Sermon Tone Analysis
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NEHEMIAH 3:1-32
No matter how big or how small, with any project, there comes a time when you just have to get started.
A few months ago Sears was having a sale on exercise equipment.
I know that I need to lose some weight and get back into shape, so we bought an elliptical.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with what an elliptical is, but it’s kind of a cross between a treadmill and a bike and a stairstepper.
Well, first I had to find time to unload it out of the truck.
That took a couple of weeks.
Then I had to find time to get it out of the garage and put it together.
That took a few more weeks.
Now, I’ve got the thing put together and sitting in my bedroom.
And do you know what?
I haven’t lost a single pound yet.
Maybe I actually have to get on it for it to do me any good.
It reminds me of the poem I heard this week:
I spent a fortune on a trampoline
A stationary bike and a rowing machine
Complete with gadgets to read my pulse
And gadgets to prove my progress results
And others to show the miles I’ve charted
But they left off the gadget to get me started!
The remnant didn’t need a gadget to get them started.
That’s what we see them doing in this chapter.
And by doing the work the way they did in this chapter, they accomplished a task that was far greater than anything they should have been capable of doing.
This ragtag, piecemeal remnant in Jerusalem did something they weren’t capable of.
They didn’t have the resources to do it.
They didn’t have the people to do it.
They didn’t have the skill to do it.
Up until this point, they didn’t even have the will to do it.
As a matter of fact, up until this point, they didn’t really even see the need to do it.
But now they did.
And they did something so far over their abilities, that the nations around them were amazed.
I’m sure even they were amazed.
Do you know what happens when God’s people are able to do things they aren’t capable of doing?
God gets glory.
God gets the most glory when He accomplishes something through us that we can’t take credit for.
We can take credit for programs and budgets and skills and abilities.
But when we are able to accomplish something bigger than all of those things, God has to get credit.
That’s what happened here.
God was glorified by the willing work of a bunch of feeble Jews.
He was glorified by the way they accomplished the work—by the way they worked the plan Nehemiah developed for them.
They accomplished the work in the exact same way that God calls His church to accomplish the mission He’s given us.
Do you remember what God’s mission for the remnant was?
To lift up His name before the nations.
They were to do it through His temple and His holy city Jerusalem.
Now, do you remember what our mission is, as the church?
Our mission is to lift up His name before the nations.
We are to do it by fulfilling His Great Commission.
We are to make disciples of Jesus.
We are to baptize them and teach them.
And we are to do that here in our neighborhood.
We are to do it in our area.
We are to do it cross-culturally.
And we are to do it throughout the world.
Look around at who we have here tonight.
Sanballat called the Jews feeble.
What do you think he would call us? Do you think we are capable of fulfilling our mission?
I don’t.
And you know what?
That’s good.
Just like it was good that the remnant was not capable of rebuilding a 2 ½ mile wall that in places was up to 8 feet thick… complete with gates and watchtowers.
Because when we accomplish that mission… and I believe that we will… then nobody can give us credit.
Just like nobody could give the remnant credit for getting the wall rebuilt.
This chapter does more than simply give us a list of names and landmarks.
It gives us a two part pattern of the way God works through His people to accomplish His work.
The two part pattern that is set forth here, is the exact same two part pattern that He sets for His church today.
And it is the exact same two part pattern He has set forth for us at Brushfork Baptist Church.
The first of those two parts is that God accomplishes His work through the diversity of His people.
God accomplishes His work through the diversity of His people.
Once you get past the seeming redundancy of this chapter, one of the things that is clear is that the tasks were different for different people.
The workload was not evenly distributed.
Somebody today might even accuse Nehemiah of not being fair in the way he assigned tasks.
Things weren’t even.
Some people worked a lot harder than others.
Some people accomplished a lot more than others.
The job was divided into 45 sections.
That’s a problem when you only have 40 work crews.
Why did Nehemiah divide it that way?
I don’t know.
We see in verse 5 that some of the crews wouldn’t do their work.
That probably caused part of it.
But other than that, we don’t really know.
All we know is that there were more sections than there were crews to work them.
You know what that means?
It means that some of the work crews took on more than one section.
At least 8 times in this passage, people are mentioned as having “repaired the other piece” or “repaired another piece.”
That means that they finished their original assignment and went on to do somebody else’s work for them.
They either picked up what somebody else was lacking or they went on to do a section that nobody was assigned to.
And it wasn’t like Nehemiah’s original assignments were distributed evenly.
The modern cry of fairness wasn’t in his vocabulary.
Look at the assignment Hanun and the people from Zanoah had in verse 13.
They had to build a major gate—complete with framing, doors and all the security hardware.
Then they had to build 1500 feet of wall.
That was far more than any other work crew had to build.
As a matter of fact, that one work crew alone built over 10% of the wall by themselves.
And then there were some crews that were only responsible to build small sections.
Was that fair?
Not by some people’s thinking.
But as I tell my kids all the time—life isn’t fair.
Workload is never evenly distributed.
And even if it could be, people will always look at the work that other people do as being easier than what they are doing.
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