Nehemiah 8
Notes
Transcript
So many of us quit right before we are at the end. I’m sure you have seen this comic before, where the guy is almost to the end and he just gave up before it was time to stop. We stop for so many different reasons, burn out, opposition, just a plethora of things. We have spent so much time talking as we walked through the Book of Nehemiah about all the different forms of opposition and how we are supposed to handle those things, and this morning it is no different. As Nehemiah and his people come closer to their goal of finishing the wall the opposition doesn’t stop; in fact it may get even more intense. The enemy doesn’t like the way things are headed and he will stop at nothing to get us off the path God has for us and our lives and that may mean using well intentioned people, people who are definitely against us, or just using our own thoughts and feelings to sabotage us.
This happens to us in our personal lives, you may have decided you needed to refocus your life and your family needed to get back into church again and you have your Sunday all planned and you have the kids showered and in bed early on Saturday night and everything is good to go, but then you forget to set your alarm for Sunday morning, so it doesn’t go off to get you ready and you are now 25 minutes behind the time you wanted to wake up so you could get yourself and the kids looking fresh, and the temptation is to stay back in bed and just throw in the towel for good. What’s the use right? Maybe everyone was right and you really are the mess up you always have been and its no use trying.
Maybe its not the alarm, maybe you make it to church and someone says something that unintentionally hurts your feelings like this time when we were at a church in Northern Kentucky. We had someone who worked for the church, he was our trash man, he would take out the trash from all the classrooms and offices, and he had worked at the church for like 50 years, it was his only job. This guy was in his sixties, and he was autistic and he had just the most amazing memory you can imagine, he also kept our attendance, and when I say kept attendance he had a roll sheet and he checked off each week if you were there. You could ask this guy, Hey how many people did we have in attendance on Easter of 1997 and he would be able to tell you right off the top of his head. So anyway, a lady comes in one morning on the day he was scheduled to be a greeter and pass out bulletins, and she walks up and he says, “Well, Trisha, I haven’t seen you since September 15, 2018.” And you could just see all the life drain out of her face. Now, this might be the thing someone says to you and you just decide to hang up your hat and throw in the towel, it hurts you so bad, but here is the thing this guy wasn’t trying to hurt anyones feelings, he was just stating facts. He didnt’ realize stating facts could be hurtful, but maybe someone says something like that to you and you just decide thats it, I can’t take it anymore.
Maybe its not church, we are so close to the beginning of the year maybe you have decided this is it, this is the Monday you are going to start your diet. You know, because all diets start on Monday, we can’t start those things on Friday, because the weekend is coming and we really need the weekend to prepare our mind to eat better on Monday, everyone knows this. So on Monday you go the grocery to get your groceries for the week and you jsut do fantastic, you are walking through and getting all the healthy stuff, you even passed up as you entered the Little Debbie cakes that were bogo and you check out and start to walk out of the store and you are so proud of yourself. As you walk out of the store though, your face does the same thing as Trishas when my friend said that to her, all the color leaves you because as you walk out of the store, you see it, the little table, with the girls and their moms sitting behind it, with delicious boxes of Carmel delights, or are they Samoas here, and thin mints, and all of the amazing goodness and before you know it you have already given up on the diet, because whats the use.
So how does the enemy try to get us to get off the wall and stop the work God has called us to do, and what are we supposed to do about it?
He tries to distract you.
1 Now when it was reported to Sanballat, Tobiah, to Geshem the Arab and to the rest of our enemies that I had rebuilt the wall, and that no breach remained in it, although at that time I had not set up the doors in the gates,
2 then Sanballat and Geshem sent a message to me, saying, “Come, let us meet together at Chephirim in the plain of Ono.” But they were planning to harm me.
Okay, everyone just stop for a second and say “OH NO.” Quick and free life lesson, whatever you do never take a meeting in a place called Oh No. There is nothing good to come of it. So you see the enemy comes in and says, let's distract him from the focus of what he is trying to do; lets make him stop a great thing for a good thing.
The same thing happens in our lives today. When you begin to do what God is calling you to do, you are going to find the enemy will try to distract you. See, what we think is, the enemy is going to use something big to get in the way to distract us and take us off the wall, but most of us are too smart to allow those big things to get in the way and make us come down; so its not the big things that do us in most often, its the little things. Its most times the little distractions that become big distractions and get us off of the task at hand. For some of us this doesn’t take a whole lot okay, we can become easily distracted, it happens to me all the time. In my house, my family likes to make fun of me about ADHD piles. These are the piles of dirt that I will leave in different rooms of the house as I am sweeping. It’s not that I am leaving it for someone else or anything but I will sweep a room into a pile in the floor and the dust pan won’t be around so I will do the next room, then I will pick something out of the pile that doesn’t need to be thrown away, most often a sock, and I will take that to the laundry room, but on my way there I will see the glass I used for dinner last night on the table, so I will grab that and take it to the kitchen sink. Then on the way back I notice something that looks out of place, so I go to fix that, and all of a sudden I have run down about fifteen other tasks and have completely forgotten I have small piles of stuff that needs to be swept up in different rooms. There was nothing large to distract me, it was just a lot of little stuff one after the other that ended up taking me an hour to finish before I could get back to work.
You may not have ADHD that is going to distract you, but the enemy has other ways to distract us. You may be going to sit on your computer and work on this amazing plan for how you are going to help the poor in our community. Halfway through you remember a person who used to talk about the homeless and hungry at a church you used to go to, but you haven’t heard from them in a long time so you decide you need to look them up on facebook and before you know it you have wasted an hour combing through the depths and you’ve come no closer to finishing your goal, but you do know your friend now has three grandchildren, two of them went to UI and one went to Purdue, much to their grandparents chagrin.
Maybe you didn’t waste your time on facebook, maybe you are too smart to allow your mind to wander when you are working so you use a pomodoro timer like me so you don’t have to worry about those things. So, you are spending all of your free time working on getting grants and contacting other people to help you get your plan off the ground, and you get a call from your kids school they want you to come and help with the PTO and you know how much the school district needs you so you accept their invitation, but you don’t realize before you start how much of your time it is going to demand. Before long all the time you were spending working on taking care of your plans is now spent working at the school. Its a good task, but you’ve come down off your wall.
Maybe you are really wanting to get closer to God and you know it means you have to get plugged into a body of believers who believes the same things as you, but before you know it is football/baseball/soccer/volleyball season and you are so tired from Saturdays and travelling you can’t get up and make it to church.
So what are we supposed to do? Look at the words of Nehemiah
3 So I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?”
Basically, Nehemiah says, look what I am doing is too important, I’m not coming down. We have to get to the point where we say, “I’m NOT COMING DOWN!” Say it with me, “I’m not coming down!”
Say it like you mean it.
This will happen to us as we are trying to complete the work I believe God is calling us to as well. There will be people who will see some things other churches are doing and they will say, man we should really try doing this program, or that program. All of those ideas may be good and something helpful to the community, but just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean we have to, and while it is good, we have to keep our eye on the wall Jesus has given us. We have to keep pushing forward and finishing that work that God has called us to.
There are some things you may be asked to do and what you have to keep in mind is just because you could, doesn’t mean you should. There are tons of places where this is the case. We could all think of bad things that people COULD do but they shouldn’t do. I am here to tell you that there are things that in and of themselves that are not bad but we shouldn’t be doing them because God has never called you to it. This goes out to all of those who have a hard time saying no, just remember, just because you could, doesn’t mean you should, and God will bless both parties more if we do exactly what he has called us to do. So you just say “No, not that what you are asking me isn’t important, but I am doing a great work and I can’t come down.”
So the first way the enemy tries to take us down is by trying to distract us, the second way is he will:
2. Try to discredit us
There are a few different ways the enemy will try to discredit us in our lives, the first way that normally works is
1. By Spreading Rumors –
4 They sent messages to me four times in this manner, and I answered them in the same way.
5 Then Sanballat sent his servant to me in the same manner a fifth time with an open letter in his hand.
This fifth time they come is important because the servant shows up with an unsealed letter which signifies this letter was supposed to be read publically. This was no longer just an issue between the two men, now Sanballat was trying to make this whole thing public for everyone to know. An unsealed letter is the modern day version of a blog post, its just this thing that is put out there and everyone is supposed to read it. Thats an important thing to know, because what we see in the next two verses would have been read out loud for everyone to hear.
6 In it was written, “It is reported among the nations, and Gashmu says, that you and the Jews are planning to rebel; therefore you are rebuilding the wall. And you are to be their king, according to these reports.
7 “You have also appointed prophets to proclaim in Jerusalem concerning you, ‘A king is in Judah!’ And now it will be reported to the king according to these reports. So come now, let us take counsel together.”
Here is the thing, if you have been paying attention as we moved along in the book of Nehemiah you will quickly understand Nehemiah was doing nothing for his own gain, he wasn’t trying to do what this letter said, it is very clear he has a heart for his people and this is the reason he is doing this great work in Judah.
What you have to realize, is the more you do for God the more people will start to spread rumors about you to try to discredit you.
For instance, I had a friend in high school, his name was Seneka. We had a falling out at some point in high school becasue at one of our many nights sitting at the waffle house, he got mad about something and blew cigarette smoke in my face. And it kind of was the shift that started our friendship to fall apart. Anyhow, about ten years after high school one of my employees at the ice cream shop I was running asked me to come speak to her high school FCA. So, I go and preach and talk, and the girl who invited me thanked me on I think it may have been back in the myspace days, she thanked me for coming and said something about my message. This guy sees it and on her comment he said something about how it didn’t sound like the Adam he knew. You know, because he didnt know me at all anymore, we hadn’t talked in over ten years.
Just know, The more you do for God the more the enemy will use people to try and discredit you.
So verse 8…
8 Then I sent a message to him saying, “Such things as you are saying have not been done, but you are inventing them in your own mind.”
So what did He do? Nehemiah just said, NOT TRUE, and prayed and got back to work. He didn’t go and tell everyone what someone had said about him, he didn’t whine about it, he just prayed and went on.
A lot of the time our problem is, we hear all these people say these bad things about us and we don’t move on. Some of us take them to heart and get really bothered by what people are saying. There may be people saying in your life you shouldn’t be helping in a certain area, because of what you did in your past, and you can get out of shape and decide to take your toys and go home, or worse, you turn into Sanballat and start talking bad about the person to anyone who will listen to try and discredit them.
So, they will try to discredit you by spreading rumors and the second way they try to discredit you is by
2. Tempting you to Compromise
What happens next is kind of like the Jerry Springer moment in the story, look at what happens next.
10 When I entered the house of Shemaiah the son of Delaiah, son of Mehetabel, who was confined at home, he said, “Let us meet together in the house of God, within the temple, and let us close the doors of the temple, for they are coming to kill you, and they are coming to kill you at night.”
He was the double agent,
11 But I said, “Should a man like me flee? And could one such as I go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in.”
12 Then I perceived that surely God had not sent him, but he uttered his prophecy against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him.
13 He was hired for this reason, that I might become frightened and act accordingly and sin, so that they might have an evil report in order that they could reproach me.
As you begin to rise in influence as a leader, what can easily happen is we can start to believe we are entitled to more than we are. Nehemiah could have easily thought, “hey, I am building this wall, and the people really need me because I am doing this great thing and restoring them to the place they need to be, and if I die the wall will quit being built. If the wall isn’t built then the people will once again lose hope and if they lose hope we are right back where we started, so maybe I SHOULD go to the temple and hide, I deserve it,” but he knew that’s not where he was supposed to be.
We see this all the time amongst people as they can status at their job, or in their community, or whatever they are doing. THey may think things like “I am deserving more than you know - look at all I am getting done here! I deserve more money than they are paying me,” and it can start to taint who we are and who we are called to be.
This is what you see ruining marriages, one spouse gets around someone and this new person says more kind things than their spouse does, so they start to think this is obviously the person God wants for them, so they pursue this new relationship.
At work you have this reputation as a great Christian, and one day you’re think, “they are taking advantage of me and you put something on your business account that should be there.”
Just remember, the closer you get the more the enemy will try to distract you.
When this happens the first thing you are going to do is say, “I’m not coming down,” then you say, “I’m not giving up.”
Shemaiah said, “Let’s go. They’re trying to kill you, lets hide.”
11 But I said, “Should a man like me flee? And could one such as I go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in.”
Nehemiah said, “Should I run away? NOPE!”
And so Nehemiah shows us how to handle these attacks of the enemy.
And look at vs 15
15 So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of the month Elul, in fifty-two days.
