This is a time when the country stops to remember war, the loss of war and the suffering of war. We are living in a peaceful country now and war is easy to forget, but we remember to honour the sacrifices of those who have died and suffered in war.

As a church we have been studying the book of Nehemiah, which is the story of the building of a city wall to keep out warlike enemies. War is not far away in Nehemiah.  

It’s interesting to me that Jesus talked about the Christian life as a both being like a war and a building project. In Luke 14 large crowds of people are following Christ and he turns to them and with great honesty he warns them about the cost of becoming a disciple of his- he says to them if you are interested, then you need to know there is a cost and are you willing to pay the price?

He says ‘whoever does not carry his cross cannot be my disciple.’ 

And then he gives the illustration of someone who wants to build a tower. And that person wouldn’t just rush into the job, but first he would take time and figure out if he had enough money to actually build it. Otherwise he might start the building project and then only get as far as laying the foundation and run out of money. He would then look very stupid. 

And the same with a king who is facing war with another king. He would first think if his army was big enough to deal with the opposition, if he could actually win war. And he would take his time to it through, after all defeat in war could be devastating. If he thinks he can’t win, he will ask for terms of peace. 

And then Jesus says in the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. So sit down at the start and decide if you are willing to pay that price. 

The sacrifice that Jesus asks of us

There is a sacrifice involved in being a Christian. Because you are making Jesus Lord, he now becomes the one in charge of your life and he might ask you to do things that you wouldn’t want to do. You’re his disciple. Are you willing to obey, even if you don’t like it? 

I think we often don’t tell people who are interested in being Christians, in being baptised that really they are entering a costly building project, a costly war and they will be asked to make big sacrifices. We don’t encourage them to do what Jesus is saying here, sit down and work out if you are really willing to pay the price. 

So that means when people become Christians, they are surprised to find that it’s not easy and that much is asked of them, a high moral standard is being asked of them in the Bible and that they must give up their comfort and desires and time in being a disciple and they discover that there is a real devil and that this devil is now their enemy and before long they lose heart and they fall away. The temptations of the world and the desire for other things has stolen what could have been. 

One of the crucial lessons of the book of Nehemiah is that the God obeying life is a battle from beginning to end. From the moment Nehemiah set his heart to obey God’s command and rebuild the city defences, Nehemiah found himself exposed to attack. 

Why are we studying the book of Nehemiah?

We are continuing looking at the building project of Nehemiah and the people of God because I feel that many in this church are called by God to be builders. You are builders, I’ve said it before Hong Kongers and yes Scots, but Hong Kongers have the organisational ability, the work ethic, the mind-set to train and equip and set vision and goals which is all part of any building project. I’ll say it again Isaiah 58:12 is a word for this church – 

Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
    and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
    Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

And we are in the midst of building up this church again. And some of you are building new enterprises, charities and small companies and you are involved in organising arts projects, you are building outside the walls of the church also. Some of you have entrepreneurial gifting and callings. And off course we are all called to build one another up, to strengthen one another, and Jude says ‘build yourself up in your most holy faith’- so we are all called to build strong Christian lives ourselves. 

And Nehemiah, this book we are studying, shows us how to build for God and with God. Because we don’t want to just build our own things, we don’t want to build little towers of Babel, we want to build God’s projects. But we are maybe realising as we study this book that building for God involves overcoming opposition. And there is an opposition to building God’s projects that we are all going to have to understand and know how to deal with. So this morning we are thinking about the opposition.  

The personality behind the opposition- Satan

If you live obediently for God, you can count on it, opposition will come. And the ultimate source of that opposition is not human anger or hate of jealousy. As Paul told the Christians in Ephesus, ‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’ -Ephesians 6

People are not the problem. When people attack us, we easily assume that they are the enemy. But our real enemy is invisible. Our enemy strikes us from the spiritual realm and he uses people as his weapons. The rulers and the authorities and powers are active today, just as they fiercely opposed Nehemiah in his day. Our enemy loves to lie and kill and demoralise us whenever we set out to do God’s work. That is the battle we face and it will continue all our lives. But remember God is with us as we face the battles, we will never battle alone.

Satan is our enemy. The word Satan means ‘adversary’ and comes from the Hebrew verb meaning ‘to oppose or obstruct’. And Satan often comes at us not with a full frontal assault, but in disguise, in the form of what Paul calls an angel of light. He comes to us with the appearance of wisdom, gentleness, compassion charm and attractiveness and he offers us enticing promises and flattering words. 

How do we avoid being taken in by Satan, the false angel of light and his human agents of deception? Paul tells us we must live godly lives in order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes. (2 Corinthians 2:11). And here we see some of Satan’s schemes, schemes that he might use against any of us.

The enemy’s schemes against Nehemiah- distraction

First, one trick was for that the enemies of the Jews, Sanballat and Geshem, leaders of nearby nations, offered to engage in talks. They invited Nehemiah to come down from Jerusalem to a village in the plain of Ono to engage in talks. The plains of Ono are in the vicinity of Ben Gurian airport near Tel Aviv if you have ever been to Israel. They actually sent the invitation four times. And each time Nehemiah said ‘no’- for he knew it was a trap, they were scheming to harm him, once he was out of the safety of Jerusalem. 

His reply is a classic - ‘I am carrying out a great project and cannot go down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you?’

Sometimes the enemy’s tactic is to try and lure us away from the work God has called us to. And like Nehemiah we must stay focused. Many of us have a hard time saying ‘no’ to people who intrude on our time. We feel obligated to attend this function or that meeting we have though it is going to take away from the important work God has given us to do. We need to keep our priorities straight and be firm under pressure, even if people repeatedly try to pull you away from God’s work. 

The other temptation of here is to compromise. Sanballat and Geshem were offering negotiations, talks aimed at coming to some sort of compromise. There a place for compromise- marriage takes compromises, our joint services takes compromises, but we cannot compromise on moral and spiritual issues and on what God has told us to do. If God has told us to do something, if we know something to be right and someone opposed to God’s word says let’s talk, lets come to a compromise, the answer must always be ‘no’.  

And at the same time we need to be sensitive to ‘the ministry of interruptions’ Jesus often allowed himself to be interrupted by an urgent human need, someone who needed to be healed, someone who needed the gospel. But Jesus refused to be diverted and distracted by the opposition of the Pharisees and other pointless demands on his time. He stayed focused on his goals, including the goal of ministering to people in need.

Ray Stedman tells of a young American missionary in China before the Second World War. He was a recent university graduate, fluent in Mandarin Chinese and a proven leader. An American oil company wanted to open a new operation in China and it planned to open its main office in the city where this young man lived. When company officials became aware of this young missionary, they offered him a position with their company at ten times the amount of money he was allowed as a missionary. The oil company executives were shocked when he turned down their generous offer. 

So the officials came back with a much larger offer. He turned down that offer as well. So they came back again with a bigger salary offer. Again he declined. Finally the executives asked him ‘What will you take?’

You don’t understand the missionary said. ‘It’s not that the salary is too little. It’s that the job is too small.’

God’s jobs often don’t pay well in money terms, but they are the ones that really matter, they are the big ones. They will matter for eternity, God’s jobs are the ones that produce fruit that will last. Even if the job seems small, if it’s a job from God, it’s important.

We are easily lured away from God’s will by the offer of money or some other worldly inducement. Keep your focus! The thing or things God has called you to do.

I was dipping into the book Driven by Eternity by John Bevere who had a particular ministry in the United States. John knew a pastor of a thriving church in the south eastern part of the US.

This pastor started the church in 1991 with 22 people and it grew to be about 4000 members. The church grew rapidly through much prayer, strong preaching and hard work and they built a beautiful building to accommodate the large numbers of people. After several years, the pastor began observing a distinguished white-haired gentleman, always well dressed, attending the services. He also noticed that this man would sit and watch service after service with tears running down his face. The pastor felt that they weren’t tears of joy.

Finally the gentleman approached one of the associate pastors and shared than in 1981, the Lord spoke to him clearly that he was to start a church in that city. A few days later he had a dream about the building this church he was to pastor would meet in. The dream was so vivid that he got a professional to draw a rendition of the building he saw. He then said that he ran into some resistance and backed off from starting the church. After a while he travelled in other cities for a short time and eventually went back into the business world.

He then opened a carefully folded paper and told the associate it was the artist’s rendition of the building he had drawn up in 1981. When the associate looked at the building, he almost went into shock. It was the building the pastor, John Bevere’s friend had built years later, in which they were now meeting.

The older man had not received and acted on the word. He had understood what the word was, to start a church which would become large, but opposition had stopped him.

The enemy’s schemes: slander and false prophecy

One way opposition can come to our God given building projects is through slander.

They enemies of the Jews tried sending an open letter to Nehemiah accusing him of rebelling against the king of Persia. It was open letter which mean that other people could read it. It was false, slander. But it was dangerous, if the authorities in Persia felt it was true, Nehemiah would be in trouble. 

Remember the devil was called the ‘father of lies’. Or fake news as it’s sometimes called today. And it is intimidating to hear lies spoken about you. That’s what the aim was.  

Notice Nehemiah’s response. Simple denial. He doesn’t attempt to disprove the accusation and prove his own innocence. He simply calls the accusations a lie, unworthy of detailed innocence. 

He knows they were all trying to frighten him and weaken his resolve. But he prayed to God for strength saying ‘Now strengthen my hands.’ 

Having failed with this slander. His enemies try using false prophecy. 

Shemaiah is believed to be a prophet and he gives a message to Nehemiah which says ‘let us meet in the house of God inside the temple and let us close the temple doors, because men are coming to kill you, by night they are coming to kill you.’ And we see that in verse 12 the message came in the form of a prophecy. But we see that it was a false prophecy. The prophet had been hired by Nehemiah’s enemies to give a false prophecy. 

The purpose was to intimidate Nehemiah, to get him scared and for him to run and hide in the Temple.

But Nehemiah wasn’t going to run and hide. He realised that the prophet was a false prophet and one way that Nehemiah could tell that the prophecy given to him was a false prophecy was that it went against the written word of God, it went against scripture. The book of Numbers in the Bible 18:7 says that anyone other than a priest who has who enters the actual Temple building (as opposed to the courtyard) is doing wrong.

So running and hiding in the temple, was clearly not a true prophecy. 

Completing God’s work in God’s power demonstrates God’s reality to others

Intimidation, distraction, lies and slander, threat none of it worked. The people and Nehemiah kept going and so we come to the wonderful words; ‘so the wall was completed on the 25^th of Elul in 52 days’. That is early October in our calendar. Nehemiah had left Persia in April and taken several months to get to Jerusalem. But then the people had come together and worked hard and had thrown the walls up in 52 days. And it says that when all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self confidence, because they realised that this work had been done with the help of our God.

When it says that enemies were afraid it means they were awed by the achievement. They were awed by how quickly the work had been done. Their respect for the Jews and for their God increased. They saw that God was moving, it could only have been through God that this could have happened. 

We need that today. God’s people need to partner in God projects that require God’s blessing to happen, projects that are so obviously being favoured by a Higher Power that that the people will see that there is a God and stand in awe of that God. We need to give our generation a demonstration of the grace and power of God. I have nine year old family member who isn’t sure if there is a God or not, even though she goes to church every Sunday. Why does she think like that? Because she has never seen something that is so obviously supernatural, that she can’t deny that God did something. 

An American pastor called Bill Johnson said ‘we owe the world an encounter with God. Our mandate is simple; raise up a generation that can openly demonstrate his raw power.’

And that is what Nehemiah and his people did. They demonstrated God’s power, gave the surrounding nations an encounter with God. How did they did it? Simply by walking in faithful obedience despite heavy opposition. And because they did, they gave God a chance to move and empower them to do the work supernaturally quickly. That is what caused their enemies to stand in awe.

When people see God’s power, it is very hard for them to remain as agnostics or atheists. Our job is to make it hard for people to doubt by giving them a demonstration of God’s grace. Like Nehemiah and the Jews of Jerusalem.

Victory, but the opposition continues

The initial victory was won! The walls had been successfully built and the gates safely hung in place. Great, a time for celebration. But not a time to relax. Because even though Satan is defeated, he hasn’t retreated from the battlefield. Satan does not quit easily. 

And so we read that the letters were continuing to be sent from Tobiah the enemy of God’s plans and God’s people to certain Jewish nobles in the city. It says in verse 17 onwards-

Also, in those days the nobles of Judah were sending many letters to Tobiah, and replies from Tobiah kept coming to them. For 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.

This guy Tobiah was related to some of the Jewish nobles and he therefore had influence on them and he was using this influence to intimidate Nehemiah. 

Jesus said don’t let family ties, family relationships draw you away from him. He said no one who puts family above him is worthy of him. It’s so easy out of loyalty to family to listen to what your loved ones are saying and actually turn aside from what God is saying to you. Jesus got heavy opposition from his own brothers and sisters and mother in his earthly ministry- at one point they thought he had gone mad and wanted to take him away! Family is wonderful, but they don’t always get it right.



Dependability is our greatest ability

Finally Nehemiah had to put someone in charge of the city of Jerusalem- this would be the man who would be in charge of the future defence of the city walls. And he chose two people who he could depend on- Hanani, his brother, who he clearly knew well and trusted and a man called Hananiah who is described as a man of integrity and who feared God more than most men do. 

You know that man Hananiah got his position of authority and responsibility not because he was greatly skilled, not because he was very intelligent or gifted, but because he a good, dependable man. Sometimes character matters more than your gifting, being dependable, being trustworthy, knowing that you will hang in there. 

Bob Jones Senior said the greatest ability is dependability. If we truly fear the Lord, we will be faithful to the work he has called us to do. We will build what he has asked us to build and we will remain standing despite all the warfare that comes, knowing that God is faithful and that he is totally dependable and that he wants to display his goodness and power through what we are building to an unbelieving world. Amen.