with the same name.

Background to Nehemiah and the need to rebuild the wall.

We find ourselves starting at about the halfway point in the rebuilding of the wall. As a

matter of fact in 4:6, Nehemiah even recorded that it as “joined together up to half its

height”. As the work is being accomplished and the people are honoring God with their

efforts, we find that there were thundering voices of doubt all around Nehemiah. He was

getting reports of plans to kill him and was even starting to hear the rumblings of

grumbling from within his own ranks. I am sure that He began to have a few doubts as to

the ultimate success of the building project, was probably fearing for his own life and for

that of his workers and also was having to expend great amounts of time and energy to

“shore up” or to encourage those around him.

What about you? What will you do when you begin to doubt? What will you do when

others come against you and ask you to quit what you are doing for God? What will you

do when there are opponents in life? When you attempt to do something for God, when I

yearn to live for God, when you strive to serve God, when we long to honor God with

everything that we are and with everything that we do you had better expect opposition

along the way and I had better opposition along the way, we had better expect opposition

along the way.

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Any cause worth doing is also a cause that someone will feel they need to criticize! Any

cause worth doing is also a cause that someone will feel that they need to criticize! All

great causes have had great critics. It was Aristotle who said, “You can avoid opposition

by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing!”

Opposition will hit all of our lives. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that summed it up

fairly well, it said, “Some days you are the windshield and some days you are the bug”. I

think that is a kinder, gentler way of saying, “Some days you are the monument and some

days you are the pigeon”. When I view opposition through the lens of being effective for

God, it suddenly changes not only what I see but also how I actually view it, for with

God all things are possible! Especially when we are in line with His will and plan for our

lives.

Opposition is going to happen. There are accounts recorded throughout God’s word of

opposition that the greats of the faith faced. Moses faced 40 years of griping and

complaining. It of course started with Pharaoh and his army but probably even worse was

the constant griping and complaining from within his own ranks, the Israelites, the ones

whom he was leading. He faced continual conflict and continual criticism. Remember the

shepherd boy David as he came against Goliath and how Goliath “trash talked” him and

made fun of not only David but the entire nation of Israel. Jesus especially had critics and