Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Don’t we all love a good underdog story?

We love to see stories of small, insignificant people who overcome all the odds and accomplish something amazing.

Stories like the Lord of the Rings where the hero is not the great warrior king Aragorn but a small hobbit named Frodo who destroyed the Ring of Power and saved Middle Earth

Its the reason we can be watching planet earth and root for the seal as it is trying to escape the killer whale one minute and the next wish that same seal had died in the ocean because now its murdering baby penguins on the shore.

Or even in sports, we love to root for the plucky underdog team in hopes that they win and finally topple that one dynasty’s tyranny of dominance.

I think the reason we like these stories so much is because they remind us of ourselves.

If we were all honest with ourselves, every single one of us would like our life to matter for something great.

But we all know that in the grand scheme of history, we are small and insignificant just like the heroes in those underdog stories.

Those stories resonate with us because they give us hope that if someone else who is small and insignificant can accomplish something great, then maybe so can we.

As we continue our study in , we have been focusing on how God invites his people to join him in his work to save sinners and in this chapter, God shows us a very important piece of this invitation.

God doesn’t just use heroes to accomplish his purposes.

He uses everyday saints like you and me and everyday churches just like ours to join him in his work of making disciples.

As Nehemiah list the names of different people that move into the city of Jerusalem, what we see is that God uses all of his people to carry out his mission to save sinners.

Allow me to remind you were we are in the book.

Nehemiah had been called by God to lead the people of Israel to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

The significance of the reconstruction effort was not so Jerusalem could have a shiny new wall.

Nehemiah was called to rebuild the wall because Jerusalem was the city of God and he had called his people Israel to be a light to the nations of God’s glory and salvation.

However, with the walls of the city in ruins, it made it look like God was a deadbeat who did not care about his people.

Why would any nation turn from their false gods to worship the One True God if this is how he treated his people?

So the people of God gather together to rebuild the walls and end their disgrace as Nehemiah said in chapter 2.

Once the walls had been rebuilt, Nehemiah moved from rebuilding the walls, to rebuilding the people of God themselves.

To help them recapture their identity as God’s holy people so that they could once again be light to the nations of God’s salvation.

Part of that meant that the people had to move back into Jerusalem so that it would once again be God’s holy city.

If Jerusalem was not restored to be the city of God on the earth where God’s kingdom went forth, then it would be likely that the worship of God at the Temple would decline in importance.

And if the worship of God was devalued among his own people because they chose to willingly live outside of his kingdom, then they would once again be led into sin and idolatry and defame the name of God before a watching world.

So Nehemiah noted in The city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt.

The city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt.

Seeing this problem, Nehemiah knew that he had to help the people of God live for God’s kingdom rather than for themselves so he reminded them of God’s faithfulness in chapter 7, and Ezra the priest, led a revival amongst the people in chapter 8 by reading from the Word of God, which led the people to recommit themselves to keeping God’s covenant in chapter 9-10.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), .

Now that the people had been reminded of God’s glory and their call to live for his kingdom by being a light to the nations, it was again time to revisit the population issue in Jerusalem.

Now for us to see what a passage that is mostly a list of names has to say to God’s people today, we need to see the theological significance behind it.

We touched on how God’s mission in Nehemiah was to restore his people and the city of Jerusalem so that they could once again be a light to the nations of his salvation and prepare the way of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who would die for the sins of the world.

God’s mission in this book is to make worshipers.

Both among his own people as they commit to live all their lives for him and among the nations as they repent of their sin through the witness of Israel and worship the One True God of the Bible.

To accomplish this mission, God had led his people to rebuild the walls, and now he was leading them to give up their lives in the countryside to move back into the city.

As God’s people today, God’s mission for us is the same mission God had then.

God is saving sinners and transforming them into worshipers or as Jesus called them disciples.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

This is what is known as the Great Commission.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), .

These verses give us our marching orders as a church.

The reason the people of God exist is to glorify God and make disciples so that others might glorify him as well.

To accomplish his mission to reach the nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ which proclaims his sacrificial life, death, and resurrection, God is making disciples through local churches, and therefore local Christians, just like us.

And because is careful to point out that God uses everyday believers and not just Nehemiah or Ezra or the other religious leaders of the people to accomplish his mission, we must see how God desires each and every one of us to commit to his mission so that he can use our seemingly small, insignificant, underdog lives to accomplish incredible things for his kingdom.

Reason for not reading the passage

Before we dive into our main points and what this text has to teach us, We are going to handle this passage the same way we have handled similar passages throughout this book.

Instead of me mispronouncing Hebrew names for an extended period of time, I want to show you how this list actually communicates some wonderful truths for what it takes for God to use us to carry out his mission to make disciples in this church.

I want to teach you what God’s word means in this passage as we work through it together.

So how this passage is organized is:

Verses 1-2 provide an introduction to how God was accomplishing his mission to restore Jerusalem to be a light to the nations once again.

Then in verses 3-24 Nehemiah lists the names of those that commit to the Mission and uproot their lives to engage in the work of the Kingdom by moving into the city.

Then verses 25-36 provides the names of the villages that surrounded Jerusalem where the rest of the people of God lived.

Summary

So the main idea of this sermon is that: God uses all of his people, great and small, to carry out his mission to save sinners.

And God accomplishes this mission by his people committing to live intentionally for his kingdom by engaging their lives in the life and ministry of local churches just like ours as they work to proclaim the gospel and make disciples.

And what we are going to focus on in our time together is how we as a church, the local body of Christ here at Metro, must go about committing our lives to that mission so that God will use us to accomplish wonderful things for his Kingdom where we will see the dead brought to life, the blind see, and the lost found through the ministry God has entrusted us to do.

And as we dig into , the first thing we see for God to use our church to build his kingdom then our...

For God to use us as we commit to his mission...

1. Leaders Must Commit to the Mission by Example

Now the leaders of the people lived in Jerusalem.

This verse describes a fresh move into the city rather than an existing situation where the leaders were already living there.

It is better understood as “the leaders of the people settled in Jerusalem.”

At this point, even though the walls had been rebuilt, Jerusalem was still a bit of a fixer upper.

It was going to take some tender loving care to restore the city back to the Holy city that God desired it to be.

And the leaders of the people see the work that is to be done for God’s glory and said “Sign me up.”

The leaders of Israel knew that it was going to take more than just them to make Israel the city of the great King, God himself like says.

But they also knew moving into the city was a hard sell.

Some of the families in the areas surrounding Jerusalem had been there for almost 100 years after returning from the Babylonian exile.

They weren’t too keen on uprooting all their life just to move into a city that still needed a lot of work.

So the leaders of Nehemiah’s day did what leaders to.

They made the sacrifice and led by example.

They were showing with their own lives, that living for the kingdom of God was worth it, and they picked up and moved into Jerusalem.

Church Leaders Today

In the same way, the church today needs godly leaders who are whole-heartedly committed to the mission of God in their own life.

The people of God need godly, qualified leaders to show them what it looks like for a believer to grow in their discipleship.

To die themselves and live for the Lord.

Without godly leaders in the church who are able to say with Paul, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” then the saints will be plagued with ravenous wolves who prey on the weak leading people away into false teaching and false living and the lost will be lead away from Christ to their own destruction.

But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

15 Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.

16 Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

One thing I do.

This is the whole point of Paul’s Ministry.

He wanted his whole life to be about growing in his discipleship and helping others to grow in theirs.

To live all of his life for the glory of Christ

Let those who are mature think this way.

Those that are mature are growing in their discipleship to Christ andThey are committed to God’s mission to save sinners by living it out in their own life as they put their sin to death and follow Jesus and make disciples.

So Paul is wanting those that are mature disciples, living for the Lord to live with such an urgency that Christ and the purposes of his Kingdom is the sole focus of their life.

Let us hold true to what we have attained or been given.

Namely salvation in Jesus Christ.

Christian leaders must remain faithful to the Lord.

They don’t give up or given in when things get hard.

They don’t wander away into false teaching.

They remember the great salvation God has given them and they continue to labor faithfully for the Lord.

17 Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.

Brothers, join in imitating me.

What an amazing statement.

Paul is telling this church that if they want to see what it looks like to follow Jesus, to commit to the mission of God to save sinners by growing in holiness and proclaiming the gospel, in other words if you want to be a disciple who makes disciples, Paul says “Then look at my life.”