Nehemiah – workers and warriors and oppressors and oppressed

Perseverance- keeping on with God’s work

2 Nov 25 Sermon Duncan Whitty

Perseverance is a great quality. The ability to keep going despite difficulty. There are times all of us probably would like to give up. 

We are in the book of Nehemiah- the story of how Nehemiah and the people of Jerusalem rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. We saw how many amateurs from many backgrounds came together and rolled up their sleeves and started building the defences of the city, the city wall of Jerusalem, which had been broken down long before.

And we left it last time with the wall having been built up to half its height. The people it says in verse 5 had worked with all their heart and they made progress and got half way. But they were facing difficulties. 

Jerusalem was surrounded by enemy nations and they were plotting together to stir up trouble and this was on the peoples’ minds. And the people were getting tired. Their strength was starting to fade and their morale was dipping. And there was so much rubble debris around that it was getting in the way of the work (Verse 10).

You know starting a project is easy. But completing it is the bit that matters. Anyone can begin to run a marathon, but its completing it that is the aim. The people of Jerusalem had begun strongly in building the wall, but now they are starting to despair.

Same with us. In the projects that we try. There can come a time when we feel our strength is going to give out and we can get into despair. 

And we begin to say we cannot complete the work.

May Savidge’s story of perseverence

‘I cannot’ are words that one woman I discovered would never say. Her name was May Savidge and her story is an amazing story of perseverance in a mighty struggle. 

May Savage was a single, middle aged lady, living in an old medieval house in the town of Ware, in Hertfordshire, England. In 1953 the local council told her that her house was to be demolished to make a way for a new roundabout. For 15 years she fought the council plans, but then in 1969, the bulldozers reached her gate. Her response was to take her house down, piece by piece and get it moved to another part of the country- 100 miles away. She numbered each wooden beam and pane of glass so that her home could be reassembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle and with the help of a team of demolition contractors, she got it taken down. 

She bought an empty plot of land in a seaside town in Norfolk and aged about 60, she set about rebuilding her old house, brick by brick. Could you believe it!

And so from 1969 to 1992 she worked rebuilding her house. She lived in a caravan and it was freezing. But she persevered!

Here is a photo of the house in its original location. It was originally built in the year 1450. 

And here is the house in bits after she got it deconstructed.

Looking at that photograph brings to life the words of the rebuilders of the walls of Jerusalem when they said; ‘The strength of the labourers is giving out, and there is so much rubble that we cannot rebuild the wall.’ These are the roof tiles of her house surrounding May in the photo.

She kept on going. By the time she was into her 70s, May had moved in and the house stood proudly in its new gardens, each old oak beam in place, the brickwork nearly complete and many of the walls plastered.

She died in 1993 at the age of 82. The house wasn’t yet fully built, but it was mostly complete. It was fully finished by her niece and here it is today

May Savidge once said – ‘My mother brought us up on the maxim that there is no such word as " can't ".'

There is no such word as ‘can’t’ with God

Well as Christians our Father brings us up on the maxim that there is no such word as ‘can’t’ also!

Paul says ‘I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.’ If God has called us to it, then we can certainly do it, with Jesus’ strength.’

The Israelites were saying we cannot rebuild the walls. They were doubting God. 

‘We can’t, we are not able’ is the rallying cry of all who take their eyes off the Lord and start looking at themselves and their problems. 

Hundreds of years before, in the book of Numbers in the Bible, we read of how when the spies came back from scouting out the Promised Land, Caleb, one of the spies, said ’We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.’

But the other spies replied; ’We can’t attack those people, they are stronger than we are.’ It says that the ten unbelieving spies ‘discouraged the heart of the children of Israel’ and as a result, they never entered in and the people had to wait and the nation wandered in the wilderness 40 years until the new generation was ready to conquer the land. There are bad consequences to saying ‘we can’t’ – when God has said ‘you can’.

For us we can build this church up in the way God wants it, in a united way. Also if God is calling us to also pioneer in Holyrood Road, and I believe he is, then we can surely do that also. If God says we can, then we surely can!

Fear is the enemy

Now what made it harder for the Jews of Jerusalem was the external opposition. The enemies, the surrounding nations, were conspiring and spreading rumours and intimidating. And the Jews who heard this, kept on telling Nehemiah and the others the intimidations of the enemy. They were saying ‘where you turn, they will attack us.’

The Jews were getting scared. Fear was entering in.

In his first inaugural address on March 4 1933 US President F.D Roosevelt said to a nation in the grip of an economic depression, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’

He may have borrowed the thought form HD Thoreau the American naturalist who said ‘Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.’ 

Why?

Because fear paralyses you and fear is contagious and paralyzes others. Fear and faith cannot live together in same heart.’ Jesus said ‘Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith?’ Frightened people discourage others and lower faith. 

So Nehemiah inspired the people by encouraging them to focus on the Lord and who he is He tells them, ‘Don’t be afraid of them, remember the Lord who is great and awesome.’ Our God is ‘great and awesome’. Another translation is ‘great and fearsome.’ We have a great and fearsome God on our side, why should we fear people?

And so Nehemiah simply re-organised the builders, positioning some of them at the weakest points of the wall with swords spears and bows and they faced down the enemies.

Nehemiah and the builders faced opposition and fear by combining prayer and good organisation. Nehemiah writes ‘’But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night meet this threat’. 

Prayer on its own is not enough. But neither is posting a guard on its own enough. Combine the spiritual and the practical, the prayer and the posting of a guard and you get a solution that works. 

The enemy within- selfishness

But there was a bigger danger to the success of the community and their building project than the external threat from their enemies. More threatening was the division within the community caused by their own selfishness. 

Selfishness means putting myself at the centre of things and insisting on getting what I want. The Cambridge Dictionary defines selfishness as ‘the quality of thinking only of your own advantage.’ The Meriam Webster Dictionary definition is ‘a concern for one's own welfare at the expense of others.’ 

That’s selfishness. We all have it and God’s program is to help us face up to it and remove it. 

This chapter reveals the depths of selfishness in the human heart.

What was happening was that there is famine, a lack of food and there were many poor people in the Jewish community and they were going hungry, they couldn’t afford to buy food for themselves and their children. 

Others were having to borrow money to pay for the high taxes the king was demanding.

And still others were having to sell their sons and daughters into slavery to other Jews because they just didn’t have money to support their family. 

And then there were wealthy Jews who were taking advantage of the situation and exploiting their own people by lending them money and taking their lands and their children into slavery in exchange. They were also charging interest on their loans which according to the Law of Moses, was not allowed.

So basically we see wealthy businessmen selfishly exploiting the poor in order to make themselves rich. They were using their power to put others into bondage. 

And so Nehemiah is angry. And there is a place for righteous anger, the right kind of anger in the Christian life. Jesus was angry at sin. God has a holy anger at selfishness.

But Nehemiah doesn’t act immediately. He has a think about it, which is always a good idea. Don’t act in haste. And then his solution was to call a large meeting and accuse the wrong doers publically. He wanted to publically shame them and use the power of peer pressure, to bring them into repentance. 

‘What you are doing is not right’ Nehemiah tells them. ‘Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies? ‘

Selfish attitudes within the people of God don’t look good to outsiders- it brings reproach. Today, when Christians are selfish and uncaring towards other Christians – it’s not a good look, people who are not Christians are not impressed.

God’s call to Christians to be unselfish

We Christians are called to a very different way of life than the selfishness that Nehemiah’s community were showing.

Paul tells us in Philippians 2:1-4;

‘Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.’

God calls us to a radical unselfishness in our community life. And my friends our joint services are I believe God’s method of teaching us how to be unselfish people. For our joint services to work, all of us need to be unselfish. For we, who are people of different ages and different cultural and church backgrounds to truly come together, to truly become like minded, to be one in spirit and one in mind as Paul tells us, then we are going to have to get rid of all selfishness, all vain conceit, and be very humble and very loving. 

It’s not easy, but it’s what Christianity is all about. This humility and this love, this unselfishness which I’m talking about this morning is absolutely central to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

The purpose of a worship service

What is the purpose of a church worship service? What is the goal of our weekly Sunday gatherings? Well one of the main goals is to learn to become better disciples of Jesus. Worship gatherings or services have a discipleship function, they are meant to make us better disciples through hearing and living out the word of God. I believe God has guided us Scots and Hong Kongers to unite into a single joint service to disciple us. To teach us love despite difference, to help us to love across cultural and personality differences, to teach us to be unselfish.

It would have been easier for us in many ways not to unite, but God often guides his people along an uncomfortable path, a path they would not have chosen themselves. Jesus said that By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another- John 13:35. Learning to worship together in one room, diverse people, different kinds of people with different tastes, but loving each enough to overcome our differences shows the world that we are special- that we are Jesus’ disciples, loving like he loved.  

The goal of a church worship service is not to give us what we want. It is to give God what He wants. You know we live in a consumer society, where we are used to going to a shop, a restaurant, a cinema or whatever and we pay our money and we get what we want. We get served with what we want. And if we don’t get what we want, we won’t be back! That’s the way we are used to operating in our society. 

But church is different. Yes it’s a place where we should be blessed and if we are not being blessed, there might be a problem with the church. But more important than we ourselves getting blessed, what matters most is that God gets blessed in our worship. You could say that the Lord God is the customer and the church service is meant to serve him, please him. Its not all about us. And if our worship doesn’t please the Lord, He won’t come back! I mean the Lord’s manifest presence, the Holy Spirit won’t be felt in a church service, where the Christians aren’t worshipping in love.

And the Lord wants us to love our Christian brothers and sisters who are different to us and who maybe we struggle to get on with. Our Heavenly Father wants us to yield to one another, to put each other first, to building one another up- and when we can do that, then our sung praise to him, our prayers to him are pleasing to him. He is much more interested in our humility, our love and our unity than he is in the style of worship- whether we sing traditional hymns or modern worship songs.

If we can achieve love and unity, then the presence of God will come. Then the glory will come, then the blessing will come down from heaven. How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity, it is like the dew descending, it is like the oil flowing, there the Lord bestows his blessing of life. That’s the message of Psalm 133. God’s presence comes when there is unity. 

Looking out for the interests of others in our services at CCC

So let’s obey Philippians and value others above yourselves. So that means Scots must value the Hong Kongers above yourselves. Hong Kongers you must value the Scots above yourselves. ‘Don’t look at your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.’ 

That means we are going to have to compromise in our sung praise in church services. ‘Looking out for the interest of others’ means singing songs that other people like and we don’t like. Because some people like traditional hymns and others like contemporary praise songs. We are not going to find a way that pleases everyone, we must all surrender something so that others will benefit and then we will meet somewhere in the middle. We must be unselfish in our choice of worship music.

There is an interesting phrase that we see in Nehemiah 5. Its spoken by the Jews whose children are being sold into captivity. They say ‘we are powerless’. 

But actually they weren’t powerless, they could appeal to Nehemiah, they could raise the voices and tell Nehemiah. And when Nehemiah heard the problem, then he could do something about it. 

No Christian is powerless- when they pray to God, they are making an appeal to the governor of the universe who has all power. Also in a well running church, no- one should feel powerless in the face of injustice. It’s my hope that in this church no one feels that, if they are facing injustice, they feel powerless- because they know that the church leadership will hear them and do the right thing. 

The book of Nehemiah is sometimes described as a leadership manual and really it has a lot to say about good leadership- in the church and in society. 

Nehemiah- an example of godly leadership

And Nehemiah really does set a good example for leaders. Nehemiah came as a servant to the people. He didn’t heavily tax the people, like earlier governors of Judah did, he didn’t even demand the food allotment that governors of Judah were normally entitled to. Instead he actually paid for the feeding of 150 Jews and officials at his table and he devoted his efforts to building the wall.

Nehemiah devoted himself to working for the good of the people, not pursuing selfish goals. That’s what leaders in the church must do. 

Earlier governors and their staff, those who came before Nehemiah according to verse 15 ‘lorded it over the people.’ That phrase ‘lording it over’ appears in the New Testament also in a passage where the apostle Peter is addressing elders. But his address is relevant to not just elders but all leaders within God’s church. Peter says;

1 Peter 5:1-7 

‘To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: ² Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; ³ not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. ⁴ And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

⁵ In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because,

“God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.”⁶ Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. ⁷ Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.’

And so we see that like Nehemiah a Christian elder, and any Christian leader really, is called to be one who serves eagerly, who doesn’t lord it over those entrusted to them, or as the Message translation puts it: ‘Not bossily telling others what to do, but tenderly showing them the way.’ Leaders shouldn’t be ‘bossy’, but good examples. 

And the other side of the coin is that those who are younger should be submissive to those who are older, or as the Message says ‘you who are younger must follow your leaders.’

And Peter reminds us that everyone, old and young, leaders and followers need to be humble. Because God gives grace to the humble. And surely we really do need grace!

So let’s not allow things to upset us. Persevere, don’t be selfish, stay humble and keep the love on and if you do and if we as a church do, the promise is verse 6 of 1 Peter 5- that God will lift you up at the right time.’

Remember the example of Jesus who stooped to wash his disciples’ feet, even the feet of Judas -the ultimate act of humility. Despite being the Son of God, He took on the role of a servant, teaching us that no act of service is beneath us. 

We in this church are learning to walk the way of Christ, it’s hard on the flesh, on our sinful nature, but it’s the right path. 

Lets persevere and build a church that stoops to serve, even if it’s a sacrifice. Amen