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We’re going to start today on a journey together. And here’s here’s my hope. This is a this is a good start into this book. I don’t know what it is about the feeling that I have today, but it is a good start to this book because this book kind of starts in, in the the tragedy of life really is where it’s at. And we’re going to go on a journey together with Nehemiah. And what we see in the book of Nehemiah is a transformation that takes place in the hearts and the minds and the lives of the people in Jerusalem. And I think that’s perfect for any church at any point in their lives to study the book of Nehemiah. It’s about building God’s kingdom in Jerusalem. And as a church family, we’re about building God’s work as a community here together. And so there’s a lot of comparisons that we can draw from the book of Nehemiah into our lives. Nehemiah is about healing a broken city, and it’s about healing broken hearts. It’s about loving God’s people and loving God’s city. The good thing about Nehemiah and what we’re going to learn together, especially here in the beginning, is you can’t really do anything for God until you care. A lot of us face the same sort of danger in all of our Christian lives. Is a is a place of of complacency. Periodically in our Christian lives, we find that our experience in relationship to God, in a lot of ways, is maybe comparative to a roller coaster.
It’s got its ups and downs. Just remember, with every down you’ve got to make the up. But a lot of times as as believers in Christ, we’ll start the descent in our relationship with God and enter into what we cliche the term as a as a valley in our walk with him. And sometimes we never make it back up to that mountaintop. And Nehemiah is a book all about getting to that mountaintop and and looking for that experience with God. You know, I think in a lot of ways we’re not going to look at this today, but just a tidbit of information. It’s because we really don’t take the opportunity to experience and appreciate God where we are in the moments that we’re in. In times of desperation, we wonder where God is. And in times of triumph, we forget about him in our celebration, and we forget to just enjoy that relationship with him, right? Right where we are in our lives. And Nehemiah was really a man appointed by God to recognize this before the people. And what I wanted to do as we started this, this book together this morning is identify for us how it relates to our lives. Because what Nehemiah is about to do is he’s about to go build, rebuild a hurting city, a city that was really a wonder of the world and praise to who God was, the city of Jerusalem.
And he’s been called back to build, build the city. And he’s not the first one to go back to attempt to build the city. Nehemiah is actually the third person to go back to attempt to rebuild the city. Zerubbabel has gone in with a with a few people. After the Babylonian captivity. Ezra has gone in. And now Nehemiah gets led of the Lord to go help to rebuild and work this city, bring it back to to God and seeking his praise in their lives. This story happens happened thousands of years ago. It literally was hundreds of years before Christ was even on the scene. And so for us to begin to make some application, we got to draw ourselves into the into the story. And so what I wanted to, to bring to our attention this morning is that God is really a God of the city. He built the city of Jerusalem and he calls us as people. He says in Matthew 514, you are the light of the world. A city set on a hill that cannot be hidden. And what God has called us to do. Last night I flew in from back east doing the funeral and speaking at a few churches. It was a great opportunity, but as I was flying in, it started to become nightfall from Vegas to to Salt Lake City.
And I got to do is look out the window and admire the city, to look out over the the horizon and just see it lit up in the night. It’s a beautiful sight to ever see. Vegas or Salt Lake City when you come in. Anybody ever traveled at night knows that. But that’s the way Jesus describes us as a church. He wants us in the in the midst of darkness to be that city on a hill that’s burning brightly for him. Because we as people really are called to a world of darkness. Winston Churchill said, these aren’t dark days. These are great days. For no matter how dark the day may be, the greater your light may shine on Christ. And so someone who’s optimistically on that mountaintop would look at their situation for God and say, bring on the bad stuff, because I want this light to shine bright for you and for really for the the city of Jerusalem in the area and time in which Nehemiah is there. That’s the kind of attitude that it was going to take to see mountains move for God and to see that city restored to to following after God in their lives. And it may not be any different from where we are in our Christian lives. In a lot of ways, we are in the need of walking in a spiritual desert, looking for an oasis, and we sort of need that pick me up.
Maybe in our lives we kind of set some goals. As this year started to grow in our relationship with God and and kind of haphazardly, we’ve sort of gotten off track. I like a lot of times I knew my Christian life. I kept setting that goal that I wanted to witness to. So many people, share God’s love with so many people, read the Bible through in a year. And then as I was growing as a Christian, I really didn’t have the maturity of consistency and even sometimes lack that. But but I failed to to learn that. And so when I would start on such a great journey with God two months into the year before I knew it, I’m like ten chapters behind on on the yearly Bible reading. You know, I haven’t probably talked to anybody about the Lord in a few weeks and and maybe even missed a couple weeks of attending church to come and encourage my body of Christ together. But Jesus is a God of the city, and he’s called you guys to be that light. Even from the very beginning when he created Adam and Eve, he said, be fruitful and multiply and fill fill this earth. I mean, really what he’s saying is make an awesome mega city, build a great place that is fruitful for God. At the end of the book of Revelation in chapter 21, we see that Jesus has returned for his church in his second coming.
And it says in revelation 21 that what he brings to this earth is the new Jerusalem and the new heaven upon the earth. He recreates that, and Jesus literally rebuilds a city. He’s a God of the city. One day we’re going to reign with him in the New Jerusalem. Christianity is all about the city. Jesus refers to the Jerusalem as Zion, the place in which he will return for his Second coming. In Psalm 132 and verse 13, it’s a place that God lives, and a place where God’s people live in this Jerusalem. The city shows us what life would be like. This is Zion. This new Jerusalem, if all of us would just seek the face of God together. God has a heart for the city. Christianity really began in the urban world. It was a belief that was established within the city. When you read the New Testament, you’ll find that a lot of the epistles that the Apostle Paul wrote were letters to the churches of large cities. Christianity started into the city and literally went out into the countryside. Today in America, it seems kind of backwards to the power of the churches are out in the country and it comes into the city. It’s weird when you see the word pagan in your Bible and you do a cultural study on what the word pagan means.
The word pagan literally means out of the country. The country is where the weird people are. I just came back from there. I hope they don’t listen. I apologize. We can get online. If you guys don’t know, our sermons are online now and you’re welcome to get on and listen to those sermons anytime. So I told them that back east, so I should probably erase that. But the country is weird. Weird things are. It’s different. It’s different than the rest of the world. But it’s fun. I enjoy family and friends all back there, but God has a heart for the city. By about 300 A.D. it’s said that within the city, over half of all people were Christian. And then now, in American history, for the first time in American history, the majority of people today live within the city. And you got to understand is you see the significance of the city, why it’s so important in God’s eyes, because the city really dictates the culture of the country, doesn’t it? It’s where import exports are. It’s where our culture is identified. The new fashions and trends come from, the popular things within our society are developed there, and the city is important. If you can get the city for God, then then you win the hearts of the masses of the people, especially within a given area, and it leads out into the country.
That’s why when Stacey and I, when we were looking to move in the United States, we knew that we were going to go into missions. We actually our scope was the world. And I had the plans of going to Into India is where I wanted to live. And then I came and visited Utah in 2003. And I and I saw this area of the United States, and it kind of blew my mind. There’s still 24 cities in in Utah that still have yet had a single church, Protestant church. 24 cities. This is America. It started, you know, as a Protestant nation anyway. But over three by 300 AD, over half of all cities became Christian nations. And and knowing how significant the city was to God, I looked at this population, this area, the people that are considered less than 2% Protestant within the state of Utah. And our heart just broke for this area of the world. And by Protestant, this is what I simply mean less than 2% Christian. This is what I mean. The way that we follow Jesus in the first century. The core essentials. What made a Christian a Christian? We don’t have that stand here. We don’t understand what it means to be created in God’s image. We don’t understand who Jesus is according to the Bible. We don’t understand who God is. We don’t understand the authority that God’s Word carries. We don’t understand the purpose of the church here.
And so our heart broke. And just seeing this city, a place that we desire to come and be that light that God has called us to a place that God has brought a family together to be that light together for him. And we can’t begin to do what God has dreamed for us. Unless our heart breaks for the city. We can’t begin to dream what God desires for us in a place of complacency. God desires his love for the city to be proclaimed. As we go through this series together, what we’re going to be noticing is that the book of Nehemiah, what it focuses on, is healing a broken city and a broken people. As we look in the first section, what we see is God’s love for the city. And and we looked at the idea of Jerusalem. This was God’s city. And this was the way Jesus viewed his own personal city in which he did ministry. In Luke chapter 19 and verse 41, it says, when he, Jesus approached Jerusalem, he saw the city and he wept over it. Jesus didn’t feel guilty. He felt conviction and love towards the people there who didn’t understand him for who he proclaimed himself to be. He was about to go to the cross, and he’s just done ministry in this area of the world for three and a half years. And yet he still sees a people who are broken and lost without him.
And he knows, as he enters into Jerusalem on the colt, on the back of a donkey, he walks, he goes into the city, he rides into the city, and they say, Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. They’re quoting from the psalm, and that very same psalm that they’re quoting from. If they just read a couple of verses later, it said, he is the stone which the builders rejected. The same psalm they’re using to praise God is the same psalm that also says that the people would reject them and send them to the cross Jesus. Knowing this, though in the moment of praise weeps brokenly over a city, because they’re in a far cry of where God wanted them to be in a relationship with him. There are plenty of similarities between the book of Nehemiah and our lives. Nehemiah is about building a wall, but here what we’re going to find together. It’s about building also a city within a wall. People that follow after God. The people in Jerusalem needed a home. And we as a church family, we need a home to grow together in. They are in an urban area and so are we. They need the God of the Bible and so do we. They’re waiting for the for the coming of the Messiah. And we’re waiting for the second coming of the Messiah.
A lot of similarities to the people in the and the time in which has taken place in the book of Nehemiah to the world today. A lot of application can be drawn from this book. What we’re going to find is that as we see Jesus’s passion for the city. Nehemiah, in a lot of ways throughout the entire book, reflects a lot of what Jesus was all about, as he did ministry within the area of Jerusalem as Nehemiah sought himself to build the city. What we as people can draw from that is the same desire that Jesus had for the city of Nehemiah. The same, or excuse me, the city of Jerusalem is the same desire that Nehemiah had, and it’s the same desire that we as a church family should carry forth for the. Our own areas in which we live. And one of the things I’m very committed to is the local church, because it takes a local church to reach a local community. One of the hobby horses of the American church today is, is to kind of worship, in my own personal way, and even on my own agenda and my own place. A lot of times, without even being a part of a church, just in my in my home. Um, and I don’t think it’s a very healthy thing for the state of the church, because what it does is produce a lot of individualism, and it never reaches out to the place that God has called you to.
There’s a reason that God established local churches in local communities is because he wants you to come be a part of that family and reach out to the community. A cord of three strands isn’t easily broken. There’s power in numbers, and there’s a lot bigger voice that we can use to proclaim God wants you to be a part of his family. I mean, this is his bride. Think about in Scripture. God calls it his bride. It says in Ephesians five. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. This is his bride. He calls you in Ephesians the way. Same way Jesus loved his bride. For husbands to also love their wives in the same way. And what that what that says to me is that if anyone messes with my wife, it gives me the right to beat them up. I mean, Jesus gave it all as much as he could, as hard as he could, all the way to the point that his life was given for Christ. And if you really want to make God mad, mess with his bride, right? You get my button to go from 0 to 60. Say something about my wife or boxing right there. You don’t. You don’t have to. We don’t have to call the match. No bell will ring.
The fight is on. This is his bride. This is his beautiful bride that he sacrificed his life with and gave everything that he had for you. Doesn’t that make you incredibly value to know that valuable? To know that the price that could be paid for your life is the most infinite value that has ever been placed on the life of anything has been placed upon your head. His bride, the church. And God has called you as a city to be a light. One of the things that we see as we dive into the book of Nehemiah, if you have it with you here this morning, if you have your Bible with you just it’s in the Old Testament, right after the book of Ezra and verse one, I’m just going to go through the first chapter of Nehemiah together with you. We’re going to look at the first 11 verses and see as Nehemiah carried this heart for the city, how Nehemiah got to this point and where Nehemiah is going, so we can begin to develop the same heart together. Verse one, it says the words of Nehemiah, the son of Zachariah. Now. It happened in the ninth month of Kislev in the 20th year, where while I was in Susa, the capital. Now, those are a lot of big words there in the beginning of the book of Nehemiah. And so what you say is just say those words confidently, and people just take your word for it.
But what we find here is that Nehemiah isn’t a spiritual leader. I think it’s one of the most interesting things that we can put in, put in the book as we begin to study together, is that Nehemiah is just a regular kind of guy. He worked for the King. It tells us that it was in the around the time of December that Nehemiah was having this meeting or vision from God that God led him to, to do what he’s about to do in the month of Kislev. It tells us here. But it’s literally in between November and December, and the year is about 4445 BC, and he was just a common man. And what we’re going to find as we study together, and we look further into the passages that Nehemiah wrote within the scriptures, that Nehemiah was a journaler. We’re not going to get a lot of the world’s opinions on what Nehemiah is about to do. Nehemiah really just took some pages from his journal and inserted it within this book. For those of you who like to journal. Nehemiah may be a man after your own heart. Those of you who hate the journal, I don’t blame you. Who knows where it could end up? People could post that thing on a blogspot somewhere. But Nehemiah is just revealing to us his personal leading from God as he desired to see the city transformed and and grow back into relationship with the world.
He was just a common man. In verse 2 to 4, as it continues on, it says that Hananiah, one of my brothers, and some of the men from Judah came, and I asked them concerning the Jews who had escaped and had survived the captivity and about Jerusalem. Here’s what they said in verse three. The remnant there is in the province who survived the captivity are in great distress and reproach, and the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are burned with fire. 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. This is what Nehemiah finds out. His friends come from Jerusalem and he asks about the city. How’s the city doing? And the people tell them that people have been killed. People have been drug off. People have been in exile. It’s like finding out the news. If we didn’t have news today, someone come in and explain to you that the city of New Orleans had just been wiped out by a hurricane. I think we’re on the five year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. We’ve literally lost this city. It’s been devastated. People are living in the in the arena down there in the Superdome. People are killing one another. People are starving to death. We’ve got elderly people that can’t get to their medication.
They’re all dying. This devastating news gets to Nehemiah, and Nehemiah just weeps. He is broken. It tells us in the bottom of verse four that he’s fasting and praying. If you associate this with chapter two and verse one, it literally says, Nehemiah spent months fasting and praying over brokenness for the city. The interesting part about this passage of Scripture is that the news that Nehemiah got about the city of Jerusalem is 141 years old. This isn’t anything new to Nehemiah. Nehemiah already had this information. They’ve already sent back Zerubbabel and Ezra to begin to build the city. And he’s finding out the same situation that he knew 141 years ago. The Babylonians came into Jerusalem, and they stormed Jerusalem and knocked down the gates, and they carried the people into captivity. 141 years later, and now Nehemiah is crying over it. I mean, what in the world is going on? This guy would say, this is just a little bit late. Nehemiah, isn’t it? I mean, it’s the equivalent of us finding out that there was a civil war that took place in our nation’s history that existed the same amount of time period for us as it did for Nehemiah to find out that the city of Babylon was destroyed. Abraham Lincoln was shot. Tear. Anybody ever been moved to tears over the death of Abraham Lincoln? Nehemiah, to me as I read this passage of scripture, sounds crazy.
Why in the world do we need to ask ourselves the question, why in the world is Nehemiah moved with such compassion for the city, when it’s 140 years since Jerusalem had been destroyed? As I looked at this and begin to study and question why Nehemiah would be experiencing this kind of pain, it became sort of a conviction to me in my life. Maybe the problem isn’t that Nehemiah has issues. Maybe it’s me. I think as we looked in the book of Luke and we saw that the way that Jesus responded over the city of Jerusalem as he wept for the people who didn’t know him. Nehemiah and his personal life now is experiencing the same heart that Christ carries for the city of Jerusalem. Nehemiah is being touched by the Holy Spirit and things that used to not convict him, and things that he kind of got complacent over. And now he is carrying the heart of God in the situation. And Nehemiah is broken for a city. He’s broken for God’s city. He knows that there is a place in which Jesus plans to come one day and rule and to reign. And right now, that city sits desolate. Nehemiah isn’t the unhealthy one in this situation. It’s me. So we give this this feeling or aura about ourselves as people. As long as we’re talking about our problems, it looks like we’re doing something about it.
And a lot of times, you’ll see even people who blog on the internet over particular beefs that they have with different issues in society today. But all that talk looks as if we as people are putting on a facade or a gossip exists in our lives where we talk bad about situations and in our lives that we’re actually doing something about it, when in reality, all we’re doing is creating a bigger problem that that makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution. And Nehemiah could have looked at this situation. He could have been bragging about or talking about how ignorant these people were going back into Jerusalem, trying to rebuild the city. And they keep filling with rubble. They they haven’t really succeeded with Ezra. And now Nehemiah is looking at the situation he could just complain about and say, forget about this. Nehemiah is living with a king. I mean, he’s got things in his life that are really going his way. And what we discover here is he begins to get the heart of the God of God. Nehemiah is moved to do something about it, not just complain. He wants to make a change. This morning I’m just going to share some information with you concerning the Church of America. I don’t want you to feel guilty about the state of the American Church in America. Don’t feel guilty. Here’s what I want to do.
Something convicted. There’s a difference between feeling guilty and convicted. Feeling guilty means I just walk around and feel bad, and I probably end up complaining. But I don’t ever get up and do something about it. Feeling convicted about it is that I start to carry within my lives the burden and passion that God has for his people. And I become that city on the hill that burns brightly for him today. This is what I want to say goodbye to. I want to say goodbye to complacency. I want to say if I made a commitment to God to study my Bible, if I fall in that, just get back in and study my Bible. If I made a commitment to God to share my faith with other people, no matter how difficult they’ve made it, I want to share my faith with other people. Whatever God has called me to do, I want to get rid of that sin of complacency, that place where it just makes me get apathetic and do nothing. I mean, how do you get to a place and all of a sudden, in four years you haven’t been to a church? Here’s why you don’t show up for a couple of weeks, and then a couple weeks turn into a couple of months, and you think of all the excuses that you can’t be there. And all of a sudden, you know, before it’s it’s been months now, it’s turned into years, and you’ve entered into a place of complacency.
It’s not okay to be complacent in your walk with God. God has called you to more to that, and I’m not saying your whole purpose in a relationship with God is to avoid complacency. It’s to enjoy him and the way he’s created you and grow in that relationship. But we have to recognize as people we get complacent sometimes, and we forget that God has a city somewhere that we need to be active and a part in pursuing and growing with people together in him and being that light. Utah I’ve shared with you is less than 2% Christian. If we were today as a church family, think about this. If we were just to be committed to the city of Utah. Utah is growing so fast that if we planted a church of a thousand people every day, we still can’t keep up with the population increase that’s occurring within the state of Utah, let alone reach the people that are already here. Do you see the significance in that? 24 cities remain without a single church. Have never had a church starting at whatsoever. Um, in my hometown, where I just came from, 50,000 people live there. One day I decided, as I was trying to think about whether or not I should come to Utah and plant a church. Feeling really convicted? Just weighing all the options about being here.
I started to count the churches in my home city. How many churches are here? Because I knew Lehigh needed like a church. Northern Utah county. Be good to have a church here. When I got to 250, I stopped. I don’t know how many churches there are in our city. I have no idea why they’ve never gotten to this area of the world. Does not make sense to me unless the sin of complacency crept into the church, and we became content with just our own personal walks with God, but never about sharing that with other people within America today, America is now considered the third largest nation that needs missionaries in the world, the third largest mission field in the world. The only two nations that are ahead of us are India and China. 3000 churches in America closed their doors every day. 80% of all churches have either plateaued or are declining. The state of the American church is going inappropriate sounds. You know, sometimes as church, as Christians, we need to think about this mentality, whether it’s for us or not. We we started to develop while churches are closing their doors, 80% of all churches are declining or plateaued. We think about what I can get out of the church, but not not necessarily what I can give. And I think in our relationship with God, if I had to choose between which requires me and helps me to grow more, it’s really learning how to give and giving.
I learn a lot about my relationship to God. I mean, I learned about how much he really had to pay for me to even pay attention to him, how much God had to give to me before I even thought about giving back to him. And I’m not telling you that to guilt you. I’m not telling you that to convict you. But as long as the state of the church continues to go like that, what’s going to continue to happen is the churches that are in local communities to reach local people will continue to shrink and die, and they’re not going to have people that have the desire, like Nehemiah, to go into a city that’s breaking or go into a church that’s breaking and begin to minister and see that church take off and grow for the Lord. And so these statistics that I share with you is going to continue to suggest that the state of America’s spirituality and its relationship with Christ will decline? I tell you that. Let me remind you again. It’s not it’s not to guilt you. It’s to convict you. It’s to look at this situation. Look at our spiritual lives and say, God, okay, this is where I’ve been in my relationship with him. And this I need to grow in these areas. I need to start taking this serious in my relationship with you.
When you think about Nehemiah. Nehemiah is led of the Lord. He’s going through this great distress. He’s he’s fasting and he’s praying. What about the people who have lived for the last 141 years? This was no new news to them. They’re looking at Nehemiah. He’s sitting there weeping and crying. They’re thinking, we’ve known this man. What’s the big deal? I was in Jerusalem last week. It’s in shambles. It’s been in shambles. That’s Jerusalem. That’s the way we all know. I mean, they’re generations past. These people have only known a broken Jerusalem. They’re used to it, and I don’t want to get like that as a church in my relationship with God. Hey, he just kind of goes, God’s called me to grow in that. To be convicted where I’m falling short and to grow in that relationship with him. So I like where Nehemiah starts, and this is where we’ll focus the last half of the of this, our time together as Nehemiah begins to pray. He doesn’t complain. He weeps and he fasts, but he looks for a change. It says in verse five, I said, I beseech you, O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who perseveres or preserves, excuse me, the covenant and loving kindness of those who love him and keep his commandments. I like how Nehemiah begins his prayer. The first thing Nehemiah does is he recognizes the need and he prays about it.
That’s a good habit to get into, but I like on top of that. Not only that, Nehemiah begins to think about prayer and focusing on the need that he has on prayer and really getting God behind the vision that he’s put upon Nehemiah and the burden he’s put upon Nehemiah. He’s agreeing with God. God, you’ve placed this in my heart and I’m talking to you about it. I need to do something about this. And he focuses on the magnitude of God and all that he is in this prayer. He just opens up in just the beauty of who God is. He’s a powerful God who preserves his covenants. He said he’s full of loving kindness, a people that have rejected him for well over 100 years. Now. He’s just looking to that loving kindness in that God. You know, in the situation of such a hopeless city, you know, what Nehemiah needs is he needs a big God. As we look to reaching Utah for Christ, you know what we need. We need a big God. As I went to the funeral last week, and the man who passed away was a faithful follower of Jesus, the family placed their hope in seeing him one day, but you know what they need in that situation to know that they are worshiping a big God. When things get hard, God, where are you? And Nehemiah says in this prayer, God, you preserve those covenants.
God, we know that you have loving kindness. God, we know that we don’t have to be hopeless people. God, let’s just talk about where you want us to be. Doesn’t make God a pinata. I love that about Nehemiah. He doesn’t say, okay, the city. We need some in the city. Okay? God put something in the city. He starts to just enjoy where they are in their relationship with God, whether he’s in the valley or in the mountaintop. Nehemiah is just focusing on the glory of God, and he’s saying, God, I remember that you are a loving, kind God. God, I remember that you keep your covenants. God, I remember that you’re big enough to handle the situation. And then in verse six he says, let your ears now be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant which I am praying before you now, day and night, on behalf of the sons of Israel, your servants confessing the sins of the sons of Israel, which we have sinned against you. I and my father’s house have sinned. Nehemiah recognizes what’s obstructing that relationship to God. It’s sin. Sin always pulls us away from that relationship with God. Since the beginning of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve sinned. And it says they ran and hid. I like how Scripture refers to Jesus as the wonderful Counselor in Isaiah chapter nine and verse six.
There’s no better counselor than the wonderful counselor who Christ is, but our tendency as people is to not open up to that. Most people who need counseling never seek after it, because the initial step in getting counseling is coming with your need and sharing what that need is. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Their human response was to run away. They ran and they hid. And Nehemiah, knowing that the nation of Israel has done that for so long, he says in verse six, okay, God, we’re not going to be complacent anymore. The stuff that I’ve been falling short on, I’m giving to you right now. It would have been easy for Nehemiah to criticize the situation, but it was harder for him to make the sacrifice and he simply just confesses to God the need. In verse eight it tells us, as he goes on, remember the word which you commanded your servant Moses, saying, if you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples. He recognized that God had already told him, that’s what’s going to happen if they reject him. It says in verse nine, but if you return to me and keep my commandments, and do them, though those of you who have been scattered were in the most remote parts of the of the heavens, I will gather them from there, and will bring them to the place where I have chosen to cause my name to dwell.
So God has revealed to the nation of Israel that the place that the Messiah will live is within Jerusalem. And what he reminds the people, and what Nehemiah is reminded of in his prayer, is that what it’s all about is the name of God name. And it says in the very last passage my name to dwell at the very bottom sentence, there name is a closely identified or recognized with the the person in whom you’re speaking of. To talk about someone’s name is to refer in the flesh to that person. Let me just tell you guys. In doing ministry in Utah, we have just come off the busiest summer of ministry that I’ve ever had here, and I am. I’m getting close to 30 years old, and at 30 years old, I feel like I’m walking in the body of an 80 year old. I am tired walking off the summer, I realized if we do what God has called us to do, and if we live like the light that God has called us to be, it gets exhausting. And anymore. I don’t really care much to play games over God. It’s one of the things I didn’t share with you about churches today is that while 80% of all churches continue to decline or plateaued, 3000 churches shut their doors every day. Is that a lot of churches now are walking away from the fundamentals of what the faith is, the very core of Christianity.
They’re beginning to leave that. And here’s why. It’s because they don’t think it’s very popular. Well, churches, some churches today are preaching that there’s more than one way to heaven than when Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the father but by me. He didn’t really mean that. So to embrace all faiths, let’s just open ourselves up to every belief that’s out there. Because who knows, there could be many ways to God, and the message of the hope of the gospel is getting lost in the midst of all that. And it’s becoming a church about me ism. It’s becoming a church of popularity. It’s becoming a church of entertainment, but it’s becoming a church that’s forgetting the doctrine of truth. Do you realize that some churches today are preaching a theology? It’s called Post Jesus, where they say, well, we don’t really mention Jesus’s name in the service because it kind of it might offend people, but, you know, post Jesus is really preach. Well, that’s all it is. And that’s not a good place for any of us to be. If that is the message, then that’s what the church should preach. If someone would walk in your door, they see a cross hanging on your church building. I hope the message would be about the cross.
The Bible says the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but to us which are saved, it is the power of God. I mean, that is the church’s battle cry. It’s what we stand behind. It’s who. It’s who Jesus is and what he was all about and what he came to this earth for. For the dying of our sins, for the forgiveness of our sins. That way, those who are complacent in a relationship with God can enter into that relationship with him based on what Jesus did and grow in that relationship. If we lose that message, we might as well disassemble. And Nehemiah says in the bottom of this that we they forgot the name of God. But he says in verse nine, my, we chosen to cause where he causes my name to dwell. It’s about you. Let’s just strip away all the garbage and just say, Jesus, it’s about you. I don’t want to play games. I didn’t move here to play games. Guys are all our family now with a baby on the way. But together, we’re not going to play games. It’s just about Jesus and these things that I’ve made life out to be. The things that I thought were so significant, I just eliminate from my life and focus on that relationship with Christ. It says in verse ten, this Nehemiah goes on in the prayer, they are your servants and your people whom you redeem by your great power and by your strong hand.
O Lord, I beseech you, may your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and the prayers of your servants, who delight to Revere your name, and make your servant successful today, and grant him compassion before this man. Now I was the cupbearer to the king. Nehemiah has gotten to a place where he’s recognized the need and he’s about to make his mark. So recognizing the state of complacency, a state of apathy in your relationship with God requires you to make a mark. Here’s what I’d encourage you to do today. If your walk with God isn’t where it needs to be, and you know there’s something that God has laid upon your heart to work on, tell somebody. You see in the life of Nehemiah, he made this decision to follow God where he’s going immediately. As soon as he ends his prayers to speak with the King, the man, if he enters the presence of the King in a wrong attitude or manner, could literally have his head chopped off on the spot. Because Nehemiah is about to mark the state of complacency in which he was in, and how it’s transitioned to a desire to follow after God with all his heart. Nehemiah decided that he wasn’t okay with the state of the city of Jerusalem, and he wasn’t going to complain about it anymore, but that he was going to be a part of what God wanted to accomplish there.
Nehemiah is about to meet the king. You think about what Nehemiah is going to give up. He’s the cupbearer of the king. He sits in the castle and his job. If I could get it, I would take it is to sit next to the king and just drink a cup to make sure there’s not poison in whatever the king wants before the king has a drink. And that’s the job all of us are looking for, right? I want a job that pays me well, that I don’t have to do a lot. I wouldn’t call it work, but. But Nehemiah is about to give this up to go. Sacrifice in a broken city for God. And he starts it. And the idea of prayer, as we’re going to read on, I’ll just let the cat out of the bag. On what Nehemiah is able to accomplish for 141 years, the city lay broken. A broken people and a broken city, desiring to see the glory of Jerusalem to return. Nehemiah is literally going to reconstruct. Reconstruct the entire city of Jerusalem, rebuild the walls of Jerusalem in a period of 52 days. For 141 years, people have been waiting for this. And the matter of 52 days, one man of God, with a prayer before the Lord is able to stand up in front of the city and see it rebuilt.
What can God do with one? One regular, ordinary person? Nehemiah wasn’t a religious leader. He was just a cupbearer to the king. God convicted his heart. He didn’t let us settle with him. He did something about it. And this world was changed. Jerusalem. The city returns to its glory. Because Nehemiah was willing to lay down his life. I called to you this morning. When you meet your maker one day. When you walk before your Savior. What an opportunity it would be to stand before him and say, God, I gave you everything. When you stand up on the edge of the precipice of greatness, knowing it’s just sink or swim. How awesome is it just to be able to dive headfirst and just live that life to the fullest for God? America. The Church of America. We are not in some gross, immoral decline. This is what’s happening to the state of the American Church is complacency in our relationship with God has crept in. And that’s the sin that goes unnoticed. That’s the sin that everyone let’s slide past our lives. That’s the sin that when we look back in our lives, we can’t figure out how in the world we’ve gotten to where we are. All we know is that it just sort of crept up on us. God’s call through the life of Nehemiah is to take us as a people and heal our broken hearts, heal our broken land.
But it starts with an individual making the decision, saying, God, whatever the cost, whatever the price, whether I’m living in a castle and I need to become just one of the lowly people out in the valley who’s living in a broken city. Whatever it is, God, it’s for your name. Let’s close in a word of prayer. God, I just thank you for the life of Nehemiah and the change he was able to make. God through you. As he surrendered himself to your call in his life. God as he broke down for the city of Jerusalem. And he wept, and he prayed and he fasted, and God, he gave his heart. This morning for us as a church. God, I just pray that we carry that heart, that your spirit, God, empower and dwell within us. Give us the desire to just yearn and crave your, your, your heart for this city. And God, I know that the way it begins is within our own hearts. God, to take in our lives the moments where we say in our failures, forgive us God, may we look to you as our big God, the God who keeps his promises, the God who can work within us to see a mighty change for you. Lord, we thank you for our time together. God, we just pray that you bless us the rest of this week. And it’s in Jesus name, Amen.