One Holy Passion
Nehemiah 4
March 11, 2001
“Defeating Discouragement”
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and to love our enemies,” said G.K. Chesterton, “probably because they are generally the same people!” In the case of the Jews rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, this was certainly true. In the course of this chapter, we come to find out that the people of Jerusalem are surrounded by hostile enemies on all four sides coming at them from all four directions—it is their neighbors who do their dead-level best to discourage them from continuing the work that God has called them to.
As we read this chapter in a moment, one thing that jumps out at us is the fact that, once again, the Bible doesn’t gloss over the reality of the situation. Hey, these were real flesh-and-blood people here who experienced the same range of emotions and physical sensations that we do. They were people who could praise God and get excited about His working in and through them, and the next day could fall into discouragement. They could eagerly volunteer to be a part of a tremendous project, but then when the project got going they’d come home and nurse muscles and joints as sore as ours get when we tackle a building project.
Let’s read the account together, through verse 14 for now:
PRAYER
How we deal with adversity says more about our character than most anything else. You want to know what a person is really like? Watch them when things go wrong; when they are imposed upon; when they are made to wait; when someone cuts them off in traffic; when they are tired and achy. Some people whine while other people shine. Some people learn from their situation, while others burn with resentment. We can learn a whole lot from Nehemiah about how to deal with discouragement in the work of God.
Sources of Discouragement:
1. Ridicule :1-3
Sanballat is ticked off. He, remember, is a governor of a nearby territory who no doubt feared the potential of a strong Jerusalem emerging as a threat to his territory. Now it is obvious that these Jews are serious about the project, and Sanballat is steamed about it. And so he resorts to the tool of a loser: ridicule! Thomas Carlyle said, “Ridicule is the language of the devil”; indeed, the Bible indicates that Satan is a liar and an accuser of the brethren. It is his business to deceive and discourage, and make no mistake about it: while Sanballat and Tobiah might have been the mouthpieces, Satan was the one who was behind this whole deal! And sometimes ridicule works! Let me read to you briefly from an article that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on January 7 of this year. It is written by a fellow who will remain nameless but who is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas; he had previously spent twenty years in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Science Center. What has him all worked up is the proposal to change science teaching standards in Pennsylvania public schools to allow for the possibility that naturalistic, Darwinian explanations cannot account for the creation of life on earth.
Now, before I quote from the article, what would you expect from a scientist? Wouldn’t you expect some reasoning which would defend his position? Wouldn’t you think that a learned man such as this would take at least a portion of the article to reinforce his belief? You’d be disappointed, I’m afraid. His lengthy essay amounts to little more than ridicule and name-calling—which, if you think about it, ought to be encouraging to those of us who believe that “in the beginning, God created!” He warns us of “mockery raining down from the four corners of the Earth”. We will be seen as “dense, dumb, and dim-witted” if we change the standards—obviously because we who doubt macro-evolution are just that! He equates a belief in creation with what he calls “The Stork Theory of Sex”. And what some in Pennsylvania want to promote is the “mental hijacking of an entire state’s schoolchildren by sectarian zealots.” I guess when one fears losing the argument, one attacks the opponent!
Ridicule can be effective, though. Some people who will stand bravely when shot at will cower meekly when laughed at, and that is what we see these enemies of God doing, all within earshot of the workers on the wall:
A. Belittled their Qualities
“”What are those feeble Jews doing?”
Sanballat, who was a thoroughly worldly man, had no concept of work which would be done with the glory of God being the primary motive. He pontificates to his buds, no doubt, that these Jews are attempting something foolish with the aim in mind of power or profit—for power, profit, and pleasure are the motivations of worldly people; they can hardly understand any other motive.
B. Derided their Ambitions
“Will they restore their wall?”
C. Mocked their Optimism
“Will they offer sacrifices?”
What he is saying here, most likely, is a taunt that goes something like this: “do they think that they can pray that wall up? Do they believe that their devotion to their God will make the wall magically rise from the rubble?”
D. Lampooned their Enthusiasm
“Will they finish in a day?”
“Do they have any idea what they are attempting? Don’t they know that they’ve bit off a whole lot more than they can chew? What unrealistic folly to imagine that they can dig through the rubble and find stones strong enough for the task, and then that they can actually construct a sturdy wall from this mess!”
E. Undermined their Confidence
“Can they bring stones back to life?”
And the implication is “No, they don’t have a chance!”
Then in verse 3, this little monkey Tobiah makes a funny, suggesting that even the light footsteps of a fox would be sufficient to knock the wall down. I’m sure his cohorts yukked it up really loudly, but my advice to Tobiah would be that if he thought he could make a go of it in standup comedy, he’d better not quit his day job just yet!
Let’s notice another source of discouragement:
2. Force (Threatened) :7-8
These knuckleheads determine to go beyond ridicule; they make a show of force. We’re not sure if this was real or just a bluff; we don’t know if they were actually making plans of attack or if they were just sabre-rattling. We do know that from every direction the people in Jerusalem could look and see enemies.
3. Burnout :10-12
For all of the excitement of chapter 2, and for all of the unified commitment to hard work we see in chapter 3, we are really seeing the reality of the situation in chapter 4. One of the things that is true in any work we undertake for God is that we are naïve if we expect everything to be just hunky-dory all the time. Ministry is hard work sometimes, and there is plenty of frustration sometimes. God’s people can easily become burned out when we allow the natural frailties of our human constitution to come to the fore ahead of our daily trusting in God. Notice the things we see happening in verses 10-12:
A. Fatigue
“The strength of the burden-bearers is failing.” Again, this is reality. Romans 15:4-5 is instructive to us here! If this project were presented as having been accomplished without any snags or problems, we might be tempted to dismiss it as unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky irrelevance, for we know that there are problems attendant with any project. But the Scripture is written for us real people to be able to draw from and learn to live obediently to God in real-life situations, and so it says, “these folks were dog-tired!”
B. Frustration
“This job is just more than we are able to do. Who are we fooling?” I wonder if the things they’d heard Sanballat saying were beginning to register, to have the dastardly effect intended by Satan and his lackey Sanballat. At the halfway stage, there was a sinking of heart. A lot of folks were seeing the glass as half-empty! It is easy for us to get focused on the negative. It is easy for us to believe the naysayers. It is easy for us to look at our weakness rather than God’s strength! It has been said that in the history of the church, pessimism has been a greater obstacle to the work of God than atheism! Would Nehemiah’s rubble-rousers succumb to the temptation of negativity?
The Bible describes David as a “man after God’s own heart.” One of my great theologian friends here at FCC and I got on this subject this past week for a little bit. David was a guy who got into a good bit of trouble with God; he certainly committed some whoppers of sins. And yet the Bible describes him in these glowing terms. Why? There are more reasons than we can take time to enumerate here, I’m afraid, but I’ll list just one of them: I believe he was a man who pretty consistently saw God’s strength as being more important than his weakness. It’s obvious that this was the case when he took on that monster Goliath! Throughout his life he understood God’s awesome ability.
Now the people of Jerusalem were tired and frustrated. What would happen? Would they give up and go home and say, “well, we gave it a shot—but the job was beyond us. We just couldn’t do it!” “On the plains of hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions who, on the verge of victory, sat down, and in sitting down, died.”
C. Fear
Not only are they bone-weary and beginning to doubt their abilities, but what’s more, they’re getting really shook. “The sky is falling; the sky is falling!” Well, maybe not, but according to verses 11-12, the people from Judah surrounding Jerusalem came up to the people again and again with words of concern and fear. Not only could the workers see people dressed in military gear with hostile intent, but it seems that some of their families were coming to Jerusalem and saying, “they’re going to attack us and you. You’d better get home to protect yourselves and your families!”
Fear is paralyzing, and fear is contagious! And there was enough of it to go around, threatening the continuance of the wall-building efforts. What a burnout cocktail we have: fatigue, frustration, and fear are enough combined to do many a project in!
Responses to Discouragement:
Nehemiah is facing the greatest test of his leadership; if he fails to act decisively, wisely, and effectively, he might retain the title of governor, but his leadership of the people will be over; the wall will not be rebuilt; and the glory of God will still suffer. But what he does is little short of leadership genius!
1. Prayer :4-5, 9a
Disaster looms if nothing is done, but Nehemiah, as we might expect by now, begins his response on his knees! He calls upon God for vengeance! There is a brutal honesty in this prayer, so much so that we might be taken aback by it. We generally, in the light of the cross and our understanding of God’s desire that all people come to him, do not pray in this way—and I’m not so sure that we are wrong. At the same time, I am not so certain that Nehemiah was wrong to pray in this way; for one thing, he saw these people as opposing the work of God. This was not merely opposition to the plans for rebuilding; these people were opposing God, and this brought to the surface in Nehemiah an indignation based upon his zealousness for the glory of God! C.S. Lewis noted that, in some circumstances,
“The absence of anger is a most alarming symptom and the presence of indignation may be a good one. For if we look at their railings we find they are usually angry not simply because these things have been done to them but because these things are manifestly wrong, are hateful to God as well as to the victim.”
Speaking of the things that Americans have turned a blind eye to in the last decade, Bill Bennett title his book The Death of Outrage. Franky Schaeffer wrote a few years back a book he called A Time for Anger. Nehemiah goes to God with his outrage, though; these people are attempting to discourage God’s people in God’s work and Nehemiah recognizes that before anything else, this is God’s problem! For some reason, I have been quoting lately a whole lot of those old choruses that were cool when I was a kid. Another one was “I’ve Been Redeemed”, and one line of it said, “You can talk about me just as much as you please; I’ll talk about you when I’m on my knees!” That’s good advice, and it is just what Nehemiah did.
He prays again prior to taking action in verse 9; it is clear that Nehemiah understands the important balance between prayer and planning. Notice two things about this: one, Nehemiah recognizes that he must do what he can do but allow God to work where only God can work. Two, notice that throughout the book, there is a consistent order: “we prayed, and then we…”
2. Perseverance :6, 15
Notice this important verse: “the people had a mind to work.” Sure, their minds were assaulted by the relentless ridicule; their bodies were physically dealing with the effects of exhaustion. Fear played tricks with their minds, and they struggled with the enormity of the task. But they had a mind to work! What do you have a mind to do? There are folks who seem to have a mind to criticize, condemn, complain; I had a friend tell me one time that a woman sat in his office (a member of his church) and tell him that she had the spiritual gift of criticism! She might have had a gift for it, but it wasn’t a spiritual gift! Derek Kidner, speaking of the contrast between the critics, Sanballat, Tobiah, and their cronies, and the workers, said, that the critics “appear small and shrill, dwarfed by the faith, unity, and energy of the workers!”
Verse 6 says, “the people had a mind to work”. Verse 15 says, “all of us returned to the wall.” Verse 21 says, “we carried on the work.” In fact, we see in verse 21 a redoubling of their efforts: “’til the stars came out.” Quitting time would normally be sunset, but they worked later than that; theirs was a desire to get the job done! There was an urgency to the work. A great old gospel song in our hymnals is “Work for the Night is Coming”, and it calls us to an urgency in the work of the Lord. We have all eternity to rest, you know! The trite but true old saying goes like this: “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last!”
Did they face discouragement? Yes. But they found in a dogged persistence a significant part of the answer. This theme continues throughout the book—the people stuck with it. Years ago I read what Calvin Coolidge once wrote, and I saw it again recently. He said,
“Press on. Nothing can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are the overwhelming power!”
3. Planning :13, 16-20
Nehemiah took the concerns and fears of the people into account; he didn’t bash them or merely say “suck it up, men; don’t be such wimps!” Nehemiah carefully planned the deployment of the people. This included positioning a show of force at the most vulnerable points of the wall; a system of rallying the people together in the case of an attack; an organization of the people into a force that would be ready. Nehemiah engendered confidence because he was a guy who was concerned with careful planning and organization. He took the time to do things well and in an organized fashion, and I believe that that pleases God.
4. Positive Reinforcement :14
Nehemiah says two things here, and they are both important:
1. “Remember the Lord”. Different movements have been sustained by the rallying cry of “Remember!” In the Spanish-American War, it was “Remember the Maine!” In WWI, it was “Remember the Lusitania!” In Texas, it was “Remember the Alamo!” In WWII, the Pacific theater, it was “Remember Pearl Harbor!” But all of those were defeats remembered; here, it is “Remember the Lord!”, who is the Giver of victory. Would the workers ever forget God? Would we? In the immediacy of a difficult situation, yes, we might! Paul urges Timothy, in II Timothy 2, “Remember Jesus Christ.” Nehemiah continually remembered God, and he called his workers to do the same; God is the One who is able to give us victory. And we can get caught up in situations in life and in ministry, and even though we name the name of Jesus Christ and are God’s people, this is a word to us: “Remember the Lord!”
2. “Fight” is Nehemiah’s second word to the people. And he says, “fight for your loved ones”, if the need arises. If it comes to it, have the guts to fight. Folks, there are elements of battle which we are involved in today in our culture, and we as believers need to guard against a cultural surrender. I say we need to guard against it; I’m afraid that we have given an awful lot of ground already.
Some of you are aware that I have taken on an added job: I’m writing now for the Tri-County News, the weekly paper that you get tossed on your porch whether you want it or not! My most recent article deals with a placemat, of all things, I found when I went to a local burger joint to eat lunch. It spoke of the “Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards”, and the kids were invited to use the placemat as a ballot from which to vote. I was literally appalled at the choices these kids were being asked to vote for! Three of the four movies they were being asked to select from were rated PG-13, and remember this rating comes from those paragons of virtue, the Motion Picture Assoc. of America. They said that these kids shouldn’t watch this movie until they are at least thirteen, and yet Nick and BK think we ought to lift these up as award-winning choices for little kids! Drew Carey was a choice for “favorite male TV actor”; can anyone name a show Mr. Carey is on that is remotely fitting for a little kid to watch? It gets worse, but time forbids me talking about it more here (read the paper!); suffice it to say that there are forces in this society that we need to fight against. They might not be as tangible as enemy soldiers, but the need to be willing to fight in defense of God’s glory is every bit as real today.
5. Preparedness :9b, 21-23
The workers were armed with building tools and weaponry at the same time. Spurgeon named his magazine The Sword and the Trowel, taking the title from Nehemiah 4 and saying that it would be a record of “combat with sin and labor for the Lord.” These people were serious about being prepared; they didn’t take off their clothes, Nehemiah said. Perhaps the thinking was to repel the invaders with the smell alone! Hey, you’re in a battle, you use whatever is at your disposal, including body odor, I guess! As individuals and as a company, the builders and their servants were prepared for warfare and work.
I could pull over and park here for a long time, but I won’t, and yet let me say that there is a place for the balancing of these two concerns in the building of God’s church. We need to play offense—build—and at the same time we are called by God to play defense as well. Paul calls on us to take on the “whole armor of God”, and most of it is defensive in nature; in fact, the only clearly offensive weapon that makes up our armor is the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God! Jesus calls us the “salt of the earth”, and we must remember that in antiquity one of the most important functions of salt was to act as a preservative. We have a role to play in society in the restraint of evil, and my, are we needed in this wicked culture to play that role perhaps more than ever before!
Next week we rejoice together in God’s goodness to us over the course of the last ten years. Have there been seasons of discouragement? Sure. Will there be these seasons ahead? I’m absolutely certain of it. There will be critical points where the temptation will be to listen to the naysayers, fear the worst, give in to fatigue, think that the work can never be completed. But don’t quit.
Two frogs fell into a deep cream bowl,
One was an optimistic soul;
But the other took the gloomy view,
“We shall drown”, he cried, without more ado.
So with a last despairing cry,
He flung up his legs and said, “Good bye!”
Quoth the other frog with a merry grin,
“I can’t get out, but I won’t give in!
I’ll just swim round ‘til my strength is spent,
Then I will die the more content.”
Bravely he swam ‘til it would seem
His struggles began to churn the cream.
On the top of the butter at last he stopped,
And out of the bowl he gaily hopped.
What of the moral? ‘Tis easily found:
“If you can’t hop out, keep swimming round!”
