What’s Worth Working On? 21 of 31 The Story Series Scripture: Ezra 7; Nehemiah 1-2, 4, 6-8; Malachi 1-4 Scripture reading: Nehemiah 1 – 2:6 “Come help me clean up this mess.” It’s a theme that has reverberated in my mind and heart since it first occurred to me back at the beginning of this series. God always invites us to help him put the creation design and vision back on track. It’s a huge process, but God’s got more than all the time in the world. Along the way, at every point along the arc of world history, God’s people are regularly invited to take up the cause, trust in God’s plan and provision and work toward the fulfillment of His vision. This is hard work because so many of the people of this world, all of us really, are infected with the evil sin nature. We would rather realize our own vision apart from and distinct from God’s vision, even though that ambition is actually rebellion against Almighty God, whose will should prevail because He created all this and it is His to begin with. We have no right to mess with it. But sinners keep making messes. The wider the gap is between the upper and lower story, the bigger the mess in which we live. But God patiently, like the kindest of mothers and fathers, surveys the mess, looks into the eyes of His own rebellious children and rather than destroy us in His wrath, invites us to be involved in restoration and redemption, “Come on then, help me clean up this mess.” That in a nutshell is the story of Nehemiah. He heard about a big mess in Jerusalem. It saddened him and he prayed about it. Then God granted him an opportunity to do something about it. Amazingly, the Persian king for whom Nehemiah was the cup bearer, or food taster to protect against the king from poisoning, noticed that something was troubling Nehemiah and he asked him about it. So Nehemiah said a quick prayer and plunged into a request for a paid vacation to get something done in Jerusalem. Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, “How long will your journey take, and when will you get back?” It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time. So he went. Then when he got to Jerusalem and examined the work, he determined that they could do it and he spoke to the Jews or the priests or nobles or officials or any others who would be doing the work. In his own words, “I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace. I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me.” This must have encouraged them. They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began this good work. Nehemiah’s memoirs preserve the story of a prosperous individual who put community needs before his own. He left the opulence of palatial surroundings for a dispirited city he had never seen, a thousand miles from his home. When he reached Jerusalem he had to inspire its citizens and people from the surrounding area to forsake their self-interest for a period in order to do something for the broken city, and once the wall was rebuilt he had to persuade others to do one further unselfish thing, come to live in Jerusalem for good. Nehemiah accepted the call from God to help him clean up a big mess, and the way he went about it he set a good example that empowered him to invite others to make similar sacrifices and join him in the work of helping to clean up the mess. The first thing we see in the reading is that even though Nehemiah had a good job, he was broken hearted over the condition of a city he had never visited and had compassion on a people he had never met. They were his heritage and family. I have a heritage and family in France. But I don’t know who or where the way Nehemiah did. Closer to home, I would be deeply concerned if anything happened to my mother or brothers. Our hearts go out to those who suffer in disasters like tornadoes and we seek to help. We pray for them and some of us are able to send resources or even go and lend a hand. Nehemiah’s lament goes far deeper than family or national connections. Nehemiah knew that the fate of Israel had a direct bearing on the reputation of God in the world. If God was really God and worthy of worship, then God had to keep his promises that he had made so long ago. Nehemiah acknowledged that things were currently as they were because of his people’s sin. Now listen again to his prayer. “Lord, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses.” As we read the rest of Nehemiah we find that being involved with God’s work of cleaning up the mess is not a breeze. More mess making people hang around to mess things up and generally hinder the progress we are trying to make. This happens both from the outside and from the inside. It is why God often says, “be strong and courageous.” That’s what it takes to really make a positive impact that helps to clean up the mess. In Nehemiah’s story the external opposition came from the neighboring governors, whose power base and control were threatened by the potential restoration of a powerful Jerusalem. The internal opposition came from his fellow Israeli citizens, who were either having a hard time being strong and courageous, or they just weren’t that interested in cleaning up the mess. They were busy making their own messes and calling it prosperity. If you’ve read the story you don’t need the details of all this. But I will say that at every point along the way, Nehemiah negotiated the dangers and pitfalls of the mess by staying close to God in prayer. He prayed for protection from their enemies and he set up guards and divided the people into two divisions, half of the people would do the work on the wall, and the other half stood guard because there were threats that their enemies would attack. They also developed this strategy that if an attack occurred at any point along the wall, everybody would drop whatever they were doing, take up a sword and rally to battle scene when they heard the blast of a trumpet that Nehemiah kept near him to sound the alarm. Even though they prayed to God, they also had to be ready to fight. There is a delicate interplay between what God does for us and what he expects of us. He sure isn’t going to hand us everything on a silver platter so we can just sit back and watch. He wants us to help him clean up the mess. At the same time, if we are faithful to serve him with due diligence, eh can make sure we succeed. Some say that we have to keep two things in mind at all times. Pray as if it is all up to God, because ultimately it is. And work as if it all up to us because He won’t do anything if we don’t. It is the same for the internal struggles we face. Nehemiah had several incidents in which he dealt with the fact that his own countrymen had lost the vision of the kind of community God envisions. For example in chapter 5 Nehemiah reports about the outcries of the poor. It made him angry. Listen to what he said when he accused the nobles and officials. This is from 5:7-11. “You are charging your own people interest!” So I called together a large meeting to deal with them and said: “As far as possible, we have bought back our fellow Jews who were sold to the Gentiles. Now you are selling your own people, only for them to be sold back to us!” They kept quiet, because they could find nothing to say. So I continued, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies? I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let us stop charging interest! Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the interest you are charging them—one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil.” As for Nehemiah himself, he said, “When I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, until his thirty-second year—twelve years—neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the governor. But the earlier governors—those preceding me—placed a heavy burden on the people and took forty shekels of silver from them in addition to food and wine. Their assistants also lorded it over the people. But out of reverence for God I did not act like that. Instead, I devoted myself to the work on this wall. All my men were assembled there for the work; we did not acquire any land. Also reported in 6:17-19, “in those days the nobles of Judah were sending many letters to Tobiah, and replies from Tobiah kept coming to them.” Tobiah was one of the Gentile enemies of Israel, nevertheless the Scripture goes on to say, “many in Judah were under oath to him, since he was son-in-law to Shekaniah son of Arah, and his son Jehohanan had married the daughter of Meshullam son of Berekiah. Moreover, they kept reporting to me his good deeds and then telling him what I said. And Tobiah sent letters to intimidate me.” In other words, Some important Jews had intermarried with some important Gentiles and that was giving the Gentiles an avenue through which to have a say in the affairs of Jerusalem and they were not supportive of Nehemiah’s work. When we, the people of God, are called to do the work of God we must be prepared to do battle with enemies both external, the spiritual forces that oppose the kingdom of God, and also internal, our own sinful natures that pull us away from serving God and are more inclined to cooperate with our spiritual enemies. Just as in the external battles, so with the internal battles we must pray as if it’s all up to God but work as if it’s all up to us. The way this looks for the internal struggles is that God gives us the grace and Spirit power to overcome sin, but we must show that we have the will to do so. God forgives sin, and then he instructs us, “go and sin no more.” In Nehemiah’s case he made those nobles and officials promise to change their ways and he made them sign a behavioral covenant so that it would be on record that they had made this promise to live according to God’s will and wisdom. I’ll just mention here that the Evangelical Covenant denomination encourages all their congregations to create their own behavioral covenants when they embark on the Veritas path to congregational health and vitality. That’s because the Veritas path is a venture to make sure the congregation is committed to carefully and purposefully discerning and obeying God’s plan for how they are to minister to the world around them. Ultimately, one of the best things that Nehemiah did to win the people over to the kind of life they should be living was to simply read the book of the Law in public. Listen to Chapter 8:2 and 3, “So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. He read it aloud from daybreak till noon.” Now listen to how the people responded to the Word of God. Nehemiah 8:5-6 say, “Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the Lord, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen! Amen!” Then they bowed down and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.” Isn’t that a great response? We should be so moved by the reading of God’s Word. And then when they learned from the law that it was the time of year they should have been celebrating the festival of booths they went ahead and did it with such gusto and joy that the historian notes that it hadn’t been celebrated like that since the time of Joshua! But events are not enough. Hearts have to change and be sustained in good faith. Sad to say, it wasn’t long after Nehemiah’s work was done that Malachi came along and his word from God was to tell the people they were messing up again! They were offering unacceptable sacrifices. They were half-hearted in their worship. They didn’t trust God enough to bring in the full tithe. And Malachi said, “That’s it. Not another word from God until Elijah comes to announce the arrival of our Messiah. Then God waited four hundred years before he set the stage and sent the angel to announce the birth of the one true King, Jesus our Lord and Savior, whose gospel it is our to preach. We can and should view our work together as something that happens on purpose, not status quo existence but plans for improvement and development. Not criticizing the past but evaluating current structures to plan for the future. In preparing this sermon it occurred to me that most of the great leaders in the Bible actually accomplished something that God asked them to do as part of his plan. They weren’t just moral teachers. They had a task to finish. Moses led the people out of Egypt. Joshua led the conquest of Canaan. The Judges liberated their people from oppression. King David established peace in the land. Solomon built the temple. The prophets’ task was to pronounce God’s judgments and promises of restoration during the years that Israel wandered far from God through idolatry and were taken in into exile. Then there’s Ezra, Zerubbabel and Nehemiah leading the people back and rebuilding Jerusalem. Even Jesus had a task to complete and at the end he said, “It is finished.” So likewise the church, that’s us. Our task is to fulfill the great commission. We are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I, Jesus, have commanded you. We should be careful to develop plans and goals for the long term. It’s great that we are finding things to do in the community. We have to stay involved. We have to be students of the culture we are trying to reach. We have to be flexible to adapt to the needs of the day and the situation. We want to do this conscientiously and deliberately, with a plan and a strategy that we develop together. I believe the Veritas process can help us become spiritually healthier as a group and therefore more responsive to God’s leading. There’s still a lot of mess in this world and God is inviting us to be part of the solution. He invites us today, “Come on. Help me clean up this mess.” Nehemiah put community needs before his own. God invites us to do the same. Jesus called it taking up a cross. Nehemiah left the opulence of palatial surroundings for a dispirited city he had never seen, a thousand miles from his home. All we’re being asked to do is to be willing to move out of our comfort zones and consider making some sacrifices for the sake of reaching the lost. Nehemiah accepted the call from God to help him clean up a big mess, and the way he went about it he set a good example that empowered him to invite others to make similar sacrifices and join him in the work of helping to clean up the mess. Will we accept the call from God to help him clean up the big mess that remains? And he himself empowers us to do so by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The community has a task to do in getting the word of God out to the unbelievers and every believer is called to find his or her place in doing that work. It may not be a full time job, for most Christians it is not, except that they are being Christian wherever they are. Sunday mornings are to refuel, offer praise and prayer, and get ready to serve more fruitfully during the week. Sundays are for receiving grace that each Christian can then "dispense" during the week. Here is where you learn the upper and lower story truth about God’s work in the world so you can share that with others, so as we wrap this up, we finish our overview of the Old Testament. How well do you understand the Old Testament now? Here’s a quick summary of God’s story. In Gen. 1 and 2 we learn that God’s vision is to be with us. In Gen. 3 the vision is lost because God’s original people, Adam and Eve, turn away from him to pursue their own vision. The rest of the story, Gen 12 – Malachi God works with and through the nation of Israel, as the vehicle through which God reveals himself to all the world, and from which comes the divine human /messiah Jesus. All along the way we hear over and over again in many different ways that sin must be dealt with. John 3:16 tells the extent that God will go to get us back. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, to die on a cross for us, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Everything in the OT points to and prepares the way for Jesus. Through Christ God’s vision is restored. Now New Testament Church points to the second coming of Christ. In order for us to take our places in the story and help God clean up the mess that sin has made of the world, we must become doers of the Word and not hearers only. On Sunday you hear it. The rest of the week, upon hearing and understanding we hope and pray that you would have an audacious kind of faith to align your life to the teachings of the Bible. Amen.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 02:11:56 +0000
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