Why Walls Matter

What’s your problem?
Hopefully you have one.

We will open the Scriptures and consider how God hears and heals our brokenness–not only individually–but whole communities.

It is often in the broken places and with broken people God does His most audacious work. Big problems require a big God. This week we plunge into Nehemiah. This book is soaked in hope!

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Grace Fellowship Church
Buddy Hoffman
Series: Nehemiah
April 27, 2014

Why Walls Matter
Nehemiah 1:1-2:8

I will just say, and I know all of us feel this way, but hasn’t Jon done a wonderful job? Jon would be the first to say that one of the things that makes Grace Grace is God’s hand is just upon it. We would like to explain mechanics of why amazing things happen in our midst, but ultimately, it’s God’s hand, and it’s God’s work. It’s also one of those funny things, and we’ll see this in this passage this evening…

We have the most amazing children’s program anywhere…anywhere. Honestly, it’s just incredible. The youth ministry. I don’t know if Randy is in here, but when you look at these walls back here and you see all these seniors (and this is not even all of them), these seniors are one of the reasons the Athens Campus has exploded, because these kids don’t go off to college untrained disciple makers. They go to their dorms and they start doing what they have been doing since they were in middle school here. It is just such a fun thing. It’s like God has gathered together…

There’s a phrase that Nehemiah uses. They build the entire wall in 52 days, and this is the phrase he uses. “The people had a mind to work.” They didn’t mind it. They jumped in and they liked doing God’s work.

If you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. I’d like to put a Bible in your hand. If you have a Bible already, great; if you don’t have a Bible at home, take one of these. It’s our gift to you. When you get that Bible, open it up to the book of Nehemiah. I’m excited about this series. If you don’t have a handout sheet, you’ll want to look at that because there are several things there.

The title of this is Why Walls Matter. Really, what we’re looking at in the book of Nehemiah is restoration. Rebuilding. Renewing. If you remember that series; we did it a long time… Well, it has been awhile back. We actually went through it twice. Do you remember the One Story series and the chart? It goes through this process of Kingdom Foundations, Kingdom Families, Exodus, Kingdom Fighting, Famous Kings, and then the kingdom fractures. They go into exile.

Do you remember what exile is? That’s really important. Exile is where God allows you to go geographically where you already are spiritually. It’s just like the nation was rotten and apostate within, and then what really was there became exposed. Sometimes people will look at situations. Like they’ll see a family that gets divorced, and they’ll say, “Oh, isn’t that a shame that these people were married so many years and they got a divorce?”

The shame isn’t the fact that they got a divorce; the shame is that somewhere a long time ago, layers and layers of days and events ago, they quit being committed to each other. They quit loving one another. They stopped doing what brought them together originally. That divorce just makes legal what was already going on.

Sometimes you’ll see somebody get to a stage of life, and they start doing things that are so seemingly out of character with the way they have lived, and you’ll go, “Wait a minute! That’s just out of character for them.” Well, usually, it’s because they have been moving. The interior part of their world had been moving that direction for a really long time.

Is anybody here from Florida? God bless you. Do you know how they have those sinkholes down there? Do you know what causes those sinkholes? There’s a thin crust. The surface is very hard and calcified, but underneath there has been water washing away underneath there, sometimes very, very large. There have been cases where whole towns have been swallowed up by sinkholes. Then finally the surface starts to crack and then starts sliding off into that abyss of a sinkhole.

Spiritually, the same thing can happen. People can look at you and they can think, “Oh, everything’s fine. Look how solid everything is.” But then if we don’t pay attention… There was a book written years ago about your private world. If we don’t pay attention to our private world, what everybody else sees can cave in. What happened with the nation of Israel was it caved in.

But then in three different movements away they took the children of Israel. Daniel was in that group. They took him away. They went into captivity. They stayed in captivity. Then this nation of Babylon, which was a really, really murderous regime (it’s modern-day Iraq) was defeated by a nation at the time called Persia. We know it as Iran.

We look today at Iran and say, “Oh wow, they hate us. They want to blow up the world and everything,” but actually Persia has the longest history of religious toleration of any nation in all the world. There is, in the British Museum, a cylinder. It’s called the Cyrus Cylinder, and it’s the proclamation that King Cyrus issues for all the people who have been taken captive to Babylon. He says, “You can go home now. Go home. Rebuild your temples. Rebuild your cities. Rebuild your lives.”

Sometimes we read the Bible and we go, “Did this stuff really happen?” Yes, this is not like Cinderella. This is not Disneyland mythology. It is historic. It is reality. So let’s look at this rebuilding and renewing our lives. Across the top of your handout sheet, I wrote down here Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Joel, Obadiah, Malachi. If as we’re going through this series, if you make it a point to read all of those books, and particularly those last four books… They’re short books, and sometimes they call them Minor Prophets.

That was always extremely confusing to me. When I was a kid, I thought about it like the Minor Leagues. They weren’t quite prophets. They gave it a good shot. They were better than average so they got to be in there. They got to play, but they were just kind of the minor prophets. But that’s not why they’re called Minor Prophets, and they’re not in a chronological order. It’s just because they were shorter than the other books, and so they stuck them back there. Chronologically, they should be with Ezra and Nehemiah.

The timeframe of Ezra and Nehemiah is about 450 years before the Incarnation, before Christmas, before Christ came into the world. There are three blanks there and three names that you probably want to have some familiarity with. Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Now we’re going to focus primarily on Nehemiah, but the whole movement actually begins with Zerubbabel. Zerubbabel’s involvement really is he leads it. He’s of the lineage of David, so he has royal lineage there. It tells about Zerubbabel coming back.

If you want to write these words out by those names in those blanks, it’ll help you understand where the emphasis was and why it matters. Zerubbabel restores right worship. His passion, the first thing he wants to do is come back and rebuild the temple. He wants to come back and rebuild the temple.

Ezra, as you probably are aware, is a scribe. He has dedicated his life to the study of the law. He’s a teacher of the law. He is somebody who can articulate the Word. At one point, he brings all the people together and for an entire day they stand and they read the Pentateuch. They just stand and read. They read the entire book of Deuteronomy, and they let the people know, “This is your history. This is your story. This is who you are. This is where we come from. This is the lineage we’ve received.”

Then Nehemiah rebuilds the walls. Now if you’re just reading through there, it might seem, “Oh man, wouldn’t it be fun to rebuild the temple? That would be amazing to be a part of that reigniting the passion and the heart for God.” There’s a passage in Ezra 3. It says he built the altar of God for Israel and burnt offerings on it.

In verse 10 of Ezra 3, it says, “And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord, according to the directions of David king of Israel. And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord…” They would respond to one another as they chanted back and forth, “‘…For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.’ And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.” (Ezra 3:10-11)

How many of you have ever built a house from the bottom up? Jody and I did that once, and our marriage survived. I will never do that again. That won’t happen to me. If you want to give your marriage the acid test, build a house together. I remember when they cut the foundation in, I looked at the hole where the basement was going to go, and I said, “I don’t think that’s going to be big enough.” Generally speaking, when you see the foundation, you really don’t get an idea of how big a project you’re taking on, because it starts going up, and there are floors above that.

When they start laying this foundation, it’s interesting. Well, I’ll just read it to you. In verse 12, it says, “But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses…” Now listen to this. “…old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away.” (Ezra 3:12-13)

It’s interesting. There are two groups of people and they’re looking at what’s going on and they’re seeing the same thing but they see it completely differently. The young people have never seen the temple as it was, and the temple as it was was grand, massive. David assembled all this equipment and he leveraged all his relationships. He got everything ready for Solomon to build the house, and Solomon built the house.

I did this calculation one time (it has been years and years ago) about in modern-day dollars how much it would cost to build the temple today. It’s like in the billions. It’s just insane how much gold is there, how much timber is there, and just all the stuff that goes on. Well, guess what? These people have been slaves all their lives for years.

They don’t have silver. They don’t have gold. They don’t have this stuff, but they come back and the best they have (and we’ll see this later) that they could basically borrow from Persia they’re putting into this new temple. The old guys are going, “Oh, it’s not like it was. It’ll never be like it was. It’s just not the same.” The other young guys are going, “It is so exciting what God is doing.”

I believe from the bottom of my heart that God has not quit doing miracles and doing great things. I hear people talk about the good ol’ days. Listen. Let me tell you something. The best is yet to be. Sometimes we look at the beginnings of things. Let me give you this quote from Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon preached to thousands in London. It was the largest church in the world in its day.

He said, “The smallness of our gifts may be a temptation to us. We are consciously so weak and so insignificant, compared with the great God and His great cause, that we are discouraged, and we think it vain to attempt anything. Moreover, the enemy contrasts our work with a work of others, and with that of those who have gone before us.

We are doing so little as compared with other people, therefore, let us give up. We cannot build like Solomon, therefore let us not build at all. Yet, brethren, there is a falsehood in all this; for, in truth, nothing is worthy of God. The great works of others, and even the amazing productions of Solomon, all fall short of His glory.”

Even people who we think, “Oh, they’re doing amazing things. I could never do things like that,” listen, whatever God calls us to do, when we offer that up as a sacrifice, as a worship unto him, God delights in it. I listen to Aaron and the band and watch them lead worship, and I stand over here and sing. If any of you have ever sat near me, it doesn’t sound like the guys who are up here.

Sometimes you wonder if it’s even a different song altogether. Sometimes Jody will nudge me and she’ll go, “You’re disturbing the people around you.” Do you know what? I don’t care. If the worship I give up unto the Lord is unto the Lord, I think he hears my voice as sweet as anybody else’s. I do.

Besides that, God does say make a joyful noise unto the Lord. He doesn’t say you have to be in harmony. It can just be a noise. We tend to measure one another by one another. Sometimes we even get envious of somebody else’s work. I don’t know if you ever read A.W. Tozer, but if you don’t, you’re missing out on something.

A.W. Tozer wrote, “Dear Lord, I refuse henceforth to compete with any of Thy servants. They have congregations larger than mine. So be it. I rejoice in their success. They have greater gifts. Very well. That is not in their power nor in mine. I am humbly grateful for their greater gifts and my smaller ones. I only pray that I may use to Thy glory such modest gifts as I possess. I will not compare myself with any or try to build up my self-esteem by noting where I may excel one or another in Thy holy work.

I herewith make a blanket disavowal of all intrinsic worth. I am but an unprofitable servant. I gladly go to the foot of the cross and own myself to be the least of Thy servants. If I err in my self judgment and actually underestimate myself I do not want to know it. I purpose to pray for others and to rejoice in their prosperity as if it were my own. And indeed it is my own if it is Thine own, for what is Thine is mine, and while one plants and another waters, it is Thou alone that giveth the increase.”

Don’t you love that? Don’t you want that kind of a spirit within you that says, “As long as God’s kingdom is in advancement, that’s all that really matters.” It really doesn’t matter who on earth gets the credit because none of us deserves credit at all! We are saved by grace. Now listen, if you are here and you think you’re in a different category, you’re in the wrong church. You’re sitting around with a bunch of people, and a lot of us have messed up. Does anybody here mess up? Yeah. Join the company!

So we find Zerubbabel. It starts with worship. If it doesn’t begin with worship, it really won’t amount to anything. But that worship must be aligned with truth, because you can have an emotional experience, but it needs to be really in line with who God is.

Now the third one here, and I think this is really important and needs to be said, actually needs to be repeated over and over, Nehemiah’s thing is the walls. So often in churches, either intentionally or unintentionally (I hope it is unintentionally) we communicate that if you’re not a preacher or in Christian work or doing something like a missionary or in full-time Christian ministry that somehow what you’re doing is not quite as pleasing to the Lord.

Now let me tell you something. Nehemiah builds walls. Bricks. He doesn’t preach bricks. He doesn’t sing bricks. He builds a wall! There’s a whole book in the Bible about building walls. So here’s the question…Why are the walls so important? Why are walls important? Now on your sheet there, there are four questions. I’ll come through there.

1. Are the things which trouble us worth the trouble? What happens first is he gets the news. In verse 3, he says the exiles are in great trouble. In verse 3, he says, “The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.” The temple is going up. Teaching is going on. But look at this. This is his response. “As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” (Nehemiah 1:3-4)

There’s this beautiful prayer there. “O [Yahweh] God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel…” Now notice this pronoun. “…which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father’s house have sinned.

We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments… Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples…'” (Nehemiah 1:5-8) And then this prayer goes down through verse 11. Look at this. “O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name, and give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.” (Nehemiah 1:11)

Now the reason the walls were important… There are two things. One is a city without walls wasn’t really a city. It was a group of people, but nobody saw it as a city. For instance, does anybody here live in the city of Brookwood? No, you don’t. Do you know why? Where’s Brookwood? It’s not a city. Now it’s a great place to live, but it’s not a city. Where’s Snellville? Does anybody here live in Snellville? You can say it. Grayson? Does anybody live in Grayson? Does anybody live in Lawrenceville? You know there’s a city.

I want to apply this to ourselves personally. If you don’t know what defines you, where your boundaries are, what lines you won’t cross, that this is really who you are, you’re really not your own person. You don’t even know who you are. As you grow and develop, you decide. You make decisions. “Okay, this is what I do. This is what we do.”

I grew up in a family. It was not terribly infrequent… Did any of you get in trouble a good bit growing up? Did any of you your parents have the talk with you? “You’re a Hoffman, and that’s not what Hoffmans do. You’re part of this family. This is the way our family lives. We define it that way. There’s a culture. There are things we do; there are things we don’t do.” A city needed those boundaries. There was no defense. So we find here that sometimes we don’t give credit to where credit really is due.

I’m surprised God lets me do what I do. I’m actually really shocked in it. Sometimes people will ask me, “When did God call you to preach?” Do you know what I always say? “I don’t really think he did. I just kind of volunteered, and he started blessing me.” And not just blessing me. If you, whatever work you do, if you do it unto the glory of God, it’s holy work. It’s holy work. It matters!

I don’t know how to put this, but this whole idea of clergy and laity actually is not even in the Bible. It’s not there! This idea that, “Well, Nehemiah, he was just somebody who worked with the government and built a wall,” well, God found that important enough that it’s a whole book in the Bible.

When we go out and we work, that is not just like, “Oh well, it’s just work.” No, it matters! If people didn’t clean the streets, if people didn’t build the bridges, if people didn’t teach in the schools, if people didn’t run… How much better is Atlanta because of Chick-fil-A? Can anybody say amen to that?

People who work (and the word we use very often here is) for the shalom of the city, who say, “This is our community. We’re going to work and make that community a place that’s safe for children. We’re going to work and we’re going to make this place that’s a healthy place where people have jobs and people have careers and people build homes,” those things actually matter.

So the first question is a real simple one. It’s, “Are the things that trouble us worth the trouble?” What are you really, really troubled about? So many times we worry about things that just aren’t worth the time to worry about. We’re having our little golf outing out at Summit Chase. I love playing Summit Chase. We used to have a house out there.

The owners aren’t here. Don’t tell them. I would sometimes go out at night and play, because I hit the ball and can’t find it sometimes anyway. I actually would go out and play a couple of holes and think about sermons and walk around at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I had a friend. His brother was Lee Janzen. I don’t know if you that name. If you’re a golfer, you know that name. He won the U.S. Open a few years ago.

His brother was David, and he was a pastor. He and his brother were playing golf and David got mad because he hit a ball so badly, and he threw his club. Lee walked over and picked up David’s club and handed it to him, and this is what he said. David laughed when he told me this. He goes, “He looked at me straight in the face and he said, ‘David, you just don’t play well enough to worry about it.'”

Now a lot of things we get all worked up about aren’t worth getting worked up about. A lot of things that are worth getting worked up about we just let them ago. Apathy is a horrendous thing. Actually, hate isn’t the opposite of love. The opposite of love is apathy, when we just don’t care.

2. Have we prayed persistently? I’m going to have to push through this. Forty days at least (and actually it was probably a little longer than that) he prays. He prays. Before he takes any action at all, he just prays and he prays and he prays and he fasts and he mourns and he’s deeply going before God. The book of Nehemiah opens in prayer and closes in prayer. I think there are 12 prayers. Some of them are quickly uttered prayers, but this is concentrated, specific praying. We as a church believe God answers prayer. Say amen.

I was with Jody in a restaurant. It has been a couple of months ago. We saw some friends across the restaurant, and I walked over, and I said, “Hello,” and we were just talking. They had just come to retirement age and they’d started traveling some and they were having a great time. The lady looks at me, tears come into her eyes, and she said, “I’ve just been diagnosed with macular degeneration, and the doctor says I’m going to go blind.”

I said, “Oh, I am so sorry.” She said, “Would you pray for me when you think about it?” I said, “I’m thinking about it right this minute. Let’s just pray right now.” She said, “Right here in the restaurant?” I said, “God loves to answer prayers in restaurants.” I called Jody over, and I said her name, and I said, “Let’s pray for her,” and I told her what happened. We prayed for her.

I was in another restaurant this week, and I was sitting there, and I noticed her and her husband across the way. As they were on their way out, she comes by and she stops and she leans over and she looks at me and she said, “It’s gone.” I said, “What?” She goes, “I went back to the doctor this week, and the doctor said he doesn’t have any clue but it is gone.”

Now if you ask me to explain that, I don’t have any explanation for it, but I know she’s not lying. I know that sometimes we pray for things and they don’t turn out like we expect, but God still shows up in miraculous ways. I don’t think he minds us asking. He says, “Call unto me, and I will show you great and mighty things that you don’t know.”

If you’re here and something in your life is broken… It may not be your health. It might be your marriage. It might be your job. It might be a relationship or a friendship. Let me just tell you something. We want to pray with you. We want to believe God with you. I know people are excited that I lived through this silly dissection of all my arteries and all that junk, but here’s the reality. My arteries, except for this upper arch, they’re still ripped. I could die tomorrow!

People keep asking me, “You’re going to have to explain to the congregation what the plan is.” Well, I don’t have a clue. I might go home tonight and die. Listen, if I do and you cry I’m going to come back and haunt you, because I’m not sad about seeing Jesus. I’m not. I’m not sad about crossing the finish line. I’m not sad at all! I’m happy. I don’t have the strength that I had. Well, so what? Probably I needed to rest a little bit. Listen, God is in charge, and the sooner we recognize that reality the quicker we’re going to have peace.

I remember when I was at Moody I saw a sign on this guy’s dorm room “Two rules for life.” I thought, “Man, if you can get life down to two rules, this is genius.” You couldn’t see them from down the hall. You had to actually walk over. So I walked over, and they’re written in small print. The first rule: “There is a God.” Do you know what rule number two is? “You are not him.” That’s pretty good, isn’t it?

Okay, so are the things which trouble us worth the trouble? You might even just want to jot the things down that trouble you and rate them. Have we prayed persistently?

3. Have we inventoried our options?

4. Will we risk making the Big Ask? Because this is what he does. He’s the cupbearer. So here’s what he does. He is the cupbearer, and what his job was was he managed the king’s wine. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but a king doesn’t run for election. The only way you get a new king is the old king dies. So he would always have Nehemiah taste the wine and see how it worked out for Nehemiah.

Nehemiah’s job was to watch the wine cellar and the collection of wines and all this stuff over there and to guard it, to make sure nobody slipped bad poison into the food and into the wine of the king. Now I know some of you it bothers greatly that… I heard a guy say one time, “Well, it really wasn’t wine; it was just grape juice.” No, it was wine, okay? Wine.

I know some of you don’t need to touch it. You know it. You have a history with it. You have alcohol issues. Alcohol has destroyed so many homes, but at this point in time, that’s his job, and if you don’t like the way it’s written, God did not ask you to edit the Bible, okay? If you get a call and God says, “I would like for you to edit Nehemiah,” then let me know and we’ll commit you somewhere.

God lays this on Nehemiah’s heart, and he’s close to the king, and he says, “Listen, I need some time off. I would like to have access to your Home Depot credit card. I’d like for you to pay for the trip. I’d like for you to send guards to make sure everything goes well.” This is called the Big Ask. Am I willing to go for the Big Ask?

Sometimes we aren’t willing to go for the Big Ask because we’re afraid somebody is going to say no. Let me tell you something. If you aren’t pushing into the Big Ask, you’re probably not asking big enough, if nobody is saying no ever. Your next door neighbor whom you have prayed for. Have you ever just said, “Hey, let’s talk about your relationship with God?” You say, “Well, I’m just afraid I might offend them.” Well, would you rather them go to hell?

Why haven’t you had this conversation? If you don’t talk to the people you say you love about eternity, you don’t really love them. You don’t! You have responsibilities. Let’s do the things. Some of you, God is calling you into something that is beyond your mind and you don’t even want to articulate it because you don’t feel qualified. Well, why don’t you just see?

Maybe God has put in your heart to start a business or something. Go out on a limb. Put yourself in some place of vulnerability. If you’ve prayed about it for 40 days, and you’ve looked, and you get this whole realm of reasons why, maybe what you’re missing is just asking God for it and taking that risk and putting yourself out there.