Reforming The People

When my sister, my younger sister turned 16 years old, uh, she could have a tendency to be a little bit forgetful. And so my dad, knowing that she could be forgetful when she started driving a car, had this very intentional conversation where he said, Beth, your keys, you have to know at all times where your keys are. Otherwise you run the risk of locking your keys into your car. And so he, he would have this conversation, make eye contact. Well, about few months after she turned 16 and she was driving somewhere and she calls my dad and she’s crying and she says, dad, I’ve got a problem. I can see my keys inside my car, but I am locked outside my car. And my dad says, Beth, it’s okay. Calm down. I want you to walk back to your left wheel. And underneath the left wheel, my dad had placed one of these bad boys.

It’s called a hide Akey, anybody out there had a hide akey at some point in your life? And so my dad says, I want you to return to that left wheel. I want you to take out the Haida key, open up, you’ll find a key to your car. And then he said, but Beth, here’s the rule about the hide Akey, as as soon as you open your car door, I need you to take the Haida key, put it back in to the Heke box and put it back underneath that tire. Otherwise the next time you need it, it will not be there. And she said, dad, I promise I’ll do it right now. A few more months go by. My sister calls my dad, she’s crying and she says, dad, I locked myself out of my car again and I can’t get in. And my dad says, well, Beth, use the hide key behind the left tire in the back.

And Beth says, dad, I’ve been using the Haida key for the last six months, <laugh>, but I forgot to put it back. And so now both my keys and the Haida key are inside the car and I’m locked outside the car. What do I do? And my dad’s response was, next time, put back the Haida key. And he hung up on her <laugh>. But then he called her back. He was just letting it marinate there for a moment, letting her feel all the feels. And so about 10 seconds later, my dad calls her back and says, Beth, next time remember to put back the Haida key. I have good news for you behind the right back tire <laugh>. There’s a second Haida key. And then he said, but Beth, here’s what I need you to know. He said, when you put back the back right Haida key, you also need to put the back, the back left Haida key.

Otherwise you’re gonna get into the same situation and you will in fact be locked out of your car. About a year later, my sister calls my dad in tears and says, dad, I need to know where’s the third Haida key <laugh>. I checked the back left. I checked the back, right? There’s not one in the front left to the front, right? Where’d you put the third Haida key? And my dad said, Beth, there is no third Haida key. There were only two. And then me and my brother had to get in the car with the spare key to go find my baby sister. What happened? Hey, it didn’t happen in the first week or even the first month. It happened over the course of about 18 months. But she got so used to that hide Akey that she started to get complacent and she started to rely on, well, my dad’s got an answer.

My dad’s gotta fix. And so even when I don’t know what to, I’ll just call him and he’ll fix it right away for me. Have you noticed that in life we have a tendency to become complacent? We have a tendency to lose focus on the things that are the most important. We have a tendency to just slowly drift a little bit at a time until we get completely off of where we intended to go. If you’ve got a Bible, turn with me to Nehemiah chapter 13, and we’re gonna finish out Nehemiah today. So if you’ve got a Bible, Nehemiah chapter 13, and if you ever have sat down and watched a movie and loved 75% of the movie, but then hated the very end of the movie, and you say, man, I love that movie, except I don’t like the ending. And it kinda ruins the entire movie, doesn’t it? I got bad news for you. If you, if you really care about the end of the movie, you’re not gonna like the end of Nehemiah because chapter 13 does not end on this successful high note. If we wanted to end there, we should have ended a few chapters ago where the wall is built and Nehemiah has done what God has called him to do. And woo-hoo, we get to 13 and we see that the people have become complacent and they have started to drift.

And what could have been just this triumphant victory and ending ends up becoming a warning to you, to me, to all of us of the dangers of drift. Nehemiah chapter 13, Cerner, verse one, it says, on that day, they read from the book of Moses specifically, we’re gonna see in a second, they’re reading from the book of Deuteronomy. But the book of Moses is just talking about the first five books of the Old Testament in the hearing of the people. And in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God for they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired balam against them to curse them. Yet our God turned the curse into a blessing. As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel, all those of foreign descent. Now, pause for a second, because this is actually the first indication in chapter 13 that things are going the wrong direction.

They are taking a warning that exists in side of scripture, and then they’re adding legalism and religion to that warning. So in Deuteronomy, there is this verse that is talking about this two groups of people, and it goes back to when the nation of Israel was passing through their land, they asked for a safe passage. They even sent gifts for a safe passage. And instead of giving them safe passage, instead of welcoming them, they actually do the opposite. They attack ’em and they curse them. Now, in the Old Testament, and we’ll see this a little bit later on in chapter 13 as well, it’s very strict about saying, do not marry a foreigner. Now let’s unpack what that means and what that doesn’t mean. So it’s actually saying the same thing in the Old Testament that we see them say in the New Testament and the New Testament.

The way that Paul describes is this. He says, do not be unequally yoked. So, so Paul tells us in the New Testament that if you are a Christian, that you should marry someone else who is a Christian. Why? Because that should be the most foundational piece of your identity of who you are. If everything in your life, if the most important thing, the foundational piece is built off of this truth, that Jesus is your Lord and Savior, and you marry someone who does not have that same value system, what’s it going to do? It’s gonna cause a lot of friction. And that’s what it means in the Old Testament when it says that you should not marry a foreigner. It’s talking about someone who is not a follower of Yahweh. How do we know that? Because the old t testament is very clear that there are ways for a foreigner to become a part of the nation of Israel.

There’s a set system of things that they have to walk through, but ultimately it comes down to them professing that Yahweh would be their God. They would choose to follow the religion of Israel. And so there is this rule that they found, but then what does it say? It says, as soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel. All those are foreign descent. That’s not what that rule said. So all of a sudden we see this legalism that has started creeping in, but then it gets work. It works. Let’s go on. It says, now, before this, Elias said, the priest who was appointed over the chambers of the house of God and who was related to Tobiah, prepared for Tobiah, a large chamber where they had previously put the grain offering the frankincense, the vessels, and the tis of grain, wine, and oil, which were given by commandment to the Levites singers and gatekeepers, and the contributions for the priests.

Here’s what that means. Tobiah is a name we should recognize. He is mentioned multiple times throughout the narrative in Nehemiah, and he’s always the bad guy to toba samba. They are trying to destroy what God is doing through Nehemiah and the people to build the wall. Tobiah over and over again is trying to disrupt the building of the wall. And now Tobiah that bad guy, we find out that they’ve taken a room inside the temple, a room inside the temple that is supposed to be used for setting apart things that were used for the Levites, the priests in order to honor and worship and glorify God. They’ve gotten rid of those things and they’ve taken the bad guy and they’ve let him have a residence inside the temple. Now, why would the bad guy want a residence inside the temple? ’cause the temple was the hub.

It’s where everybody went. It was where all the commerce happened. It, it would be like having a condo on Main Street. And so Tobiah, who’s somehow related to one of the high priests, is saying, Hey, I, I want to move in and be a part of what is going on. So people have become legalistic and then they’re completely turning away and making poor decisions. Uh, and now let’s see what Nehemiah says to this in a second. So there’s 10 covenants that we see in chapter 10. In chapter 10, they make a covenant. Uh, so, so a little bit of context, chapter 10, the wall is built. They’ve started having this reformation. Uh, they’ve had the, the law of God has been read. Ezra has proclaimed the, the law. Everybody’s crying and repenting and turning their hearts back to God. And so in chapter 10, here’s what we have.

They make this commitment. They say, okay, we’re not going to marry people that are not worshiping God. Uh, we’re not going to have commerce on the Sabbath. We’re not going to, uh, refrain from having that sabbatical year. Uh, we will make the covenant and the promise that we will continue to give our offering for the temple. Uh, we’re gonna make the promise in the covenant that we will have our first fruits. So these are the covenants that we see that happen in chapter 10. But unfortunately, here’s what we see. The covenants that are broken in chapter 13, we see in chapter 13 in verses 10 through 12, they’re not tithing. They’re working on the Sabbath in verses 15 through 17, and they’ve entered into foreign marriages. As a matter of fact, it says in verses 23 to 24, it says that most of the children couldn’t speak Hebrew.

Why is that a big deal? Because God’s law is in Hebrew. And so this is that danger of marrying people that aren’t following after our God. You’re gonna see this drift, the Sabbath. Sometimes we look at that and we just think of Sabbath and we say, well, that means that you’re supposed to go to church on Sunday morning. And that’s culturally we is what we think of because our culture, for the most part, all over the world, people have days of rest. That’s because of scripture. But that has not always been the case. It wasn’t until scripture influenced the world and the calendar and the rhythm of things that that was the case. So you go back to Nehemiah’s time 2,400 years ago, and we find that most people worked every single day. And yet God told his people, I want you to take one day and rest.

Why? Why would God tell him to rest? Ultimately, the underlying thing that God was trying to show his people was trust. He was saying, I want you to lean into me and trust me that one extra day that in theory, that we’re becoming one seventh less productive than all the nations around us. He said, no, no, no. I’m gonna make you more productive in your six days than you would be in seven days. If in that one day you would rest in me. That’s hard for us. We, we have a challenge of not doing e Everything inside of us wants to do and have checklists that we, we check off the boxes. I’ll, I’ll give you a very tangible example. My wife and I have been married for 17 years in the entire time that we have been married. There are certain things that when I do those things, I make sure that she’s aware that I have done those things.

Like there’s certain roles and responsibilities that I kind of take on to lawn things and trash things and outdoor things and more manual things. And there’s certain things that oftentimes she does, uh, like doing the dishes. But, but sometimes I will jump in and do the dishes. Oftentimes I jump in and do the dishes, and yet almost every time I do the dishes, I try and slide in there to her. The fact that I have done the dishes. Sometimes casually, sometimes she’ll be finishing up with a glass and, and she’ll be cleaned out and I’ll say, Hey, you can go ahead and put that in the dishwasher ’cause they’re dirty. ’cause I unloaded it and loaded ’em just a few minutes ago. So I was just, I just wanted to point that out so that you, you you knew. But what am I doing? I’m one to take credit for the fact that, hey, I have done something.

I, I deserve some credit for the fact that I am so great and so wonderful and have done something that now my wife doesn’t tell me every time she does the dishes, but for some reason there’s this feeling that I need to let her know why. That’s just the way that we’re wired. Maybe you are a checklist person, maybe in your career, in your job that you like to be able to, to every day say, Hey, these are the things that I have done. And so here’s where that desire and that drive sometimes comes in conflict with the gospel that we see all the way in the Old Testament with this idea of Sabbath. The idea of Sabbath is God saying, rest in me, trust in me. You can’t do it on your own. And that’s what the gospel is. The gospel is God saying, you can’t get to me on your own.

You have to rest in me. Grace is the gospel is not by good works so that no man may boast. And so the idea of, okay, we, we made this covenant to Sabbath, but we’re we’re slowly moving away from Sabbath and taking on more ownership and more responsibility. Why was that such a deadly thing? Because it wasn’t trusting in God inside the church. We, we can fall into that same trap. I think the tendency in a sermon series on Nehemiah is to focus on do, do, do, do. If you wanna build a wall, you’ve gotta do this and do this and don’t do that. But Christianity starts with be not do. It starts with entering into a relationship with Jesus. I can’t get to God on my own. Jesus died on the cross for me, for my sins by putting my faith and trust in him.

I become a Christian. That is who I am. It’s my being a Christian. And then the do is the result of the being. So we have in chapter 10, all these commitments that they make. We have in chapter 13, all the ways that they break those commitments. And so now let’s ask, okay, why? Why have they broken their commitments? What went wrong? We find out in verse six, here’s what it says. While this was taking place, I, this is Nehemiah talking was not in Jerusalem from the 32nd year of Arctic ex Xes, king of Babylon. I went to the king and after some time I asked Leave of the king and came to Jerusalem. This is one of those, those time jumps that we can be unaware of unless you really read carefully what happens in chapter one. And then what happens in chapter 13 and chapter one at the very beginning, he tells us it’s the 20th year of King Arctic Xerxes.

Now it’s the 32nd year. So 12 years pass. Now, we don’t know how long Nehemiah after building the wall, the wall gets built in 52 days. We don’t know how long after that he spends reforming the people and redirecting the people and guiding the people before he goes back. We just know that at some point he goes back and he’s with Arctic Xerxes and he’s doing whatever role arctic ex Xerxes has for him, whether that’s still being the cut bear to the king or some other role. We’re not really sure. And then it says at some point he asks, can I go back? So we don’t know exactly how long the time jump is. We just know that from the time that Nehemiah goes away to the time that he comes back, everything starts falling apart. If you’re a parent, sometimes you leave your kids in one room and say, Hey, don’t do this and don’t do that.

And hey, don’t touch that over there. And you walk away and it only takes 10 seconds before you walk back and you say, what happened? These, these are the things I asked you not to do. And Nehemiah is having that exact same type of experience. Why? Because we are always either drifting off or driving towards something. If you take a boat and you throw it into the middle of the ocean, here’s what happens to that boat. It just gets taken wherever the wind and the waves decide to take it. ’cause in the middle of the ocean, it’s, it’s too deep to throw down an anchor. And so unless there is an action, a drive, a motor, a paddle that is pushing that boat a certain direction, then it is just going to drift and drift and drift. There’s no such thing as standing still. If you ever go to the beach and you go out and swim on the beach, if you go swim for an hour, what you will notice is that unless you’re carefully paying attention, you’ll drift one way down the beach or the other way down the beach.

You have to be looking back and find some kind of a landmark that you’re saying, as I’m drifting this way, I’m gonna constantly be swimming back the other direction. Otherwise, you’ll wake up and be way far away from where you started. We are always, as a people, either drifting or driving. We’re either drifting away from God or we’re driving towards God. I I, I think here’s the, the challenge when you look at a story like this is sometimes we think the way that temptation works is that you’re gonna wake up one day and have huge crazy temptation. But can I tell you like tomorrow morning, my temptation when I wake up is not gonna be to go murder somebody. Like it’s not a temptation that I’ve got. Probably not a temptation that you’ve got either. If you do have that temptation, come meet us at Trailhead afterwards, we’d love to talk to you, but probably not a temptation that most of us are going to face.

So what then is the temptation is to drift. It’s to slowly not pay attention to what I’m doing with my time, who I’m hanging out with, what I’m doing. It, it, it’s this slow and steady step and the right direction, wrong direction. That is one step at a time until I get off course. That’s what happens when we drift and we see it all the time. We see it in individuals, we see it in organizations. If you go to Harvard University, at the main entrance to Harvard University is this seal. This seal is from when they started as a school, the 16 hundreds when they, they first started their seal. Veritas, which is Latin for truth, is right there in the middle. But at the very top it says Christo and Ecclesia. It was Veritas Christo at Ecclesia, which means truth for Christ. And the church plaques just like this.

You can find ’em all over their campus. It still has Christ in the church up top. And in the 16 hundreds, that was their, their call, their desire, Hey, truth for Christ. And the church, there were primarily a school that was raising up people to proclaim the truth of God’s word. And now they’re nowhere close to a Christian institution. It was in the 18 hundreds that they officially changed it to just be veritas instead of truth for Christ in the church. Well, how did they get there? Did they wake up one day and say, Hey, we are Christian yesterday and we’re not gonna be Christian today? No, it was adrift and it was a slow and steady movement away. What caused them to drift one step after another? Uh, what caused Israel to drift? That, that when Nehemiah leaves, everything was going great, they were headed the right direction, he comes back and it’s all falling apart. Why did they drift? It’s the power of influence that we see this guy tobiah. People like Tobias start influencing the people to drift in the wrong direction slowly, one step at a time.

People have a big influence on our life. And there’s an old phrase that says, you show me your friends and I will show you your future. That the people that you spend your time hanging around, they rub off on you. I, I can just tell you, if you hang around people that have really healthy diets and eat really healthy food, that that will eventually rub off on you unintentionally, sometimes begrudgingly. But that’s just what happens if you hang around people that are fit and like to do fit things and work out and take care of themselves, and those type of habits will fall off onto you sometimes completely unintentionally. If you take a junior high student or a high school student and you put them in the wrong group of friends, what happens? They influence that individual. Rarely, if ever does one person that has good high moral and character integrity move into a group that does not have that high character moral integrity, and that person pulls everybody else up.

The opposite almost always happens. They pull ’em down. And so you can take a kid that, that man, they’re great and they’re wonderful and they’re following all the rules, and then they get caught up with the wrong crowd. And all of a sudden the language that that crowd speaks starts to rub off on that person. And that person had never thought about different kinds of substance abuse, but man, they start hanging out with that crowd and they’re using those things. And what happens? All of a sudden, that person starts using those things. And that person had never thought about going into these places and making those kind of decisions, but because of the influence of the crowd, they get taken in a direction in life that they never intended to go. And we, we can easily look at a junior high kid or a high school kid and say, Hey, that’s true.

But can I tell you the same is true in your life, in my life? Whatever stage that you are in, that there are influences around you that are influencing who you are and what you think and what you do. And so then we see Nehemiah do something about it. Nehemiah shows back up. Nehemiah is angry. And then Nehemiah has this rebuke chapter 13, verse eight, he says, and I was very angry and I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber. Verse 11. So I confronted the officials, verse 17, then I confronted the nobles of Judah and said to them, what is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the Sabbath day, verse 21. But I warned them and said to them, why do you lodge outside the wall if you do so again, I will lay hands on you we’re starting some T-shirts in the coffee shop that you can get.

And they say, if you do so, again, I will lay hands on you. Verse 25 says, and I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. And now I’m not saying that that’s normative, that that’s like what we should be doing inside the church. But I’m saying, here’s what Nehemiah does, is Nehemiah just being mean and angry. Why is he doing what’s he, what he’s doing? Because Nehemiah knows the history of Israel. Nehemiah knows that we walk with God and God blesses us. But when we turn away from God, everything falls apart. And so when Nehemiah left, they were walking with God, and Nehemiah was looking in the future and said, this is gonna be a wonderful thing. And then he comes back and they’ve already turned away. And because of the future that he knows they could have, Nehemiah is distraught and he loves them enough to beat some sense into their life.

And can I tell you that you and me need some nehemiahs in our life? That you need somebody in your life that will look you in the eyes and say, Hey, the way that you are treating your spouse right now is not okay. And I recognize how you’re interacting with your kids and that that’s not right, that’s not godly. Hey, I see in your life that you solely started to drift away from the love and the discipline that you used to have and your love of God. And I’m going to pull your hair out and lay hands on you and let you get back on track. That we all need a Nehemiah. We need multiple nehemiahs. Why? Because it’s an either or. Either you’ve got people in your life that are helping you get on mission and stay on mission, or you have people that are distracting you from those things.

That’s what we see in Proverb chapter 12. It says, one who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. Then a few chapters later, it says this, whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. What’s it gonna be? Do you have people that are influencing you in a positive way? Or do you have people that are harming you, that are distracting you, that are pulling away from the direction you see? The drift is rarely wake up and have this terrible decision that I shouldn’t make. The drift is often neutral. The drift is often decisions that are not necessarily dishonoring God, but they don’t necessarily honor God. And slowly I start making more and more neutral decisions and my life is adrift. So here’s a question for my life, for your life.

And that question is this. What are the people and things influencing my life? You know, if I take a step back and, and pause and reflect, what are those things that are influencing me? You get to the end of Nehemiah and and it ends on a downer. I mean, God’s done such great things throughout the entire book, and then they blow it. And I think it shows us a few things. I think it shows us that look over and over again, nation of Israel turns away from God. And it’s, it’s an example from the Old Testament over and over again to help us know that we can’t do it by ourselves. We need Jesus. But guess what? In the New Testament, people turn away from God over and over. Paul plants a church, invests into people, loves some people. Then he walks away and immediately he’s writing a letter back to ’em that says, you idiots stop it.

That that’s not exactly what it says. That was my translation of it. But he’s getting irritated ’cause they’re not doing what they are supposed to do, why they’re drifting away. But it’s also a warning for each and every one of us. Are we drifting or are we driving intentionally towards something? Uh, Nehemiah’s a fun book because of the wall. There’s this wall that, that he builds in 52 days. But guess what? This wall is not standing anymore. Why? Because they drifted in my life, I’ve done a lot of funerals, a lot of memorial services. I’ve attended a lot of memorial services and funerals. And at the end of people’s lives, especially when you’re the one preaching, you’re always talking to family and talking about likes and dislikes and where do they spend their time? And occasionally you have to get up and do a service where it’s really hard because they spent a whole life and they really didn’t build very much. You’re standing at the end looking back and, and you’re trying to pull together some pieces, but they really didn’t build into relationships and they didn’t really build into the church and they didn’t really build into themselves. And so they just kind of drifted away and wasted so much time. But then occasionally, occasionally you get to do a service for someone that they built with their life.

And, and I’m not talking about material things. Uh, I’ve done services for rich people and poor people. And, and the wealth had nothing to do with it. Wealth is not the thing that you build. You can build it, but it it’s about what you’re pouring into relationally, what you’re pouring into the kingdom of God, what you’re pouring into, the things that ultimately matter that you leave behind. How when you look at those lives where they built something of substance, of meaning, of purpose, how did they do it? One brick at a time’s, one brick, that every day that you and I wake up, we have a chance to build a brick. And so my question for you, my question for me today is, what’s the brick that you’re gonna build tomorrow morning When you wake up? What is the brick that you are going to build?

What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to build into? And the question for each of us is, am I drifting? Am I just floating or am I driving? And if you’re driving part of driving, sees the vision of what you’re trying to build, and then does it day by day, brick by brick, one step at a time. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father God, we thank you so much for the incredible story of Nehemiah. God, we thank you so much for the encouragement that we see in Nehemiah. We also thank you for the warnings that we see in Nehemiah, that we are a people, the prone to wonder, prone to leave the God we love. And so help each and every one of us just be challenged to not drift, to not fill our lives with influences that don’t matter, but instead to intentionally drive towards you. Be building something worthwhile each and every day to surround ourselves with the influences that are gonna encourage us and drive us. We pray these things in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.