The Work is Not Finished!
Notes
Transcript
Good Evening!
Good Evening!
It’s so great to see all of you here tonight and to be able to sing these songs of praise with you as one church, united in our love for God and our salvation in Jesus Christ.
It is always a great time being around and catching up with brothers and sisters in Christ, and I’m very much looking forward to fellowshipping with you afterward, we hope you will stay and eat with us there is plenty of great food and deserts so stick around and let us get to know you a little better.
I’m really looking forward to getting to know all of you, and I would like to plug a Facebook group that is out there for you to join, it’s called Caddo County churches of Christ - News and Events, and the goal is for that to be a place where we can share information about youth rallies, encampments, area wide singings, and other news and events so please check that out and join that if those things interest you and I hope that they do.
If you would like to turn in your bibles to the book of Nehemiah, that is where we will be spending a bulk of our time tonight because the books of Ezra - Nehemiah have been on my mind a lot lately.
I doubt that I’m alone in this, so I’m going to ask this question and I hope that I get some head nods or something out of you tonight that makes me feel not alone. But have you ever been so overwhelmed with things to do that when you look at the mountain of work ahead of you, you kinda just shut down?
You know that there is a name for this? It’s called Workload Paralysis. It’s like what happens when you have three kids and you have basketball games all week and you haven’t been home to fold the laundry and the couch looks like tower of Babel reaching up to heaven right? You look at that and think, where do I even begin, eh maybe tomorrow.
Or maybe it looks like you are in your last semester of Grad school and you’ve got midterms, comprehensive exams, papers, and graduation to prepare for along with all your family and work responsibilities...
Whatever your workload looks like, when it starts to pile up, it can be intimidating, stressful, and if we aren’t careful, it can cause us to give up, or at least be not as effective as we want to be.
Now think about our problems, and how small they are compared to rebuilding a nation of God’s people! Because that’s exactly what we read about in the books of Ezra - Nehemiah...
The Historical telling of the fulfilled prophecy that they people would return from captivity, That the temple and the city of Jerusalem which had been destroyed would be rebuilt.
The Historical telling of the fulfilled prophecy that they people would return from captivity, That the temple and the city of Jerusalem which had been destroyed would be rebuilt.
Isaiah Prophesied that this would happen in
28 who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose’; saying of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be built,’ and of the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.’ ”
And lo and behold, the first line of the book of Ezra says
“In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia...
The Persians have conquered the Babylonians, and 70 years after the people of God had been carried off into captivity and temple and the city of Jerusalem destroyed, it’s time for the people to go back, It’s time for the temple and the city to be rebuilt.
Talk about something that would give you workload paralysis!
The temple is destroyed, the city is laid waste. The inhabitants of the land have overtaken the area and are not too happy to have these Jews coming back into their lands.
Where do you even know where to begin?
Well, long story made short, after Zerubbabel and Jeshua lead the people down from exile back into the land, the first thing they do is rebuild the alter and the Temple.
Then Ezra is sent down by king Artaxerxes in to teach the people, with
10 For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.
And so Ezra does that throughout the rest of the book of Ezra.
So by the time we come to would think that the people of Judah have should be in high spirits and the work there at this point would be self perpetuating. I mean the people have been sent back to their lands, the temple has been rebuilt, the law is being taught, sacrifices are once again being made on the altar. We I think expect for the people to be rebuilding the city and being all that God has called them to be, and yet at the beginning of Nehemiah that is not what we find at all.
1 The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the citadel, 2 that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. 3 And they said to me, “The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.”
What was preventing the people in and around Jerusalem from building up the walls of the city on their own? What was stopping them from repairing the houses and the infrastructure?
Nehemiah 1:
Now I told you all of that to tell you this. I think we can see some unfortunate parallels between the Jewish people that we are reading about here, and those of us in the church today.
Now I told you all of that to tell you this. I think we can see some unfortunate parallels between the Jewish people that we are reading about here, and those of us in the church today.
There’s so much work to do! We look around at the world around us, we look around and see how our numbers are declining, We understand how we are losing our kids, our friends and neighbors and coworkers being lost to all the “ISMS” of the world:
Atheism
Denominationalism
Post-Modernism
and the list goes on and on
The walls of our society are crumbling around us and it seems like there is a mountain of work to do and the all too often
Prayers of Nehemiah
Prayers of Nehemiah
But I wanted to go to Nehemiah tonight because as we read throughout the book, we see that he is able to unify the people around the singular goal to put their hands to work.
But there is more to Nehemiah than him being a good motivational speaker or a good manager of people. I think what we can learn from Nehemiah is the importance of going to God in prayer.
Throughout the book we read of Nehemiah praying sincerely to God.
I want to look at the three areas of prayer I believe will help us today in getting about the work that we’ve been called to do.
Prayer of Repentance for not doing what we have been called to do
Prayer of Protection in times of fear
Prayer for strength
, “Let us rise up and build!”
Shame - Fear - Distraction
Repentance - Protection - Strength
Zerubbabel and Jeshua - Rebuild the Temple
Ezra - To teach the people and reestablish the law of God.
*The people are back in the promised land, The Temple has been built, the law has been established, It seems the people were content with sitting around with the walls and the gates of the city of Jerusalem in utter disrepair.