Vision

Nehemiah had a problem. The wall of his home city was shattered and his people were living in “great trouble and shame” (Neh. 1:3). But even though the problem was enormous, Nehemiah didn’t let its magnitude overwhelm him or consume him. Instead, he prayed and took action.

But then Nehemiah did something peculiar–when he finally arrived in Jerusalem, he went for a ride on his horse at night to survey the walls. What he saw may surprise you, even if you’ve read the story before. But the results of Nehemiah’s night ride contain one of the most important keys to rebuilding our communities and our cities in the entire book.

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Sermon Transcript

Grace Fellowship Church
Jon Stallsmith
Series: Nehemiah
May 4, 2014

Vision
Nehemiah 2-3

I’m excited about JAQ at the end of the month, getting back to teaching that. We try to do that about three times a year in Atlanta, and then of course, our team gets invited around the US and the world to do other training. You would love it. If you haven’t been, especially come check it out.

Good morning. Yeah, beautiful day today. If you were here last week, you know we just launched into a series in the book of Nehemiah. If you have your Bibles with you, go ahead and open up to Nehemiah. If you don’t have a Bible, you can slip your hand, and we will put a Bible in your hand so you can read along with us. If you don’t have a Bible at home, you’re welcome to keep that one. If you need a sheet for notes, you can also slip up your hand and get you one of those.

The message this morning is really for anyone who has a problem. I’ve talked to some of you, and I know some of this applies. But not just any problem. It really is a message I think that will be an encouragement, especially if you’re facing some of those problems that seem a little bit too big to change.

Maybe in your own life or in your family something has come up, or maybe there’s a pattern that seems to have repeated itself over and over again. You’re looking at that in your life and you’re going, “That’s never going to change.” You’ve begun to lose hope, and maybe you’ve even started to think that it’s going to be like this forever.

What we see in Nehemiah is a man who faced an immense problem that had not changed for a very long time, and yet as he went into engagement with that problem, with the help of God and with the community around him, we’re going to see he really accomplished a great deal.

Now before we read we’re just going do the first four verses here from Nehemiah 1, and then we’re going to skip forward to the second half of Nehemiah 2, but as a way of review, just remember where we are in the Scripture. We’re in that period which is called the post-exilic period in the history of Israel.

Remember the nation of Israel dates all the way back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They multiplied, ended up in Egypt where they were enslaved until God set them free through the Passover, crossing the Red Sea. Eventually they made their way into Israel. There they established a real nation, a kingdom.

God appointed kings…Saul, David, Solomon. But then there was a civil war and the kingdom split. It seemed like there was this long pattern where the people of Israel kept rejecting God and drifting farther and farther away. Even though God sent prophets into their midst to remind them to call them back to godliness they went their own way.

Eventually, in the year 722 BC, the empire of Assyria, the armies came down from the north and swept away the northern 10 tribes, that northern kingdom, never to be heard from again. A little bit more than 100 years later, because of their ongoing persistent rebellion against God, in 586 BC, the Babylonians came down and carried off most of the Israelite people, leaving Jerusalem in ruins, burning just about everything. So the people of Israel were in exile, that southern kingdom, the people of Judah, for about 70 years.

Then at the end of the 70 years, God moved upon the heart of Cyrus to allow some of the exiles to return to Jerusalem. There we see around 516 or 515 BC that they rebuilt the remains of the temple into a new temple. That was under Zerubbabel and Joshua. But nothing really happened after that. Every time they tried to start anything in Jerusalem in this post-exile time, the time after returning from exile, their enemies would just say, “No, you can’t do that,” or they’d lose enthusiasm. They’d lose focus. They wouldn’t have the resources.

So for about 55 or 60 years, nothing really happened. The people just lived in the midst of the rubble of the city of Jerusalem. Ezra came back. Originally, they look at Ezra and Nehemiah as one book. But Ezra came back and he helped to invigorate the people’s connection with God, helped to restore that worship.

But then, again nothing really happened in terms of building until the time of Nehemiah, which is 13 years after Ezra. When this book starts, Nehemiah is actually in the capital of Persia, the invaders. He’s still in exile. He’s in Susa. He hears this news about a massive problem. So we’ll pick it up in Nehemiah 1:1.

It says, “The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the citadel, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, ‘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.’

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 1:1-4) This is Nehemiah’s problem. He hears news from Jerusalem that the people are just living in great trouble and shame. This is one of the first steps.

I spent a number of years living in Buddy’s basement. As I learned from Buddy, one of the things he always would tell me about leadership is that the first job of leadership is to define reality. I actually for about three years didn’t know what that meant at all. In fact, the first time I heard that, I remember going back and getting the dictionary, flipping to the letter r. “Reality. Noun. There’s the definition. I don’t understand.”

But the point is very good that really you have to figure out what’s going on with this problem before we make any headway in solving or addressing the problem. So what’s going on here for Nehemiah? Why is this particular problem about the walls and the gates and the people so troubling? Well, first of all, this is about way more than walls.

A lot of times you think about the book of Nehemiah, if you’ve been around church and think, “Oh yeah, that’s the book about rebuilding walls.” Actually, we have like a wall in progress back here, our production people have put together as an illustration. It’s wonderful. But really this is about way more than the wall, because the report that comes to Nehemiah is that the remnant, the people, were living in trouble and shame.

The word trouble elsewhere in the Old Testament is used to describe when a branch is broken. The idea is that the people are just shattered. This is the people, remember, that God had promised all the way going back to the days of Abraham. Through this people God was going to restore the earth, and yet now here they are living in rubble as a shattered people.

Then it says they’re in shame. That word shame has an idea with it that they’re the lowest of the low, the insulted people. All of their neighbors around would look at them and go, “Oh, those pathetic Israelites living in the ruins of Jerusalem.” This is really the thing that breaks Nehemiah’s heart, that the people of God, the fabric of their community and their culture is not just fraying, it’s broken down. It has been shattered.

And then, on top of that, the walls. The walls are breached, broken down. Buddy talked last week about how a wall helps to define the identity of a city, but also, wherever a wall is broken down, there’s no security. So at this time, there were enemies. We’ll hear about these later as we go in the book of Nehemiah.

Any of these, at any point, could just come and go from the city of Jerusalem, which meant it was virtually impossible to establish any sense of society to educate your kids, to have commerce going on in this city. It’s just people could come and go, raiders could come and go, and there was really no protection, no safety, no security around which to build a real family life.

If you think about that in terms of your own life… Sometimes this happens in our hearts, in our minds and everything else. It just feels like our defenses and the security of our thinking and our feeling begins to break down. Whenever a certain temptation or a pattern, habit, reaction confronts us, it just feels like we have no defense against it and we’re totally a victim of that thing. It runs right in. That’s kind of how the whole city of Jerusalem felt, just a porous sort of place without definition, identity, or security.

But then on top of that, the gates are burned. If you do a study of gates in cities in the Old Testament, the gates were actually really essential places. A lot went on around the gates. We know that right around the gates was where the elders of the city, those who were wise in governing, where they would sit. Sometimes even the kings would set up their thrones right outside the gates and administer justice from that place.

In fact, in Proverbs, there’s this phrase, at the gates, that is referring to the way that justice is given, the whole legal system. So essentially, rather than having a courtroom up there in Lawrenceville, the gates was the place where decisions were made legally. But it wasn’t just the justice and administrative system. It was also the place where commerce would’ve occurred. If you remember the book of Ruth, Boaz is down by the gates. That’s where the market and the trading went on.

It was also one of the places where the prophets would come and they would address the people of God. So it was a source, a fount of real wisdom and insight for the community. The whole point is if your gates are not functioning, if your gates are burned down, then your administrative and legal system is not functioning. There’s no commerce. The place where the prophets speak too is broken down. The source of wisdom for the community is broken down. If your gates are burned, you’re in big trouble.

Then on top of all of this, it has been this way for quite some time. As we mentioned, it has been roughly 70 years from the time the first remnant has returned till now, and still nothing has been done about the walls or about the gates. So Nehemiah hears all of this, and it’s actually overwhelming. We saw last week about his reaction. The first thing he does is just weeps, tears his garments, fasts. Then he begins to pray, and for four months he prays that God would show him a plan, show him what to do with the brokenness in his heart.

Looking at this pattern, this is why we launched again that Operation Mongoose on Monday mornings with women, on Tuesday mornings with men, at 5:00. Just this last week, we had a number of women come on Monday at 5:00 and pray. You don’t have to get done up or anything else. Before the kids are even awake, just come and pray together a little bit. On Tuesday, the men came in and prayed.

But then, because this pattern of Nehemiah’s life that before he goes into direct engagement with the problem, we’re going to see what he begins to do with it in a moment. Before he does that, he spends time with God, praying, seeking, allowing that prayer season to really confirm and shape what’s going on in his heart.

But then, finally, he gets the permission from the king to go to Jerusalem. He has a whole convoy of people with him. He has resources and everything else. He shows up at the city. What does he see when he gets to the city? This is one of those questions we need to really think a lot about. What do you see?

One of the classic illustrations in our culture is the old glass like that. Is it half empty or is it half full? Are you a pessimist or are you an optimist as you’re looking at that glass? It’s interesting because they say there’s more than just determining pessimists and optimists when you look at this glass.

They say a worrier is concerned that the remaining half is going to evaporate by the next morning. The cynic wonders who drank the first half. The physicist says, “No, it’s actually full; just half full of water and half full of air.” The project manager says, “The glass is twice as big as it needs to be.” Sometimes your perspective on the glass really depends on your point of view. This is amusing to me. They say while everyone is arguing over the glass, a pragmatist just drinks the water.

What is Nehemiah? Is he an optimist? Is he a pessimist? Is he a pragmatist? A cynic? How does Nehemiah see things? I would suggest to you Nehemiah really, when he gets to Jerusalem, doesn’t see a glass that’s half empty or half full; he actually comes upon a city where the glass is really shattered. He doesn’t walk up on a situation that’s a choice between optimism and pessimism. He walks up on a really broken down, messy, dangerous sort of thing.

So what does he do? What does he see? How does he deal with this? We’re going to read Nehemiah 2:9 and go through the end of the chapter in verse 20. Before I read, I want you just to get in your mind what Jerusalem might have looked like at the time, so let me show you a quick map and a picture. It’s hard to know archeologically exactly how the city would’ve been laid out, but this is one of the best theories.

There on the left, you have a map, and we’re going to see in a minute a number of the names of these gates. That red arrow, the Valley Gate, is where Nehemiah is going to begin his survey of the wall. He’s going to go down south toward the bottom of the Dung Gate. We believe they called it the Dung Gate because that’s the gate they would take all the refuse from the city out of, and so on, and make his way around the city.

On the right, you have actually a model of what a completed wall system around the city would’ve looked like, but remember when Nehemiah got there this is not the picture we see. This is actually much more optimistic. So this is the walls after construction would’ve been completed. But I just wanted you to have this in your mind as I read. So let’s go to verse 9 of Nehemiah 2.

Nehemiah is writing in the first person. “Then I came to the governors of the province Beyond the River and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen. But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant heard this, it displeased them greatly that someone had come to seek the welfare of the people of Israel.

So I went to Jerusalem and was there three days. Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem. There was no animal with me but the one on which I rode. I went out by night by the Valley Gate to the Dragon Spring and to the Dung Gate, and I inspected the walls of Jerusalem that were broken down and its gates that had been destroyed by fire.

Then I went on to the Fountain Gate and to the King’s Pool, but there was no room for the animal that was under me to pass. Then I went up in the night by the valley and inspected the wall, and I turned back and entered by the Valley Gate, and so returned. And the officials did not know where I had gone or what I was doing, and I had not yet told the Jews, the priests, the nobles, the officials, and the rest who were to do the work.

Then I said to them, ‘You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.’ And I told them of the hand of my God that had been upon me for good, and also of the words that the king had spoken to me. And they said, ‘Let us rise up and build.’ So they strengthened their hands for the good work.

But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they jeered at us and despised us and said, ‘What is this thing that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?’ Then I replied to them, ‘The God of heaven will make us prosper, and we his servants will arise and build, but you have no portion or right or claim in Jerusalem.'” (Nehemiah 2:9-20)

We’ll get to the opposition Nehemiah and the people faced in the next couple of weeks, but for now, I just want us to see what Nehemiah sees. When he gets to the city, he inspects it. He walks around. He doesn’t flinch from the mess, the brokenness that is there, but rather he looks it right in the face.

Now this is something important for us. If we are facing problems, we have to look at them. We have to be willing to open our eyes to the bad stuff. It says as Nehemiah was inspecting that there were parts that were just broken down and burned. Some parts of the wall actually had caved in so much that the rubble around made it impossible for his steed to pass. These walls are in bad shape. These gates are burned down. But Nehemiah makes himself go out and survey the situation. He’s brutally honest.

For my part, this is hard for me. Sometimes in my life I can sense that there’s something a little bit off or that there’s a problem in my family or in my own heart or sometimes it’s in the community. But I don’t always like to look at it. I don’t like to be brutally honest with it. Sometimes I’ll even avoid it.

You guys know what it’s like when you know that bill is coming in the mail. Maybe you had a hospital visit or some sort of medical expense, so there’s time you’re just waiting and waiting. Then one day you get to the mailbox and you open it up and you pull it out and there it is. This is what I’ll do.

I’ll walk inside and I’ll think, “Man, it has been a long day. I have a lot on my mind. I’m not going to deal with this right now,” and just leave it there. I won’t even open it. Maybe you’re totally unlike me, but for me, I’m just like, “I’m going to wait until I feel better.” What? So I can open it and feel worse again? I mean, it’s not good logic, but I have a hesitation. I don’t always like to be so honest with the stuff I don’t want to deal with.

Or maybe you’ve gotten an email. There’s a situation at work and someone sends you an email, and as soon as it pops up in your inbox, you look at it and you go, “Oh, I can’t read that right now. I’m not ready for that.” Have you guys ever had that feeling? You just don’t want to look at it. You say, “I’ll just see if I can delay it.” They actually have apps on your phone now. It’s great. You just swipe to the left and it’ll come back in like two days. Just procrastinate. Let me know if you want to know about that app.

Then there’s the phone call. Do you ever get that? The cell phone rings, you pull it out, and you look at it and go, “Oh! I do not want to talk to this person. Your first thought is you want to decline it, but then you realize if you decline it immediately they’ll probably know you declined it, so you just have to let it ring it out. So you just let it ring or vibrate, then it finally goes to voicemail. Then the voicemail is on there. I do this sometimes. I don’t even want to listen to the voicemail. I’m not ready for it. There’s an app for that too. So this is my own stuff.

But I think it’s common to all of us. In fact, we have no idea why Nehemiah waited three days to look at the city, but in the back of my mind I’m wondering if Nehemiah rode up and he saw just the parts that were broken down and going, “Oh, this is more than I thought.” Maybe he needed a few days just to get up the courage with God to be brutally honest, to go out by night to see what was really going on there. It’s a fascinating story.

It’s not just emails or the letters or your cell phone ringing. This happens in relationships. I remember not very long ago when I was in college and I was a young adult, single guy. I was in community with folks, and I remember we were all trying to figure out how to get married, who to marry, when to get married (as soon as possible, most of the guys were thinking in the Christian circles). So all of that was on our minds.

I remember people would get into these relationships and they’d start dating. Within like a month or two you would know, “This is not a very good relationship.” Neither of these people make each other very happy. They’re actually pretty miserable, but because they’re not willing to be brutally honest about their relationship, because they’re just kind of, “Well, let’s just put it off, let’s just swipe it to the left and wait a few days,” and everything else, it ends up being this one-, two-, or three-year relationship that’s never really going to work. Then there’s a breakup and it’s miserable because people aren’t willing to just be brutally honest with the situation.

The same thing is true in marriage. Sometimes in our marriages it is easier, it feels more expedient, to live in denial of the deep issues that are assaulting our relationship. You can sense when something’s off. You can sense when you’re beginning to drift apart. You can sense when your worlds are diverging. Sometimes it just feels easier, “I don’t want to deal with that right now.” And so we just push it off. We forestall. We live in denial, and the problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

What we’re learning from Nehemiah here is that at a certain point it is essential, it’s crucial, that we learn to be brutally honest with what’s going on. The same thing is true in our community. There are all sorts of problems in the neighborhoods, in our county, city, state, the nation. A lot of times, we don’t really want to look at those, or we’re just not aware of them, or we live in a studied neglect of some of that stuff.

Poverty is one of those things. It’s surprising to many of us that Gwinnett County, our very county, has an enormous amount of poverty. In fact, if you look at the study, over the last 13 years, out of the top 20 metropolitan areas in the United States, Atlanta, our poverty has increased by the second-most amount of anyone…behind Detroit.

The even more surprising thing is that the way poverty in the metro area of Atlanta has increased is actually in the suburbs, not so much the city. It has remained relatively constant there. It’s actually this enormous increase of poverty in the suburbs that has caused the metro area to climb the ranks.

Let me show you a quick map here. This is out of a study comparing the community survey between 2007-2011 and the 2000 census. What you see here is in the center, inside the perimeter, you have a poverty rate of around 21 percent, but then that next ring…Cobb, Fulton, Gwinnett (you see those orange), DeKalb counties…like that, that first ring of suburbs, the poverty rate is almost 13 percent. So not that much lower than the inner city, but the change is dramatic. It has gone up almost 6 percent.

I think we have another map here that shows some of these areas with a lot of poverty. They’re that blue square. That shows the area where we are now. Look at all the red areas in there. There’s this pretty dramatic increase of poverty in our own county. One of the most shocking statistics I heard last year was that in the entire metro area of Atlanta, 87 percent of our poor live outside of the city. Does that make sense? Eighty-seven percent of the poor people in the Atlanta metro area live outside the city.

Yet a lot of times it’s very easy to just go through life and not notice the problem, not pay attention, not recognize it or live in the studied neglect or even denial that it’s a deal. Yet we know Jesus calls us to engage with the community around us, to be good neighbors, to care for the poor. We don’t always want to be brutally honest in our observation of the problems around us, but we need to be. That’s what Nehemiah here is showing us as he goes out on his night ride.

Believe me, we can’t tackle every problem. We’re not going to rebuild every wall ourselves. In fact, I don’t even think God designed us to watch 24-hour news networks so we could see every problem on the globe all the time. It’s kind of overwhelming. Remember it was in the garden of Eden that too much of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil leads to death. Sometimes we saturate ourselves with so much of knowing all the good and evil that we get overwhelmed and paralyzed.

But what is true (we’ll see this in a moment) is that God has called us to engage with some problems in our community, in our families, in our own lives, that he does call us. That first step of engaging those problems is to authentically define reality, to learn how to be brutally honest with the help of God in assessing what’s gone wrong.

This is why in the road to recovery for those who suffer addiction the first step is always a recognition, “I have a problem.” That’s the first step in the 12-step plan. It’s the first step really anywhere, because what happens if you’re addicted to alcohol or drugs or whatever it may be is this pattern of denying. “No, I’m not that. No, no, no, that’s not me. No, no, hey, I’m not, whatever,” like that.

The real road to recovery cannot begin until someone who’s an addict says, “No, I have a problem. I’m going to quit playing games, quit lying, and be honest about this thing. I have a problem.” That’s what Nehemiah is doing. He’s walking in Jerusalem, seeing the shattered remains of the walls, and he says, “Yeah, there’s a problem here.”

Now biblically, there’s actually incredible power in naming our problems, really in naming anything. In the Bible, naming something is a way of having authority over it. So remember back in the garden of Eden God made Adam and then he put him in a position of authority over all the animals. So what does Adam do? He names the animals. It’s a sign of his authority.

Parents throughout the Bible, when they named their children, it’s a sign of their authority. When Jesus encounters people who are demon possessed, what do they try to do? “We know who you are, Jesus. You’re the Holy One of Israel.” They try to name Jesus to exert authority over him. What does Jesus say? “What’s your name?” ”

Legion.”

“Okay, get out.”

Like that, because Jesus has all the authority in heaven and on earth, but there’s this naming thing that’s so crucial. It actually empowers us to be able to make a difference. If something is going on in our lives or in our community or in our families that is unnamed, then it has authority over us. It just works its way through our lives, works its way through our hearts and through our homes. But when we name it, we begin that process of change. We begin that engagement with the problem itself.

So that’s what Nehemiah does. In verse 17, when he gets all the people together, he just names it. He says, “Guys, you see the trouble we are in. How Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned.” He’s very brutally honest about the bad stuff, about the problem he sees. This is a little piece of advice. If you do begin to recognize, maybe even the Spirit of God is working in your heart right now that you have something you need to look at, maybe it’s in the neighborhood, maybe it’s in your own life, my advice is as you go on that journey, go with God and stick to the facts.

Because a lot of times what happens is we’ll get an impression or a sense that something is off, but rather than sticking to the facts, we just worry about it. That actually takes us out of that place of being brutally honest and into a new place of new anxiety about what that is. So stick to the facts. That’s what Nehemiah does. As you read this, he’s meticulous in the detail. This gate, this spring, that gate, that area is broken down. He’s very brutally honest, but he’s sticking to the facts. This is essential.

But then there’s a second part, and without this second part, we are not really reading the Scripture well. What does Nehemiah see? Is he an optimist? Is he a pessimist? As he walks up on the shattered remains of Jerusalem, what does Nehemiah see? Well, he’s brutally honest with what’s broken, but at the same time, he’s brutally honest about what’s good. Sometimes, we miss this. Sometimes, we can get so consumed with the problem, with the need in an area that we fail to recognize the resources that are right there.

In the passage we just read, maybe your tendency was just to focus on the rotten parts of the wall, the places where it has been breached, where there’s rubble just falling everywhere. But if you read the text again really carefully, there are actually a number of incredible resources God has embedded within this situation that will enable real change and progress to occur.

Nehemiah says in verse 12, “And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem.” (Nehemiah 2:12) Nehemiah actually had a vision from God. That’s an incredible resource. Up at the top, he had been sent with officers, the army, and horsemen. He had resources from the king.

If you notice in verse 15, it says, “Then I went up in the night by the valley and inspected the wall, and I turned back and entered by the Valley Gate, and so returned.” (Nehemiah 2:15) As he’s talking about the second half, the return half of his night journey of exploration and inspection, he mentions the wall. He doesn’t say the broken-down wall. The idea here is that the wall, though it has been breached, is not uniformly gone. There are sections of the wall that are still in place and foundations of the wall upon which they can build.

So when Nehemiah shows up, he’s not just brutally honest with the broken-down parts of the wall, he’s also brutally honest that there’s some of the wall that is in place. Then, most significant of all, what he does here at the end of the chapter is he gathers the people around. He says, “Hey, guys, we can rebuild this.” He recognizes there are enormous human resources, human people, the people there who can work to engage the problem.

What Nehemiah is actually doing here is not just being brutally honest with facing the needs, but he’s figuring out what assets, what resources exist already in this place that can help solve the problem. This approach is incredibly important when it comes to working in communities. We just talked about poverty a little bit. How do you engage with the poor and all the rest? So they’ve developed…

Actually, if you’ve ever read this book (it’s called When Helping Hurts), if you want to learn a little bit more about how to engage with the poor in a productive way, this is a great place to start. But in here they talk about something that folks have been learning for awhile, particularly within the church. They call it ABCD, asset-based community development.

Rather than walking into a community and seeing what’s really broken down, what’s really wrong, and focusing only on the places that break your heart, you walk into a community and say, “What’s here? What’s valuable? What’s good here? What is redeemable? What do you bring to the table?” So rather than setting up a relationship of dependency and need, you set up a relationship of mutuality and exchange. Super crucial.

One of the best examples of this kind of approach to a problem actually came from a very influential source in my own life. It’s a little movie called Three Amigos. I don’t know how many times you watched this movie when you were a child, but I watched it quite a few. In fact, in the first service, somebody came up to me and said, “How did you even remember that?” I was like, “Well, I kind of memorized the whole movie.” I’m not recommending that as a healthy thing, but it’s just every line is up there.

So anyway, I want to show you this clip. If you remember the Three Amigos… If you’ve never seen it, and I know some of you are unfortunately still without having seen Three Amigos, the basic plot is that there’s little village in Mexico that is getting attacked over and over again by this bandit nearby. His name is El Guapo. It means the handsome guy. He has a whole band of bad guys with him.

One day, one of the villagers goes and sees a movie where she sees these three cowboys, the Three Amigos, acting and saving the village. So she writes to them. Of course, they’re just actors, but they get the invitation. They think, “Oh, this is another gig. We can go down and act.” So they show up and it turns out that it’s real. They have no idea how to solve the problem and everything else. But of course they discover their identity, and the town begins to figure out how to fight back and all the rest. It’s a whole great meaningful tale.

But this scene actually is right after the Three Amigos have rescued the girl from the bandit’s place, and they’ve come back to the town, and El Guapo is coming to attack them. They have a big problem they have to face, and this is how they do it. It’s a great example of asset-based community development.

“El Guapo is on his way.”

“Someday the people of this village will have to face El Guapo. We might as well do it now.”

“In a way, all of us have an El Guapo to face someday. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big dangerous guy who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo.”

“We want to defend ourselves. But how?”

“By using the skills and the talents of the people of Santa Poco. This is not a town of weaklings. You can turn your skills against El Guapo. Now what is it that this town really does well?”

“We can sew.”

“There you go. You can sew.”

“If only we had known this earlier.”

“Ned, Dusty.”

“Sewing.”

“Remember our film, Amigos, Amigos, Amigos?”

“Yes.”

“Remember what we did in that movie?”

“Gee, do you think it could work?”

“It’s got to work. It’s our only hope.”

Well, if you haven’t, I don’t want to spoil the end of the movie, but the way they actually win is that the town does come together and they sew a bunch of costumes so they all look like the Three Amigos. They confuse the bad guys, and of course, they overcome. I love that scene though. I always think, “In a way we all have an El Guapo.” But do you see what’s happening there? They show up but it’s not just this focus on El Guapo; it’s the idea of coming in and saying, “All right, what do we have here? What do we have?”

You think about some of the challenges we know about in our community. The last several months, you’ve heard us mention a number of times that there’s a bit of a crisis regarding foster care in our county, that there are a little bit fewer than 500 kids in crisis who need homes, and yet we only have about 50 homes in our county where they can stay who have been approved for foster care.

So we’ve begun this journey where a number of our families here at Grace, some of you guys have volunteered and said, “Yeah, that’s my place. My heart is broken for that. That’s my breach in the wall where I can fill in by opening up my home.” So we’ve had a number of folks go through the training, the approval process, which is actually fairly extensive. We’ve begun to see our first families from Grace be approved. Actually on May 16, one of our families will be getting a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old.

What we’re seeing now is not just a focus on the need or the crisis for foster care. We’re actually going, “Wait a second. Yeah, there is a need, but what do we have? What are the assets here? What are the resources here? What has God already put in place that can help us address this issue?” We said, “Well, we have families. It’s who we are. This church. We’re a bunch of families. We can help. We can be a part of this.”

Or you think about maybe it’s just on a smaller scale. Massive in your own life, but just sort of a more personal level. You think about in your marriage, maybe there are some of these patterns that have begun to separate you, lead you guys, drifting away. It has been 20 years, and at this point you feel like…you’re here.

Well, you’ve been married 20 years though! It’s pretty great! Learning to recognize what God has done. How have you been married 20 years? What are the good things in your marriage? Why did you get married in the first place? Learning not just to be brutally honest about the problems but also about the resources. It’s absolutely essential.

There’s an example of what happens when we miss seeing the resources, the assets in a community. We actually can create some really big problems. This is a book called Toxic Charity. It’s written by Bob Lupton. He has worked in Atlanta for years and years, one of the nation’s leading voices on Christian community development, really just community development in general.

But he tells this story about when he was first getting started in the late 70s, and he was working with a ministry in the suburbs. Every year around Christmastime they would do an adopt-a-family. So they would identify families who were underprivileged, living in poverty, and they would connect them with families in the suburbs and bring them Christmas gifts.

So for the first several years, Lupton would go down with these families. They’d knock on doors, doors would open up, and they’d give the gifts to the family, and the kids would open them. Sounds great, right? Well, in 1981, Lupton actually moved into the neighborhood. That year, he had built some relationships with his neighbors, and for the first time he actually got to sit in the homes of some of these poorer families when the gifts would arrive.

So that year he was sitting in a living room and heard the knock on the door. The door opens up. Folks from the suburbs walk in. They have lots of gifts and all the rest. The kids come by. The mother is hospitable. The dad slips out. Lupton thought, “Why is that?” He began thinking about various times in the past. He remembered that when folks would show up that actually the dad would leave, very often. He thought, “What’s the deal with that? Why is that happening?”

What he realized was that even thought the gift givers were incredibly well-intentioned, because they only saw the need of the poorer families, and they didn’t recognize the resources there and everything else, they would just show up and start giving stuff away. The fathers in those homes were shamed because they wanted to be the ones. They realized, “I don’t have enough money. I can’t provide for my own kids’ gifts on Christmas.” And so they’d walk away like that. Incredibly well-intentioned sorts of involvement but creating a pattern of brokenness and dependency.

We found this exact same thing to be true when we started working with refugee families in Clarkston. We were going down there, and one year we did a KidzLife coat drive. This was a number of years ago. We collected all these coats. In the weeks leading up to the coat distribution, we put up signs all around the apartment complexes in Clarkston where we worked that said “Free Coats!”

We showed up, had a truckload of coats, a bunch of volunteers, and no people. Nobody came. We had to knock on doors trying to give away coats. We realized from that story and reading stories like this in Toxic Charity and all the rest… We said, “Okay, what if we try a different approach? What if when we come down into Clarkston, what if we put a sign and it says ‘Coat Sale’?”

So that’s what we did. We advertised that way. We had all these coats. We came back, and there were lines when they buses arrived. People buying coats, because they wanted to invest. They knew they had a problem, they knew they needed coats, but there was something about the dignity of being able to exchange. It’s not about making money. We sold the coats for very little. Of course, we invested that money back into the community.

But there was something there in the mutuality when both sides are contributing, when we’re able to both recognize the resources, that really strengthens the relationship. That’s what Lupton did. When talking about the Christmas gifts, the following year after he saw what happened, they just began to collect gifts that were donated, but as it was coming up to Christmastime they created what they called “The Old Toy Shop” and people could come in and purchase these gifts for a fraction of their cost.

If they didn’t have money they could come in and they could work a little bit and then be able to have some gifts as compensation. But then what happened was that in their own homes they were able to give the gifts to their own children. So much more dignity that way. Why? Because we began to recognize that needs are not just needs. Problems are not just problems. In addition to the reality of the broken glass and everything else, God has put resources, assets, strong things in place there to capitalize upon.

So yes, we need to be brutally honest about problems, but at the same time we have to pay just as much attention to the resources, to the assets, to the good things that are there so that they’re both functioning at the same time. If one gets way ahead of the other, if we become a kind of people who recognize the problems in our culture and only become those who condemn the culture, critique the culture, maybe set up a parallel copying culture, we’re irrelevant.

But if we learn to recognize in the culture what God is doing and the problems at the same time, we actually might join him in seeing the kingdom come. That’s what Nehemiah is doing here. He’s seeing both the hard stuff and the good stuff, and he gets them together and deploys them into this project of repairing the wall. I’ll save you the four-and-a-half minutes it takes to read chapter 3 out loud, but if you’ve snuck ahead in your reading you know it’s a lot of names.

The beauty about the list in Nehemiah 3 (and I would encourage you just to read this at some point this week) is that everybody has a spot on the wall. There are priests, goldsmiths, perfumers. You think the guy who’s making the perfume might not be a great wall builder, but he is. There are rulers, rich guys, two people named Shallum. There’s a role for everybody. Daughters are building. There’s a spot on the wall for everybody.

Once you are able to be brutally honest about what’s going on, you can name the brokenness, but at the same time you’re able to identify the resources, “Yeah, we’ve got a vision from God. Yes, we have the resources from the king, and we have people who can work and there are foundations to this wall,” when both of those things are in place, that’s when we really begin to find where God is calling us into the solution, the redemption of our problems.

So this morning, I don’t know where you are. Maybe you’re in one of those places where you’re aware of a problem but you haven’t been brutally honest about it. You haven’t named it yet. It could be in your own life. It could be in your community. It could be in the schools, your workplace. What would it look like to ask God to give you courage to name the problem, to look at it right in the face?

Some of you are in a place where you have problems in your life but it’s almost like the problems have become so overwhelming you can’t think of anything else. Maybe it’s a challenge with one of your children where there’s a behavior issue. Sometimes this can become so consuming in your family that you begin to lose sight of the person God made your child to be, and all you see is the problem. Maybe you need the Holy Spirit to help you this morning to remember the good things God has put into that situation in your family or in your community.

Maybe you’re in that place where you’re trying to figure out, “What’s my spot on the wall? I know the community, I know the culture, I know our county…we have problems. There are shattered things all over the place. There are breaches in the wall, but I want to know what my spot is.” Maybe you’re in that place where you feel like you’re on the wall, you’re seeing the problem clearly, you know the positive stuff, and you need just strength.

The good news is that this morning I believe God, just as we pray, can give you guidance in every one of those situations, can give you grace, power, vision, the things you need, the people alongside of you. So let’s pray together with that. If you’re in that place, especially if you’re feeling like you have that brokenness in your life, we’ll have Communion as we respond in worship.

You can come forward. It’s that reminder that our brokenness is healed because of Jesus’ brokenness and his new life. It’s that reminder that even though things are shattered, broken, beaten down, in God’s kingdom he can resurrect wholeness out of what seems like total brokenness. We’ll have Communion down here, receive the offering, and have a chance to worship together, but first, let’s pray.