Tom Shrader concludes an 8-session series on leadership through Nehemiah chapters 1-6, examining how Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem's wall in 52 days while facing constant opposition. He emphasizes that faithful service to God happens in everyday work - whether building walls or selling real estate - and that Christians must be immersed in culture without being assimilated by it. The teaching challenges believers to create godly environments in their homes and communities, serving as salt and light in a dark world.
“God didn't call you to save the world. He called you to reach your world.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Just Do It (2004)
Recorded: 2004
Duration: 42 min
Themes: leadership, opposition, perseverance, faithfulness, service, witness, calling, stewardship, facing opposition, workplace ministry, community leader, business owner, parent, mentor, new leader, ministry burnout
Scripture: Nehemiah 1-6, Nehemiah 1:3, Nehemiah 1:4, Nehemiah 2:2, Nehemiah 6:15-16, Nehemiah 8:8, Romans 12:1-2
Theological Themes: biblical leadership, servant leadership, cultural engagement, salt and light, divine calling, spiritual warfare, christian witness, kingdom work
Full Transcript
So, let's get after it. Session 8 of an 8-session series. We're doing something really unique today, in that normally, every lesson is kind of a stand-alone lesson. We come in, we do a segment, and that's it. This is really a summary, and it's even odd as compared to other series that we've done, because in other series, typically, that last session, we may pull some stuff together, but we rarely stop and summarize, and that's what we're going to do today.
We're going to take a look at these first six chapters of the book of Nehemiah. It's 13 chapters, so obviously, we're getting just a portion of what Nehemiah is communicating to us, but we're going to summarize all this, pull this together. For me, personally, there's just a lot of great stuff in here. There's a lot of little sub points that you can take and apply to your life. There's a lot of little sub points that you can take and throw under the microscope, and think about, and ponder. There's that great old word, ponder and reflect on these things.
Focus on Strengths and Leadership
As you look at Nehemiah, we hold him up as a leader. I was doing some reading this week on just life stuff for a class that I'm in, and it's a book that says something that we've taught in here for years, and that is, focus on your strengths and essentially ignore your weaknesses. Most companies, I think, and most businesses spend most of their training dollars and their efforts trying to get people to be better at something they'll never be good at, and all this money is wasted, and you're maximized when we can put you in the situation where you use your strengths, and that's a great challenge, and that's always been something that's been really important.
What we're talking about here is not strengths, but we're talking about leadership. That's what Nehemiah is typically associated with, is leadership. Webster says, a leader is one who leads. Now, we also said that as we study this topic of leadership, we can learn a lot about following, and that's really where most of us fit.
All of us in this room are a leader somewhere, and obviously at differing degrees, and even in terms of just numerical followers. We're all leaders somewhere. You're a leader, by Webster definition, you're a leader if someone is following. So, as we've said, it may be a toddler, it may be a whole company, but somebody's following. You're a leader, but you're also a follower, and a lot of times by studying something like leadership, we can learn what it means to be a follower. So, that's what we've tried to do.
Nehemiah the Cupbearer
Let me just take you through. You've got Bibles. I'm going to invite you to open them to the book of Nehemiah, and we're going to try to understand just a little bit about this guy. Remember, we meet him, and he's introduced to us here in chapter 1. He is the cupbearer to the king. That would mean that he's in a very strategic position. He would spend a great deal of time with the king.
Anytime that there was a party, anytime that there was food, anytime that there was drink, the cupbearer would be there to taste this for him. And then often, it tells us in history, that there would be a relationship that would develop between the king and the cupbearer. That's what happened to Nehemiah and the king.
The Breaking News from Jerusalem
Nehemiah learns in chapter 1, verse 3, that there's a remnant in the providence in Jerusalem that have survived captivity, and they're in great distress and reproach, and the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are burned with fire. This is one of those defining pieces of information in Nehemiah's life. It's that thing that ignites something in him.
Look at his response. Verse 4, "It came about when I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven." Nehemiah hears this information, and he's touched by it. He's consumed by this, and he begins to fast, and he begins to pray.
The Dangerous Moment with the King
If you turn over to chapter 2, a period now of four months has passed, and Nehemiah is in the proximity of the king, and he takes him the wine, and he says, "I have not been sad in his presence." But the king detects this sadness. Look at verse 2. "So the king said, why is your face sad, and you are not sick? There is nothing that this can be but sadness of the heart." And he says there, "I was very much afraid."
Do you remember why he would be afraid? Remember what we said? To be in the presence of the king, and to be sad was an offense to the king, and was oftentimes punished by death. So here's Nehemiah. Make sure you understand the situation. With a heart that's been broken for four months, he's in the presence of the king, and all of a sudden, apparently this burden has become so great that it's just oozing out of Nehemiah, and the king detects that he's sad.
And the king said, "What is this? You're not sick, are you? This can only be a broken heart." And I don't know what the king is thinking. I'm assuming he's thinking maybe jilted lover, or something that he hears that's got some depressing piece of information. I doubt he would associate it with this. He said, "Well, you know, this can only be sadness of heart. I was very much afraid."
And then I said to the king, "Let the king live forever. Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my father's tomb, lies in desolate, and its gates have been consumed by fire?" Then the king said, "What would you request?" I don't know if I'm normal or not. I think that I am. I think that's one of the strengths about the way I teach. I think I'm an average guy who thinks like average people. And that most people connect because we're average. We're just kind of the way we are. In my mind,
I find myself daydreaming a lot. Do you daydream? I find myself daydreaming a lot. In a scenario or situation like Nehemiah's, I know how I would react if my heart was broken like this, and Nehemiah understood that God was beginning to do something in his life. He was God's man, God's way, God's job, God's timing. He knew, humanly speaking, that there was no way for him to participate in this if the king wasn't on board.
So I would think for four months he would have been preparing for this moment. Waiting for the moment when the king says, "What do you want?" The king says, "What do you want?" And Nehemiah said, "I prayed." He just didn't step out and say, "Here's what I need." Then he unloads his plan on the king. He said, "If it would please the king, here's what I need. I need a letter from you—a letter that would guarantee passage, and a letter that would provide me the materials, and a letter that would secure that I could get to the city to be used by God in this extraordinary way."
Nehemiah's Greater Mission
Grabbing your outline, let's fill this in. Why did Nehemiah come to Jerusalem? To build a wall, to secure a city, or to serve God. The answer is really all of them. He came to build a wall, and as he built the wall, he secured the city, and as he secured the city, in all that he did, he served God. He wasn't just laying bricks. He was building a wall, and he wasn't just building a wall. He was on a greater mission.
That's a great way, I think, for us to view our own life. What do you do? Well, I sell real estate, or I'm an attorney, or I'm a teacher, or I'm a mom, or I'm a dad. What are you doing? Well, we're raising these kids. Why? Well, to make them independent of us, and dependent upon God, and good citizens, and people who love God. What's that all about? Well, we're serving this greater purpose that God has placed us here.
Here's Nehemiah. I want to get back on thought, because we are at a key point. Here's Nehemiah, and he's understanding that there are these things that need to be achieved, but overall it's to serve His God. It's the same thing in your life and mine.
Opposition Comes to God's People
So here's Nehemiah: God's man, God's way, God's job, God's timing. And yet, what comes? Obstacles and opposition. This is a very important part. Remember what we said today? There are some of these side lessons that you need to grasp. Here's one of them: You cannot necessarily evaluate your spiritual condition by your physical circumstances.
You can't necessarily say, "Well, here I am, and now there's opposition. There must be something wrong with me." No, we've established Nehemiah is God's man, God's way, God's job, God's time. That's Nehemiah. And the opposition comes. Why? Because that's life, and we have a real enemy. It's very dangerous to say that there has to be this necessary connection between my physical circumstances and my spiritual circumstances.
I'll tell you how this fleshes out practically. I've been in situations where you go into the hospital room, and there's somebody there that's very sick. You walk in, and they're weeping, and they're broken. Somebody's just left there and said, "Listen, what's wrong with you? There must be something wrong with you. You must be sinning in your life. You must have done something wrong to be in this condition." And they're devastated. Not necessarily so.
The Prosperity Gospel Error
We had a presentation on Tuesday to our staff from a missionary of ours—from a missionary who's just been in Sierra Leone, which is essentially one of the top five poorest countries in the world. Talking about the people, and showing the pictures, and you know how susceptible you are to pictures. You see these pictures, and you see this poverty. Are you going to fly in there on one of these jets, with rings flashing and diamonds all over, and say, "Listen, if you're sick or you're poor, there's something wrong with you"?
I'm watching last night, and it's weird, because it was a point I made yesterday, and there they are last night making the point. They're saying, literally, when Christ died on the cross, He died for all your sickness, and for all of your poverty, and all of these things, that that was all redeemed. That's not why Jesus died on the cross. Jesus died for sinners. Jesus died to free us from our sin, not necessarily our poverty or our sickness. That's catastrophic, to allow that to creep into your thinking.
Nehemiah's Accomplishments
Nehemiah is God's man, God's way, God's timing, God's job. Was he there to build the wall? Yes. Was he there to secure the city? Yes. In the process of this, was he serving God? Absolutely, that's what Nehemiah was doing.
Point B on your outline: What did Nehemiah accomplish in Jerusalem? Well, three things that we can identify. Number one, he rebuilt the wall. We're going to look at it today. It took him 52 days, but at the end of 52 days, he completed his task. He had rebuilt the wall. Number two, he secured the city. The wall was up, the city was secure. Number three, he had served His God. I want to apply it to our life, in that Nehemiah is building...
a wall, but the project is about serving God. I want to connect that, and I want to attack this idea of mundane. Here's the phrase, Robert E. Lee's phrase: the glory of the grind. We're grinding it out in everyday life.
One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Bob Newhart, the old one where he's the psychologist. There was a day where Emily, his wife who's a teacher, was having career day. She had these guys coming in, and she asked Bob to come too. The policeman comes in with his gun and badge, talking about catching criminals, and the kids are loving him. Then the fireman's there with his axe, talking about fighting fires. Then Jerry the dentist is there with his tooth, talking about tooth cleaning. And then Bob is there, and Emily says, "Bob is my husband." Bob comes on and says, "I'm a psychologist." There's just this awkward moment. He asks, "Do you kids really know yourselves? Do you kids really know who you are?" Within a few seconds, they're booing him, and he leaves.
But let's take the fireman for a second. He spends most of his day polishing the truck, preparing for that mountaintop exhilaration of going and fighting the fire. The cop - I'm coming in today, and right down here at McDonald and Invergarden, there sits one of the town's finest just sitting in his car, waiting for somebody to roll through that red light. Most of that time, we live in the mundane. I've tried to say to you over and over again: you have to conquer the mundane.
God's Mountaintop Moments in Ordinary Life
What God typically does in our faithfulness, as we slug it out, is He drops these mountaintop experiences. I don't know where this day is going, but in an ordinary day where I don't feel very good, to have Dr. Korkel walk in - that's a huge deal for me. To see Phil, whatever happens next, I know is going to be good.
To have the opportunity to be sitting in a restaurant - we were there like three weeks ago, and we start talking to our server. When I go in a restaurant, I'm in there about three hours, and by the end, I couldn't get this gal to leave. She had just graduated from Hamilton and was on her way to school in the Midwest, Illinois Wesleyan. She wants to be a physician and work in the emergency room at Cook County. She's really brilliant, and she's really lost.
I've learned one of the great questions you can ask somebody: don't ask somebody if they're a Christian, because they don't know. You ask them where they go to church. That's really helpful, because a lot of times they'll say, "Well I don't really go," so they're not believers probably. Or they go to a church, and you just know from it that gives you another set of questions to ask. She doesn't go to church.
My son-in-law said to her, "What do you really like?" I asked, "What do you believe?" She said, "Oh it's kind of evolution and stuff." My son-in-law was there and asked, "What do you really like?" She said, "I love science." He said, "Really? What about it?" She said, "Oh it's like blood," and then she describes blood, what it is, and what it does. He said, "Do you really think that just happened randomly? Doesn't it seem like there ought to be a design to that?" She said, "Oh yeah, I think it just kind of happened," and she walked away. But she couldn't stay away. She would just keep coming back, and back, and back.
God brings these things, and you have those mountaintop exhilarations and those opportunities to serve Him as you're banging it out in the mundane.
The City Secured and Enemies Defeated
Here's the second thing: He secured this city. Let me read to you from chapter 6 now. Chapter 6, verses 15 and 16: "So the wall was completed" - and the official date for us on our calendar would be September 25th - "and it took 52 days. And it came about when all the enemies heard of it, and all the nations surrounding us saw it, they lost their confidence. For they recognized that this work had been accomplished with the help of our God."
The city's secured, and the enemies here are defeated. You and I live in a world... let me go back to the missionary of the other day. You look at that poverty, and you look at that, and you say, "What can you do?" The answer is, not very much. Our flinch is to not want to do something. If we can't fix everything, we don't want to fix anything. That's exactly the wrong approach. God didn't call you to save the world. He called you to reach your world.
Taking Your Ordinary Life as an Offering
Let me read to you Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2, from The Message. This is a paraphrase. I want to tie this in again - Nehemiah's building the wall. You're selling real estate. You're teaching kids. You're taking care of sick people. You're doing whatever it is you do. Making burgers. Whatever it is you do. How should you do it? How should you live?
Romans 12:1-2, Eugene Peterson, The Message: "So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, your eating, your going to work, and walking around - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him. Listen to this now: Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God, and you'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what
He wants from you, and quickly respond to do it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, and develops well-formed maturity in you.
Here's what Nehemiah's doing. He's building a wall, but it's something bigger than that. He's securing a city. It's something bigger than that. He's serving His God. My question to you is, are you serving God? And when we ask this question, we tend to think of these grandiose, huge things that need to be done. I'm talking about in your everyday life.
The Reality of Our Culture
When Dr. Korkel was here and spoke, I don't know how many years ago, he did a thing called a typical day. It was a typical day in a life of America. It was focused on school kids. Here were some of the statistics that Phil used that day. I don't know that these are accurate anymore. They're now five or six years old, but I'm going to guess they're pretty close.
Every day, 150,000 kids carry guns to school. Every day, 2,740 girls are pregnant. Every day, 1,200 abortions take place. Every day, 12 kids are killed by guns. Eight kids commit suicide. Every day, 3,200 kids run away from home. Every day, 1,700 kids are placed in adult jails. Every day, 2,400 babies are born to unwed parents.
Two big ones to me. Every day, 1,500 kids drop out of high school. I think that's a devastating number, ultimately. Every day, 2,987 kids see their parents divorce.
The Wrong Response to Cultural Decline
I think, and I have to guard against this, and it seems to me the evangelical, conservative, politically right-wing people need to guard against this, because I hear this like the culture is so bad, and the culture is this, and almost we want to withdraw from it. That's not the answer. The answer is to be immersed in the culture. Listen now, not assimilated into it, but immersed into it. You don't become one of them, but you infiltrate the culture, but you're not assimilated into it.
The world's a dark place. There's a lot of yucky stuff. I read these statistics, and I look at them, and I go, this is overwhelming. I listen to the news. I listen in a political debate, whether it's greenhouse effect, or whether it's social security, or health care, or whatever these things are, and I'm thinking, what can I do? What am I supposed to do?
Where God Has Placed You
Here's what you're supposed to do. Wherever God has placed you, you're to serve there, to beware of the world around you. There's this giant tide that's moving in one way, and it's your job to be salt and light in the middle of that, and to be clarion calls to people.
I have opportunities all the time to sit with people, husband and wife. They hate each other. We're not getting along. This is miserable. We need to divorce. It's best for the kids. It's best for everybody. No, it isn't. I'm telling you, it isn't. The best thing for you is to put aside your selfishness, and your concern about yourself, and get your can back in there, and make this thing work.
We've got a guy. This guy's a terrific guy. He's got a great wife, and he's got some great kids, but there's a life that precedes this. In climbing the professional ladder, this guy along the way ignored his wife, and ignored his kids, and ultimately it cost him that family. Now he's got a great relationship with the kids out of that family now, and if you look at him, he's kind of a model citizen. He said to me one day at breakfast, there is not one day goes by that I don't regret what I put my family through.
Infecting Your World
I'm really calling you, not to save the world, but to infect your world. I'm sick of hearing about, we don't live in a Leave It to Beaver world anymore. I understand that, but I think you can create a Leave It to Beaver environment in your house.
When the girls were younger, and they'd have, you know, obviously they're not around anymore in that context, but they'd have friends over, and I'd hear them periodically, and a kid would say something, and the girls would say, well you can't talk like that with my dad's ear. My dad's not going to let you talk like that. Or I'd hear them say, we can't do that. My dad isn't going to let us do that, and I'd have to go out and say, you know what, I think your mom wants you at home, and I'd drive the kid home and say, what'd you bring that kid over here for anyway? There's a problem in there.
The Result of Faithful Parenting
Here you are, my girls, now 24, married now at three months, just bought a first house, just bought their home together yesterday. The other one, Haley, will be married two years. Isn't that amazing? Two years this weekend.
So they call last Monday, and they say, it's Father's Day, we got a special idea to treat for you. I said, all right. They said, be dressed up on Saturday morning at 11:15. Don't dress like you normally dress. Wear pants and a shirt, and don't wear shorts and flip-flops and stuff. So I said, well how should I do it? They said, dress like you would dress on a good Sunday. So I said, all right, where are we going? It's a surprise.
So they come. I felt like a little kid, because Saturday I'm saying to Susan, do I look okay? And she said, that's fine. So they picked me up, and we're driving down the 101 and the 202. I thought we were going to see Shrek. I thought we're going to go see Shrek and have dinner or lunch or something. We come up 24th Street. We're going to the father-daughter Father's Day tea at the Ritz.
And the kids are wired, because they know exactly what's going to be. There's all these little girls, about this high, with these snow-white dresses on. And then we come waltzing in, and we said, here we are. And we had a great day. We're two and a half hours. We're not big tea drinkers. We're eating these little sandwiches. I had a cucumber sandwich, and we're in it about a half hour. And Haley said, we're going to have to stop at In-N-Out on the way home and get something to eat.
I'm saying to you, it can be that way. I'm saying to you, it's your responsibility to live that way. It's your responsibility to create that environment.
And it's your responsibility to let people see you live that way. It's your responsibility to call people to a different life. It's your responsibility, like Nehemiah. You look at him—he's building a wall. He's trying to secure a city. He's trying to do what God's called him to do. This is where you need to live. And while the momentum may be moving strongly in one direction, that doesn't mean you go along with it.
There's something else Nehemiah did. I just can't resist this. Nehemiah secures the city without firing a shot. And again, this always gets a little controversial. Kind of like Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. I'm reading an interview with Bill Buckley the other day. The question was this: looking back over the past fifty years, what political development surprised you most? Buckley said, "I was most surprised by the implosion of the Soviet Union. I prayed it would happen, but I didn't dare hope it would. Reagan did." It's amazing to me, for a guy that was as dumb as he was, how much he had figured out, and all the bright guys missed it.
The Cost of Living God's Way
There's a cost with this. This is the way you live. I got this last week's USA Today, from a week ago today. I got it right after the meeting. It's a story, and the cover on it says, "Do Evangelical Protestant Fathers Really Know Best?" The whole gist of this article is, Evangelical Protestants are the best dads. Well, that's no news. Who didn't know that? Evangelical mothers are the best mothers. Why? Here's why: because doctrine affects behavior.
I come in, and are they all perfect? No. Have we got some stupid dads? Sure. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm saying, you want to look at the societal issue. It doesn't matter what you're talking about, the breakdown of the families at the core of it. You look at poverty, you see unwed mothers, the whole thing. Conservative biblical principles address those problems.
What's real funny to me, because you always have to have in an article like this, the counterbalance. So they have the chairman of the sociology department at the University of California, Riverside. And so he's talking, and he's saying, you know, there are multiple—here's a quote—"I see there's multiple paths to involved fatherhood. The key is whether a family is child-centered," which is dead wrong, "and whether the parents show love." And then he says this: "Any family can do that whether they're religious or agnostic." Obviously they can, the point is they don't. You see that? I understand you could take a pagan, and a pagan could do this. The whole point of the article is, they don't do it. See, what you believe affects how you behave. And in Nehemiah's case, it's to build a wall.
Commitment Without Compromise
I don't know what God's called you to do. I just picked up this book for Susan, "Marriage to a Difficult Man." Not because she's married to a difficult man, but I thought it would be an interesting book. And several friends of mine have read it. It's a story of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, and talking about her marriage to him. In this, the author writes, "Sarah had learned the costliness, as well as the magnificence, of being married to an unusual man, because her husband was totally committed to what appeared to him to be the will of God, and he was not cramped by the tiny fears that make another kind of man cautious."
We don't live in a cautious way. Isn't that what Nehemiah said to the people? Do not be afraid. Nehemiah's building this wall. I don't know what you're doing, but Nehemiah understands that His call is to serve God, and that's what he ultimately does. He ultimately serves God in this whole process.
How Nehemiah Fulfilled His Mission
Let me give you the seven things, and that's about all the throat I got left. Seven things, and then we'll comment on them. Under C, how did Nehemiah fulfill His mission?
Number one, he identified the people of Israel. There had been urban blight, essentially, now in the city. He identifies them. They had married and intermarried, and all of those things. So he's assimilating again, or assembling again, God's people.
Secondly, he communicated the Word of God. Look at Nehemiah chapter eight, verse eight. It's a classic passage. It simply says this: Nehemiah has all of the people gathered together, and they read from the book, from the law of God, translating to give sense, so that they understood the reading. Here's what Nehemiah did. He communicated to them the Word of God.
The Power of God's Word
I want to go back to it, because there's this big emphasis on making church relevant. You cannot get any more relevant than to teach the Word of God. Do you remember the USA Today article? Best fathers: Evangelicals. And he goes on to say the reason—in fact, let me just read it to you. He says, "Religious men outscore other fathers on most family indicators, because religion stresses family involvement," because what you believe affects how you behave.
Here's what we've got that separates us from everything else. We've got the Word of God. We don't have to guess what God thought. When it comes to this whole parenting thing, and I know we have seminars about it, and we write books about it, and all this stuff, the Bible, especially the New Testament, doesn't give you much input on it, really. It says, fathers love your wives—or husbands love your wives, wives submit to your husbands, children obey your parents.
I am convinced that Christian life is very, very simple, I think, to see and understand. It's not as easy to live. But the strength that we have is we have the true north. In a world that's lost its compass, you have the true north.
Confession and Repentance
Here's the third thing. He encouraged the confession of sin. We went back, remember in chapter one—see if I can find it here, about verse six. He's confessing sin. He said, "Thine ear is now attentive, thy eye open to hear the prayer of the servant, which I pray before thee now, day and night, on behalf of the sons of Israel. The servants confessing the sins of the sons of Israel."
The Power of Confession
Israel, that we have sinned against thee. I and my father's house have sinned. Isn't that amazing? There's something powerful about understanding sin. I can't, I mean, the chances of me buying this Clinton book are zero, and reading it are obviously remote. But I mean, here's His comment. This is His comment on Monica Lewinsky. I did it because I could. That's what a dog does. And I mean that. That's what a dog does. A dog's walking down the street and says, I can nail that collie, and does it.
This is an amazing thing to me. It is an extraordinary thought process to me. And the man still can't say that he sinned. He still can't deal with all these things. He's still in denial, and we're going through guy after guy after guy. Nobody's guilty anymore. Nehemiah comes in and says, I sinned. I did it. And not only me, my fathers were guilty. And I'm guilty because they're guilty.
You and I as Christians, listen, our sin is forgiven. This whole idea, do I have to confess my sin to have it forgiven? No, He died on the cross, you're forgiven. The power of confessing your sin is calling sin what God calls it. That's the power of it. So the best indicator of where you are spiritually is not talking about how much time you're spending in God's Word or prayer or Bible reading or fellowship, but how do you respond when you sin?
We've got lined up now at church probably three or four cases of church discipline coming. And I can guarantee, they're very difficult. Because when we deal with them, I'm going to get the call. Don't you ever, you think you're perfect? You don't ever sin? I do. But when I do, I confess it. See, there's the distinction. There's the difference. Nehemiah breaks these people's hearts. Nehemiah brings them again and again and again to brokenness over sin.
Soliciting Commitment
Here's the fourth thing. He solicited a commitment from the people. Nehemiah solicits a commitment from these people. When I was a younger man and was part of a non-thinking generation, we said, we don't need marriage. We don't need a marriage license. It's just a piece of paper. Remember that? You don't need marriage. It's just a piece of paper. It's fascinating to me that the gay community certainly doesn't see it as just a piece of paper. They have the exact opposite view that we have. They understand there's something powerful about this. And it's more, in some cases, I'm going to guess, even though these people are blinded by their sin, in some cases, it's more of an understanding that this is a very important step. It's a sense of commitment.
I can't imagine many things that have been accomplished in life without commitment. And I don't, this is a silly illustration probably, but obviously, I just haven't felt very well. I go to the doctor and I wasn't going to go to the doctor. Susan would tell me to go to the doctor for two weeks. I said, well, that's not going to happen. And finally, I felt so yucky on Monday. Somebody in the office said, well, call this guy and He'll see you right away.
So I go in and he said, you're sick. And I said, well, I hope the co-pay is low. He said, why didn't you come in earlier? And I said, because I'm a guy. And he said, look, I'm going to give you three prescriptions. You need to take these things and go to bed. I said, well, that's not going to happen. I'm not going to go to bed. Tomorrow's Wednesday. I got P.L. on Wednesday. I got P.L. on Thursday. I'm going to miss priority living. I take your things, you know, double the dosage or something. I don't know how you do this, but I'm not going to miss that.
Now, is that stupid? It probably is stupid. Is that prideful? It probably is prideful. But let me tell you what flows from the core of it. I got a commitment to this thing. You people commit time, energy, and effort. Some of you are committing a lot of money to keep the thing moving. I'm not going to miss that because I got a sore throat. You've got to really understand that there's some things that you've got to just commit to. And when you say you're going to do something, you need to do it. And that's what Nehemiah got from these people. He solicits their comments and their commitment. Remember, he sat down, they identified a problem, that was a couple weeks ago, and it was all done. He said, now, everybody, are we in this? Yeah. Break.
Three Final Actions
Three more things. He resettled, and we can, these are quickly, he resettled Jerusalem. The town's now repopulated. People are back in. And he dedicated the walls, and you can read the balance of the book and see this. And he verified the return of righteousness. Then he comments on that at the end. Those are those last three.
Living as God's Light
Here's the point I want to make, and then we're done. Nehemiah's a leader, you're a leader. And in Nehemiah's life, He's God's man, God's job, God's way, God's timing. But he also understands that that doesn't mean that there'll be no problems, that there'll be difficulties and challenges. And in the midst of that, you've got something very powerful, and that's God's Word.
You and I are called to live a very different life. We may look, if you drive down, if I drive down your street, and there you are, you're out in front, watering the grass. Your family may, on the outside, look like every other family, but there's something very different about you. There's an understanding of God and who He is. There's an understanding that, yeah, I'm building a wall, but it's bigger than a wall. I'm securing a city, but it's bigger than securing a city. I'm serving my God.
So that's my question today. How are you serving God? And are you serving Him faithfully in what you're doing? Go and, remember we talked about Great Commission? Go and make disciples. And the go there is not get a visa, get a passport, and go. Because the verb, the verb of that sentence is make disciples, not go. It's as you're going, as you're leaving, as you're walking out, you are God's light.
Don't let the culture squeeze you into its mold. And yet, we're immersed in the culture, but not assimilated into it. Because God's going to do something extraordinary in your life, as you obey Him. And I have not the foggiest idea what it'll be. It may be some big grandiose thing that they write articles about in a magazine, but in all likelihood, it's going to be some little thing that's going to put a smile on your face, because you're going to see God did it in some extraordinary way. I love that truth. I love that reality.
Next week, we're going to talk to you about getting control of your life. We're going to look at four specific areas over our remaining four sessions before vacation.
Father, help us take a look at this. Look at and examine our own lives. Thank you for your Son, Jesus, we pray to you in His name. Amen.
Have a great week. We'll see you next week.