A man who bought a new hunting dog was eager to see how he would perform. So he took the dog out to track a bear. No sooner had they gotten into the woods than the dog picked up the trail. Suddenly, he stopped, sniffed the ground, and headed in a new direction. He had caught the scent of a deer that had crossed the bear’s path. A few moments later he halted again, this time smelling a rabbit that had crossed the path of the deer. And so on and on it went until finally the breathless hunter caught up with his dog, only to find him barking triumphantly down the hole of a field mouse. (Bible Illustrator)
Like that dog, it is easy for us to get sidetracked. We can go chasing off into so many different directions that we miss the important things in life. Please, don’t let that happen to you. In your pursuit of God, don’t be sidetracked by the “rabbit trails” that can lead you away from God. If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Nehemiah 6, Nehemiah 6, where we see the “rabbit trails” that can get us off track like they almost did Nehemiah.
Nehemiah 6:1-2 Now when Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left in it (although up to that time I had not set up the doors in the gates), Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, “Come and let us meet together at Hakkephirim in the plain of Ono.” But they intended to do me harm. (ESV)
Now, the plain of Ono was 25 miles northwest of Jerusalem, about halfway between their two cities. So Nehemiah’s enemies were suggesting a compromise. “Let’s meet halfway,” they said. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, Why not meet halfway? Why not work out an agreement that’s suitable to both parties and live in peace with each other?
There’s only one problem: Nehemiah smells a rabbit, I mean a rat. They intended to do him harm. After all, why would they want him 25 miles away from Jerusalem, a whole day’s journey? And why would they want him in a place that borders hostile territory? Besides, Nehemiah would waste precious time getting there and back, which would delay completion of the wall. No. Nehemiah is not about to stop work on the wall or risk getting himself killed. So Nehemiah says…
Nehemiah 6:3-4 I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” And they sent to me four times in this way, and I answered them in the same manner. (ESV)
Nehemiah stayed at the task God had given him to do and refused to be sidetracked by concessions that took him away from his primary mission. Nehemiah refused to compromise with the enemy, and that’s what we need to do. When the enemy comes calling…
DON’T BE SIDETRACKED BY COMPROMISE.
Don’t get off on the rabbit trail of making concessions with the enemy. Don’t be diverted from your primary task by conceding with those who don’t share your core values.
The Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting article about the evolution of the ever popular Monopoly game (2015). Early on, the famous board game was designed to provide a warning about the dangers of greed and big business. The initial version, known as the Landlord's Game, was invented in the early 1900s by Elizabeth Magie who wanted to teach players about the evils of monopolies and land ownership.
But over time, as the game spread through word of mouth and as people developed local versions of the game, the focus drifted from that original vision and purpose. Instead, the game started focusing on building (rather than preventing) huge monopolies and bankrupting your opponents. That's the game's version that Charles Darrow, and then later Parker Brothers, turned into the hyper-competitive game that we know today. (Andrew Innes, “Synthesis: What Board Games Can Teach Business,” Harvard Business Review, January-February 2015; www.PreachingToday. com)
A game which started out to warn people of huge monopolies ended up encouraging those very same monopolies. Such drifts happen all the time, and they can happen right here if we’re not careful.
Carey Hall was once a large Baptist church facility in Leicester, England. It was named after William Carey, one of its early and popular pastors, who left Leicester in 1793 to reach the Hindus in Burma and India. A year earlier, William Carey had founded the Baptist Missionary Society, and today is recognized as the father of the modern missionary movement. Through the work of the Baptist Missionary society, Carey started a great wave of foreign missionaries coming first from England and then from the United States.
Today, most of England’s churches are dead. In the late 19th Century, they began compromising their stand on the Word of God and bought into the concept of universalism. That is they began to believe and teach that everybody is going to heaven whether or not they believe in Jesus.
By the way, the liberal, main-line churches in the United States followed suit in the early part of the 20th Century, and now I fear some so-called “evangelical” pastors in the early part of the 21st Century are compromising in the same area.
That compromise will kill our evangelical churches as it has killed the mainline liberal churches in our country and most of the churches is England. It happened to Carey Hall! In 1971, the small, struggling congregation that was still meeting there sold it to some Hindu devotees, who remodeled the building and opened it as Hindu Temple three years later in 1974. They called it the Shree Sanatan Mandir Temple, and today it is Leicester’s largest Hindu temple.
Think of it! Carey went to India to convert Hindu’s to Christ, but less than 180 years later, the Hindu’s came to England and converted his church facility into a Hindu temple. (Neale & Barbara Goetsch)
My dear friends, we dare not compromise our stand on the Word of God, and we dare not compromise our mission. We exist to equip people to follow Jesus, so that they KNOW Him personally, GROW in their relationship to Him, and SERVE Him as He has gifted them to serve. That’s our mission, and everything we do must be tied to that mission. Anything else, no matter how good, is extraneous. Anything else, no matter how good, is a rabbit trail that will get us off track.
In our service for Christ, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” (George Sweeting). In other words, don’t be sidetracked by compromise. Don’t make concessions that take you away from your primary task. Second…
DON’T BE SIDETRACKED BY SLANDER.
Don’t get off on the rabbit trail of thinking you have to answer all the lies said about you. Don’t be diverted by defending yourself against the gossip and rumors that are sure to come when you seek to serve God. Nehemiah didn’t let those false rumors stop him for one minute.
Nehemiah 6:5 In the same way Sanballat for the fifth time sent his servant to me with an open letter in his hand. (ESV)
After privately inviting Nehemiah four times to meet him halfway; on the fifth time, Sandballat does it publically. He does it by way of an “open letter”, which is meant for public consumption.
Nehemiah 6:6-7 In it was written, “It is reported among the nations, and Geshem also says it, that you and the Jews intend to rebel; that is why you are building the wall. And according to these reports you wish to become their king. And you have also set up prophets to proclaim concerning you in Jerusalem, ‘There is a king in Judah.’ And now the king will hear of these reports. So now come and let us take counsel together.” (ESV)
These are lies, all of them vicious lies, but Sanballat is trying to force Nehemiah’s hand. He thinks that by spreading such rumors, Nehemiah will have to stop his work on the wall and address those lies. Tell me: is that what Nehemiah does? Look at his reply in verse 8.
Nehemiah 6:8-9 Then I sent to him, saying, “No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind.” For they all wanted to frighten us, thinking, “Their hands will drop from the work, and it will not be done.” But now, O God, strengthen my hands. (ESV)
Nehemiah STAYS at the task and PRAYS for strength. He doesn’t waste his time trying to answer the false rumors against him, and neither should we.
Plato once said, “When men speak ill of you, live so as nobody may believe them.” That’s the way Nehemiah lived. He didn’t care what people said of him. His character spoke for itself, and he knew no one would believe the negative press about him.
The fact is: if we take care of our character, God will take care of our reputation, and we won’t have to waste our time trying to stop the false rumors spread about us.
For many years, each fall, until her death at age 79 on August 9, 2011, Eleanor Josaitis (show picture) offered a challenge to the incoming class of MBA students at the University of Michigan. “Every single person in this room,” she said, “is going to help me change the world.”
Eleanor Josaitis had been doing her part to change the world for nearly 50 years. It started in 1962. “As she sat watching a television program about the Nuremberg trials, Josaitis – then a housewife with five children – asked herself what she would have done if atrocities were taking place in her own backyard. When a breaking news report interrupted the program to show images of Mississippi police turning dogs and fire hoses on civil-rights protesters, Josaitis knew her moment of truth had arrived.”
Six years later, in 1968, Josaitis co-founded an organization called “Focus: HOPE” in Detroit, Michigan, which according to their mission statement provides “intelligent and practical action to overcome racism, poverty and injustice.” They began with a food distribution program. Then soon, they added child care and focused on job training. When Eleanor Josaitis died in 2011, Focus: HOPE was serving 43,000 people a month in its food distribution program, with an operating budget of $23 million, along with 280 employees and 15,000 volunteers.
Over the years, Josaitis’ offices were firebombed, and she regularly received threats and hate mail that she referred to as “love letters.” Showing them to her student audience, she would ask, “Does anyone in this room think I'm going to be intimidated for one minute by this? It's only going to make me work harder.”
Summing up her years of relentless, positive service, Josaitis explained, “You have to have the guts to try something, because you won't change a thing by sitting in front of the TV with the clicker in your hand.” (Alison Overholt, “The Housewife Who Got Up Off the Couch,” FastCompany, September 2004, p. 94; www.PreachingToday.com)
I like that woman’s attitude. She was a housewife who got up off the couch one day and would not let the hate mail and attacks from her enemies stop her. She was not intimidated by their threats nor their lies.
Think about what the church could do, in the Power of the Holy Spirit, if we had more people like Eleanor Josaitis – people who know what God has called them to, and who won’t let the lies and threats of their enemies deter them from their God-given mission in life.
How about you? How about me? In your pursuit of God and His will for your life, 1st, Don’t be sidetracked by compromise; 2nd, Don’t be sidetracked by slander; and 3rd…
DON’T BE SIDETRACKED BY SIN.
Don’t get off on the rabbit trail of disobedience to God’s Word. Don’t be diverted by actions which SEEM right at the time, but go contrary to what the Bible SAYS is right. Here, Nehemiah refused to disobey God even to save his own life.
Nehemiah 6:10-11 Now when I went into the house of Shemaiah the son of Delaiah, son of Mehetabel, who was confined to his home, he said, “Let us meet together in the house of God, within the temple. Let us close the doors of the temple, for they are coming to kill you. They are coming to kill you by night.” But I said, “Should such a man as I run away? And what man such as I could go into the temple and live? I will not go in.” (ESV)
Nehemiah refused to go into the Temple, because it was contrary to God’s Law. God had made it very clear: Only priests were allowed in the Temple (Numbers 3:10; 18:7). You see, Nehemiah feared disobeying God more than he feared losing his life.
John Wesley once said, “Give me 100 [men] who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; they alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the Kingdom of Heaven on earth” (Bible Illustrator).
Nehemiah was that kind of man. He feared nothing but sin and desired nothing but God, and no one was going to force him to disobey God. In fact, Nehemiah smelled a rabbit, I mean a rat, as soon as someone suggested it.
Nehemiah 6:12-14 And I understood and saw that God had not sent him, but he had pronounced the prophecy against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. For this purpose he was hired, that I should be afraid and act in this way and sin, and so they could give me a bad name in order to taunt me. Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to these things that they did, and also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who wanted to make me afraid. (ESV)
You see, fear is often what leads people into sin. They’re afraid of losing their popularity, or their power, or some sort of pleasure; so they do what they know is wrong to try and keep these things. Here, Nehemiah doesn’t even let the fear of death lead him into sin, and we, like Nehemiah, must have the same attitude. Don’t let yourself be sidetracked by sin no matter what!
Six or seven years ago (2009), a rash of flying accidents for single-engine planes occurred across North America. So a comprehensive study was conducted of the 44 most recent fatal accidents involving these small planes. Here’s what they discovered.
First, all but one of the accidents listed pilot-related causes.
Second, and most surprisingly, experienced pilots were responsible for a majority of the accidents. A few of the accidents were caused by pilots with less than 150 hours of flight time, but over 75 percent of the accidents were caused by pilots with over 400 hours of flight time. Apparently, those pilots assumed that because they already had a lot of hours under their belts they could cut corners and get sloppy.
By contrast, beginning pilots with fewer hours were extremely careful, even painstaking in their preflight routines, meticulously inspecting every rivet of the airplane. They did it by the book. The study concluded that pilots who get overconfident and stop pursuing ongoing safety training are four times more likely to have a fatal accident.
Wayne Cordeiro, in his book Jesus: Pure and Simple, cites this study and comments: “Sometimes we as Christians are 400-flying-hour disciples. Accidents take place because we stop doing it by the Book. We stop studying the Word of God. We compromise on devotions… We slump on allowing the standards of Scripture and the Holy Spirit to inspect every ‘rivet’ in our hearts and lives. We go on day after day cutting corners, wondering why we lose power on the climbs, and we stall. (Adapted from Wayne Cordeiro, Jesus: Pure and Simple, Bethany House, 2012, pp. 121-122; Dave Hirschman, “Surprising Cirrus Stats,” AOPA Pilot blog, 12-10-09; www.PreachingToday.com)
Please, don’t do that to yourself! In your pursuit of God and His plan for your life, don’t cut corners; don’t slump on allowing the standards of Scripture to inspect every area of your life; don’t be sidetracked by sin lest your life end up in a mangled heap. Even if the sin seems logical at the time, it’s lethal to your walk with God and to the work He has called you to do.
Please, don’t be sidetracked in your pursuit of God. 1st, don’t be sidetracked by compromise. 2nd, don’t be sidetracked by slander. 3rd, don’t be sidetracked by sin. And finally…
DON’T BE SIDETRACKED BY THE WRONG COMPANY.
Don’t let the wrong friends lead you off on a rabbit trail. Don’t let the wrong associations divert you from what God has called you to do. That was the problem in Nehemiah’s day with some of the people in Jerusalem.
Nehemiah 6:15-16 So the wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty-two days. And when all our enemies heard of it, all the nations around us were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that this work had been accomplished with the help of our God. (ESV)
What a great thing God did! The wall was rebuilt in 52 days, but not without its problems.
Nehemiah 6:17-19 Moreover, in those days the nobles of Judah sent many letters to Tobiah, and Tobiah’s letters came to them. For many in Judah were bound by oath to him, because he was the son-in-law of Shecaniah the son of Arah: and his son Jehohanan had taken the daughter of Meshullam the son of Berechiah as his wife. Also they spoke of his good deeds in my presence and reported my words to him. And Tobiah sent letters to make me afraid. (ESV)
There were some unholy alliances here. The leaders of Judah were in partnership with the enemy. They had sided with Tobiah against Nehemiah, and it undermined the safety of the city.
My dear friends, we need to be very careful about the partnerships we form, because those partnerships can lead us astray. The Bible is very clear: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with and unbeliever?” (2 Corinthians 6:14-15).
Now, this does NOT mean we cannot spend time with unbelievers. Otherwise, how would we encourage them to follow Jesus? No. What the Bible says is don’t form a partnership with an unbeliever. Don’t form a business partnership, a marriage partnership, or any other kind of partnership.
You see, these partnerships can only sidetrack the believer. That’s because the unbelieving partner is pulling in a different direction than the believer. For good or ill, the associations we form have a profound effect on our decisions and ultimately the direction of our lives.
I’m sure you’ve heard if the “home field advantage”, where the home team seems to win more often than the visiting team. Well, in 2011, a Sports Illustrated article concluded: “Home field advantage is no myth. Indisputably, it exists… Across all sports and at all levels, from Japanese baseball to Brazilian soccer to the NFL, the team hosting a game wins more often than not.”
The question is, “Why?” Well you might be surprised at the answer. According to the Sports Illustrated article, it’s not the cheering (or jeering) fans that encouraged better performance. On a number of statistics – such as pitch velocity in baseball or free throw percentage in basketball (which over two decades was 75.9 percent for home and visiting teams) – home field advantage didn't make a difference. Their research also eliminated other likely theories based on the rigors of travel for the visiting team or the home team's familiarity with their field, rink, or court.
So what drives the home field advantage? According to the authors of the article, “Officials' bias is the most significant contribution to home field advantage.” In short, the refs don't like to get booed. So when the game gets close, they call fewer fouls or penalties against the home team; or they call more strikes against visiting batters. Larger and louder fans really do influence the calls from the officials, who naturally (and often unconsciously) respond to the pressure from the crowd. When the fans get angry, the refs make the calls that will lessen the pain of crowd disapproval. In the end, the crowd is a big influence on the calls the officials make. (Tobias Moskowitz & L. John Wertheim, “What's Really Behind Home Field Advantage,” Sports Illustrated, 1-17-11; www.PreachingToday.com)
Those who surround you really do influence you, no matter how you try to make the “right” calls. So be careful about the partnerships you form.
In your pursuit of God and His plan for your life, don’t be sidetracked by compromise; don’t be sidetracked by slander; don’t be sidetracked by sin; and don’t be sidetracked by the wrong company.
Like the old hymn says:
Rise up, O men of God.
Have done with lesser things.
Give heart and soul and mind and strength
To serve the King of kings. (Aaron Williams & William Pierson Merrill)
