One Holy Passion
Nehemiah 6:1-14
April 1, 2001
“In Danger of Distraction”
If you have email, you will appreciate the following message I got from an old friend recently. It read
Let it be known:
1. Big companies don’t do business via chain letters and there are no computer programs that track how many times an email is forwarded, let alone by whom. Bill Gates is not giving you $1000, and Disney is not giving you a free vacation.
2. Proctor and Gamble is not part of a satanic cult or scheme, and its logo is not satanic.
3. The Gap is not giving away free clothes. You can relax; there is no need to pass it on “just in case it’s true”.
4. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to his cousin. The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for actual victims of organ thieves to come forward and tell their stories. None have. Not even your friend’s cousin.
5. Neiman Marcus doesn’t really sell a $200 cookie recipe. And even if they do, we all have it. And even if you don’t, you can easily get a copy via the internet.
6. Craig Shergold (or Sherwood, or Sherman) in England is not dying of cancer or anything else at this time, and he would like everyone to stop sending him their business cards. He apparently is no longer a “little boy” either.
7. If you are one of those people who forwards anything that “promises” that something bad will happen if you “don’t”, then something bad will happen to you if I ever meet you in a dark alley.
8. There is no bill before Congress that will allow long distance companies to charge you for using the internet.
9. Last, just because someone said in a message, four generations back, that “we checked it out and it’s legit”, does not actually make it true!
And it ends with this warning: “copy, paste, and send this to everyone you know or the program I just put on your hard drive while you read this email will open up your CD-ROM and reach out and slap you upside the head!
Wow, can people be quick to believe rumors! To our shame, the Christian community has been duped for the better part of 30 years by a rumor that made the rounds over and over and over again that suggested that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was pushing legislation before Congress to have all Christian programming taken off the air—I have even seen that passed around since she has been dead! And many of us gulped it up and believed it and got all worked up and called our congressmen—without stopping to check to see if it was true, which it isn’t!
Nehemiah still doesn’t get any rest from his tormentors in Chapter 6. The wall is complete now; all that remains is to set the gates and the work will be done. Desperation is setting in now, and his nemeses Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem are back at work again, using, among other things, rumor as a way to try to bring down Nehemiah. By now, though, we know what the outcome will be! And yet there are some very instructive things we find here regarding how we as a church need to deal with the very real threat of becoming distracted from doing what God has called us to do.
I. Distracting Dangers Nehemiah Faced:
Let’s look at these from God’s Word:
A. A Plot to Kidnap/Murder - :1-4
The enemies were now desperate. And yet they still held out hope that the project could be stopped, or at least that Nehemiah’s leadership could be rendered ineffective. Hanging the doors, the work which yet remained, was a difficult task in its own right. These doors would have to be custom-made; heavy scaffolding would have to be put into place. The work wasn’t finished yet; there might still be time to ruin it, at least in part.
And so they make what Boice suggests looks like a political concession speech: “Nehemiah, it’s no use pretending that we haven’t been opposed to your project—we have. But you have succeeded in spite of us, and now there is no use to carry on our opposition. For better or for worse, we’ll have to live together. Let’s meet for a summit conference to figure out how.” Might have sounded reasonable—but Nehemiah saw through it all. He understood what their intent was: “to harm me!” He knew that the Ono plain, a full day’s travel from Jerusalem, was on the edge of Samaria and Ashdod (and remember, we said a few weeks back that Jerusalem was literally surrounded by enemies). Violence could easily be arranged against him, and could even be blamed on an accident having befallen him.
B. A Plot to Malign - :5-9
Let’s read verses 5-9, where we see a plot to assassinate his character. After four letters have been sent, and after Nehemiah has rebuffed them all, a fifth letter is sent—but this one is an open letter. The situation here was such that anyone and everyone would be able to have access to the words being said—and the accusations being leveled—against Nehemiah. Here in these verses we have rumor defined: notice the words “and Gashmu says” (that’s our old buddy “Geshem”, by the way). This is something like our email “we checked it out and we swear it is legit!” An important and supposedly credible source is enlisted in support of the allegation.
People tend, don’t they, to believe the worst! I think that this might be especially true about people in leadership, such as Nehemiah. Leaders are blamed for things they didn’t do, and then criticized for things they do! We see in our society today the reality that people are misquoted, misunderstood, and are rarely given the opportunity to set the record straight. People use all types of means to do this. Sometimes it even happens from well-meaning people! I got an anonymous letter awhile back—please, never send anonymous letter, no matter what your motives or intent. The person who sent this had, I believe, good intentions, trying to alert me to a person whom I had offended by not doing something this person had asked me to do. One problem: I had done that which I was accused of not doing; I had actually gone out of my way and made a special effort to do so! I called the person who had supposedly been offended and she claimed she had no idea why someone had written this to me. But the problem was that I couldn’t go back to the person who wrote the letter and clear it up, because the letter—and the false accusation—were anonymous!
Now, the first thing we’d think of in regard to the upshot of this rumor-mongering is that the workers might begin to doubt Nehemiah’s leadership intentions. In Nehemiah’s case, this rumor could have had even more disastrous consequences than we might at first realize, because these false accusations might well find their way back to Artaxerxes, the pagan king who had commissioned Nehemiah to rebuild. If he believed them, Nehemiah could be summoned back to Persia where his head might be severed from his body! This rumor-mongering was serious stuff—as it always is!
C. A Plot to Discredit - :10-14
Shemaiah is ostensibly a prophet of God but one who had been paid off by Nehemiah’s enemies to do their dastardly work. It is difficult to understand this distracting danger without understanding the Old Testament law. In Numbers 18:7, we read that the area of the temple to which Shemaiah was proposing to take Nehemiah was strictly off-limits to all but priests. What he is suggesting is that they misuse God’s house, or at least, with the doors closed and no witnesses, that Shemaiah can make the charge before the people that Nehemiah had gone onto forbidden territory. If the people of Jerusalem are made to believe that this Nehemiah, a foreigner, remember, even though he is a Jew, is a callous enough individual as to blaspheme God, then again, his leadership will be quenched.
If Nehemiah’s enemies couldn’t stop the work up to this point, they would try to distract Nehemiah and the people through a series of devious maneuvers. Can I diverge from the text here for a few minutes to point up some distracting dangers that churches face—and that we had better be ready, by the grace of God, to combat as a church as we move into the next chapter of the story God is writing here at FCC?
II. Distracting Dangers Churches Face:
I have done you the favor of arranging these dangers in the form of an acrostic spelling the word “dangers”. Bear with me…I have seen, either firsthand in churches I’ve been involved in, or secondhand in churches around us, these different issues become the tools of Satan to distract churches from doing what God has called them to do.
Do not risk Disease
“But we’ve never done it that way before!”
Those famous last words of a dying church! Churches get distracted from doing what God wants them to do when they baptize the methodologies of the past and fear changing anything. In my previous church, I caught grief from one old codger because I dared to move the offering to the end of the service! Folks, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (and this won’t be the last time): the message never changes, but the methods must! JC Penney has never, to my knowledge, varied from the purpose that the old man set decades ago, but they don’t do business today in the same way they did back then. Today, for instance, it has been said that there are two kinds of businesses: those with an effective web site, and those that go out of business! In Psalms, God says, “Sing me a new song!”, and I take from that, among other things, that each generation of His people needs to find out how to effectively bring Him glory in fresh ways that fit that generation. Remember the men of Issachar, described in the OT as men who “knew the times, and understood what Israel should do.” Times change, so must methods; we cannot be distracted by fear of the unknown.
Accept us, world! Ailment
The desire to be seen as in step with worldly wisdom.
I’m referring here to what happens to churches and denominations when they decide that the Bible and its teachings aren’t as important to them as the approval of society. I spoke with a new friend this week, who told me a story that some of you can tell. He was inquiring about our church, about what we believe and practice, because his denomination, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., (and I have some good friends, good people, in that particular denomination) had just recently decided not to bar its clergy from performing so-called “same sex unions”. You hear liberals raising a ruckus over this issue; some march in the streets. Can I suggest that what they are doing—in addition to being a stench in the nostrils of Almighty God—is nothing more than standing boldly for the right to cower meekly before the spirit of the times! And I’m not railing at all here against homosexuals—by the grace of God, change through Jesus is possible, just like it is for all of us sinners who so desperately need to be changed! But we see churches and denominations jettisoning God’s Word so that they can appear to be trendy and in step with the norms of society.
Nice, comfortable old sweater Nemesis
“Getting used to it”; not allowing God any room to work.
This nemesis which plagues churches is a cousin of the “Do Not Risk” disease, but it is a little different. This is where we get comfortable, not so much with time-worn methods, but with our personal levels of spiritual commitment. Our Christian experience fits us like a nice comfortable sweater; it warms us and comforts us and fits us snugly; it doesn’t make us feel anything but secure in our given situations. We compare ourselves among ourselves and find that we “fit” at our given level of spiritual growth. We’d not think of getting more radically-committed to God, because then someone would call us a “radical” or something. We like to do our religion thing, open that box of our lives once a week or so, and then go on about our business. By doing so we get distracted from that still, small voice of God that beckons us into ever-more-intimate real fellowship with Him.
Got to keep the doors open Goof
“We aim at nothing, and we hit it with accuracy!”
This is the church that is distracted in the sense of having no clue why it even exists—it’s raison d’etre is nothing more compelling than self-preservation. The “why” question is one that a church with this malady is terrified to face. “Why is your church here?” A lot of churches have forgotten why they exist in the first place, and so their energy is directed merely toward doing whatever it takes to keep on doing it one more week. Frankly, the cause of Christ would be greatly furthered if those churches would regain their sense of purpose; barring that, the second-best thing that could happen would be for those churches to close!
Everybody else is doing it Error
“Keeping up with the Presbyterians—or Baptists—or…”
Now here is a distracting danger that is very real for us here at FCC. If we aren’t careful, we’ll become enamored with what Willow Creek is doing—or the Baptists are doing—or what Saddleback Church is doing—or what D. James Kennedy or Alistair Begg or Chuck Swindoll is doing—and forget that God has called us to do something unique in Mercer. While we praise God for some of these successful ministries, and while wisdom dictates that we learn from them, we can’t expect to have a church that pleases God merely by trying to clone what some other church is doing.
Relevance at all costs Risk
Fudging on the truth to try to appear trendy.
This risk is the cousin of the “Accept Us, World” Ailment, but this one is especially pernicious, because it doesn’t go to the extreme of adopting liberal theology. Rather, it keeps a very conservative, evangelical doctrinal statement, to which it claims fidelity, but when the rubber meets the road and the hard calls have to be made and the hard truths have to be taught and the hard convictions have to be displayed, it wimps out. It causes us to live out our faith—to a point, the point at which we have to make hard decisions—and then we back off, afraid of offending people. Which leads to our last malady:
Satisfy me Syndrome
Keeping everybody “here and happy” becomes Priority One.
People begin to see their church as a place that is supposed to cater to their every whim. Leadership, out of a fear of losing people (which no pastor likes to see but which some pastors seem to consider to be the worst possible thing that can ever happen in a church), seeks to try to satisfy every desire of every person. We run around putting salve on every booboo and walk on eggshells out of fear of someone being offended; we treat people like babies, basically, as though they need to be burped and coddled incessantly. You know what? Let me say this: I respect you enough not to assume that you are a baby whose every wish has to be my command, okay? Let’s just make that agreement. And let’s recognize that, while compromise with the world is an unconscionable thing, compromise with each other is often the way love works itself out in a body of believers. Now again, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when we each will have legitimate concerns—I know I certainly do! But what it means is that the worst thing we can do is not to displease somebody; the worst thing we can do is to displease God!
All of these things are threats to distract us from what God has called us to do, and I thank you for indulging me while I point them out. Now let’s answer the important question here in our remaining time together.
III. How Nehemiah Dealt with the Problems -- And how we must as well:
A. He kept working!
He had his answer right there in front of him; when they asked him to meet on the plains of Ono, the answer was simple: “O no!”
1.) His Priorities were right.
“What we are doing here is a great work, because it is God’s work!” There are a whole lot of things which threatened to distract Nehemiah and us, but his priority was doing the work God had called him to do to the glory of God, and he set his mind to this priority. J.I. Packer wrote that a key element of leadership is to keep one’s priorities clear, and that just as no amount of theoretical learning will help the golfer who won’t keep his eye on the ball (oh, how I know that!), so no amount of wisdom will make a leader if he will not keep his priorities in view!
2.) His Discernment was keen.
Verse 3 indicates that he understood their real motive was to harm him so as to put a stop to his leadership and work. How he knew this is not plain, but I think he knew these guys well enough to know from what cloth they were cut, and that these leopards hadn’t changed their spots. He smelled a trap because his God-given discernment was keen.
3.) His response was courageous.
Some of these threats were fear-inducing, but Nehemiah had established a pattern early on. Remember how, in Chapter 2, he said that he was fearful when he stood before King Artaxerxes? This had been a make-or-break moment for him; when the king asked him what was wrong, he could have said, “Oh, nothing king, never mind. I’m fine!” But he didn’t. Though he was fearful, he prayed and proceeded on with what he had planned. He acted with courage in the face of fear, and that emboldened him to do it time and time again when scary things threatened. The issue in dealing with fear is not whether or not you feel fearful about things, but what you do in response to that fear. Nehemiah had courage.
B. He asked God for strength!
We see this in verse 9. He knew that he couldn’t do it alone. He asked God for the strength to keep him from giving in to the distractions that threatened him.
C. He trusted God to vindicate him in the end!
We see this in his final prayer here, in verse 14; this is a constant theme, asking God to judge rightly regarding those who have opposed the work.
There are lessons here for us as a church, for we face the risk of distraction. “Fightings and fears, within, without” is how the songwriter put it. But we dare not allow ourselves to be distracted from God’s purpose for us as individuals, or as a church.
A Chicago youth pastor was taking a group of teenagers to Florida to do evangelism on the beach, where the people were! But his fear, of course, was distraction, and so to keep the teens on task, he assembled, from two pieces of lumber, a cross. Before they climbed on the bus to head south, he explained that they were going to take the cross with them everywhere they went: into restaurants, on the beach, to their rooms at night. At first, this was odd to them; lugging the cross around was even a bit embarrassing. Soon, though, it became for them a point of identification, a silent reminder of who they were and what they were about. The night before going home, the youth leader gave each kid two nails, and explained that, if they wanted to live their entire lives committed to Christ, they were to nail one nail into that cross and keep the other. 15 years later, one of those youth, now a stockbroker, called the youth pastor and told him that he still had the nail—and that it served to remind him that, whenever he was tempted to lose focus, the core of his life was his commitment to Jesus. Keep working, Christian; keep trusting God. Keep seeking first His glory. Don’t be distracted, but focus on the cross!
