Nehemiah 13:1-2 KJV On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of God for ever; [2] Because they met not the children of Israel with bread and with water, but hired Balaam against them, that he should curse them: howbeit our God turned the curse into a blessing.
I. INTRODUCTION—THE BACKGROUND OF NEHEMIAH
A. Nehemiah’s Dilemma
-This story that Nehemiah tells is a sad one in the beginning. The walls of Jerusalem had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar when he had besieged Jerusalem. There had been some abortive attempts to rebuild them (Ezra 4:6-23).
-As a side note, you can read the book of Ezra in conjunction with the book of Nehemiah. Ezra’s book tells about the rebuilding of the Temple and Nehemiah is concerned with the story of the walls.
-The walls had remained in ruins for a century and a half. Because of the destroyed walls, Israel was left in state that made her susceptible to her numerous enemies that were around. Apathy, fear, discouragement, and complacency had allowed the walls to remain down far longer than what they should have been.
-One scholar (Kenyon, Digging Up, p. 170) notes:
“The effect of Jerusalem was much more disastrous and far-reaching than merely to render the city defenceless. . . The whole system of terraces down the (eastern) slope, dependent on retaining walls buttressed in turn by the fill of the next lower terrace, was ultimately dependent on the town wall at the base, forming the lowest and most substantial of the retaining walls.”
-Nehemiah comes along and appears to be the man that God has set aside for this choice job. But before Nehemiah ever got started building the wall, he had a great crisis in his heart at the condition that he saw his home in.
Nehemiah 1:3-4 KJV And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire. [4] And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven,
-The astounding fact about this whole story is that in a matter of fifty-two days, Nehemiah had marshaled his men and they had fought through the challenging circumstances and moved past their enemies to rebuild the walls.
II. BALAAM
-The passage we read from Nehemiah concentrates the story of the mercenary prophet, Balaam, who went to curse Israel in the audience of Balak and the Moabites.
-He looked down on the encampment of the Israelites and when he opened his mouth, it came forth blessing instead of cursing.
A. God’s Reversal
-There is something about the reversals of God that works out for the saints of God in a powerful way. The devil is always working in the opposite direction. He seeks to turn blessings into cursings and he accomplishes this by turning man against God. It is through subtlety, temptation, and sometimes sheer strength that he may work.
-Man isn’t much better because he can turn a blessing into a curse too! Through his mental capacity, his social position, and sometimes his wealth, he can work against the purposes of God.
-Man is not basically good. . . he is depraved and he will use every instrument and occasion to evil to be corrupt.
-But God starts working in all of it to let His prevailing will be worked out! God works in mysterious ways.
• Fine gold has often been found under a barren and unprotected surface of rock.
• Rare jewels have been found in crevices of rocks and in among the pebbles in river beds.
• Beautiful flowers can often be found in the rock confines along Rocky Mountain ranges.
• Palm trees have lifted their long leaves in the middle of deserts.
-God can do things so out of the ordinary and so unexpectedly that it astounds us. In places where we would expect curses, we find blessing!
• Joseph in the Egyptian courts.
• Obadiah hidden among Ahab’s henchmen.
• Saints growing in Caesar’s household.
• Nehemiah in the middle of a wicked eastern king.
-Cursings turned into blessings!
B. Nothing But Slag
I read a story told by Russell Conwell about a young man who lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania years ago. It just so happened that he inherited an iron furnace after his grandfather and father had passed away. He was a young man who had inherited a passel of wealth and as many have in the past was not accustomed to know what to do to handle it.
His father had sent him off to the east to a college and while he had gained a fine education, his ability to manage a business wasn’t what he had been trained to do. His education had fitted him more to work in a classroom than have his muscles stretched by running a steel mill. He did the best he could but as time passed it was very obvious that the business was being run into the ground.
The rate of freight climbed, the expense of getting the coal to fuel the furnaces rose in steady increments, and the difficulty of pulling the ore from the northern regions of the country soon consumed him. He was in a state of terrible despair one evening as he mulled over the invoices of the creditors. But his crisis came to a fevered pitch that night as he was rustled from the bed by one of his men who told him the furnace had caught fire and burned to the ground. It was a total loss as the fire from the furnace soon engulfed the entire plant and adjoining work yards.
All he could do the next morning was go out and look over the pile of slag. There were a few pieces of molten iron and some of the brick walls were still standing but leaning horribly. But overall it was nothing but a great monument to ruin. What to do now?!
He had no money, no furnace, no income, and in those days, no insurance money to cover his losses. There was nothing but a long ridge of slag along the river there in Bethlehem. He went out in the gloom and showed his friends and his creditors around the place and told them that his grandfather and father had labored long and hard to get it to where it was but now he had destroyed their success with his poor efforts.
Several weeks passed and the young man increasingly grew into a quiet, brooding, and disturbed state of mind. He still was responsible for a massive debt that had been incurred from his creditors and he just did not know what to do. One day as he shuffled through the ashes and slag caused by the fire, he determined that he would see if he could find a buyer and basically give the land away at a drastically reduced price and walk away. He determined that he would just disappear from life forever.
Later that evening, one of his college friends that was just passing through the country happened to stop in and see him. The visitor heard his friend’s terrible story of loss and how the fire had destroyed everything. After hearing out his friend, he asked if he could go and see the site where the steel mill had once been. So they took a couple of kerosene lanterns to the site and the friend then told the man that he had recently read in a business journal about an endeavor in England that was using slag to make concrete. But as an added benefit, it was discovered that what was not used to make concrete could be formed into leaded glass. They soon discovered that what could not be turned into concrete and leaded glass could be used to form synthetic marble tile.
The young man and his friend entered into a business partnership that soon repaid the creditors and turned both of them into very wealthy men. It was a slag heap that brought them to that place. Nothing but ashes, dust, and a man’s broken spirit but out of it emerged something so very valuable.
In the great Boston fire of 1872, sixty-five acres of land was destroyed. The damage totaled up to $75 million but in our day would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion. Hundreds of businesses were destroyed. Someone came along and wrote a message on a rough board that read: Cast down, but not destroyed. Perhaps half out of madness and half of hope that hastily scribbled message seemed to prevail.
Everything was in ruins and there was nothing but ashes. However there was one man who was a druggist and had a small pharmacy that he owned. The building was burned flat but he managed to find the door to the basement of his pharmacy and when he crawled down into the cellar he discovered something. Some of his drugs had managed to make it through the fire in their glass containers but had been horribly melted. When he emerged from the cellar, he asked a couple of Boston policeman who were patrolling the area to keep an eye on his cellar. The pharmacist contacted a great professor from Harvard University who came down a few days later to Boston.
Together they went down into the cellar and begin to analyze the drugs and the chemicals that had gone through the fire. The heat had so changed the molecular compounds that a long list of improvements were discovered and Bostonians and others soon became healthier because of what happened in the fire.
C. Cast Down To the Bottom
2 Corinthians 4:8-9 KJV We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; [9] Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;
-It is almost like Paul was saying, “Cast down to the bottom, seemingly to have nothing.” That one thing that we must know is that no man is exempt from these experiences of life. The only education that we seem to get comes from our own failures and pressure filled situations of life.
-No man has ever made anything of his life unless it has come from the wise and thoughtful calculations of his previous failures. Education, both in the physical world and the spiritual one, is often accompanied by learning from failures.
-It is saying, “There is nothing but slag but somewhere in this slag is the key to turning my world into its rightful position!”
-Give a man a problem and he will try to work it out. But give him a little time and he will soon discover that he has failed to reach a workable solution. Doing so often shows us our ignorance and our imperfections but as he keeps working at it, he soon discovers that the work, the study, the learning is turning his mind into a fine piece of equipment. It is honed by discipline and it is stretched by the challenges of learning.
-It is no wonder that the Lord urged us in Matthew 11:28-30 that we should come to Him. . . All who were weary and heavy-laded. . . Let Me have the burden, the challenge, the difficulty, the failure. . . Take My yoke upon you. . . . Learn of Me. . . it is then that we have true rest in our soul!
-The slag is full of valuable material but often we cannot see it until someone comes along and urges us to take a second look. There is a learning process that comes to this thing called the Christian life. But far too often we give in to the excuses and allow them to weigh us down!
• I was born into the wrong family.
• I had an abusive dad.
• I had a crazy mother.
• I had a bad teacher.
• I am too fat. . . . too skinny. . .
• I don’t have enough money.
• I don’t have enough talent.
• I am not smart enough.
• I never got a chance.
• I don’t like the cold.
• I don’t like the heat.
• I don’t like the pain.
• I didn’t have the right teachers.
• I can’t take that subject.
• It is too hard.
• I am not interested.
• I don’t like to read.
• I don’t like to study.
• I don’t like to get up early.
• I don’t have a good job.
• The dog ate my homework.
• There aren’t any more scholarships.
• I have migraine headaches.
• I battle with depression.
• I wasted my last chance.
• I can’t change, I’m too old. . . young. . . set in my ways. . .
• They didn’t like me.
• My blisters hurt.
• I never. . . . .
. . . . At some point, it has to get inside of you to quit making excuses!!!! But as long as you see the slag, the excuses will crowd you out!
III. GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THE SLAG
-Far too often in life, so many allow themselves to be torn down by the slag they feel surrounding them.
A. Rubbish
-Rubbish is what the enemies of Nehemiah said to him in Nehemiah 4. They said, “You will never get a wall out of this rubbish!”
-Have you ever been at the place where you generally thought that there wasn’t anything left but rubbish? You kind of felt like that fellow who looked at the damage of the fire and had lost his hope and said that it was useless to try to go on forward.
-Rubbish was all that was left. . . Just a slag-heap of junk.
• Ashes and dust of dead dreams
• Remnants and remains of shattered intentions
• Broken pieces of the ship
• Piles of rubbish created by enemies
-There are perhaps people who are hearing me right now that are saying that not only do they know what I am talking about but they feel as if they have lived out that very moment. Looking at some past experience there is a feeling of weariness that settles in on the soul and what consumes them the most is that feeling of present loss.
-They seem to say, “This is the very picture of my life!” There is nothing here but rubbish and slag. Yet despite what you may see as absolute loss and something that cannot be recovered, there is something about the Word that gets preached into our souls and our minds that can cause a flicker of faith to catch fire to get us moving all over again.
-Jesus brought much into the world with the hope of the resurrection and the outpouring of His Spirit that can push us into forward motion to regain what may have been lost at some point in life.
B. Face the Fear
Michael Pritchard—Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.
Screwtape (The Screwtape Letters)—There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy (God).
-You will have to contend with fear. You may even wonder if you can ever be useful again. Paul even mentioned it in his second letter to the Corinthians, he said that there were fightings without but fears within (2 Cor. 7:5).
-Sometimes it seems that fear may get the upper hand in every one of our lives. But if Paul struggled with fear, I am under no illusion that I will be any different.
• He might have feared that he would become a castaway.
• He might have feared that he had not been as devoted as he should have been.
• He might have feared that he should have gained more wisdom and knowledge than what he had.
• He might have feared that the work of God had suffered because of his leadership.
-We have no way of knowing but despite the fears that he contended with on the inside, there was still a mighty progress on the outside of his world. He wasn’t alone. Countless other biblical characters struggled with fear.
• Gideon—In facing the Midianites but in the end God delivered him. The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon and you will note that he did not even have a sword!
• David—In facing Goliath, there were undoubtedly some fears in that. Yet with the victory he is elevated by the songs to say that he had slain his ten thousands.
-When we overcome our fears, our victories are magnified by God. He turns the cursings into blessings!
Anonymous—Courage is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.
C. Overcoming Your Failures
Winston Churchill—Success is never final; failure is never fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.
Samuel Stiles—It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.
-You will have to fight with your failures.
-While I am not going to instruct you how to vote—although I do think that you ought to vote—there was a very interesting exchange this past week in the debate prior to the Republican primary in South Carolina.
-From CBSNews.com and CNN.com, I found the following article describing the debate’s opening salvo:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich slammed CNN host John King for asking about an explosive ABC News report claiming the White House hopeful asked his former wife for an "open marriage" before they later divorced.
KING: And just as Speaker Gingrich surged into contention here in South Carolina, a direct fresh character attack on the Speaker. And Mr. Speaker, I want to start with that this evening.
As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News and another interview with "The Washington Post." And this story has now gone viral on the Internet.
In it, she says that you came to her in 1999, at a time when you were having an affair. She says you asked her, sir, to enter into an open marriage.
Would you like to take some time to respond to that?
GINGRICH: No, but I will. . . . I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.
KING: Is that all you want to say, sir?
GINGRICH: Let me finish.
KING: Please.
GINGRICH: Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question for a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine. . . . My -- my two daughters -- my two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate. . .
KING: As you noted, Mr. Speaker, this story did not come from our network. As you also know, it is a subject of conversation on the campaign. I'm not -- I get your point. I take your point.
GINGRICH: John -- John, it was repeated by your network. You chose to start the debate with it. Don't try to blame somebody else. You and your staff chose to start this debate with it. Let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period said the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren't interested because they would like to attack any Republican. They're attacking the governor. They're attacking me. I'm sure they'll presently get around to Senator Santorum and Congressman Paul. I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.
The audience responded with a standing ovation and the other three candidates on stage did not touch the issue.
-While I am not endorsing the infidelity in his marriage, I am going to pick up on one fact and that is that you can wallow in failure or you can come to yourself in your pig pen, get up, shake off the husks, and make a bee-line back to the father’s house!
-Jesus said that sometimes the children of the world are wiser than those in the Kingdom and we ought to adopt some of their ways and actions to do the will of God.
-Again, I appeal to you to look quit looking at the slag and thinking that there is nothing but failure! Press on forward to where the will of God wants you to get to. Some of the greatest men of Scripture had to overcome terrible failures and move ahead!
• Peter—Warmed at the world’s campfire, cursed and denied the Lord all in one night.
• David—A horrific immoral act that involved adultery and murder.
• Saul of Tarsus—Persecuted the early church by jailing, beating, and killing those who carried the apostolic message. Paul said he was the chief of sinners but that humility helped him to overcome his failure.
-You are not meant to wallow in the failure that may have unhinged you for the last year, few years, or the last decade! If we as a church are going to do the will of God, you will have to get involved to the capacity that God has called you to fill.
IV. CONCLUSION—YOU WILL HAVE TO CHANGE!!!
-You have to make a conscious, God-given decision to move beyond your fear and your failure but to do it you are going to have to change!
-Change can be unnerving and difficult but it is the only hope that you have! You can get all you can get in the altars, in prayer, in prayer lines, in worship services, in special services, conferences and so forth but until you make a conscious decision to change nothing happens.
-You will have to change if you are going to get beyond the fact of nothing but slag.
• Change your thinking!
• Avoid the people who are dragging you down!
• Success comes to those who habitually do the right things!
-Some people focus their thinking on survival and they are failures. Some people focus their thinking on maintenance and they are average. A few people focus their thinking on progress. . . they become leaders.
THERE IS MORE TO WHAT YOU THINK. . . THERE IS SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST SLAG!!!
Philip Harrelson
January 22, 2012
