My Mind Is Made Up...I've Got Work to Do!

Passage: Nehemiah 4:1-6

Main Idea: We are in a time where everyone must get a mind to work.

Message Goal: Help everyone make up their mind to work for the Lord and His purpose.

Introduction

Colonel Harland Sanders was fired from a variety of jobs throughout his career before he first started cooking chicken in his roadside Shell Service Station in 1930, when he was 40 years old, during the Great Depression. His gas station didn’t actually have a restaurant, so he served diners in his attached personal living quarters.

Over the next 10 years, he perfected his “Secret Recipe” and pressure fryer cooking method for his famous fried chicken and moved onto bigger locations. However, as the interstate came through the Kentucky town where the Colonel’s restaurant was located in the 1950s, it took away important road traffic, and the Colonel was forced to close his business and retire, essentially broke. Worried about how he was going to survive off his meager $105 monthly pension check, he set out to find restaurants who would franchise his secret recipe—he wanted a nickel for each piece of chicken sold. He drove around, sleeping in his car, and was rejected more than 1,000 times before finally finding his first partner.

By the time of his death, there were 6,000 KFC outlets in 48 countries with $2 Billion ($6.3 Billion today) in sales annually.

Colonel Sanders experienced many hardships. However, he had the right mind for success.

The word “mind” could be referred to as the heart. It is the locus of a person’s thoughts (mind), volition, emotions, and knowledge of right from wrong (conscience) understood as the heart.

Practical Point: Essentially, we manifest what our minds are.

An Indian fable says that a mouse was in constant distress because of its fear of the cat. A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat. Immediately it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog. Immediately it began to fear the tiger. So the magician turned it into a tiger. Immediately it began to fear the hunter. Then the magician said, “Be a mouse again, you have only the heart of a mouse and I cannot help you.” —Maxwell Droke

It does not matter how much you change your appearance, if your mind does not change, you’re just a mouse in a costume.

Tony Evans once said,

EVERYTHING you do in your life, you do because of your brain. Without your brain, nothing else works. It is the channel that controls your motor functions, your speech, and all the other functions. When your brain dies, nothing else can work. What the brain is to the body, the mind is to the soul.

Practical Point: When it comes to God and our Christian responsibility, what is our mind?

What does our actions say about our mind?

Let’s consider a few people from the Bible that had a made-up mind:

Jesus had a determined mind to do the will of the Father.

The earliest followers were committed to living as a community in Christ despite the shame and oppressive abuse.

Paul was committed to fulfilling the apostolic mandate to preach the message of Christ to all the world.

Nehemiah was comfortable in the kings palace. Yet, he got word of a problem and was moved to get uncomfortable and do something about it (Nehemiah 1:1-4).

Practical Point: The mind to work requires us to get uncomfortable.

Sermon Points

Share visions from your trip to Atlanta this week. The standard immaculate church that has impressed us and swept us off of our feet is no more. There were three churches I visited, whose former glory was greater than their current. One had a decor of a 1970s living room, which speaks of its irrelevance and inability to meet the needs of the current generation. The second looked like a graveyard, with visions of its prior success, but signs of lost focus and misplaced motives. Yet, there was a third who’s sight was that of occupation. It was vibrant, active, and productive.

The Lord said, the walls need to be rebuilt— not the walls of temporary success. Rather, the walls of the orthodox way of the earliest believers that built communities that will lead to a genuine relationship with God and each other.

Something has happened to our mind. Why is the mind so important in the work that God has for us?

You will face opposition: Nehemiah 1:1-3

Notice in Nehemiah 1:4-11 how Nehemiah prays.

Things will be broken: Nehemiah 2:11-13

3. You will be mocked: Nehemiah 2:19, 4:1-3

4. You will be setup and hindered: Nehemiah 6

Yet, they built the wall! Nehemiah 6:15-19

This is how we respond to such things:

We possess the right mind that will give us what it takes to work.

The temple is a depiction of the current world’s religious state. There are some that are saying that what exists is irreparable. However, this notion is to be combated by the people and their mind to work.

There must be a transformation of our minds by the Word of God (Nehemiah 8-10).

We need someone to encourage us to work (Nehemiah 2:11-18).

3. There must be a team of people who have the right mind.

4. The team must be someone to do the work that is motivated by their mind.