Rebuilding The Wall - A Lesson From Nehemiah

Welcome and good morning everyone! So blessed to see everyone here today! We had a wonderful marriage retreat weekend last week and experienced God in a tremendous way! Thank you to all those that participated in this marriage retreat.

This week the title of our message is rebuilding the wall. It is a lesson from the book of Nehemiah and I trust it will be impactful in your life. Before we get into the book of Nehemiah, I want to share some information about another famous wall.

This wall was built more than 2,300 years ago. It has an official length of over 13,000 miles long. The average height of this wall is over 25 feet tall with parts of the wall eclipsing 45 feet tall. Not only is this wall high, it is wide. The average width is 21 feet. So in some place the wall is just as wide as it is high. Over the years, millions of laborers have worked on this wall. I am of coarse speaking about the great wall of China. It is interesting to note that the wall is disappearing year by year as a result of people vandalizing the wall, taking brings, weathering and in some areas the wall is collapsing. It is estimated that one third of the wall has already disappeared.

Like the Great Wall of China, there was a wall surrounding the city of Jerusalem to provide protection for its citizens. Well constructed walls during this time period, provided an enormous amount of protection from their enemies. Archeologists have discovered parts of Nehemiah’s wall and the length of the wall was around 2.5 miles with a height of about 39 feet and was 8 feet thick. This morning, we are talking about building protective walls, how to fight off discouragement and how we have already won the victory.

I. Building walls

A. Background on Nehemiah

a. Nehemiah, the author of the book was a cup bearer to the king of Artaxerxes.

b. During this time period, the cup bearer was a high ranking officer and was responsible for pouring and serving drinks at the royals table.

c. Due to constant plots to kill kings during this time period, the cupbearer was a person that the king totally trusted.

d. The cup bearer would guard against poison in the kings cup and would at times be required to swallow some of the drink before the king took a sip.

e. Because of his closeness to the king, the cupbearer had a great amount of influence in the king’s life.

B. The need

a. After learning that the Jewish remnant were in distress and the wall of Jerusalem was broken down, Nehemiah asked permission from the king to return to the city and work to rebuild the walls.

b. The king approved Nehemiah’s request, in fact, so much so, he placed him in charge with the mission to rebuild the wall and gave him provision of lumber from his own forest.

c. This rebuild was going to take a lot of hard work. Obviously, they did not have any heavy equipment during this time. They did not have the technology we have today. They did not have the engineering knowledge we have.

C. In face of adversity

a. As the people labored in building the wall, they faced a tremendous amount of opposition.

b. There in Nehemiah chapter four, we see some of the enemies of Israel were furious and were mocking the Jews who were working on the wall.

c. The enemies then conspired with each other to attack and to create confusion.

d. Under this constant threat and opposition Nehemiah and crew continued to work on the wall.

e. The workers became weary and discouraged, but they never stopped working and after 52 days they were victorious and completed the wall.

II. Fighting off discouragement

A. Personal

a. The story of Nehemiah is an amazing story of ordinary people doing something extra ordinary.

b. Even in the face of discouragement these men and women of God were able to overcome.

c. Maybe, you are here this morning and you are feeling discouraged?

d. There have definitely been times in my life that I have grown weary in the battle.

e. There are some truths here in Nehemiah that can help us this morning to remain strong, and be faithful to the Lord, even in the midst of struggle.

B. Troubled trials

a. No matter where you find yourself in your walk with the Lord, we can all know that we will all face trouble in our labors.

b. The enemy of God does not just sit around and say “Oh, that is so nice that so and so is leading people to the Lord. I am just so happy for them and I sure hope they win others.”