We are continuing with our series called The Story. God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. This Sunday will actually be our last week we will be looking at the Old Testament. Next week we will be opening up the stories told in the New Testament. Specifically, we will be looking at the story of Jesus, his miracles, and his ministry. But what we want to do today is finish off the story that I began last week. The story of the Jewish people returning back home from exile in Babylon back to their beautiful city of Jerusalem. You may recall last week we talked about some prophets by the name of Haggai and Ezra. Today, we are going to look at the prophet known as Nehemiah. Nehemiah is somewhere about the middle of your Bible. A little bit of background on Nehemiah. He was someone who worked for the king during the time of Babylonian captivity. About 606 B.C. the Jewish people, because of the sin, were taken over by King Nebechudnezzar. He came into Jerusalem, destroyed the city, and destroyed their temple. As kings often did at that time, the kings would drag away the people and bring them into their foreign land. The goal would be that they would assimilate them totally into their culture to take away their identity. In this case their identity as a Jewish people. I was trying to think of a modern analogy you might be able to relate to. The only thing I could think of was a football analogy. It would be something like you had a bunch of Pittsburgh Steelers fans who are tired of those Browns fans. So they decided to get a busload of Steelers fans and go to Cleveland and go to the Browns stadium and destroy the stadium and take all the people back to Pittsburgh and force them to wear Steelers jerseys and root for the Steelers.
As the story goes, the people were in captivity in Babylon. God raised up this king named Cyrus who had a good heart and decided he was going to let the people go. He was going to let the people return back to Jerusalem. Not only was he going to let them return back to Jerusalem. He was going to give them the supplies they would need to go back and rebuild their city and the temple. The temple was very important for them because the temple was their worship center. More importantly, it was the place that they believed actually contained the very presence of God. They went back and began to rebuild. First they rebuilt the altars then they rebuilt the temple. Although they had some false starts and stops, after 20 years they ended up rebuilding their temple and thus establishing their relationship back with God. That was really what the temple was. It was symbolic that they had reestablished their relationship back God.
As we come to this point in the story, we see there was a problem. There was a very, very big problem. Although they had built this temple, they had failed to rebuild the walls surrounding the city and the temple. That is where we pick up in the story of Nehemiah. Nehemiah did not come back with the initial wave of Jews that returned from Babylonian exile back to Jerusalem. It was only about 50,000 of them. There was a good contingency that stayed back in Babylon just to see how things would go. One of these people was Nehemiah. Nehemiah was called a cupbearer to the king. In this case, it was King Artaxerxes. The cupbearer was the guy who tasted the wine before he gave it to the king to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. It wasn’t really that bad of a job unless you had people trying to kill the king and then it wasn’t the best thing. So he was a Jew and a cupbearer that worked for King Artaxerxes. As the story goes, a contingency of Jews returned back from Jerusalem and basically Nehemiah wants to know how things are going. What is going on? In Nehemiah’s very own words, he says in Nehemiah 1:3 : “They said to me, ‘Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burned with fire.’” This is 90 years after the first wave of people came back to Jerusalem and 70 years after the rebuilding of the temple, and the walls were still down, which meant trouble. Trouble in the sense that they had lost their protection and were vulnerable to the attacks of their enemies and even disgrace, the mocking of their enemy. They are living in disgrace which basically means outside of God’s grace. Outside of grace. They had built this beautiful worship center, but they failed to establish their ruler-ship over the city. Nehemiah being a man of God and a great Jewish man, this really upsets him. So much so that when he heard these things he sat down and wept. He says Nehemiah 1:4 “I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.” That is what he did. I will be honest with you. When I think about a major problem that we might have in the church or a construction project or whatever, my first response is not to cry and fast and pray. Nehemiah knew the situation. He knew there was a lot of risk to the situation. He knew there would be people that wouldn’t want these walls to be rebuilt. He knew that it would require a lot of great resources to get this job completed, these massive walls and gates. He also didn’t know whether or not his boss, King Artaxerxes would allow him to have the time off to go and complete the project. What we see is not only did Artaxerxes give him the time off, he gave him the authority to pass through the various provinces throughout the land that he would need. He gave him a permission slip to give to the various governors of the land so that he can pass through freely. Back then, it was a time when you didn’t just cross borders freely. As Ramsey mentioned a few weeks ago, there were these guys called satraps. They would be the ones that were responsible for securing the boundaries of the king. To cross over borders, you would have to make sure you had all your permission and passports and documents and whatever you needed to pass on through. Nehemiah got from the king letters or authority that basically told the people he is operating under the authority of the king so let him go. Not only did he give him permission to pass through the various borders but he actually gave him authority to go into the king’s very forest and get all the timber that he would need to rebuild these massive gates. He goes on to say in Nehemiah 2:8 “Because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my request.”
As the story goes, he enters into Jerusalem and he waits for about three days. Then he goes out at night and begins to survey the situation to see how bad the situation was. The passage goes on to say in Nehemiah 2:13-14 “By night I went through the Valley Gate toward the Jackal Well and then the Dung Gate, examining the walls of Jerusalem, which had been broken down, and its gates, which had been destroyed by fire. Then I moved on toward the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, but there was not enough room for my mount to get through; so I went up the valley by night, examining the wall.” It is a picture of what he is doing. He is going through and taking a survey of the various walls and seeing how bad things were. He could tell they were pretty bad. He couldn’t even get around at some particular points. As a side note, when they refer to different types of gates, the gates were given a name to represent the various things that would happen there. The Sheep Gate would be the gate that the animals would be brought through for sacrifice. The Fountain Gate would be the gate you would go through to get the fresh water from the spring. The Dung Gate would be the place where you would bring the trash through. He surveys it out and sees the situation is pretty bad. So he decides to call all the people together and tell them how bad things have gotten. He says in Nehemiah 2:17 “‘You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.’ I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me. They replied, ‘Let us start rebuilding.’ So they began the good work.” If you notice here, Nehemiah is using words like we and us and let us do this thing. Let us rebuild. What he is doing is saying this is all of our problem. This is not just your problem. This is our problem. The gates are broken down. The walls are broken down. We are defenseless against our enemies. It is not just your problem. It is our problem too. We have to do something about it. So the people got excited and they said let’s begin. Let’s start to rebuild.
But as we saw last week when they started to rebuild the temple, likewise when they started to rebuild the walls, they were faced with all sorts of opposition. The main opponent that Nehemiah encountered was this guy named Sanballat. He was some sort of a leader in the northern province of Sumeria and he really did not want those walls to be rebuilt because if the walls are rebuilt that means they can defend themselves. It also means that they might be able to gain power and even begin to prevent the Sumerians from coming through that area, which was a very important trade route. So he brings down his armies and begins to mock them. He begins to verbally assault them. He says in Nehemiah 4:2 “What are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble – burned as they are?” He is mocking them. He is mocking them in various ways. Will they begin to worship? In other words, when they get these walls up, will they continue to worship or now that they have the walls up maybe they won’t find the need to go into the temple anymore. Will they finish in a day? Of course they won’t finish in a day. Will they take these broken stones that are around and bring them back to life? Will they actually use these broken, shattered stones and use them to rebuild the situation? Rather than freak out, Nehemiah does what he does. He basically gets down on his knees and begins to pray again. He says in Nehemiah 4:4-4 “Hear us, our God, for we are despised. Turn their insults back on their own heads. Give them over as plunder in land of captivity. Do not cover up their guilt or blot out their sins from your site for they have thrown insults in the face of the builders.” Nehemiah knows these guys are just harassing them so he brings it back to God. He says put it back on them. I don’t have time to deal with this stuff. We don’t need this harassment. He puts it back to God and says deal with them. Shut their mouths. Do whatever you can so we can keep on moving. That is what they do. They temporality shut the mouths of the oppressors. They keep on building, but the oppressors keep coming and coming. They begin to get not only attacked verbally but physically. So much so that at one point, Nehemiah had to assign half the people to guard the walls while the other half of the people continued to build the walls. It went on and on and on. Finally, the walls were complete. We see in Nehemiah 6 :15 where it says “So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth day of Elul, in fifty-two days. When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God.” In fifty-two days. This is a massive wall but it was done in fifty-two days and the people knew that the hand of God was on those people. That is pretty much the story of Nehemiah and the broken walls and gates.
As I think about us today, is there an application? One thing that came to me really what I think is Nehemiah is really a picture of the Christian life. Not the ideal Christian life. I believe that it is a picture of a Christian who is not living the life that God desires for them because they are not utilizing their own Nehemiah to rebuild their own broken walls. Let me unpack that a little bit. If you are a Christian, and a Christian I define by somebody who would be considered a born-again believer. You have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord. Then you have received the spirit of God. In some sense, you become the temple of the Holy Spirit. But we know that just because we accepted Christ and received the Holy Spirit, we still have broken walls around us. We still have wounds from our past. In other words, we still have holes in our soul that continue influence us. So much so that we are a walking temple of the Holy Spirit yet at the same time our walls are broken down, which means that we are vulnerable to mockery, personal attacks, and repeated sin. Consequently, what happens is we are not whole. In fact, we are damaged physically in many ways, emotionally, and spiritually. We end up living a life that really is just a mere shadow of the life that God actually intends for us to live. If Nehemiah was alive today, I suspect that when he looks out among the Christians not only here but the Christians in the world, he might not have a positive assessment. In fact, he might say something like you see the trouble we are in. Many of the Christians who are filled with the Holy Spirit are living in disgrace because the walls of their souls have broken down and consequently they are exposed to mockery, personal attacks, and repeated sin.
As a side note, disgrace again means without grace. It means you have the grace of God but you are outside of that grace for some reason. So you are experiencing trouble. The trouble comes because you are not experiencing the grace that has come through you by the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. You are limiting your resources. As Debbie mentioned, today is Pentecost Sunday. It is seven weeks or about fifty days from Easter, so we celebrate Pentecost Sunday. We don’t celebrate it here so much but a lot of the denominations do. They make a big deal out of it. It is fifty days after Easter. What that means, as Debbie explained, it is the birthday of the church. It is opening day of the church. Read the first chapter of Acts. You see Jesus had been walking around for a number of days and getting ready to ascend up into heaven. He has all these disciples around him. He says I need you disciples to go up in the upper room and wait. After I ascend into heaven I want you to wait because I am going to send the Holy Spirit down in fire. That is what he does. He ascends into heaven and the Holy Spirit comes down and fire sits on the tops of their heads and they become filled with the Holy Spirit and go out and begin to build the church of which we are part of today 2,000 years later. It all started in an upper room because the people got filled with the Holy Spirit. If you are a born-again believer, someone who has made Christ Lord of your life, accepted that gift of the sacrifice on the cross, the forgiveness of sins that comes through that sacrifice, you get the Holy Spirit with you to be able to begin the work to rebuild your life. In some sense, you get your own personal Nehemiah. I don’t think that is too much of a stretch. What I found out is that Nehemiah actually means ‘God comforts’. If you know your basic Christianity, you know the Holy Spirit is referred to as the comforter. We have been given the Holy Spirit to begin the work in our broken lives. Just like Nehemiah had the authority of the king to work and rebuild the walls, the Holy Spirit has the authority of the king to begin to do the work in your life. To build those broken walls and burned out gates. In order to do that, we have to make ourselves available to the Holy Spirit. We have to allow the Spirit of God, like Nehemiah, to survey the terrain of our lives. To open ourselves up and expose ourselves to those areas of weakness. About six years ago, I did a series on Nehemiah. I actually thought about repeating the series. It was about 13 weeks. I went through the whole book of Nehemiah. At some point in that series, I did a survey just to find out what are some of the issues that people in the congregation are dealing with. At that time, about 60 people responded to it. These are just some of the things that people were dealing with. Alcoholism 23%. Illegal drugs 14%. Financial problems 54%. Poor self-esteem 54%. Eating disorders 36%. Anger 40%. I don’t think I need to take another survey. I would suspect that if I did the results wouldn’t change that much. What a lot of people here need to do is allow the spirit of God to take a survey of their life to figure out what are the issues that you are dealing with that, for whatever reason, you choose to not acknowledge that are pretty much messing up your Christian walk. Some of those things I gave you, those aren’t really so much wounds on your wall. Those are behavioral issues that are symptomatic of deeper wounds. Eating disorders and alcoholism and all that kind of stuff. Those are symptomatic of broken walls. Those are symptomatic of things that you have not dealt with from your past. Things like fear, insecurity, maybe abuse from your past, maybe pride issues. All this stuff. Those are breaches in the wall. When you have breaches in the wall, you are susceptible to making bad choices in life. You have the responsibility to allow the spirit of God, your personal Nehemiah, to come in and do a survey of your life and then begin to partner with him as he does the work to restore those broken walls. In some cases, he is going to say you need to find another believe that is going to help hold you accountable to make sure this stuff gets done. This is not rocket science. It is not as mysterious as you might think.
A simple example. Let’s say you are someone who has a tendency to think negative thoughts about others or say negative things or gossip or whatever that might be. You know it. You are tired of it. People have called you on it. In your quiet time God makes it clear you are a negative person and you want to fix it. You spend time in your quiet time with God wherever you do it and however you do it, meditating, worshiping, praying, opening the Bible, and he reveals to you that you have this issue of negativity. You say God I want you to deal with this. I want you to help me. I am tired of it. He might say negativity is not your problem. The problem is you still are looking for value from your parents that you never received as a little child. You feel undervalued is your problem. You feel insignificant. What happens is because you feel insignificant and you want to feel significant and somebody else is looking more valued, your approach is to knock them down so it will elevate you up. He might reveal something like that and that is not fun to know that. Then he also might say I am so determined to fix you that I want you to go out and talk to somebody that might be willing to hold you accountable to make sure that you follow through on exactly the things I am telling you to do. What will happen is over time that little breach in the wall will begin to be sealed up. You will begin to feel free from that negative behavior or that insecurity that you carry. The interesting thing is just like Nehemiah, God will take the broken pieces of your past, the broken stones, the pains of your past, and particularly the lessons you learned through those pains and use those to help build your future. That is what God does and that is an amazing thing. That is a cool thing.
I don’t stand here and say it is easy. If it was easy, we would all be looking out here and seeing a bunch of little Jesus’ sitting there. I don’t see anybody who looks too much like Jesus, including me. It is because it is tough. It requires you to be vulnerable. It requires you to be vulnerable before God and before other people. Not only that, just like Nehemiah, when you begin to try to heal those wounds to actually change, you are going to get opposition all over the place. Starting first with your family and your friends. Maybe they don’t like you to change. They like you just the way you are because when you are down and you maintain low and you don’t change and you continue in the bad habits, they feel right alongside you. But you start to try to change. Try it. Try to be different and that opposition will rise up. Opposition comes from the friends around you. From your family. Some of you believe it comes from the enemy of your soul, Satan himself, which I believe he does. I believe somehow he is out there. He doesn’t want you to change. He doesn’t want you to become more like Christ. Really I think most of the obstacle is right there. The biggest battle you have is in your mind. The habits of your mind. The stinking thinking of your mind. The voices you hear when you try to change. The voices that say you want to become a better Christian. Are you going to become a worshiper? Who are you to worship? Look at your past. Are you going to be able to complete this massive project in a day? Are you going to be able to take the broken stones of your life and use them to rebuild your life? You get discouraged. You quit. But again, as we can tell from the story, we don’t need to quit because we have this Nehemiah that will fight our battles for us. We give the prayers. We give it up to Nehemiah and say, you know what Nehemiah, I want you to shut their mouths. I want you to stop the mockery. I want you to stop the insults. If you choose not to do that, at least stop me from processing it, from being preoccupied with those thoughts like many of you are. Somebody says something negative and you will churn on it for weeks. God will let you stop that. God will teach you how to stop that. As you continue to fight through the obstacles what happens is over time you begin to see that wall coming up around you. You begin to see your soul basically becoming more secure. You begin to see your life becoming more balanced. You begin to feel like a whole, complete Christian. You don’t know when it happened, but you know if you look back five or ten years or so, you are a different person. You are actually beginning to look more like Jesus. That is a cool thing.
In closing, this is serious stuff. It is not just this congregation. You look around and we have all these Christians walking around saying glory to God. I have the spirit of God living in me, but they walk around just moping around, living defeated lives. The first thing that comes up that is an obstacle they basically want to throw in the whole towel. All forgetting that God is using that to build something new in them. They just have the responsibility to partner with the spirit of God and anybody else that he brings into their path and to begin to respond in obedience to whatever he tells you to do. If you do that long enough, what you will see is that you are becoming a different sort of you. You are becoming the real you. The true you. Not the false you that has been created by your family or by the world or by culture, but the real you that God intended for you to be since before you were even born. And to live not only in this life but for the life to come. Just a reminder that this may seem hard, but God is the one who does the majority of the work if we just avail ourselves to him. I will close with a passage that I use for the benediction quite often. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and I use The Message version of that because I think it says it so well. This would be my prayer. “May God himself, the God who makes everything holy and whole, make you holy and whole, put you together – spirit, soul, and body – and keep you fit for the coming of our master Jesus Christ. The One who called you is completely dependable. If he said it, he’ll do it!” Let us pray.
