Doubling Down against Discouragement
September 21, 2012
Nehemiah 4:1-23 (Background Passage)
Nehemiah 4:10-14
Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
10 In Judah, it was said:
The strength of the laborer fails,
since there is so much rubble.
We will never be able
to rebuild the wall.
11 And our enemies said, “They won’t know or see anything until we’re among them and can kill them and stop the work.” 12 When the Jews who lived nearby arrived, they said to us time and again, “Everywhere you turn, they attack us.” 13 So I stationed people behind the lowest sections of the wall, at the vulnerable areas. I stationed them by families with their swords, spears, and bows. 14 After I made an inspection, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people, “Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the great and awe-inspiring Lord, and fight for your countrymen, your sons and daughters, your wives and homes.”
Former heavy-weight boxer James (Quick) Tillis is a cowboy from Oklahoma who fought out of Chicago in the early 1980s. He still remembers his first day in the Windy City after his arrival from Tulsa. "I got off the bus with two cardboard suitcases under by arms in downtown Chicago and stopped in front of the Sears Tower. I put my suitcases down, and I looked up at the Tower and I said to myself, 'I'm going to conquer Chicago.' "When I looked down, the suitcases were gone."
Today in the Word, September 10, 1992.
Isn't that just the way it goes? We have the world figured out, the wind is at our back, and something goes wrong that deflates us. It's an age old problem, with an age old solution. Today we are going to double down on God, and defeat that demon of discouragement.
Let's look this morning on some of the reasons we get discouraged, and how we can avoid falling into the trap where discouragement defeats us.
From The Outside In
Nehemiah 4:1-2
Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
4 When Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became furious. He mocked the Jews 2 before his colleagues and the powerful men of Samaria, and said, “What are these pathetic Jews doing? Can they restore it by themselves? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they ever finish it? Can they bring these burnt stones back to life from the mounds of rubble?”
The Israelites were flying high, the work on the wall was getting done and they were moving forward. They started it out with a great enthusiasm, but as time marched on it began to take a toll on them. Keeping the workers enthusiastic became a problem, much as it does in our own community of believers.
Where God is at work, the enemy wants to tear it down. Where the people of God are getting the job done, the detractors try to stop the progress.
A tool that is often used to discourage us is ridicule. Ridicule is debilitating, destructive, and difficult to defend against. It strikes us where we are most vulnerable, and for that reason is extremely effective.
Sanballat is consistent in his approach, as this is the third time we see him railing against Nehemiah and the Israelite workers. He continues to stand against the work of God, joking, and poking fun in an attempt to belittle and discourage those who are doing the work.
When his earlier machinations proved ineffective to keep the wall from being built he systematically orchestrated a campaign far more insidious than a brute force approached would have been. He first attacks their abilities, calling them pathetic and mocking their worth.
From there Sanballat and his surrogates ridicule the craftsmanship of the Jewish workers, claiming that even a small animal running across it will cause it to fall down. Then intention was clear, by making their work seem insignificant they could enhance any seed of discouragement that was planted in the fertile soil of discord.
While we may not be building nine-foot thick walls to protect our city from the hordes of marauding enemies arrayed against it, we do have important things we work hard at every day. We have our faith to live, or families to take care of, and a fight against evil to win.
The forces of the enemy continually conspire together against the workers of God. They have a vested interest in spreading discouragement among us. Warren Wiersbe writes, “God’s people sometimes have difficulty working together, but the people of the world have no problem uniting in opposition to the work of the Lord.”
When the darkness of discouragement begins to take hold we lose the urgency, we lose the zeal that allows us to continue to practice our faith in a world that is hostile to what we believe. We need to double down on God and defeat discouragement.
Inside Out
Nehemiah 4:10
Good News Translation (GNT)
10 The people of Judah had a song they sang:
“We grow weak carrying burdens;
There's so much rubble to take away.
How can we build the wall today?”
The constant pounding we take from the ravages of living life eventually begin to wear on even the stoutest of souls. Day in and day out we toil at things from the most menial of tasks to the grandest of adventures, but when faced with an incessant barrage of nay-saying negativity we begin to falter, and we begin to fail.
The greatest danger when it comes to discouragement comes not from without but from the inside out. We become our own worst enemy when we abandon the positive to dance with the negative.
The Israelites who said in verse 10 "How can we build the wall" were the same people who were referenced in verse 6: " So we went on rebuilding the wall, and soon it was half its full height, because the people were eager to work."
One of the issues is that when we begin a new project or start to pursue a fresh vision we get all excited and put our shoulders to the wheel. After a while we get tired and begin to slow down. We allow discouragement to slip in and fatigue takes its toll. The more tired we become, the easier it is to let ourselves get down.
The newness wears off and the routine grinds us down until we become frustrated because we remember what it used to be like before we got into the rut.
Frustration comes from many sources and from every direction. It usually occurs when we think we are doing everything the right way and we don't see the progress we expected, or when the job seems greater than we can handle. Sometimes it occurs when everything just starts to go wrong.
Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will") was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base.
It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash.
One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it." (http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-true.html)
Smile... tomorrow will be worse.
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
You never run out of things that can go wrong.
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.
Now, these seem amusing, especially when they are not happening to us right now, but they present a pessimistic outlook on the world around us that leads us right down the path to debilitating discouragment.
Everything seemed to be going wrong, all at once for these already exhausted workers in Israel. This is a circumstance that each one of us can easily relate to. In fact, in keeping with Murphy's Law, it is when we are most exhausted that things begin to fall apart.
When we are tired, as the wall workers were we begin to fear our ability to accomplish the task. It begins to take on mythic proportions and our fear keeps us from being successful. This failure to succeed is yet one more building block in the edifice of discouragement.
Top Down
Nehemiah 4:14
Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
14 After I made an inspection, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people, “Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the great and awe-inspiring Lord, and fight for your countrymen, your sons and daughters, your wives and homes.”
The cure for discouragement and all of the underlying causes for it comes not from outside, and not from within us, but from the top down. If you want to defeat discouragement, then remember who God is. Remember the mighty awesome power of the being who created this universe from nothing. Remember the frightening power of the man who preserved the family of a righteous man when the world was flooding. Remember the greatness of a God who gave His son so that we might be saved. Remember God's greatness to defeat discouragement.
On the front porch of his little country store in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln and Berry, his partner, stood. Business was all gone, and Berry asked, "How much longer can we keep this going?" Lincoln answered, "It looks as if our business has just about winked out." Then he continued, "You know, I wouldn't mind so much if I could just do what I want to do. I want to study law. I wouldn't mind so much if we could sell everything we've got and pay all our bills and have just enough left over to buy one book--Blackstone's Commentary on English Law, but I guess I can't." A strange-looking wagon was coming up the road. The driver angled it up close to the store porch, then looked at Lincoln and said, "I'm trying to move my family out west, and I'm out of money. I've got a good barrel here that I could sell for fifty cents." Abraham Lincoln's eyes went along the wagon and came to the wife looking at him pleadingly, face thin and emaciated. Lincoln ran his hand into his pocket and took out, according to him, "the last fifty cents I had" and said, "I reckon I could use a good barrel." All day long the barrel sat on the porch of that store. Berry kept chiding Lincoln about it. Late in the evening Lincoln walked out and looked down into the barrel. He saw something in the bottom of it, papers that he hadn't noticed before. His long arms went down into the barrel and, as he fumbled around, he hit something solid. He pulled out a book and stood petrified: it was Blackstone's Commentary on English Law. Lincoln later wrote,
"I stood there holding the book and looking up toward the heavens. There came a deep impression on me that God had something for me to do and He was showing he now that I had to get ready for it. Why this miracle otherwise?"
When the world is crashing around us, we really don't want to hear that God can, and will, use our circumstances to lead us out of the darkness. It's not what we want to hear, but it is what we need to hear.
When discouragement begins to take root, double down on God because he is the safe bet. Double down on God and defeat discouragement!
