Sermon Tone Analysis

It’s Time to Re-Calibrate

Rebuild

2022-08-21

GFC

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Introduction

Lego is one of the most amazing toys ever invented.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the world’s number one toy.

(blank) How many of you are Lego fans?

What I like about Lego is that you can build so many different things with the same blocks.

Especially when you combine many different sets of Lego.

Now for some people, what I just said was sacrilege.

They never combine their sets.

In fact, I know a few people who build their Lego sets and never take them apart.

If that’s you, you can do as you like, but I will have to emphatically state that you’re dead wrong!

It’s a 3d puzzle and just like a cardboard puzzle, the enjoyment of Lego isn’t the completed project, but in the building of the project.

Once you’re done, you enjoy it for a while, and then you take it apart so that you get to rebuild it again some time in the future.

It’s a toy.

Toys are made to be used and used again.

Renovations on the other hand are different.

Since we moved into our house in 2010, we’ve renovated almost the entire building.

In fact, while on my Sabbatical I continued the renovations to our basement that I had started before my Sabbatical.

Much larger egress windows were required for fostering so we decided to go ahead and redo much of the basement.

(blank) Renovations are not like Lego.

I enjoy a lot of the work, but I would never take it apart so that I could do it again.

That would be ridiculous.

I’m also not a masochist.

I’ve put way too much blood, sweat and money into these renos to want to do them all over again.

I want them to last a long time.

Why do we build things with Lego?

Why do we do renovations?

Why do we rebuild things like old houses and cars and campers?

To a certain extent it is for the enjoyment of the project.

A lot of mechanics love to rebuild old cars for this very reason.

They love to bring old things back to life.

They love to create beauty out of brokenness.

To make something functional that wasn’t.

Nehemiah Built a Wall.

Nehemiah did the same.

Nehemiah’s project makes most of our projects look puny.

He didn’t set out to rebuild a house, or a chariot, he set out to rebuild an entire wall around a city.

As ancient cities go, Jerusalem wasn’t very big.

Babylon, and Nineveh were huge.

But even though Jerusalem wasn’t large, it was still a big project.

Archeologists estimate the perimeter of Nehemiah's wall was probably about 1.7 miles long and included about 10 gates and at least 8 towers.

They were also about 15 feet think and 20 feet high.

That’s a lot of stone to pile up.

It was a massive project that required complete buy in from the population of Jerusalem and Judea.

When you read the account in chapter 3, that’s exactly what Nehemiah got.

His descriptive account is of who built what and where.

Nehemiah and his associates divided up the wall into sections and then got different groups to build each section.

Often these sections were built by those who lived or worked close by.

(read 3:10) The sections were built by family groups, trade groups like goldsmiths, religious groups like priests, groups from other towns, etc.

The buy in was very impressive.

So impressive that one group of people stand out like a sore thumb.

(read 3:5, 27) Nowhere else is any other group of people mentioned as not helping.

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What was the wall like?

I’ve already described the length, width and height, but not how it was constructed.

(show wall) As you can see, it wasn’t made of perfectly square stones.

The outside was made of stone that was somewhat squared, but the inside is made of all kinds of stone packed in with dirt.

(blank) It was not an architectural wonder like the best built sections of the Great Wall of China.

It was a basic stone wall.

That certainly would have helped people from all kinds of trades and backgrounds to be able to build it.

Many of the original stones would have been reused.

Likely the most talented builders were tasked with building the gates and towers.

We also need to keep in mind that the builders were also not building it from scratch.

Throughout the book of Nehemiah, the word used for the building we would be translate as ‘rebuild’ or ‘repair’.

They were fixing what was broken.

They built on the foundations of the earlier Jebusite and Israelite walls that had been destroyed by the Babylonians.

I imagine that different parts of the original wall were torn down at varying levels.

Motivation – Future, not Past

It is clear by the people’s enthusiastic and sustained effort that the people of Jerusalem and Judea were inspired by Nehemiah’s vision.

As I stated last Sunday, he wanted to build the wall for the safety and security of the people of Jerusalem and Judea, to protect the temple and the worship of God there, and to bring glory to God and remove the disgrace of the destruction.

The rebuilding of the temple and wall signified that God had forgiven his people for their sin of idolatry.

There is one other aspect of their motivation that I want to speak to.

To explain it I want to draw our attention to an architectural wonder from India, the Taj Mahal.

The Taj Mahal is probably India’s most famous building.

It’s made of marble and it’s stunning.

But, do you know what it is and why it was constructed?

It’s a mausoleum, a burial chamber.

It was commissioned and built in the mid 1600’s by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his favourite wife and himself.

(blank) In todays dollars it cost 1 billion US to build.

Probably the most expensive burial place ever built.

Simply amazing!

But what I want to point out is that it was backward looking.

And while many have been inspired by its physical beauty and the love the Shah had for his wife, the building itself wasn’t built for the people who would follow.

No one uses the building.

Other than tourists coming to look, and workers maintaining it, it sites empty.

For most of its history it didn’t do anything for anyone living close by.

Nehemiah’s wall building on the other hand, was forward looking.

It wasn’t to conserve the past but to build a future.

It was built for the current people of Nehemiah’s day and all those who would follow after.

It was built for the living, not the dead.

And because it was God’s task, he enabled, protected and provided for them.

Despite much opposition, Neh.

6:15 tells us they completed it in 52 days.

So what do Lego, my renovations, Nehemiah’s wall and the Taj Mahal have to do with our lives?

A lot.

Lessons on Rebuilding

Creativity, playfulness, breaking things