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Welcome
Good Morning!
I’m Pastor Wayne and I’d like to welcome you all to the gathering of Ephesus Baptist Church.
Why did you choose to gather today?
We believe we are a called people!
Called to worship and exalt our God among the nations in order that His glory may be spread over all the earth!
If you are visiting with us this morning, we want you to know that ...
We are all one family of faith: “giving our all to love God, love people, proclaim Jesus, and make disciples in our generation.”
We have a connect card in the pew in front of you.
I invite you to take one and fill it out!
If you have prayer needs, you can let us know about those as well.
I promise, our prayer team will lift you up soon.
You can place those cards in the offering plate when it comes around.
Who’s Your One?
Scripture Memory
Opening Scripture Memory
Opening Prayer
Introduction
We have been following Nehemiah’s efforts to glorify God by rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem thereby allowing the Jewish people an opportunity to revitalize their city and their faith!
We are witnesses to the fact that every step of the way this man of God has faced opposition; opposition in the form of laughter, ridicule, discouragement, and even the threat of physical harm.
So far, all of the opposition has come from those outside the walls of Jerusalem, but today Nehemiah again must put on the whole armor of faith as he faces opposition from within.
As we left chapter four everything seemed to be moving according to plan, but all was not as it appeared.
You see, Satan has, throughout church history, worked his greatest harm from within, not without.
The Apostle Paul warned the Galatians believers against allowing Satan to work his destruction in their midst as he taught in Galatians 5:14-15
It is really an easy strategy, Satan doesn’t even have to do anything but wait for conflict to occur among believers and then simply supply ammunition to both sides of the conflict.
Stephen Davey has said,
“The worst enemy of the Church is, sadly, the Church itself; it is the thing that often keeps the Church from moving forward.”
Today, I hope to show you from God’s Words three biblical truths that if applied have the power to resolve conflict and keep us from consuming one another as we move forward in Kingdom work together.
1st Biblical Truth is......
1.
As the people of God, if we allow sin to remain among us, we risk consuming one another.
A. The Great Outcry of the People!
Human nature really doesn’t change.
As you will see this morning, issues that created conflict in Nehemiah’s day are the same issues that can create conflict in our day.
Let me share with you......
Five issues that create conflict!
1. Strife and Division.
According to Neh 4:22, Nehemiah had asked the workers to remain inside the walls and not return to their villages until the walls were completed.
This was mainly due to the threat against them from Sanballet and his evil hoard.
Due to the strenuous demands of rebuilding the wall and defending Jerusalem coupled with the fact that Jerusalem’s commercial ties were cut off at this time.
Satan had an open door to wreck havoc in the minds of the people.
Adrian Rogers was fond of saying, “The devil had rather start a church fuss any day than to sell a barrel of whiskey—just to get God’s people divided.”
Satan had already been successful in dividing the people by class and preventing them from working together before Nehemiah, so he is already had a lot to work with at this time as well.
So what Nehemiah gets is a great outcry from the people against their Jewish brothers.
Internal strife and division.
This had been growing for a long time, but Nehemiah is finally learning about this underlying spiritual conflict.
2. Famine and Hunger.
Large agrarian based families were having a hard time raising enough grain, which was their staple food.
They were hungry.
Grain could be bought, but at extremely high prices.
These people had been working hard on the wall, but you can’t eat the wall.
Verse 3 also tells us that there was a famine in the land.
So that helps us to understand the situation.
Have you ever been so hungry that your stomach felt like it was eating yourself from the inside out?
They say that when you get that hungry, you can also get irritable.
When you stay hungry and are having to work hard everyday, fear of starvation sets in.
Conflict sets in!
3. Financial Crisis.
Due to the famine, these large families were finding themselves in a financial crisis as they were having to mortgage their property just to eat.
With interest rates estimated as high as 40-50% during this period of time, these families had no way to repay their mortgage and as a result, many lost their homes and farms.
4. High Taxes and Deep Debt.
To complicate matters further, due to high taxes many were having to go further in debt just to pay the Persian tax on their property.
As a result, the debt these poor people were accumulating was unsustainable.
5. Slavery
The debt became so high that many families were forced to sell their sons and daughters into slavery.
With their property gone, they had no way to prevent this from happening.
They had to choose between starvation or slavery.
Does any of this sound remotely familiar?
Isn’t that exactly the situation we find ourselves in all across Western civilization?
Isn’t that exactly what America has done, piling up a mountain of debt, then leaving it for the next generation to pay?
Debt is a form of slavery.
But the slavery these young Jewish kids underwent was severe, especially for the daughters who were sold off into things you would wish on anyone.
These people were in bondage.
What happens when people find themselves in these situations?
They become divided, distrustful, and resentful toward others.
They enter into a conflict that has the potential to consume them all.
When we realize that the ones causing all of this to occur were the wealthy Jewish leaders, as they exploited the poor to make themselves even richer, we can understand the outcry all the more.
B. How Nehemiah resolved conflict.
1.
Never respond to conflict without self-control.
It is bad enough to have people being exploited, but, the thought that one Jew could act like this against another Jew enraged Nehemiah.
He wasn’t just angry, he was very angry!
I fear that we have to little anger in regard to the sin and iniquity of our day.
It ought to anger us when we consider how our faith is being attacked at every turn; at how our children are under enormous pressure to abandon their faith and conform to the world.
The Devil’s political agenda is taking more and more of our religious liberty each year.
That ought to anger us and it ought to move us to action.
We don’t have to allow our anger to become sin, but there is nothing wrong with a righteous anger.
But when we are dealing with internal conflict we must be careful, like Nehemiah, to never attempt to resolve it when we are angry and without the ability to practice self-control.
a. Self-control begins with self-consultation.
Edit Proclaim slide to only include the first phrase.
I love that!
“I took counsel with myself.”
That is a pretty good committee: three with two absent!
Nehemiah stopped and spent time thinking things over.
He thought about the best way to handle this difficult situation in a way that would be restorative and unifying, but also holy and righteous.
2. The source of conflict must always be confronted.
After his time of self-consultation, Nehemiah realized the root cause of the conflict and confronted it head on by bringing public charges against those responsible in a gracious and restorative manner.
There are no problems too big to solve, just people too small to solve them.
God’s people can solve almost any problem if we attack the problem rather than attacking one another.
3. What were the charges?
a.
You are charging interest to fellow Jews.
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