Text: Nehemiah 13:1-31, Title: Fit to be Tied, Date/Place: NRBC, 2/17/08, PM
A. Opening illustration: Imagine that you poured your life into a business. Spent forty-plus years starting, building, and spurring that company on to greatness. You made the Fortune 500 list. You outgrew four building facilities. You established a company that will provide for three or four of your future generations. But suddenly you are called up to serve our country in the role of an ambassador to Iraq, to assist them economically to be strong enough to ally with the US on certain things. So you decided to leave the company in good hands, and laid out for them instructions of exactly what to do, and even got all the board of directors and CEOs in the company to sign them. But when you came back 10 years later…
B. Background to passage: After this big celebration and dedication ceremony, life returns to normal, and somewhere along the way, Nehemiah has to make an extended trip back to Babylon to report to the king. He leaves in 433 BC but doesn’t return until 525-520 BC. So during the ten or so years that he is gone, exactly what he doesn’t want to happen happens. And God sends the prophet Malachi to the people during Nehemiah’s absence to proclaim His displeasure. Then when Nehemiah comes back, he is completely appalled at what has occurred in his beloved city. And in a last effort, even in his late sixties, Nehemiah makes some sweeping reforms with uncompromising vigor.
C. Main thought: I want to look at three truths arising from this text about prolonging spiritual well-being.
A. Prone to Wander
1. As one commentator noted, it wasn’t that Nehemiah came back to a whole new set of problems that they had forgotten to deal with. He came back to the same old stuff. Quickly run down through the areas of failure—impure worship with foreigners (1-3), desecration of the temple with the priest’s approval (4-9), forsaking of the Levites and Temple (10-14), dishonoring the Sabbath (15-22), intermarrying and multi-generational unfaithfulness (23-28). Notice all of these things are things that they covenanted to do back in chapter ten. The people were so fired up in the revival. And yet, now they seemed so far from him
2. Gen 6:5, 8:21 Jer 17:9, Ps 53:3, Matt 15:19, Rom 3:10-18, 7:18,
3. Illustration: as the song said “…prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love…” tell the story about the man who wrote it. Tell about one of those dreams or thoughts that you have after which you wonder how a saved person could ever come up with such things, tell about how after the girls’ birthday party I was compelled to walk up behind Michael with a balloon and a thumb tact,
4. This just demonstrates to us the wickedness of our own hearts. You will hear people say to follow your heart, or your heart won’t steer you wrong, but those are lies. Truth is that he heart is desperately wicked. It will deceive you, and lead you down a wrong path. The only true help we see is the Word of God. It will not lead us astray. Listen to the Spirit of God if you want to listen to something or someone. You can turn over all the new leaves that you want, make a the new year’s resolutions that you want, begin new diets or workout schedules, or jobs, or have another baby, but you cannot change yourself. Without the power of the Spirit and the Word within, you will fail. Because you are fighting a battle that you can never win with a natural man. Why are you telling us this, it’s depressing. We will talk about what to do about it later, but we must begin with an understanding of how bad we really are, lest we underestimate ourselves. For most of us think that we are pretty good overall. The preacher telling the other preachers that the reason that we don’t witness to our moral, but lost neighbors is because in our heart of hearts we don’t think they deserve hell, nor do we deserve it. But we are not! We are only a decision away from flushing our lives and testimony right down the sewer. We are all capable of doing atrocious things. This is why we never look down upon one who is caught in a sin, let alone someone who has not the capacity to defend himself.
B. Righteous Indignation
1. Nehemiah was righteously angry. He uses terms like “grieved bitterly” to describe his feelings. But his words and actions speak the loudest. He says at least three times that he “contended” with certain people, which means that he bitterly disputed with them. He told them “don’t you know this is the kind of stuff that got us sent to Babylon in the first place.” He threatened some with physical violence. He beat some of them, drove some of them out of town, he pulled some of their hair out, and threw some of their stuff out on the sidewalk. He pronounced prophetic curses upon them, and made them swear oaths. But, note his prayerfulness. This gives us an indication that this was not a loss of control, but a purposeful, careful, calculated, thoughtful plan that was an attempt to restore the honor of God’s fame in Jerusalem
2. Ex 32:19, John 2:14-17
3. Illustration: “Many of us seem to have lost the capacity to get mad, at least as mad as we ought to get, about lying, cheating and stealing. To be indifferent to wrong doing, to shrug it off and laugh at it is a symptom of advanced degeneration of the moral sense. Someone seems to have administered a massive dose of Novocain to our national conscious.” “In Christian work our cowardice in avoiding unpleasantness is currently doing more damage than any damage from irascibility on the part of Christian leaders. And what irascibility we do give way to is usually verbal. It wounds without correcting. The church has become flabby, old-womanish, inept, unwilling to act. Discipline should be reconciliatory and loving, but it should take place. And on the whole it doesn’t. Who are we—who condone every manner of evil in our midst—to criticize one of those rare leaders who do not hesitate to act when the integrity of God’s temple is in question?” tell about the Discovery Channel special on the bible that I emailed a warning to the network after I got done watching it warning them of their culpability,
4. We must regain our sense of righteous anger. We must recalibrate our consciences to be pricked at evil, compromise, sin, apathy; especially within religious life and church. Jesus was the hardest upon those whom thought themselves to be most religious. And we don’t have to be like the Muslims and try to kill the cartoonists who made fun of Mohammed every time someone takes the Lord’s name in vain. But when those whom we call brothers promote ungodly, unbiblical, and selfish ideas and practices, we must step up! And we don’t have to do it self-righteously as if God has a champion of righteousness in us, but it must be done. Sometime drastic circumstances call for drastic action! Maybe if some Christians had stood up for righteousness over the past 50 years, our country would not be in the mess that it is in, let alone our churches!
C. Correction and Prevention
1. At least the Jews’ corrected one thing on their own; they separated the foreigners out, before Nehemiah had to do something bad. Next, Nehemiah threw Tobiah’s stuff on the street, orders the Temple area to be cleansed, restored the Levites and the offering, he warned the leaders, locked the gates and posted trusted men watch, as well as threatened the sin that crouches at the door. The point is that Nehemiah took direct action. He made very practical decisions to remedy the situations, some of them more radical than others. He didn’t round up a two-year study committee to report back, then ask a solutions task force to come up with some potential solutions, then have a business meeting to see how many differing opinions he could get, and how many people would act unchristian and get mad. And when he put people in charge, he put trusted individuals that openly invite accountability. He put disciples into leadership, not the most popular, powerful, and wealthy.
2. 2 Tim 3:16, Prov 29:15, 19, Eccl 8:11,
3. Illustration: Dr. J.B. Gambrel tells an amusing story from General Stonewall Jackson’s famous valley campaign. Jackson’s army found itself on one side of a river when it needed to be on the other side. After telling his engineers to plan and build a bridge so the army could cross, he called his wagon master in to tell him that it was urgent the wagon train cross the river as soon as possible. The wagon master started gathering all the logs, rocks and fence rails he could find and built a bridge. Long before daylight General Jackson was told by his wagon master all the wagons and artillery had crossed the river. General Jackson asked where are the engineers and what are they doing? The wagon master’s only reply was that they were in their tent drawing up plans for a bridge. Peter Wagner’s quote about the Holy Spirit anointing individuals to lead instead of groups, committees, and boards,
4. If we want to sustain revival or a closeness to God in our church we must do some things. We must be willing to take definitive action. As an umpire will never please everybody, we must be willing to disappoint for the cause of the gospel. We must be swift to correct error, for in our failure, many others will be led astray. We must direct our passions to proper ends. We must also intentionally cultivate leadership with not only a proper theology, but with a proper vision and passion. We must think ahead to the next generation, and strive to shape hearts for the long term. This includes not only leadership development, but effective discipleship. We must train up disciples that love nothing but Jesus, and hate nothing but sin. We must seek to develop people that would cut off a hand or gouge out an eye to kill sin, but willingly be speared to death or burned alive for the cause of Christ in some distant land. We must create disciples that fashion every aspect of their lives upon the Word, and live with a radical preoccupation for the glory of Christ!
A. Closing illustration: Speak the differences between the two churches left to us by Spurgeon and Edwards
B. Speak about v. 30a
C. Invitation to commitment
Additional Notes
• Is Christ Exalted, Magnified, Honored, and Glorified?
