Sermon Tone Analysis

Broken Promises

Nehemiah13:1-31

A dying man got his three best friends together at his bedside (his doctor, lawyer, and pastor) and he handed each of them an envelope with $25,000 in cash inside.

He made them each promise that they would place the envelope in his casket because he was determined to take it with him.

A week later, he died.

At the visitation, the doctor, the lawyer, and the pastor each placed an envelope in the man’s coffin before it was shut

By chance, the three men met about a month later.

The pastor, feeling guilty, confessed that there was only $10,000 in the envelope that he put in the casket.

He told them that rather than waste all of that money, he had sent $15,000 to a mission effort in Africa and asked for their forgiveness.

The doctor then told the other two that the envelope that he left only had $8,000 in it.

He had given the rest of the money to cancer research.

The lawyer was outraged.

He told the two men how disappointed he was with both of them.

He said, “I’m the only one who kept their promise to our friend.

I want you to know that I put the full amount in my envelope in the coffin.

I wrote out a personal check for the entire $25,000.”

We all fail to keep our promises, don’t we?

Our good intentions and plans often fall by the wayside.

Sometimes we blatantly break our promises but other times, we just kind of drift away, a little at a time.

Someone has said that moral failure and spiritual decline are a lot like a flat tire.

Most flat tires don’t happen because of a blowout.

They get flat because air leaks out over time, often gradually.

On average, a tire will lose one or two pounds of air per month in cold weather.

Sometimes you don’t even know you’re going flat until the car gets hard to steer (unless your car is newer and lets you know).

In our passage for today in Nehemiah 13, we come face-to-face with some people who have become backsliders.

To backslide means, “to return to old, often bad, habits, or to a worse condition.”

You would think that the last chapter of this great book would be encouraging about how God’s people took their spiritual commitment to the next level.

Sadly, their story doesn’t have a happy ending.

Within a relatively short period of time, the children of Israel went spiritually flat and returned to their old ways of doing things by violating God’s laws and allowing the world to press them into its mold.

That leads to one of the biggest lessons of the book of Nehemiah:

Good beginnings are no guarantee of happy endings.

At the end of chapter 12, Nehemiah went back to Persia.

He had done everything that he had been called to do: He dealt with enemies, organized the people, rebuilt the wall, repopulated the city, and led a celebration of dedication.

Afterwards, he went back to his job with the king of Persia.

We don’t know how long he stayed but it was probably several years.

When he finally returned to Jerusalem, the city that he had devoted so much effort to rebuilding, chapter 13 records what Nehemiah discovered when he returned.

I can’t imagine what he must have felt.

When he left, 12:43 says, “And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.”

How things had changed.

In chapter 10, the people made 4 promises.

· First, was to submit to God’s Word;

· Second, was to live separate from the world;

· Third, was to keep the Sabbath,

· Fourth, was to support God’s work.

Sadly, by the time we get to chapter 13, each of these promises had been broken.

So, we’ll read from the first 14 verses of Nehemiah 13 and look at each of their four broken promises.

But first, let’s pray.

Pray!

The first broken promise was:

The Submission Promise

The promises of chapter 10 began with an affirmation of loyalty to the Word of God in verse 29:

…To observe and do all the commandments of the Lord our Lord and his rules and his statutes.

In Nehemiah 13:1, we read a description of Israel’s carelessness about what God had said in the Book of Moses concerning the purity of their worship:

On that day they read from the Book of Moses in the hearing of the people.

And in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God,

We see again that Scripture was read publicly and they realized how careless they had been about their exclusive loyalty to God.

As they listened to the words of Moses they remembered what had happened to their ancestors when they were on the threshold of the Promised Land.

· The Ammonites had not met the Israelites with food and water.

· The Moabites had hired Balaam to call a curse down on the Israelites.

We don’t have time this morning to go into much detail on this but I invite you to read Deuteronomy 23:3-5 to get a better understanding of what happened.

The bottom line is that the Moabites and Ammonites were notorious for infiltrating Israel and causing their worship to become diluted.

Here’s the good news.

When the Israelites heard what God’s Word had to say, they obeyed it.

Check out verse 3:

3 As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent.

That’s a great application for us.

Let’s admit that we fall short.

We break our promises.

We mess up.

We don’t always do what we know we should do.

It seems to me we have two choices.

We can continue being disobedient or we can stop what we’ve been doing and determine to live the way God says.

The Christian life is a series of new beginnings.

It’s never too late to start taking God’s Word seriously.

Is there something you need to do that you’ve been putting off?

Is there a decision you need to make?

I suspect that some of you have no question about what God wants you to do but you’re afraid to do it because it’s difficult.

If God is asking you to do something, He will take care of all the details.

The Separation Promise

While they broke their promise to submit to God’s Word, they determined once again to do what God says.

The next promise that they did not keep was to live separate from the world.

They did this in two ways.

An enemy intruder

In verses 4-9, we see that one of these Ammonites was actually living in the temple!

Nehemiah was horrified to find that Eliashib, who was the high priest in Israel, had prepared a guest room for Tobiah in the temple where the tithes and offerings of the people were stored and from this position he could influence everyone.

Tobiah had been a constant thorn in Nehemiah’s side opposing the work on the wall.

But while Nehemiah was away, the high priest not only allowed Tobiah inside the city, he gave him the keys to a suite of rooms

Eliashib had been entrusted with an honored position of high priest but, by cultivating wrong relationships, he misused his office and frustrated God’s work.

In verse 7, Nehemiah called it an “evil” thing that he had done.

The identification of the problem demanded drastic, public, and immediate action.

Take a look at verses 8-9:

8 And I was very angry, and I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber.

9 Then I gave orders, and they cleansed the chambers, and I brought back there the vessels of the house of God, with the grain offering and the frankincense.

Nehemiah went off!

He showed him the door and throws his furniture, TV, computer and clothes out into the street.

Nehemiah wanted every trace of Tobiah’s presence removed from the temple.

He had the room disinfected and fumigated so that no one could even smell him after he left.

The first separation vow they broke was that they allowed a pagan unbeliever to take up residence in their temple.

The second separation promise they broke was to allow mixed marriages to take place.

Mixed marriages