I invite you to turn in your Bible to Nehemiah, chapter 1, verses 1 to 11. Let's listen to God's word to us. The words of Nehemiah, son of Hakalaya, in the month of Kislev in the 20th year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, Hanani, one of my brothers came from Judah with some other men. And I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that it survived the exile and also about Jerusalem. They said to me, those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burned with fire. When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. Then I said, Lord, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father's family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees, and laws you gave your servant Moses. Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses saying, if you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my name. They are your servants and your people whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand. Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man. I was cup-bearer to the king. This is the word of the Lord. Question for you this morning is what breaks your heart. What is it that breaks your heart? What is it that keeps you awake at night? Do you have something like that? Something that keeps you awake at night, something that makes your blood boil, something that gets you angry, perhaps, makes you, as someone has said, weep and pound the table. What is it for you? I shared with you a few weeks ago that I was able to take a little tour of Vithlo with Tim McKinney who is starting a ministry out there and I learned things about Vithlo that broke my heart that day. Vithlo is a community in Florida about what four or five miles from here, I guess, 10,000 or so people live there in Vithlo and many of them struggle with illiteracy and homelessness and unemployment and health issues and all kinds of other things. There are no sewers in Vithlo, I found out. The groundwater in Vithlo is contaminated. Bus service to Vithlo ended a couple of years ago and so they're literally orphaned, cut off from East Orlando. There's no landfill in Vithlo that is filled with toxic wastes and hazardous materials that is leaking into the soil and into the groundwater which is responsible for a lot of the problems that the people in Vithlo are having. As I was looking at these things and getting to know Tim and seeing what he deals with every day, my heart broke. When I drive sometimes down University Boulevard and turn, ride or left on Alfa trail and drive past UCF, I think of those students. 53,000 plus is that what it is now, many of whom, who knows how many, but many of whom are lonely, many of whom have no biblical moorings and yet are so vulnerable to stuff that I never had to deal with when I was their age. When I drive past UCF, my heart breaks.
A couple of months ago, you remember back in May we had a prayer walk and a couple of or some of us were on my little group, we did our prayer walk around Waterford Town Center. It was a Sunday afternoon. The town center was filled with people, crowded with people who were doing their shopping. And my heart broke as I thought about how few of those people know the Lord, how few of those people have a framework for doing life, how many of those families were falling apart, how many of those husbands and wives were at odds with each other, how many of those people were lonely, how many didn't have real genuine community, how many whose lives were based basically on getting by or having material possessions or having fun. And as I thought about that and looked at all of those people along with the others in my group, my heart broke. What is it that makes your heart break, maybe those things, maybe not, maybe it's something else. It could be the kids that live in the house, a couple of houses down from you on your street. It could be something else in another country, it could be something we've talked about today, perhaps. But everybody here sees something in this world, in your life, in your neighborhood, at work, at school, in your family that's falling apart. And the question God has for us in Nehemiah, this book of Nehemiah, is what are you going to do about it? You know something that's broken, you see it every day, you feel it, you see it around you in our culture. The message of Nehemiah is what are you going to do? Are you going to throw up your hands and say, well, what is this world coming to? Will you turn away and hope that somebody else gets involved? What will you do about the brokenness? The book of Nehemiah's answer to that question is rise up and build. Rise up and build, that is a phrase that's found in chapter two that we'll get to eventually. Don't turn away, says Nehemiah, don't say the situation's hopeless, rise up and help build the kingdom. And for the next ten weeks or so, we're going to study this Old Testament book called Nehemiah. These are Nehemiah's own memoirs. This book is his story about what he did when things were falling apart around him. It's an amazing account of what God can do with ordinary people who simply say, Lord, here I am, send me, use me, I'm very broken myself, I'm a mess. But Lord, my heart breaks and I want you to use me. And ultimately, you know what it is, it's a story of an amazing Savior who comes to the aid of his helpless, broken and wounded people. So we're going to get into it and today is going to be our introduction to the book. I want to give you four things this morning in pretty brief order. First, we're going to look at a bad report, a believing prayer, a bold plan and a benevolent God. So let's get started. First of all, I want to show you a bad report. You've heard the chapter one of Nehemiah. Let me take you back to chapter one, verses one and two. Says the words of Nehemiah, son of Hakkaliah, in the month of Kislev, in the 20th year while I was in the citadel of Susah, Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that survived the exile and also about Jerusalem. All right. Now, we need to stop right there and to understand what's going on, I suspect that some of you have never even heard about Nehemiah, much less read it lately. So I got to do a little history review for you that will give you the context. Nehemiah, the author of this book, lived in the 5th century BC. The date to be exact is 445 BC. The place when we open this book to its beginning is Susah. Susah was the capital of the Persian Empire, which was located in what we today know as Iran, about 150 miles north of the Persian Gulf. Nehemiah, the man about whom we're talking, was a Jew. He was a God-fearing person. He loved and followed and worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he was born and raised in Persia because about a century and a half before this Nehemiah's ancestors, who were the people of Israel, had been invaded and deported to this area by the Babylonians. We call that the exile, E-X-I-L-E. It happened in 586 BC. What happened was in 586 Babylonian armies under a king by the name of Nebuchadnezzar, entered Jerusalem, destroyed the city, burned down the temple, killed a lot of Judas leaders and priests, and took about a third of Judas population back to Babylonia with him. That was a pretty common thing to do if you were a conquering king back in that day. Nehemiah's relatives were among those who were exiled to Babylonia. Tens of thousands of Jewish people were marched in chains to their new homeland, and that's where they settled for a while. Years went by, and then in about 539 BC, a guy named Cyrus the Great, who was the king of Persia, entered Babylonia and established the Persian Empire. Cyrus said out with the old and with the new, he instituted a bunch of new policies, and one of those policies was an order that the ex-patriots should return to their homeland and get started rebuilding their temple. You can read all about that order in Ezra, chapter 1. Ezra is the book right before Nehemiah. So in several different waves, thousands of Jews, not all of them mind you, but most of the Jews, left Mesopotamia and returned to Jerusalem. And sure enough, they said about working on the temple, and they managed to rebuild it. It was finished in about 516 BC, 70 years after the Babylonian invasion. Happy days were here again for the Jewish people of God. Sort of. Sort of. See, a lot had changed in Judah during those years that the people of Israel were exiles in Persia. Their country had shrunk to about 800 square miles of which about a third was dry and almost uninhabitable land. Worst than that, they were now surrounded by unfriendly neighboring countries. To the north was Samaria. Their governor was a man named San Ballet, whom you're going to meet a little later today. And these neighbors, along with other people who were surrounding Judah, hated the Jews. They saw them as a political threat. They wanted to get rid of them. They wanted nothing more than to make their lives miserable. So Jerusalem had a temple, yes, but not a lot else. The Jews were very scarce, land was hard to come by, the economy was fragile, leadership was stuck in a quagmire, houses were in foreclosure or upside down, the nation's debt was spiraling out of control, does any of that sound familiar? That was the situation that encountered these Jews now that they were back home in Judah. And perhaps one of the worst things about their situation was that the walls of Jerusalem were in ruins. Now you think, well, what's a big deal about a wall? Well, the walls left the city of Jerusalem vulnerable to attack. They also defined who the people were. The walls defined the Jews as God's peculiar people and helped preserve the religious purity of the people of God. And so, given all those situations, the people of God were in a state of malaise. Things had fallen apart. Enter Nehemiah. Who was Nehemiah? Nehemiah, according to verse 11 of our text, the very last verse you heard read, was cup bearer to the king. The king was art exerxes the first, the most powerful man on earth of the most powerful empire that the world had ever seen. Why was Nehemiah in Persia? Well you see, Nehemiah's family had chosen to stay in Persia instead of return to Jerusalem with their fellow Israelites. I told you earlier, a lot of the people decided to do that. Now, when you see that word cup bearer, that's not exactly a job we know a lot about. Don't think butler. No, instead, think head of homeland security. That's really what the cup bearer was. Nehemiah had huge administrative responsibilities in the court of art exerxes. He had close access to the king. He had proven himself trustworthy. He had served the king as an advisor, not just one who held the cup of wine, although that was one of his duties. And verse 3 of this chapter says that one day Hanani, who was one of Nehemiah's brothers along with some other men, came to him from the Holy Land, from Jerusalem, and gave him a bad report about the state of things back home in Jerusalem. Look at verse 3. It says, they said to me, those who survive the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burned with fire. What was Nehemiah going to do? I had to ask myself, what would I do? If I had been Nehemiah, I was in a cushy government job, good salary, good living conditions, I had a family probably, I was young, I was fed, I had life before me. What would I do if, you know, from miles and miles and miles away, somebody came, hey, there's trouble over there. Having great distress, we're in a state of malaise. What would I do? I probably would do the same thing I do when I read about that debt debacle in Washington or the war in Afghanistan or when I read about that 11-year-old girl in New Hampshire, if you read about her, who's been missing for about a week now? Well, what do you expect me to do about those things? I'm just little on me, I'm here, I don't have any part to play in that. And I sort of just put those things aside and go on with my life. But Nehemiah didn't do that. Instead, his instant response was prayer. Nehemiah's instant response was prayer. Let me show you now, not just the bad report but the believing prayer. It's recorded for us there in verses 4 through 11. Verse 4 says, when I heard these things, when I heard about the walls, when I heard about the economy, when I heard about the lack of leadership. When I heard about the distress, the enemies, everything else, when I heard about that, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. You see, Nehemiah's heart broke over the plight of his countrymen. I'd love to take the time to walk through the prayer, that's another sermon all together. But in verses 4 through 11, you read about this prayer, let me just highlight a few things, and you can read about it on your own. But it begins with adoration. It moves from there to intercession and then to confession. Nehemiah confesses his own sin. That's what struck me about the prayer. That he so identifies with the distress of his people, that it was his own distress. He wasn't blaming or finger pointing. He was feeling his own faults. He was looking at the log in his own eye as he prayed for his people before God. And then it moves from confession to recollection. Nehemiah recollects or remembers or recalls God's covenant promises to his people. And then finally the prayer ends on a note of supplication. And you can read the prayer for yourself. There's so much there to learn about prayer, is there not? And as I say, we might spend a sermon on that. But the main point is, when things are falling apart inside you or around you, the first thing to do is pray. That ought to be your and my instantaneous response. The first thing to do is pray, tell God all about it. Yeah, and scream and throw things if you have to, but express your feelings to God. Let it out. Nehemiah did that. So did so many of the figures in the Bible whose prayers are recorded in our scriptures. Jacob, Moses, David, the prophets, Paul, and yes, even Jesus. His first response to distress, prayer. And it might take us, I told the children earlier, it might take a long time before you get an answer. Nehemiah prayed, as it says in verse 6, day and night. And we're going to find out in chapter 2 that he prayed for four months before anything started to move. And you may never get quite the response that you're hoping for from God. But if you want to see things change in your family, get work, get school, in your own life, overseas, start with prayer. Why? Well, because as Jesus said, apart from him, you can do how much? Nothing. Nothing. Apart from his power, apart from his blessing, apart from his smile, apart from the involvement of God, you can do nothing. That's why we pray. See prayer is when you stop trusting in yourself and your own resources, and you put your problems in the hands of the one who can do things a whole lot better than you can. I know you know this, but so many times prayer is the last thing we do, not the first. And aren't we so impatient too? Sometimes we think, and this is certainly true of me, that a little prayer offered before I've got to do something, as I'm rushing to that place in my car, is all that I need to do in order to be prepared to do whatever it is. Nehemiah knew better. He took his burden to God day after day, month after month, before he tried to do anything about it. One of his lines in that prayer is, oh Lord, let your ear be attentive to my prayer, this prayer of this, your servant. May that be your refrain and my refrain constantly. Well, Nehemiah's believing prayer led to a bold plan. Let's talk about the bold plan. And in order to tell you about it, I need to read chapter 2 verses 1 through 9. Look at your scriptures there, let me begin at verse 1 of chapter 2. In the month of Nissan in the 20th year of King Art Exorcise, you see that's four months after chapter 1, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before. So the king asked me, why does your face look so sad when you're not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart. I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, may the king live forever. Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire? The king said to me, what is it you want? Then I prayed to the God of heaven and I answered the king, if it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city of Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it. In the king with the queens sitting beside him asked me, how long will your journey take and when will you get back? It pleases the king to send me, so I said a time. I also said to him, if it pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of Trans Euphrates so that they will provide me safe conduct until I arrive in Judah and may I have a letter to ASAF keeper of the king's forest so that he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residents that I will occupy. And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests. So I went to the governors of Trans Euphrates and gave them the king's letters. The king had also sent army officers and cavalry with me, as fascinating. Now let's look back at verse 2, because in verse 2, Nehemiah says, I was very much afraid. Literally, what he said was, a terrible fear came over me. And you might wonder why was Nehemiah afraid? And I think there are at least three reasons. For one thing, Nehemiah was taking a huge risk approaching the king with any kind of request at all. Next you see, back in that day, had to approach their kings with great deference. There's Persian art that can be seen today, showing servants approaching their kings in Persia with their mouth, I mean with their hand over their mouth, so that their breath won't possibly touch the king. That's the kind of humility, that's the kind of deference people had to approach the Persian king with back in that day. Secondly, you were supposed to keep your feelings to yourself if you were a servant of the king of Persia. You were always to be cheerful in his presence, never sad. But thirdly, and perhaps most important of all, it was this king art exerxes who had earlier heard about the Jews rebuilding their wall and ordered them to stop. Now to know that, you'd have to go back and read part of the book of Ezra, and Ezra chapter four, if you want to make a note of that. But this king, art exerxes, had known about the wall being rebuilt, and he had decreed that they not do it. And so here comes Nehemiah, planning to ask the king to give him the permission and the authorization to go and start rebuilding that wall again. Wouldn't you be a little bit hesitant? If not, downright fearful to ask him to do that? No wonder Nehemiah shoots that arrow prayer up to God in verse four, Lord, change his heart. Lord, change his heart, please. When I see that verse, I think of Dorothy standing before the Wizard of Oz with ten men and a scarecrow and the cowardly lion getting ready to ask for the ability to go back home to Texas, to Kansas, rather. Wrong movie. But that's what I'm thinking of. And unlike the Wizard of Oz, King art exerxes does not say, come back tomorrow. Now verse eight says, because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests. It's amazing that not only does Nehemiah ask for a leave of absence from the court, he also asks the king for his imprimatur upon his mission to Jerusalem for his guaranteed to have safe passage and his authorization to be given timber for the wall. And did you notice in verse eight, even for his own residents? I mean, Nehemiah, that's why I call this a bold plan. Nehemiah is really going out there on a limb and asking the king, I got to have a house too. Have you ever asked your boss for a raise? You know how that is sometimes? Well, Nehemiah is going a lot further than that. Art exerxes says, sure, and verse eight says, because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests. Four months of prayer turned into a four minute meeting with art exerxes that accomplished way more than Nehemiah could have ever dreamed. All of his wishes were granted and then some. And so for the next 12 years, Nehemiah, the cup bearer, would be Nehemiah, the governor of Jerusalem, bringing revitalization to the city. As I think about that story, my question is, how in the world did that happen? How in the world could Nehemiah do that? How is it possible? And I believe the answer to that question is in chapter two, verse 10. The last verse of the passage we're going to look at. Verse 10 says that when San Ballet, there's that guy, San Ballet, the Hora Knight, and Tobaya, the Ammonite official, heard about this, that is, heard about my mission, heard about my coming to Jerusalem. They were very much disturbed, and here's the part I want you to underline, that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites. Notice that last part. Someone had come to promote to seek the welfare, the prosperity, the shalom, the favor, the bounty, the good of the Israelites. Does that remind you of anyone else besides Nehemiah? Does that remind you of anyone else who came for the welfare of his people? Sure it does, because the point of this chapter is not just, go be like Nehemiah. We don't preach like that here. We don't teach like that here at UPC. The key to your life is not, go be like Nehemiah. The key to your life is to know Nehemiah's Savior. His believing prayer led to a bold plan because Nehemiah believed in a benevolent Savior. Nehemiah believed in a benevolent Savior who comes and seeks the welfare of the people of God. See, the book of Nehemiah as we get into it is not a book about just Nehemiah. It's all about Jesus. Nehemiah points away from himself to the one whose chapter 2 verse 8, gracious hand is upon us. The one who, chapter 1 verse 5, keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands. The one who came to chapter 1 verse 10, redeem us by his great strength in mighty hand. Hence the reason that you can weep and pound the table and get involved in the brokenness of this world and of other people is that Jesus wept and pounded the table for you. His greatest pain, his greatest heartache became Jesus's greatest passion, namely you. When we were still powerless, it says in Romans 5-8, Christ died for the ungodly. Think of it. Jesus was with his father in heaven, but he looked down from heaven and saw your trouble and your disgrace. He saw you as a sheep wandering through the wilderness by yourself, exposed to your enemies and without hope in this world. And when Jesus saw you in your sin and in your misery, he was moved with compassion, his heart broke over your situation. And so in the good plan of God, Jesus left the glory of his pre-incarnate state. And he came to this world, born as a baby, growing up as a boy, becoming a man and took your place on the cross. He took your blame. He traded his perfection for your defection. He traded his righteousness for your rebellion. He took your punishment and gave you his favor with God that you might have new life and joy, reconciled relationship with the father. Jesus promoted your welfare, your shalom, your good. Do you understand that? Do you understand the parallel between Nehemiah's mission of mercy and Jesus's mission of mercy to you? If not, you can have relationship with God by turning from your sin and yourself and asking God to step into your life and become your Lord and your leader. And the most important being in your life. If you do have that relationship, guess what? There's a place in the brokenness of this world for you. Maybe it's Japan. Where do you understand that every 15 minutes a Japanese person takes his or her own life? Every 15 minutes there's a suicide in Japan. Or maybe it's Bithlow. Or maybe your heart moves for your neighbors. Or somebody you know at school or in your dorm. Wherever it is, there's poverty and homelessness and injustice and broken homes and struggling kids and misery all around us. Right in your neighborhood, you know what? There is great trouble and disgrace to use that phrase from chapter 1, verse 3. And you are needed. You don't have to have extraordinary gifts. You've got an extraordinary God. God cares about people. And friends, this is why we're doing the Sunday of service that we talked about earlier. This is why I ask you to fill out that golden rod sheet of paper and put it in the offering basket today so that we as a church family can kind of get used to being a blessing to the people around us who are broken and in need. So if your heart's breaking for anybody or anything, do what Nehemiah did, pray about the things that distress you? When you've prayed, pray some more. Listen to your pains. Listen to where your passions are leading you. Wait on God and then make a bold plan and trust in the one whose gracious hand can move the stubborn heart of mighty kings. We who rescue you when you are in distress can use you to rescue others. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this book. Thank you for what Nehemiah experienced and as we read about his passion for his people, Lord, I've got to admit that I'm a long way away from that. I've got to admit that many times I'm a lot more selfish than that, a lot more content with where I'm at. A lot more ignorant of people's situations and a lot more insulated from their pain. Lord, we pray for ourselves today that you will move us into those things that move you. Lord, we pray for hearts that are sensitized like Nehemiah's heart was to the pain of other people. We pray for us to be able to resist the consumerist mentality of our country and be able to see ourselves not as users but as servers. And Lord, for that to happen, we know that we need to see Jesus a lot more clearly as the one who came and in our distress rescued us. So Lord Jesus, we thank you and praise you that you left your home in heaven. You came from the halls of glory to the brokenness of this planet. Thank you for being our savior. Use us, we pray, to rescue others. And we ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.