The Danger of Compromise (Jake Enns)

One of the things that happens when you prepare a sermon during

the week is you struggle with coming up with a title.

And this morning's title is the danger of compromise.

As I was reading Nehemiah 13, I thought, OK, what word best

encapsulates the idea or the the the essence of what Nehemiah is

trying to communicate here. And I tried to find out what and

I want to be a positive. Now the word, the title, the

danger of compromise sounds negative.

It sounds like it's in the negative side.

But then I went through the passage, went through it

carefully. While it is a message of warning

of what happens when you compromise.

And so when I use the word compromise this morning, I'm not

talking about a conversation between a man and a wife,

husband and wife team and they're debating what color to

paint the house. She wants one color, he wants

another or maybe what kind of vehicle they should buy.

He wants something that can load up a bunch of stuff in the back.

She wants something to haul all the grandkids.

You have to compromise somehow. When I use the word compromise

this morning, I'm referring to the danger of compromise on the

truth of the gospel, the truth of God's Word, the truth of

foundational values that we carry in that if we compromise

them, our life changes, direction changes, and we're

either diminished or impoverished or even go wayward.

When compromise has compromise has to do with taking away one's

loyalty to to God in this sense in in our sermon this morning.

So when eternal life is compromised in favor of the

temporal, that's always a bad move.

We do make compromises all the time.

Some make a compromise when they hit the snooze button in the

morning. 10 more minutes is OK, 1010 minutes less of the day.

We make compromises all the time.

And maybe you're here this morning, you've compromised

maybe years ago, a decision that's still affecting you

today. Maybe it's a financial

compromise and you're making payments on something you signed

and today wish badly you never had, but you did.

Or maybe you are doing something.

There's a habit in your life that you would so much like to

stop doing. But back some years ago you

started doing this, whatever it is you're doing and you should

not have. But you did, and you

compromised. Now you're doing something you

very much would like to stop, but you can't.

You're stuck. It's a habit, an addiction, you

call it, because you compromised.

Or maybe you want to start doing something you haven't started

yet, but you'd like to. You need to, you want to.

You just can't. You've made compromise after

compromise where you gave, where you pushed it out and pushed it

out and procrastinated and postponed and and now you can't

start because it gets harder as time goes by.

It's not working. Maybe you stopped doing some

good thing at one time you became convicted of and you

started a good discipline and you said you'd never stop doing

it. Like quiet time with God in the

form of self-discipline. And you got grounded and focused

and stable and healthy, in good shape and all the rest of those

things. But what happened?

Compromises. Or maybe you did one time stop

something. You wanted to stop doing it.

For years you did stop doing it and you kept that boundary

intact. And somehow, more recently, you

stopped keeping the boundaries, and this time it on one little

compromise after another, and one little inch after inch, you

just slowly compromise and you're back in it again.

When compromise happens, there's no telling where it will take

us. So the answers don't compromise.

To compromise on one's character, on one's values, on

one's goals in life is a trade that doesn't work.

It always costs us in the end. Why is life like that?

You see, we're born in a sinful world with a sinful nature,

sinful characteristics, and that's who we are.

We have desires that we shouldn't have, cravings we

shouldn't have, but we have them.

We're by human, by nature. We're sinful.

The Bible tells us in Jeremiah 17, verse 9, this prophet writes

Jeremiah 17:9

the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

Who can know it? We're stuck with this in a

sense. It's not just wicked, he says,

it's desperately wicked. It's beyond our own selves to

even understand it. And many passages of Scripture

were instructed to put our trust in God.

That takes discipline. When we start trusting in

ourselves, we're headed for trouble.

Good intentions don't change the heart.

It takes surrender, it takes discipline.

Another verse in the Bible, Proverbs 117, says surely in

vain, the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

I think it's a very telling verse, but it does not seem that

way with people, does it? Why does it not say something

like this in vain? The advertising industry tries

to get people to part with their money.

Why doesn't it say that? Or the immoral temptations are

all in vain as people refuse to fall for them.

Why doesn't it say that? Just think of the multibillion

dollar adult entertainment industry.

See if birds flock. If birds would flock into Nets

as people fall for temptation, what would happen of the bird

world? Think about that for a moment.

True, birds don't fly into Nets. That spread in plain sight,

obviously, but they don't have the brain capacity of people.

But it's frightening how easily people will compromise on almost

anything that comes their way. We're so easily lured and

scammed into doing all kinds of foolish things, getting

ourselves into traps that destroy us.

See, the writer of Proverbs 117 does not say, now this is for

the birds. OK, they're birds.

You have it. Don't fly into Nets spread out

for you. He's writing to people to learn,

teach a lesson. We cannot expect animals to know

about traps. But we human beings were blessed

with this thing called a brain and a mind to think.

And yet so often we're worse than the animals.

Considering what we do have developed brains for.

It's amazing how easily we're duped and scammed when it comes

to animal trapping per SE. One kind of trapping really

fascinates me. It's called live trapping.

In North America, there's this thing called a wild hog

infestation, especially in in the states to have this thing.

And I like watching videos how they trap those hogs.

They have this big circular trap.

It's a steel structure like walls and heavy wire mesh and

they have it on steel post. They raise it and it's

electronically rigged so that they can trigger it with a phone

or something. And so they raise it up and

spread corn around. And then the guy who does this,

he leaves the place and has this thing raised up high.

And then with a remote camera and device of some kind, he

watches from a distance. And then eventually a whatever

you call a herds of pigs come by and they smell the corn and they

come by and they're wary. They don't like it.

They're they're, they're curious, but not, it's not safe.

It's not sure. And so little by little, they

get closer and closer underneath.

And then they start feeding on the corn and they're skittish

and the slightest thing that sets them off and they run away

and they come back again. And then they slowly get all

getting finally, finally, they're all contentedly feeding

happily on the corn. And then the guy with the

trigger and down it goes. And the pigs now, and the

frenzy. They scream in terror and fright

and run in every direction over each other and smashing to the

fence. No avail.

The closures trapped them. They're stuck.

They're doomed. The guy comes with the truck

going to pick up a trailer and then kills the pigs and hauls

them away. They were deceived into

believing they were OK with feeding under that strange

closure. They got caught.

It was too good to be true. Yeah, sure, they were skittish

at the start, but the lure and they and the sensors were dull

and became complacent. They compromised.

Let me change the story a bit. Do you see what would it be like

if this guy would mark the pigs, paint them up so he knew which

ones they were and they let them go and then kudos, catch them

again. He would say, aren't they

learning? Don't.

Didn't they learn? And then maybe 3 or 4 times.

But guess what? That's exactly what we as humans

do. We have the ability to remember,

to record, to reflect. And how is it possible that we

repeat the same things over and over again?

Why don't we learn from the mistakes of our ancestors?

Why do we have to repeat them over and over again?

Just look at politics in our time, economy in our time.

Let's leave that aside. Look at the moral climate in our

time. Well, today we're wrapping up

the sermon series in Nehemiah this morning, and we're in

chapter 13, and we see how Nehemiah had to again bring the

people back to their earlier commitments to serve God.

They had done phenomenally well. Nehemiah had come from Babylon,

done this great reform work. Ezra had started it earlier.

Nehemiah finished it, so to speak, built the wall, dedicated

the wall. A lot of good things happened

under Nehemiah. No sooner was he gone, people

went right back to the old ways as if nothing had ever changed.

We see how easily it is for people to experience God's

grace, God's mercies, God's blessings, and this protection.

And just as quickly, off they go again to what's convenient,

what's attractive, what's what's comfortable.

It's compromise. The people had experienced

reform. They'd repented.

They dedicated themselves. They'd written down the

covenant, signed it. They were done with the old

ways. It's going to be different now.

Nehemiah left for Jude, left Judea, went back to Babylon for

a little while. We don't know for sure how long.

Some years didn't stay that long came back there.

We find him in chapter 13. Then we're going to pick up the

story. It hadn't gone well.

The reforms were pretty much done.

And there's there's one little piece that we find today in

chapter 13, verse one to to two, actually verse three.

I want to read that this morning.

It says here in chapter 1 verse 13, verse one.

On that day they read from the book of Moses and the hearing of

all the people. And it was found written that no

Ammonite or Moabite should ever come into the Assembly of God

because they had not met the children of Israel with bread

and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them.

However, our God turned the curse into a blessing.

So it was when they had heard the law, they separated all the

mixed multitude from Israel. I'm understanding this was

before he went to Babylon. So there's a little bit of a

little bit of material yet that we didn't cover last time.

So in this case, the Jews hear the word of God.

By the way, these Moabites and Ammonites are not Israelites.

We cannot be together with them. We can't have anything in common

with them. They had experienced all the

blessings that finished the wall that dedicated the wall.

One final little piece was left to do.

Separate the yourself from the Ammonites and the Moabites that

cannot be part of the congregation of Israel.

Well, the reforms didn't last. Nehemiah goes off to Babylon and

he comes back and he writes what happened and the and the

compromises are insane. Absolutely mind boggling.

But then we have to think they're not that different than

today. Let's read how it went starting

verse 4. It says Now before this Elijah

and the priest, having authority over the storerooms of the House

of our God, was allied with Tobiah, and he had prepared from

a large room which previously they had stored the grain

offerings, the frankincense, the articles, the ties of grain, the

new wine and oil which were commanded to be given to the

Levites, and singers and gatekeepers in the offerings of

the priests. But during all this I was not in

Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Arctic Circus, king of

Babylon, I had returned to the king, so he wasn't there.

Then after certain days I obtained leave from the king,

and I came to Jerusalem and discovered the evil that Elias

ship had done for Tobiah in preparing a room for him in the

courts of the House of God. And it grieved me bitterly.

Therefore I threw all the household goods of Tobiah out of

the room. Then I commanded them to cleanse

the rooms and I brought back into them the articles of the

House of God with a grain offering and frankincense.

Stop there. Verse 9.

What was the first major compromise that happened?

And it's interesting Nehemiah mentions this one the first, and

it's because it's the the important one.

They're all important, the compromise of the priesthood.

What is so interesting is that when Nehemiah was gone, the

spiritual rot started right back up.

And where did it begin? Right at the very core, at the

very top. Rot in any place is bad, but

especially bad when it's at the center.

That's what Satan does. He goes to the core.

If he can destroy the leadership, then he's got the

whole, the whole place. After Nehemiah had left, it was

as if nothing had ever changed. Nehemiah was gone and the

priest, the high priest, no doubt we'll find that later.

He himself allied himself with someone who had no business

being in part of the Israelites, the Jews.

Tobiah was not supposed to be in the temple.

He was not supposed to be in the congregation at all.

He was not even among the Jews. What does this tell us about

this high priest? He was not right with God.

He was. He was in a position of

compromise. He was not doing what he's doing

for the right reasons. He was selfish.

He was focused on other things than upholding God's honor and

glory and reputation. He was focused on the here and

now, appeasing and compromising and aligning himself with the

wrong people. His life was an example.

He was leading the wrong direction.

He had formed a connection with Tobiah an Ammonite officially

find that in chapter 2, verse 10 and remember then they were

Ammonites were not allowed to be in the congregation.

He had clearly violated God's standard.

Tobiah was an enemy of the Jews. Elijah embraced him, formed an

alliance with him and then he gave him a room in the temple.

We're not even not even Nehemiah wanted to go in.

In chapter 6, remember one of Nehemiah's enemies tried to lure

him into the temple under false pretense.

Ivan, you need to protect you. Somebody's going to come to kill

you tonight. They'll come to kill you.

Nehemiah said I won't go in. He didn't fall for the trick.

He refused to enter the temple because he was not a priest.

Here's this outsider to buy. He's not just an unbelievable

he's he's against the Jews in the lash of the high priest of

all people allies himself with him.

So he had repurposed the temple for this ungodly purpose.

The temple use had been shifted from storing things needed for

the Levites to serve to this man who now occupied a place in

there. And it happened in a very short

time. We don't know exactly how long

Nehemiah had left, but long enough that a lot of things that

happened there's some some years.

Anyway, it says in verse 8 again and grieved me bitterly.

I threw all the household goods of Tobiah out of the room.

I commanded them to cleanse the rooms, and I brought back to

them, into them the articles of the House of God with the grain

offering and the frankincense. When Nehemiah came back, he took

action. He dealt with it.

He was grieved, he was sad, he was also angry.

We'll find out more about that later.

I wonder what kind of conversations Nehemiah might

have had with Elias of the high priest.

Doesn't tell us, but we can assume they were not good ones.

Where Elias ship had compromised, Nehemiah kept the

boundary. Nehemiah did what needed to be

done to bring back to the temple of the things that belong there.

So the first compromise recorded was when Elias ship, the priest

made an unholy alliance with Tobiah.

Well, there's another compromise.

Let's continue reading verse 10. I also realized that the

portions for the Levites had not been given them for each Levite,

for each of the Levites, and the singers who did the work had

gone back to his field. So I contended with the rulers

and said, Why is the House of God forsaken?

And I gathered them together and set them in their place.

Then all Judah brought the tithe of the grain and the new wine

and the oil to the storehouse, and I appointed as treasurers

over the storehouse Shalamaya the priest, and Zadok the

scribe, and the Levites pedaya. And next to them was Hanan and

the son of Zakhur, the son of Matanaya, For they were

considered faithful, and their task was to distribute to their

brethren. Remember Me, Oh my God,

concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds that I have

done for the House of my God and for its services.

It was not just the priesthood that was corrupted.

The temple ministries have been compromised as well.

It was the duty of the other tribes to make sure the Levites

would serve in the temple, take care of the ministries, and they

all those things. The Levites job was to to look

after the spiritual ministry of the of the of the congregation.

But now the temple was deserted, almost empty.

No one or seemingly very few were still doing the work.

This compromise was providing for the Levites.

Compromise was providing for the Levites.

It was their job to take care of all the ministries.

They were in charge. The temple on that day was not

just in the Sabbath morning for an hour or so.

It was a week, seven days a week that stuff was going on there

and people were coming and going all the time.

A lot of work was involved. But now it was deserted.

Pretty much the Levites who were supposed to be there, well, they

had gotten themselves their jobs back and they were again

working. They had not been given the

money that was supposed to be theirs, the resources that they

needed. And so it says he contended with

the rulers and said, why is the House of God forsaken?

The singers, the worship leaders had been been neglected.

The portions had not been given them.

And it says in verse 11 he contended with them.

He did not put up with it. He brought the brought the

Levites back, brought the house back in order.

We can learn from this. He there's always a trickle down

effect when things start to go wrong at the top, when

selfishness, greed and control start to take over.

It's only a matter of time and everything else starts to

struggle and to suffer as well. And it would be safe to say that

earlier in the book, in the previous chapters, when they

repented, when they made a covenant at that time, they

would have not believed us all. We'll never do that all we'll

never compromising all we're, we're, we're not out of that.

That's history. We'll never do that again.

They would have said that, but how strong they were was very

quickly revealed by how quickly they fell or how weak they were.

They were not beyond rebelling. It's sinful human nature that

always tends to be drawn magnetically towards sin.

And once we start compromising, we never know where it will take

us. So they had compromised the

priesthood. They had compromised the temple

ministry. Well, what else were they

compromising? Let's continue reading verse 15.

In those days, Nehemiah writes, I saw people in Judah treading

wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves of grain

that it was, and loading donkeys with wine grapes and figs and

all kinds of burdens which they brought into Jerusalem the

Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day

on which they were selling provisions.

Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish in all kinds

of goods and sold them in the Sabbath to the children of

Judah. And in Jerusalem.

Then I contended, There it is again with the nobles of Judah,

and said to them, What evil things is that you do?

What evil is this that you do, by which you profane the Sabbath

day? Did not your father's do thus?

And did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on the

city, yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the

Sabbath. And so it was at the gates of

Jerusalem, as I began, as it began to be dark before the

Sabbath, that I commanded the gates to be shut, and charged

that they must not be open till after the Sabbath.

Then I posted. Then I posted some of my

servants at the gate so that no burdens should be brought in on

the Sabbath. Now the merchants and sellers of

all kinds of wares lodged outside the city, outside

Jerusalem once or twice. Then I warned them and said to

them, Why do you spend the night around the wall?

If you do so again, I will lay hands on you.

From that time on. They came no more on the

Sabbath, and I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse

themselves. They should go and guard the

gates to sanctify the Sabbath day.

And again, Remember Me, Oh my God, concerning this also, and

spare me according to the greatness of your mercy.

This third thing we see is the compromise of the day of rest.

Note, we have the compromises ripple outward from the priest

to the Levites. Now it's the Sabbath day.

There's no stopping here. The compromise of keeping the

Sabbath day holy. That's what they did.

What was it that led them to do this, to desecrate the Sabbath

day and work on it? When commentator mentioned that

the Jews had come back from captivity, they had become

immersed in other cultures, and perhaps these Jews had been used

to working where they were in captivity before, or the nations

that had occupied their homeland.

Maybe they were working the Sabbath too.

They had been acclimatized, so to speak, in some way.

And so now keeping the Sabbath day was a bit of a stretch.

Maybe it was something new for many of them that would have

been normal to work on the Sabbath day.

But now they had covenanted. They were going to follow the

laws of Moses. They were going to go back to

the old ways, but now here in Jerusalem, Judea, it made sense.

You know, it's, it's money, it's income, but keeping the Sabbath

day holy, well, it maybe was conditional, maybe it's not,

maybe it's optional. We must put ourselves in these

shoes of these people and just try to imagine this.

You see, it makes sense in the Sabbath.

You know, it makes sense economically.

So right? After all, you got to make

money, right? That's often the thinking.

God strictly commands people to keep the Sabbath day holy.

Yet here were the people, the Jews, doing all kinds of manual

labor on the Sabbath, the day of rest.

Nehemiah saw this. He took action.

He wouldn't tolerate it. He didn't respond kindly.

At the end, it says he contended with the leaders.

He went to the source. He didn't go to the individuals

who were trading out the grape, the grapes, and hauling that

stuff. He said, why are you allowing

this to you leaders? Why are you allowing this?

He went to the source where the trouble came from, where he

needed to go to the leaders. Again, we're seventeen.

I contended with the nobles and said to them, what evil is this

that you do, that you do? The leaders, the people were

doing it, but your fault. It was the leaders who were

responsible for how the community functioned.

The leaders were the ones where the blame lay that compromised

and the people followed along. And I believe it's safe to say

here at this point in time that the leaders were not thinking,

OK, let's do evil or let's do something we know is wrong.

No, I don't believe that's what happened.

More like, you know, what can it hurt?

What's wrong with it? Why shouldn't we always question

marks behind God's commands? It was the leaders who initiated

it, and the people just followed it.

That's hard to root out. And it says, you know, the gates

had to be shut. And Nehemiah just ends it.

He stops it. Nobody's allowed to do this.

And the merchants and the sellers, they lodge outside the

city of Jerusalem once or twice and he warns them and says, I'm

going to lay hands on you. He's not talking blessing them.

He's talking about I'm going to get physical.

Now. This is, I have to say, it was a

minute. I struggle with this a little

bit. I mean, you're going to now

handle these guys or something. Are you going to what do you

handcuff them and haul them off to jail or something?

He says, I'll lay hands on you. And for that, those people

worked. They stopped.

He's going to use force. The point was, he said we got to

keep the Sabbath, the holy guys, and you can't, you can't mess it

up. He had to take strong measures.

Now under the new covenant of Jesus, we don't use physical

force in, in, in these spiritual matters.

But the point wasn't that time. They were not under the new

covenant like we are. And so Nehemiah had to deal with

this. But there's more.

You see, the compromise, the priesthood, the compromise, the

temple ministry, the compromise, the Sabbath day.

There's another one. In those days I also saw Jews

who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, and half of

their children spoke the language of Ashdod and could not

speak the language of Judah, but spoke according to the language

of one of the other people. So I contended with them and

cursed them. I struck some of them, pulled

out their hair. Now he's losing it and made them

swear by God, saying, Shall you? You shall not give your

daughters as wives to their sons, nor take their daughters

for your sons or yourselves. He's frustrated, he actually hit

them again. He's not under the new covenant

like we are, but this is what he did.

Verse 26 Did not Solomon, king of Israel, sin by these things?

Yet among many nations there was no king like him who was beloved

of his God, and God made him king of royal Israel.

Nevertheless, Pagan women caused him even to even him to sin.

Should we then hear of, should we then hear of your doing all

this great evil, transgressing against our God by marrying

Pagan women? And one of those sons of

Jehoiada Joiada, the son of Elijah, of the high priest,

there he is, was the son of son-in-law of San Balat.

The horror night intermarriage had already happened.

Therefore I drove him from me. See the compromise of marriage,

more compromise again. This was one of the sins that

had been dealt with earlier previously.

But now Nehemiah has been gone. He's come back and it's back in

again for some years already. Children are old enough to speak

languages. The Jewish men had married

foreign women, women of foreign nations that worshipped idols,

and from these marriages they now had children and these

children on mixed homes was not God's plan.

Little side note here. I've at times wondered when I

read the Old Testament why it was that God was so strict.

And we have to say, and we have to tell us.

It seems harsh, right? But what is it that makes it

such a difficult issue? I cannot help go but go back to

the beginning of Genesis chapter 1-2 and three, when God created

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

marriage between one man and one woman.

God called it his image. He intended it to reflect him in

anything that violates that is abhorrent to him.

And I think of how harshly God dealt with some of these types

of sins in the in in the Pagan nation, even for his own people.

For example, in the wilderness when the Israelites at one point

in time allied themselves with the Moabites, while they're

mixed with the Moabites, God was angry.

His wrath destroyed many. If you find the story Numbers

Numbers 25:1–9

chapter 25 verse 1 to 9 if you want to read that sometime,

Numbers 25, one to 924 thousand people in Israel died for that.

When God created marriage, He intended it to be holy, and he's

serious about this. A man and woman, both followers

of God, dedicated to him in their marriage and relationship,

but not this mixed marriage stuff here.

Now the men had married foreign women, had brought disgrace to

God's name by marrying foreign women in Nehemiah's absence.

Nehemiah's response to this instance was more than just

severe. He gets physical, it says in

verse 20. Read that again.

He says I contended with them, cursed them and struck.

Some of them pulled out their hair.

They couldn't pull out my hair, but you get the idea.

They had long hair. In those days, even men wore

their hair long. He says you shouldn't do this.

And again, Nehemiah was not as severe as God was in Numbers 25

here. No one got killed.

They contended with them. Not a gentle conversation.

He was confronted. He was confronted.

He's decisive. We don't know exactly how those

meetings might have been. Well, they were not very good or

very easy. There was tension.

There was friction. I would say this, under the new

covenant, under Jesus Christ, we're not calling.

We're not called to go out and physically beat up people.

We're supposed to leave wrath and vengeance to God.

But there are times when compromise has gone to such a

point where physical just removal is important.

He says in verse 24 again. And one of the sons of Joiada,

the son of Eliashib the high priest, was a son-in-law of San

Balat the Horn. And I drove him from me.

You have no place here. You got no room gone.

Compromise had reached a level. It had gone past the point of

even discussion. He had to go.

He had to leave. Didn't matter.

He was a high priest son. I wonder how Eliash felt about

that. Maybe it was because he was that

close to the to the top authority that he had to go, But

Nehemiah put distance between himself and this man.

May sound harsh to us, but that's what compromise led to.

Again, today we're not under the old covenant called to hurt

people, but at the same time, we have to say the command isn't

all that serious. And Nehemiah even made them

swear we're not going to do this.

We're going to, we're going to stay the straight and narrow.

Now he drove. He drove this man, one man away.

And I wonder how Nehemiah must have felt coming back from

Babylon. And there's no good news.

All about compromise and waywardness and all the rest

can't have been good. You see, they compromise the

priesthood, they compromise the temple ministry.

They compromise the Sabbath day, they compromise marriage, and

they still believe they're God's people.

What's the message for us today? Where do we stand?

Nehemiah struggled tremendously with this.

Let's read further. In verse 29 he says, remember

them, Oh my God, because they've defiled the priesthood in the

covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.

Thus I cleanse them from everything Pagan.

I also assigned duties to the priests and the Levites each to

the service and to bring the wood of offering in the first of

the appointed times. Remember Me, Oh my God for good.

I wonder how tired he was. I wonder what it did to me

emotionally. We know he got angry, but here

we find his heart. He wants God to remember him.

He does this. He does this in a zeal for the

Lord. What I do know is that when I

was a young believer in a worker and got into pastoral ministry,

I had some of this weird idea that we're going to teach

everybody, going to train everybody, we're all going to be

1 happy, holy Christian family, everybody doing the right thing.

Boy, was I wrong. We'll never get there on this

side, folks. We're all in process.

We will. We will be perfect when we cross

the finish line from here to there.

We keep on repenting, confessing and correcting course.

If you hear this morning and are listening, I just want to

encourage you don't give up hope, no matter how bleak it may

look, how much you've compromised and and want to get

back on track. You can't.

You want to stay on track and you're falling off all the time.

It's not permanent. We as a church have experienced

in recent weeks some some serious turbulence.

Don't shift focus, don't derail. It can be a stepping stone or a

stumbling block, depending on how you step.

What gives me hopes? That Jesus Christ is the same

today, forever, and He always will be.

He has not changed. He died and he rose and He is

today at the right hand of the Father.

Father interceding for us. The Spirit is with us.

He modeled it for us, living a human perfect life.

Nobody else ever did. He's promised us to go with us.

He's inviting us, it gives us hope.

There's life, life beyond the circumstances He's promised us

an eternal presence with God. For now, the journey continues.

We should embrace it with joy, anticipation, what the Lord has

for us, not miserably looking what went wrong and why and so

on. Sure, we we have to remember it,

but we don't stop. Let's imagine ourselves where

Nehemiah was. He simply wanted the people to

serve, to live for God and follow God's commandments.

In the book of Exodus, in chapter 20, we have the 10

commandments that are recorded for us.

The 10 rules of life that God gave to Moses to write down

teaches people. He said if you live by them,

you'll experience blessings and if you don't, you won't.

And of course they didn't. They compromised.

They experienced punishment and discipline again and again and

again, and God never gave up on them.

God has not changed. He's still the same he was when

he wrote There's Adam and Eve in the Garden when he wrote the 10

commandments. He's still the same as it was

when Nehemiah lived, and he's still the same to us today.

Let's begin with, do we love Jesus?

When we love Jesus, we have a starting point.

Then we can start focusing and maybe the compromises will

become fewer and less and smaller and we'll win over

temptation. We'll stop stumbling so often.

I don't know where you're at today.

Maybe if you've compromised so much it's gone.

It's hopeless. No, it's not.

If there's breath, there's hope. If we surrender our lives to

Jesus, he'll redeem us. Not by reversing all the bad

financial choices we made. Or we got to.

We got to plod through those. Maybe not bringing back our

health that we ruined through substance abuse and neglect of

our body and so on. We got to live with that, maybe

not restoring a bad reputation that we ruined by being a very

bad person, but there's salvation, there's surrender.

When we surrender, there's salvation, There's hope, and

there's new life. I will encourage us today.

Let's surrender our hearts to Jesus.

Let Him fill us with His Spirit, His joy, and let us allow Him to

guide our paths and we can win. We don't have to be like the

people in Nehemiah's time in chapter 13 of Nehemiah that

constantly compromised and getting themselves into trouble

all the time. We can stand strong, we can win,

we can be victorious. Let us pray, Lord, we're

reminded that you are God. We're reminded we're human and

we're prone to sin and to compromise.

We're reminded that we need You all the time, not part time.

We pray that You will continue to draw us close and remind us

of Your holiness, of Your glory and Your calling on our lives

and our need to constantly repent and turn to You.

Thank you Lord, for Your mercy and for your grace.

Help us Lord, to see where we compromise and help us to

repent. Help us to walk with You.

We ask that Your Spirit will give us your peace in Jesus

name.