We Have Seen the Enemy and the Enemy Is Us

In Nehemiah 4:14, God’s people are told: “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.” For four chapters in Nehemiah we have read about outside challenges and struggles; the fight has been against the outside forces.

But for most of us, the things that are attacking our families with the most success are not the outside forces, but are the internal conflicts and challenges. This Sunday, as we honor our high school graduates and welcome our college summer interns, we will look at what the Bible has to say about redeeming a culture, fixing the nation’s problems and buying our kids back.

By the grace of God we will have a lot of fun, shed some tears and leave with a clearer direction of hope for our families.

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Grace Fellowship Church
Randy Rainwater
Series: Nehemiah
May 18, 2014

We Have Seen the Enemy and the Enemy is Us
Nehemiah 5

If you would open up your Bibles to the book of Nehemiah, chapter 5. We’re studying a passage of Scripture today that just works right off of what Jon and Buddy have been teaching in this whole process of this rebuilding. If you don’t have a Bible or a handout, slip your hand up and we’ll get you one. We have a lot to do this morning. We’re just praying the Lord can speed me through these pages of text and his Spirit would speak to us this morning.

Buddy always says exile is when you physically go where your heart already is. So the people of God in 586… King Nebuchadnezzar from the Babylonian Empire comes and takes over the people of God, destroys Jerusalem, sacks the temple, burns everything they don’t want, tears down the walls, and takes the best things of God’s people the 800-plus miles back to Babylon.

In time, the Medes and the Persians came and they took over Babylon, and they took control of some of those treasures. The greatest treasure was not the gold, the greatest treasure was not the silver; it was the children of the people of God. That’s our treasure, right, church? It’s our kids. It’s not the stuff. It’s not our computers. It’s not the screens. It’s not this room. It’s not even the newly remodeled high school room. You might take a look in there. It’s beautiful. But that’s not our treasure. These kids are our treasure.

They were taken away by King Nebuchadnezzar. King Cyrus comes into power here in Persia, and in 538, King Cyrus gives the ability of Zerubbabel and Ezra to go back and take the people back and rebuild the temple. The Persians were very inclusive of other religions as long as they could keep their kingdom established. They went back and they rebuilt the temple and they started proclaiming the Word of God.

But there was a problem. The wall was broken down. Thieves, marauders were coming in and taking away the livelihood of the people. So Nehemiah goes. The cupbearer of the king goes and he takes back more people and they rebuild the walls. It’s now about 445 BC, and if you remember from last week, in chapter 4, verse 13, we read this verse because there had been outside enemy after outside enemy tearing down what God was wanting to do in his people, tearing down, giving them discouragement, gathering alliances against them.

In 4:13, Nehemiah says, “So in the lowest parts of the space behind the wall…” The places that are broken down. “…in open places, I stationed the people by their clans, with their swords, their spears, and their bows. And I looked and arose and said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, ‘Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord…'” That’s the first command he gives. Then he gives them the second command, “‘…and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.'” (Nehemiah 4:13-14)

In chapters 1-4, the challenge has been external. Sometimes an external enemy can actually be a good thing. If you’re on a sports team and somebody says bad things about your team, what do you do? You cut it out. These are not rhetorical questions. You can answer me. What do you do? You cut it out. What do you do? You put it up on the wall. Everybody reads it. It gets you motivated.

This is an outside enemy God’s people have, but here’s the problem. Outside enemies don’t always give us the strength we need for the long term. If you remember, there was a time when Japan was our enemy and Russia was our ally. Sometimes those things turn around when we have these outside enemies. Often the biggest enemy we have is ourselves.

There was a huge national poll this week. Maybe some of you guys read this or heard about it. They asked this very simple question…Are you above or below average intelligence? Did you hear about this? Four percent of the people in the United States think they’re below average intelligence. Now here’s the problem. I’m no statistical genius, but that number should be a lot closer to 50 percent.

I don’t know about you guys, but it somewhat discourages me in that because probably half the people who said they were below intelligence were probably above intelligence. They were smart enough to not know how smart they were. For some of us, an entire genre of technological material has come our way and we missed it. We bought it in a box and we took it to Goodwill and we never understood how to get past 00:00 on our VCR. That day is over.

Some of us don’t understand the real needs in our life. I’ll give you a scarier statistic. This is the scary statistic. Ninety percent of people in the United States think they’re excellent drivers. If you’ve driven to North Georgia and seen the junkyards, we know that’s not true. Now if you look close, most of those cars have northern tags on them. I’m just joking to my friends from New Jersey. I’m just joking. We do have Richard Petty and stuff down here.

But sometimes it’s not the outside enemy that’s our great risk; it’s us. This is what happens in Nehemiah 5. They’ve been fighting outside enemies, but in Nehemiah 5 they understand that the real enemy is not what’s on the outside; the real enemy is on the inside. Let’s look at this. These are three groups of problems.

Verse 1 in chapter 5: “Now there arose a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish brothers. For there were those who said, ‘With our sons and our daughters, we are many. So let us get grain, that we may eat and keep alive.'” (Nehemiah 5:1-2) Here’s the first group: the disempowered.

What’s their first problem? It says it right there in the text in verse 2. “With our sons and our daughters we are many.” What’s the first problem? There are just a lot of people. I understand this. I’ve hit a rest area with our youth group. You hit a rest area that has like four bathrooms with 400 teenagers. This is what’s going on here.

What’s the second problem? It says it right there in the text. They’re hungry. Again, I understand this. We hit a rest area with our youth group. The concession area looks like it’s Y2K or something. All the Coke machines are sold out. The snack machines are sitting there looking long forgotten. They’re completely empty of food. So the first thing is there are a lot of them. The second thing is they’re hungry. They have a need.

There’s another group of people here. Let’s keep reading in verse 3. Let me point this out. It says there’s a great outpour of the people, but who’s specifically noted here? The wives. Now in ancient Near East texts, women’s voices are not noted that much. The women were obviously the ones making the loudest cry because they know when the kids are hungry.

Now let’s just be honest. Us men can be a little dense sometimes, can’t we? We can. We can just go along and we cannot notice the details of our family the way our wives do. If the refrigerator is overheating, our answer is just, “Honey, spray some WD-40 on it and put some duct tape on the outside. It’ll probably be all right. If that doesn’t work, get a pair of Channellocks and sit them next to it. It’ll fix itself. That’s kind of our answer. But when the tea is warm, we notice it.

The wives had noticed there was a problem here, and they’re crying out. They’re crying out. They’re actually stepping somewhat outside their culture and they’re crying out. They’re letting their voices be known because there’s a huge problem. Their kids are hungry. Remember what they were supposed to do in chapter 4. They were supposed to guard their kids. Now they’re hungry.

Verse 3: These are the debtors. “There were also those who said, ‘We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses to get grain because of the famine.'” (Nehemiah 5:3) What’s the third problem? Debt. That’s the third problem. They’re mortgaging their fields. They’re taking their fields and they’re mortgaging off their fields to get the money they need to get the food they need because they’re hungry and because there are a lot of them.

But then this particular group of people, they own things, and they’re mortgaging them. We also see now what the reason is. It’s because there’s a famine, probably a drought. So we have something going on in the culture. We have an economic downturn. They have debt and they’re hungry and they have this need.

Here’s the third group: the devastated. This is where it really gets heavy. Verse 4: “And there were those who said, ‘We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our fields and our vineyards. Now our flesh is as the flesh of our brothers, our children are as their children. Yet we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves…'” You might want to underline that word. It’s a little different than the next use of it. Look at this. “‘…and some of our daughters have already been enslaved…'” (Nehemiah 5:4-5)

This thing in Nigeria is just wrong. Most often in a culture, it’s the women who lose first. The daughters have been enslaved. The meaning of what that is is that their sons and daughters are essentially being workers, but they’re not really workers. In that culture, if you got into debt, you would give your work rights to somebody else. But this is not work rights; this is slavery. It’s not just slavery; it’s complete ownership of the daughters. The meaning of this text for the daughters is they’ve been sold off to an entirely other people. We know where that goes.

Then they say, “‘…but it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards.'” (Nehemiah 5:5) The Persians were happy to let you have your faith so long as you got the right amount of taxes paid. When Alexander the Great took over one Persian city he found 120 tons of gold, 1,200 tons of silver bullion…tons. Not pounds, but tons.

They collected these taxes, and if you didn’t have the taxes, it could sometimes mean your life. So you did what you had to do to get the money to pay it. The problem was the interest rates that were going along in this time among these people were 20 percent, upwards of even 50 percent interest rates. So they were in this place that they couldn’t do anything else. So here’s our next problem. The next problem is the taxes.

But what’s the big problem? The kids are lost. The kids have been sold off. There’s no hope now. There’s nothing we can do to get them back. This third group has borrowed. They’ve done everything they can, but they can’t get anything back. So we have lots of people, we have an economic downturn, we have huge personal debt, we have economic issues with the famine, we have huge taxes, and we’ve lost our kids. I just wish the Bible had something relevant to say to our world today. It’s us, isn’t it? It’s us. What we lose in this battle are the kids.

But the real problem, the huge problem is who the enemy really is, because the enemy is within these actions, these wrong actions. Verse 6: “I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and the officials. I said to them, ‘You are exacting interest, each from his brother.’

And I held a great assembly against them and said to them, ‘We, as far as we are able, have bought back our Jewish brothers who have been sold to the nations, but you even sell your brothers that they may be sold to us!’ They were silent and could not find a word to say.” (Nehemiah 5:6-8)

See, the crying shame in this is that the people who are doing this to them are their own people. Their own people. It’s like the church doing it to the church. Some of the most vicious attacks you see in culture is your own people coming against you. If you’ve had a family fight, you know that. The harshest things sometimes get said within our own homes, things that if someone said to one of our daughters we would take them out for saying it, and then we do the very same thing. That’s what’s going on here.

It’s a little bit like what happened in the Revolutionary War. We all know that story of Valley Forge, that horrible winter at Valley Forge. The true history of that was that was a pretty moderate winter in terms of Pennsylvania weather. It wasn’t really that bad of a winter. What was going on was the farmers would rather sell to the British than the Continental Army because the British had cash. The British had more money.

The merchants in Boston were charging 1,000 and 1,500 times the normal sales price of the blankets and the shoes and the socks and the clothes. That was the problem. It wasn’t the winter. It was what people were doing to each other. Now this next little thing I’m going to talk about here is going to be a little strong.

Jesus had this amazing way of speaking to us in a way and speaking to the people who were hurting in a way that they sensed the love of Jesus and also the correction. So before I go into this next little piece here, I want to say two things. There are people in this room who have fought for their family and lost. You’ve done everything you knew to do within your power to keep your family together and it didn’t work. Do not hear what I’m going to say as condemnation. It’s not.

There are other people in this room who’ve made really bad choices, and if you could go back and change that, you would, but you can’t. It’s over, and the damage has been done, and there’s nothing you can do about it now. Well, actually there is. We’re going to get there. There is the grace of Jesus. There is the hope of Christ to come into things even when we’ve messed up. Let me just say something.

If we’re looking for perfect people, you’re not going to start here. We are sinners, every single one of us. That’s why we need a Savior. So hear these words in the light of that. But the very thing they were building up the walls to do, the very thing they were holding their swords to do and their bows, taking half of their work time to stand guard, the very thing they were trying to prevent was people coming in and taking their children. The very thing they were preventing by standing guard they did to themselves.

The very thing they were trying to protect in the lives of their children, they did it themselves. What dad in this room, if somebody came into our house at night, would not fight with everything we have to protect our children? The moms, the same. The moms actually maybe even more. Daddy bears are dangerous, but mama bears are a lot more dangerous. Amen to that. But we wind up doing to our kids the very thing we’re so afraid the world is going to do.

The number one stat of the nearly three in every 100 Americans who are under the control of our penal system (we are so progressive, aren’t we?) is not race, it’s not economics, it’s not any of those things; it’s that there’s no dad at home. My dad was a federal prison official. I would talk to those men…their childhoods. It’s the same for unwed teen moms. Debt. Disease. You go down the list. That’s the number one stat.

Malachi says, “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her…covers his garment with violence…” (Malachi 2:16) We cover our kids with violence when we don’t protect our marriages. Again, if stuff has happened, it has happened, and you can’t go back and fix that. That’s not what this is about. It’s about here and now and where we go from here. It’s about where we go from here.

I know there seems to be a lot of confusion today about what the Bible says about marriage. I heard a celebrity say the other day that the church doesn’t get to speak for God on marriage. That’s fine. I’m going to let God speak for God on marriage right here. Okay? I’m not speaking for God. Jesus does a very good job of doing that himself.

In Mark 10:6, this is what he says. “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Mark 10:6-9)

Now we as a church have a lot to say about the beginning of that verse, and I believe the beginning of that verse. In the beginning, God made them male and female, and I believe that is very, very important. But the rest of this verse is important too, that we would hold fast, that we would not let go of the relationships God has put into our lives.

Marriage and family is under attack. I’m concerned about where the laws of this nation and religious intolerance are taking us and what we will be able to sustain as a culture. If you know history, when the family breaks the culture breaks; when the culture breaks the nation breaks. But I am more concerned about myself and my impact on my children and my marriage’s impact on my children than I am about the laws of this nation or about what’s on television.

If I don’t have a stronger voice in my kids’ lives than celebrities and Supreme Court justices, something is incredibly wrong. The government does not get to teach my kids what marriage is every single day. I do. And that scares me to death. It’s about influence; it’s not about control. You notice. Your kids get 12 years old, you don’t have control anymore. If you’re under 12, we can give you some direction. When you get to be about 12 years old, it’s about influence. It always has been about influence.

What are we going to set in front of our kids? What kind of life are we going to set in front of our kids? What we did back there we did back there, but where are we going? What are we going to be now? I’ll tell you the thing that scares me so bad. Greg Boone says this. He has polled kids at Look Up, and everywhere he speaks, and he says about 5 percent of the kids who are coming to his camps, most of those kids from churches, say they would want as a bottom line their parents’ marriage…5 percent.

Now I know kids are a little idealistic. Teenagers have this view of marriage that isn’t always completely realistic. There are yards to mow and there are dishes to wash, and students don’t always see that. They think mom is standing there as she comes in from her day at work, and she looks like a supermodel, and she walks over and she opens the oven and everything is all done there.

Dad walks in. The yard is completely well groomed, and he looks like a male supermodel. He comes in and turns on the light switch, but they don’t go all the way up. They come about halfway. The candles light. Lionel Richie is singing in the background. Maybe Barry White. “Hey, baby. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

Barry White is a little creepy without music behind it, isn’t it? There are teenagers in the room going, “Who is Barry White?” Let me just say this since you guys are all over here. You don’t need to know who Barry White is right now, okay? That’s for later. Bruno Mars, all right? Same deal. They have this idea that this is what it’s going to be like.

I want my daughters to look at my marriage and the way I treat Anita and say, “That’s what I want my husband to be.” I want my son to see the way I treat his mom and say, “That’s what I want to be like.” I actually think he’s better than me. It has been really fun to watch. Thank you, Jesus. His grace covers us.

But for a lot of us, we have to realize that it’s not just two people who come into a marriage. There’s really four. David Seamands, in his book Putting Away Childish Things, says this. There are four people who walk into a marriage. There’s the man, there’s the woman, and there’s the little boy and there’s the little girl that comes along with them.

Those hurts that are in our lives, those things that were said to us, done to us, and things get hard in life and all of sudden we feel like we’re that 9-year-old kid again, and we respond that way to the people in our lives. We respond that way to the people in our lives and then we wonder why we did that, and we walk away, and we’re like, “Why in the world did I say that? I didn’t mean that. I would never have hurt the people I love that way. That’s not who I am.” It’s that kid.

The first kid you may need to buy back is you. That’s what’s going on right here in these people. They go back and they buy back their kids. Verse 9: “So I said, ‘The thing that you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of our God to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies?'” (Nehemiah 5:9)

I love what John Courson says. “Truly, the fear of the Lord is the key to living the Christian life successfully, not being afraid of him, but being afraid of doing anything that would cause him grief or disappointment because he’s been so good to us, so generous, so merciful.” That’s what he’s calling us to. He says if we would be a people who walk in the fear of God then we will prevent the taunts of the nations, our enemies.

The culture is a mess. It’s not working. But it needs to work here. It needs to work with where we are right here, right now. It’s not idealized. We can’t go back and make everything right. We start here and we move forward. As Paul says, “Forgetting what is behind, I press on.” That’s where we’re headed.

You say, “Can anything be done?” Yeah, something can be done. Read 10-19 of chapter 5 when you go home. This is what happens. The government of the Jewish people step back and say, “We are going to lead the way we’re supposed to do. We’re not going to put our kids into slavery.”

I want you to get this. The next time somebody says to you, “I don’t believe in God,” I want you to read Nehemiah 5 with them, verses 10-19, because listen, this is what happens. The government limits its own personal spending to go and get the kids back. Only God could make the government limit its spending to do something good for our kids. That’s what happens. They go back and they get their kids back. It is time to get our kids back. I’m not saying not to vote and do all those things. We should do all those things, but the biggest impact on our kids is us.

I want you to get your comment cards. I want everybody to have one. If you need prayer for your marriage, I want you to write down, “Help.” Put your address on there, your phone number. Rachael and Chris Vigardt have this incredible ministry. There are people here. Write, “Help.” They’ll contact you. If you don’t want anybody to contact you, just write, “Pray.” We might still contact you, but write, “Pray.” If you really don’t want it, just write, “Pray. Don’t call me. Just pray.”

If you’re a single mom in this room and you’re like, “I’m not connected to a group,” this summer get connected to a group. There are some amazing groups that are meeting this summer. Get connected to a group. You need that community around your kids. You can’t do it by yourself. If you’re a single dad, the same thing. Get into a community of people. I love seeing what God does in the oikos, in the community, that we put that around people. It also protects us.

But there’s another thing I’d like you to do. Some of you guys have gone down this road and you know what that hurt is. Maybe you made a bad decision. Maybe you just received the bad decision. Maybe it’s somewhere between it. You have something to offer through that. Write, “I’ll help” on those cards. If you’d be willing to come alongside a couple and pray with them, write, “I’ll help.”

If you’d be willing to go to a single mom’s house and fix the hole in her roof, write, “I’ll help.” Put the specifics down. If you don’t know what else to do, then start praying to get our kids back, because we need to get our kids back. There are three responses I want to give you, very practical. Then I’m going to show you a video and we’re done.

1. Honor what you have by cleaning the house. If you have relationships here now, honor those relationships, honor the relationships you have in your life. Dads, never speak to your daughters in a way you would not want their husband to speak to them. Don’t ever speak to your wife in a way that you would not want your daughter’s husband to speak to her, for your daughters who are watching, for your sons who are watching.

If you say, “I can’t help it. I have an anger issue…” Is Zach Barnes in the room? Okay, Zach is sixfoot-eight and about… Well, I’m not going to say how heavy Zach is. If you wouldn’t go up to Zach and say it, you don’t have an anger issue; you have a bully issue. Does that make sense? If you wouldn’t go up to Zach and get in his face and scream at him, you don’t have an anger issue; you have a bully issue. Get that fixed. It’s not right, and it hurts the people you love.

2. Love well what you have.

3. Redeem what you can. If you can write a letter and apologize, do it. But maybe you can’t. Maybe it’s only going to be, “Sweetie, we have some problems. We need some help. We’re going to get some help. We’re going to start treating each other in a way that honors God, that our kids would want to be what we are one day, because the truth is they probably will be.”

Come with us to Gen Salaam. Come as a family. Gather on Wednesday night, and let’s go. There are refugees down here. Most of these people helped our government. They helped our nation, and now they’re refugees, and they have almost nothing to show for it. Let’s go show them the love of Jesus. Do that together as a family. Students, is it a lot of fun, or what? It’s an amazing place to go with your kids. It’s a great thing to do. It’s a great thing to be. Help us with LUG. Help us with True North. Help us with KidzLife. We have to buy back our kids.

I want to show you a video that illustrates this. It completely shows what happens in real life at a watering hole during a drought. Maybe like the one in Nehemiah 5. Here’s what happens in this video. Everything has gathered around this watering hole. The crocodiles are there. The buffalos are coming, because it’s the only place to get water.

The lions know this is basically like a McDonald’s drive-thru. “We’re just going to be here and we’re going to gather up some meat.” It’s not Chick-fil-A, because it’s beef. Watch who they go for first. This is violent. It ends well. Watch this.

Now it’s like a 10-minute long video, but if you got to see the whole thing, you know the buffalo are all coming back, and there are some other buffalo that are coming behind. One of those is what I like to call the “Buddy” buffalo. All these other buffalos are running back and they’re going, “There are lions over there.” The Buddy buffalo comes and goes, “Where y’all going?”

“There are lions back there! They’re going to kill. They got one of the kids.”

“Well, let’s go get the kid.” That’s what the Buddy buffalo would say. “We’ll get some lions while we’re at it,” because the Bible says the Devil is a roaring lion. But listen, he is not Simba or Mufasa. He is Scar, and he does not win.

When Buddy had his event last year, a couple of days later Anita and Denise Cox and I went up to the hospital, and the nurse had said, “Do not upset him.” I said, “I’m his youth pastor. It’s my job to upset him.” She said, “If you upset him I’m going to make you leave.” I said, “Okay.” So I went in. We were talking to him, and I was saying, “The Braves are getting ready to play.” Buddy goes, “I don’t care about the Braves. I care about these kids.”

I said, “Listen, Buddy, we’re really not supposed to talk about anything like that. The pollen is starting. It’s that time of the year here in Georgia.” “I don’t care about the pollen. These kids. It matters.” I said, “Yeah, it does. The Falcons had a good year. I think they’re going to have a good year next year.” I’m obviously not a prophet. He goes, “The Falcons don’t matter.”

I said, “Buddy, you have to stop because I’m not allowed to get you upset because of everything.” Buddy goes, “This doesn’t matter.” I go, “Yes, it actually does matter a lot. You matter.” He goes, “No, these kids matter. These kids matter.” They matter enough for us to be the people God has called us to be. If we’ll do that, then it doesn’t really matter what the world looks like. Please receive that through the love of Jesus and the mercy of Jesus.

There are elders here if you want to pray with someone. The ushers are coming to receive your gifts, your offerings. But your cards, please put those cards in. We pray as a staff. We will pray for you. I’ll be up here hanging out if we can do anything for you. Let’s pray.