The Courage To Face Reality Series

The Courage to Face Reality

Series: When It’s Time to Move FORWARD

Brad Bailey – April 18, 2021

Intro

My added welcome to you today. It’s so good to be gathering together in this season. As I shared last week... we are in a unique season of transition. This Spring will involve coming out of what we could think of as a long “pandemic winter.” And the end of this long pandemic season won’t be defined by a moment...but by a movement... a movement each of us will now be navigating.

As I shared last week...I believe that God wants us to take in a key word to help us...and it is the word “FORWARD.”

For over a year... to limit the spread of a virus... the underlying need has been to stay in place....and that can refer to staying at home...but the nature of “staying in place”...can also define the whole nature of how our lives just stopped moving forward. We all found that we really couldn’t plan in the way we normally do. We couldn’t move forward when we couldn’t know what to expect. And if that had been true for a month...it would have been a set back. But when it becomes true for well over a year...it becomes something that sets in.

I imagine we all sense that we have adapted in some ways. We’ve all had our internal settings adjusted. And that has likely included having to develop some healthy and holy patience. Many of us found ourselves frustrated by limitations...and we wanted a clear end point so that we could make plans, It’s been a season of having to face the reality that there is a lot that we just don’t control. It may have been a healthy challenge to surrender our sense of control.

But now we are entering a season that calls us to begin to move forward...

I recall how God led the Israelites to the edge of promised land...and there they camped for a long time. And the Scriptures tell us how God spoke to the people.

“The LORD our God said to us, ‘You have stayed at this mountain long enough. It is time to break camp and move on. … Look, I am giving all this land to you! Go in and occupy it...” Deuteronomy 1:6-8 (NLT)

You’ve stayed at that mountain long enough…in other words… don’t let what is ‘temporary’ become ‘permanent’.

There is a promised land…and you are not there yet.

There is a plan to bless the whole world. And we have not fulfilled it yet.

The truth God wants us to embrace...is that: The life that matters most...is the one that is still ahead of us.

But sometimes it’s hard ...because there are challenges we want to avoid.

So today we are going to launch into the series entitled When It’s Time to Move FORWARD... allowing God to speak to us from the Biblical book of Nehemiah. It captures what is involved in moving forward.

The Book of Nehemiah follows what God did that involved the life of Nehemiah.

Now the Old Testament covers a long history... so let me give us the very short version of where Nehemiah fits in. The true and living God of all creation begins to make His true nature known as he calls out a man named Abraham to become the father of a new people and a new nation. God explains that he is making a covenant... and through this people.... He would make himself known and bless the world. That people...the nation of Israel... often went its own way...and suffered the consequences. One of the prophets God raised up ...Jeremiah...had predicted that the southern part of this kingdom of Israel... would be captured by the Babylonian’s and that the temple at Jerusalem would be destroyed. And so it came to be.

In 587 BC, the Babylonians, under the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar, conquered Jerusalem. They killed the leaders of Judah, plundered the temple before burning it to the ground, destroyed much of the city, including its walls, and took the strongest of Jerusalem’s citizens to Babylon. There, these Jews lived for decades in exile, where they could only hope for God’s deliverance and the restoration of Israel. After 50 years...in 539 BC... there was a glimmer of hope when Persia, led by King Cyrus, overthrew Babylon. Shortly thereafter, Cyrus issued a decree inviting the Jews in his kingdom to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple and, therefore, their life as God’s people (Ezra 1:1-4). The result of this first movement was that almost 50,000 Jews got to return and they attempted to rebuild the temple... but there was little that could be done with their limited resources.

And it is in this period that three different books in the Old Testament are related. The Biblical books of Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah. [1]