Nehemiah 7
Notes
Transcript
You know, 6:30 is the best time on a clock, Hands Down.
Last week we spent a lot of time talking about the conflicts that arise when we are doing good things for the kingdom from the outside. We talked about the outside voices who will remind us of our past and who we used to be, they will tell us of all of our failures and the ways in which we have attempted and failed, and remind us we might as well quit because we aren’t going to be good enough to accomplish any of the things we are attempting. This week it is a little bit different, we are no longer going to be dealing with those outside the work we are doing, but we are going to be dealing with the voices of doubt from the people who are supposed to be with us and walking beside us; our friends, co-workers, family - the people who should be with us.
I It reminds me of years ago at the first church I was ever the senior pastor. This church was amazing, they allowed a guy who had been a youth pastor and able to grow a group of kids, and then took over as a sort of interim for his mentor in the pulpit for 3 months have a job leading the church. I was young, and rough around the edges, I knew what God had called us to and I didn’t want to let a lot of things get in the way of the vision. Well, in this church we had started some outreach events, we were doing a summer carnival, an easter egg hunt, and a trunk or treat among other things to reach people in the community - I had a hunger and passion to reach the unchurch that has never died. When we arrived the church was doing a meal on Fridays during the summer, one of the members was a retired school cafeteria worker and she knew how hungry kids got in the summers, so they were provided a lunch once a week. Well, when school started, they normally stopped the meals, but we had started growing to a point where it wasn’t just students who were coming in to get meals, and I mentioned people were hungry all year long, not just in the Summer so we kept doing meals all year long. It was amazing, we were feeding 60-90 people a week and buildinp connections in the community, but any time things start to go well you start to deal with turmoil, and as we will see this morning, it isn’t always from the people on the outside. I’ll never forget when a man in the church, who I would have considered a friend came to me and he said, “Adam, you ruined my church,” and I was kind of flabbergasted, so I asked him how I managed that, and I promise you, I have never had an intended insult hit me so good before. He said, “I think we just need to get back to the basics, all we seem to care about is reathe lost and feeding the hungry.” Look, there are times in your life when you aren’t really sure how to respond without sounding like a complete jerk, and this was one of those, and all I said was, “That seems kind of basic to me.”
The point is, sometimes when you are making strides and doing good things, in the church, in your own life, you are going to have people come against you who you never thought would. If you have been in the church for any amount of time I am sure you have seen it, well meaning people arguing about things Jesus would never want them to be so overly concerned with and feelings get hurt and people split. I think Nehemiah gives us some great instruction in how we are to handle those things.
1 Now there was a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish brothers.
2 For there were those who said, “We, our sons and our daughters are many; therefore let us get grain that we may eat and live.”
3 There were others who said, “We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our houses that we might get grain because of the famine.”
4 Also there were those who said, “We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our fields and our vineyards.
5 “Now our flesh is like the flesh of our brothers, our children like their children. Yet behold, we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters are forced into bondage already, and we are helpless because our fields and vineyards belong to others.”
There is a lot for us to unpack here and understand what is going on. So, in this agricultural community many are used to farming and providing for their families, and selling off some of the things they have grown to provide more, but there is a problem. Farmers aren’t able to dedicate all of the time they normally would to their crop, in fact, many of them are spending every waking moment they can building the wall and helping Nehemiah to complete the task God has given them. The problem is if you aren’t out working your fields, weeding, watering, dealing with infestations your crop starts to die, and because of this problem there is now a famine starting in Jerusalem. So we see here that Nehemiah tells us there are three things people are complaining about.
I’m not sure if you caught it in the first verse, but these people aren’t crying out angry with God, they aren’t crying out angry with Nehemiah, or even angry with their enemies, its almost like they expected everything all of these people had shown them. No, instead, they are crying out against their Jewish brethren, and let me show you why. Basically there are three different complaints going on here:
First, are the people who are saying, Nehemiah, bro, we have a really big family, we don’t have enough to eat, we are going to starve, let us take some time off to go and tend to our fields so we can have enough to eat and we won’t starve. This seems like a perfectly normal response as we first look at it, because we all need to eat.
Second, he tells us because of the famine the price of grain has went way up, its a supply and demand commodity, you know, so because there is less of it, the cost of it is higher, and there were a bunch of them who were having to sell and put up as mortgage all of their property just to have enough food to eat. This is a real problem, and the deeper problem with this is yet to be laid out by Nehemiah but he will get there.
Third, he says people were complaining because they were still having to pay taxes to the king and in order to do so they were having to mortgage their land to pay it, and still some were having to force their kids into slavery, and some of their daughters they are forcing into marriages, just to be able to pay the taxes to the king.
This is some bleak stuff in Judah, things have gotten really rough, all while the people are doing exactly what God has asked them to mind you. The problem seems to be even though most of them understand they are doing God’s work that needs to be done, there are some in Judah who have decided this was the time to take advantage of their fellow Jews. This is why in verse one they are crying out against their fellow Jews; they’re making life harder when they should be making life easier to do what God wants them to do.
Just think about the picture of this if you would and you can understand why they are crying out against them. If it had been their enemies who had taken their kids, or charged them more for grain than they should those enemies would have come into Judah, did their damage - taken their children, taken the spoils of overpriced grain and went home, but this isn’t the case here. These people who have taken advantage of them are working right beside them on the wall, day in day out, they are seeing the same people and it just keeps rubbing the scab off the wound.
Can I say I think this is what ruins so many relationships, friendships, marriages, whatever, is the fact when people we love and care about the most hurt us, intentional or not, we see them and work around them every day and if we aren’t very careful we can build up so much hurt inside of us that we can never get over it and take us to a place it is impossible to come back from. That is why it is so important for us to remind ourselves in our friendships, or marriages, or whatever that those people who have slighted us aren’t our enemies, their our friends, spouses, and they truly want the best for us.
And when Nehemiah finds out here is his response:
6 Then I was very angry when I had heard their outcry and these words.
7 I consulted with myself and contended with the nobles and the rulers and said to them, “You are exacting usury, each from his brother!” Therefore, I held a great assembly against them.
8 I said to them, “We according to our ability have redeemed our Jewish brothers who were sold to the nations; now would you even sell your brothers that they may be sold to us?” Then they were silent and could not find a word to say.
I want you to just take a second and look at the first 4 words of verse 7 there, he says “I consulted with myself,” and I think this is thing many of us forget to do. The Hebrew word here yimmalek literally means to give oneself advice. He took a step back, allowed himself to cool off, checked what needed to be said so he could have a better perspective on the problem before he stepped back in. I think this is the step we quite often forget. To check ourselves and see where we are coming from, where our heart is, where it should be when we respond, and we respond out of anger and let people have it out of anger and not a righteous anger, and all it does is cause more problems. We have to get to a place where before we respond we do as Nehemiah did, we stop and consult ourselves on the situation and tell ourselves how to respond and what we should say.
So, Nehemiah’s response is basically, “What is wrong with you people, don’t you remember where we came from, how we were once in slavery in Egypt, and now, you have decided to take your own people as your slaves,” he may have even finished with, “I can’t even…” The problem is he can’t believe they would all care for themselves more, than their own people - he can’t believe they are putting their own desires above the desires of the whole nation. I can only imagine this really hit him raw too because he had left his cushy job working for the King in the palace to come back and help his people get back to the greatness God had called them to, and this is how they are acting.
It would be easy for us here to distance ourselves from this narrative at this point in Nehemiah and try to act like we have nothing at all in common with these people, because we have not once cause people such financial stress, we have never taken any of our friends, family, church brothers into slavery to pay a debt they owe us. But most of us have the same underlying problem, we put our own needs and desires before that of our christian brothers and sisters, spouses, and we look to our own needs first over the needs of others.
So it appears this conflict was so important to deal with and get to the bottom of that Nehemiah actually stopped what was happening on the wall to get to the bottom of it before they went on because it says he held a great assembly against them. So he got everyone in one place and began to talk about the problem.
One thing I think we are guilty of in the charge all too often is not addressing the problem, we just let things fester until someone pops and then we have to deal with it. While we were in Oklahoma there was an elder who was filling in as the interim worship pastor, the WP position was a full time position in the church, but they had been unable to fill it and while they were waiting the elder had taken to filling in. The problem is, he wasn’t that great at what he did, now he had a heart for the Lord and was a good musician, but he played everything kind of slow and it just didn’t feel right. Long story short, he had led for about a year before we got there and no one would ever tell him to his face they didn’t like what he was doing in the position, until the day he decided he was going to actually apply to be the full time worship leader. No there was a conundrum, it had to be dealt with, and when it finally was addressed how people in the congregation felt about him it caused major problems and he and his family ended up leaving the church because they felt betrayed.
Nehemiah seems to know the walls can’t keep going higher until they deal with the problems internally so this is what he does next:
9 So I continued, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?
10 I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let us stop charging interest!
11 Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the interest you are charging them—one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil.”
Nehemiah is basically telling them they need to stop and get their act together and honor God, because they are breaking Gods law by charging this interest to their brothers and taking them into slavery, so it isn’t just the people they are hurting, but they are hurting God himself by breaking his law. He is basically calling them to get their act together and love each other and treat each other right and think about everyone elses needs over their own, to instead of being so concerned about what they want, to be concerned about what God wants and do that together.
I think this is the hardest part for us in our every day lives, because there is a path where we can view what we want as what God wants, because its not a bad thing, it is helping the kingdom, it aligns with scripture and it is good for me. The problem is when we allow these things to be more important than what God has called us to and our desires hurt other people in a way where if we were only following Gods desires we would not.
When it comes to the church as a whole this is where we get ourselves hurt and people get themselves offended and carry burden all the time. They have ideas and desires that align with scripture and they see it working elsewhere and it seems like it would really help the area of the church they fit in best, but its not exactly what God has called the greater body of the church to, so it pushes up against what God has called the church to, but its not in essence wrong, so when things don’t go our way we gossip and tear down and feelings get hurt. But when we are reminded we are to be workign together to the greater good and leave our own desires behind look at what happened for Nehemiah.
12 Then they said, “We will give it back and will require nothing from them; we will do exactly as you say.” So I called the priests and took an oath from them that they would do according to this promise.
13 I also shook out the front of my garment and said, “Thus may God shake out every man from his house and from his possessions who does not fulfill this promise; even thus may he be shaken out and emptied.” And all the assembly said, “Amen!” And they praised the Lord. Then the people did according to this promise.
So to sum it up they all threw down their own desires and realized they needed to work together for the greater good and help one another. They needed to be in unity with one another so the work of God could move forward. And once they were all on the same page they praised the Lord and got back to the work.
The question is this morning as we continue to do what God wants us to do here in Georgetown are you going to be able to lay down what you want for what God wants, are we going to come together for the betterment of everyone and move forward according to the purpose of God.
