"Remember Me!" Sunday Evening Worship Service

Open your Bibles if you would look to Nehemiah chapter thirteen.

We're gonna end our study in the book of Nehemiah tonight.

We've been in it for a year now, and it has been an encouraging time for me to study this as well.

And I hope that you've been encouraged by it likewise.

There's that line in O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.

I trace the rainbow through the rain.

And you you you look at God's providence, you trace it through the world, and you see where it leads.

And the ground there blossoms red.

Life's glory, it's dead in the ground, and then it blossoms red, it comes up in the beauty of Christ.

That's what that song is about.

And that's true of any study of the Old Testament.

You study books in the Old Testament, and you're tracing God's glory.

You're tracing the rainbow through the rain.

You're tracing his covenant promise through the world to see how it's fulfilled in Christ.

And so that's what's happening in the book of Nehemiah.

Nehemiah chapter 13.

Nehemiah 13 · chapter mention

On that day, they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people, and in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God.

For they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them.

Yet our God turned the curse into a blessing.

As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent.

We're jumping in here in Nehemiah 13.

A lot can go wrong in twelve years.

Nehemiah 13 is about twelve years or so after the end of Nehemiah 12.

There's been a long pause.

Nehemiah was governor of Jerusalem.

He left that post and went back to the capital of the Persian Empire.

In this chapter, it's called the Babylonian Empire because Babylon was still a major city in it, but it was the Persian Empire, of course.

Nehemiah was one of the highest royal officials.

He had taken a demotion to come to Israel.

He had left the capital to go back to be a governor of some small forgotten province that other, you know, there's 120 plus provinces in the Persian Empire.

This was one of the smallest and the most forgotten.

He had left the, you know, the cupbearer, which is a very prominent position where we find him in Nehemiah 1.

He left that to go back to Jerusalem and serve God's people.

He eventually became the governor there.

He spent years there.

That's the story of the book of Nehemiah.

He then left Jerusalem, went back to the capital, went back to serving Arta Xerxes, and then returns probably 12 years or so later.

I won't bore you with how we figure 12 years.

It has to do with the Sabbath years and when the kings changed, but it seems like it was about 12 years.

And he returns, and he returns for a Sabbath year where they're reading the book of Moses and the hearing of all the people.

And they discovered different things as they read through this.

And I say a lot can go wrong in 12 years, and perhaps you've had this experience if you've moved around in the military, where you live somewhere for a few years, and you go away, and then you come back, and it's not the same place it was when you left.

I grew up in Albuquerque, never spent much time away from it, and then went away to seminary and came back, you know, occasionally enough to stay somewhat aware of the city and then get married and don't come back for a few years and come back, and it's like a whole new place.

The freeways don't make sense anymore.

I grew up here and they changed the freeways, and no one even asked me.

Marty Chavez was the mayor for approximately 50 years.

That was like one of the constants in Albuquerque, and he had disappeared by the time I came back.

He didn't the police cars went from looking like Pepsi cans to looking like armored tanks.

I mean, everything in the town changed.

And that's what happens when you leave a place.

You come back and you don't recognize it anymore.

I know many people at Emmanuel have been here for a few years in the military and they loved it here and they promoted out or went away to somewhere else and with the gold.

Maybe they kept their house here with the gold coming back when they were able to, and they did, and you came back, you know, six or eight or ten years later, and hopefully you recognize the church.

But a lot else has changed.

There's a mixing bowl now where those freeways cross.

You're horribly lost.

This is what happens to Nehemiah.

He comes back to Jerusalem after 12 years, and it's not the way it was when he left.

And we're not talking about new freeways and new signage, we're talking about serious compromises.

And as we read this chapter tonight, there's five different compromises the people committed.

We just read the first one.

They had begin to allow Ammonites and Moabites into worship with the people.

You see this in verse 1 that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God.

And yet Nehemiah finds them there.

And he's astonished at this.

And he takes swift action.

He's kicking them out.

Now remember the Moabites and the Ammonites, they were related to Lot.

They were from, they were Lot's daughters.

Lot and his daughters were led out of Sodom when it was destroyed by fire.

They had gone to the cave, they deluded their father, they got him drunk, they slept with him, they had children, they were not subtle about it.

If you think of what the names mean, Moabite means, you know, my dad is my daddy.

I mean, they weren't subtle about this.

Ammonite means it's from my own people.

They named their offspring after the fact that they were fathered by their own grandfather.

Because of this, and because later on, generations later, when the Israelites are coming back to the promised land, the Moabites and the Ammonites did not let them cross through.

God banned the Moabites and Ammonites to up through the tenth generation from ever entering the assembly of God.

And it says in Deuteronomy, the tenth generation, but there's no sign that it had ever been retracted, nor that the Moabites or Ammonites had ever repented.

And so they are exiled.

Nehemiah, his first day back in Jerusalem, is kicking out whole swaths of people from the assembly of God.

But that's nothing compared to what he finds in verse 4.

Before this, Eliashib the priest, this is uh it says the priest here, we're going to find out at the end of the chapter.

This this dude is the high priest.

Eliashib, who's the high priest, who was appointed over the chambers of the house of our God, he was related to Tobiah.

Tobiah was the enemy of Nehemiah.

If you remember at the beginning of the book, Tobiah was opposed to Nehemiah didn't want the wall rebuilt, tried to stir up opposition against the rebuilding of the wall, spread lies about it, said, you know, if even a fox stands on the wall, the whole thing will topple over.

Tobiah was an enemy to God and to God's people.

He was on the take from Sandbalat.

He was on the take from the Arabs, were giving Tobiah money to spread lies among God's people.

Well, he comes back, and the high priest is related to Tobiah.

And, moreover, the high priest had prepared, verse 5, for Tobiah, a large chamber where they had previously put the grain offering, the frankincense, and the vessels, and the tithes of grain, wine, and oil, which were given by the commandment to the Levites, the singers, and the gatekeepers, with a contribution to the priests.

So Tobiah has moved in to the temple.

It's hard to understand unless you're familiar with the geography of this, but the temple is up on a mount.

They had rebuilt the Temple Mount.

The temple is in the middle there.

If you've been to Jerusalem, now you can walk around the outside of the Temple Mount.

The Temple Mount is still there.

The Temple Mount that's there now is expanded beyond what it was during Nehemiah's day, of course.

It would be expanded by Herod later on in or before the life of Christ.

But this Temple Mount still would have had a mount.

The temple would have been roughly the same size as then, that little area.

The back wall of the temple is where the storerooms were.

Now, when you walk today, if you visited the Temple Mount, you can walk on the Temple Mount.

You have the stairway that you go up through the Arab security and then through the police officers there.

You can walk around the Temple Mount.

You see the Islamic um buildings that are there.

And then on the back side where there's no temple, the back side where the temple would have been is a series of rooms.

Now today there are Arab schools.

Uh they're mostly filled with uh Arab-speaking school children, and they open up.

If you walk through one of those rooms, they open up to the main streets in Jerusalem.

So the Temple Mount is only elevated on one side, and on the back side is that street level.

If you've walked along the Via della Rosa, that you know walk where you're uh retracing the walk of Christ down a long stretch of that, all the buildings on your left side are opening up into the temple.

You don't realize that when you're on the outside of it.

But when you're on the inside of it, you see that's prime access for the temple.

The advantage of being there is that you can sell things for people to sacrifice, for people to offer.

These rooms are supposed to be used for the priests to store their supplies, but instead, the priests don't have supplies.

Instead, Tobiah has the supplies.

He's selling them, and he's literally living in the temple.

So this is, I mean, there's one level of compromise.

There's another another level of Tobiah moved into the temple, kind of compromised.

You know what I mean?

And that's what's happened here.

Tobiah is living in the temple.

You can imagine Nehemiah's um let's go with the word surprise when he discovers this.

Well, this was taking place, so it's one thing, you notice the language here, it's one thing after another.

He sees the Ammonites and the Moabites, he's he's appalled about that.

Then he turns around, Tobiah has moved in to the temple.

While that is taking place, I wasn't in Jerusalem, of course, for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I went to the king.

After some time, I asked leave of the king, remember around twelve years, came back to Jerusalem.

I discovered all the evils that Eliashib had done for Tobiah, preparing for him a chamber in the courts of the house of God.

I was very angry, Nehemiah says in verse 8.

I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber.

That would be crazy.

There you are, walking along the road in Jerusalem, and out comes the couch, a table, all his CDs or whatever he has in his office, everything flying out the window, crashing on the street.

There goes his clothes, and probably there goes Tobiah after everything else.

He just he walks in, he doesn't ask permission.

This is Nehemiah style leadership right here.

He's at it.

He didn't promote back to Jerusalem for 12 years to come back and fill out paperwork to remove Tobiah from the temple.

He comes back and he's, you know, if you want something done right, you're gonna have to do it yourself, I suppose.

So he lays hands on them and just chucks everything out the window.

That's an incredible scene.

It's just hidden in one verse there.

Then verse 9, I gave orders, they cleansed the chambers, I brought back the there the vessels of the house of God with the grain offering and the frankincense.

So he fumigates the room.

And I'm exaggerating a little bit about what cleanse means, but they would have done a sacrifice, they would have rubbed the door, the blood on the door, they would have offered up the incense in there, they're repenting for letting Tobiah live in the house.

Again, many of you are military, you've moved to and fro.

You would understand that when you move out of a house, they would clean it.

It would be a different thing altogether if they bring over, you know, priests and offer sacrifice to cleanse the house from your defiling presence there.

Like, okay, this is gonna look bad on the Airbnb review.

Well, that's what happens here.

Uh I also found, verse 10, that the portions of the Levites had not been given to them.

So the Levites and the singers who did the work had fled each to his field.

So there were supposed to be singers singing at the temple.

This is why they had to rebuild the wall.

So if you remember, everything is connected to temple worship.

Ezra led the return back and led the rebuilding of the temple, but the temple can't, you don't just need a building there, you need worship there.

For there to be temple worship, you have to have priests who can sing, and you have to have priests who can offer up the sacrifices.

That's the whole point of the temple.

For you to have the priests, you need food for the priests, you need the temple instruments that are made of gold and bronze and these precious metals.

You need a place to secure them, you need a wall around the city to protect the people that live there and the supplies for the temple.

That's why the whole book of Nehemiah is about building the wall so they can have this temple worship.

And now he comes back, and the wall is still there, and the temple is still there, but there's no Levites there.

Now, why are there no Levites?

Because they all had to go home.

Why did they have to go home?

Because they were hungry.

Nobody was feeding them, and they're supposed to be fed from the grain that is in the storerooms, but instead of it being grain in the storerooms, it is Tobias in the storeroom.

So he throws them out, cleanses the room, starts looking around for Levites.

Verse 11, I confronted the officials and said, Why is the house of God forsaken?

I gather them together and set them in their stations.

Nehemiah's back, and he's not pleased about this.

He grabs the commanding officers and you know, what are you doing?

The house of God is forsaken.

He's done with the niceties.

It's not why are you kind to Tobiah?

You know, didn't you remember what happened earlier?

He just gets right to the heart issue.

You are forsaking temple worship.

The house of God is forsaken.

I gathered them together, set them in their stations.

Then all Judah brought the tithe of the grain, the wine, and the oil into the storehouses.

I appointed the treasures over the storehouse, storehouses, Shalemiah the priest, Zadok the scribe, Padiah of the Levites, and their assistant Hana, and the son of Zakur and the son of Mataniah, for they were considered reliable, and their duty was to distribute to their brothers.

I read one commentary this afternoon that said the word reliable there is a bit of a uh uh a punny kind of word here.

It means reliable, but reliable because they have muscle to back it up.

It would be the implication behind that word.

So he found reliable men that uh hit the gym a lot.

He didn't replace them with Air Force officers, but with Marines.

You could say it that way.

Well, he doesn't need someone to fly a plane, okay?

I mean just saying.

So he finds reliable people to guard the storehouses and keep Tobiah away.

And he prays in verse 14, Remember me, oh my God, concerning this.

Do not wipe out my good deeds that I have done for the house of my God and for his service.

This is a prayer to God.

The book is gonna end with the same prayer.

God, remember me.

Don't let this be wasted.

And you can almost hear the desperation.

Remember, the book began with Nehemiah praying, Lord, I don't know what you're gonna do, but there's problems in Jerusalem.

Please use me and give me favor before the king.

Now we're jumping, you know, close to 15 years after that first prayer.

And he's wondering, did I waste all of my life now?

That's what's going through his mind.

Was this all wasted?

I mean, I I stepped away from the most powerful and influential position I could possibly have to move back to Jerusalem, and now I come back 12 years later and it looks like it was wasted.

And so he's praying to God, God, remember me.

Don't erase these good deeds, don't make it mean nothing.

That's an honest prayer, isn't it?

You don't want good deeds to fall the ground.

I'm reminded of Samuel's prayer.

When Samuel's looking at Israel rebelling after he had been so faithful, Samuel to follow the Lord, Israel rejects Samuel, and God makes Samuel appoint Saul as king, which Samuel doesn't want to do.

Remember when Samuel appointed Saul as king?

He said, This is a terrible idea.

I'm only doing it because you're making me and God's making me, and you're all gonna regret it.

You know, so here, long live the king.

I mean, that was his attitude.

But as he leaves away, he reminds himself, with Yahweh, there are no falling words, is the way the phrase is rendered, which means no words fall to the ground.

Anything done for the Lord is never wasted.

No word spoken for the Lord's use ever hit the ground without accomplishing what they were purposed.

And that's what Nehemiah is trying to remind himself of.

God, remember this, don't let this be wasted.

Well, there's more compromises coming here.

Verse 15.

In those days I saw Judah, in Judah people treading wine presses on the Sabbath, bringing in heaps of grain, loading them on donkeys, and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of loads, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day.

Remember, you're not supposed to work on the Sabbath.

The very first capital offense in the Old Testament was guys that were gathering firewood on the Sabbath.

This is not like a technical Sabbath violation that we're finding here.

This is pretty much flagrant Sabbath violation.

They're treading out the wine on the Sabbath.

They're loading up their donkeys with huge weights on the Sabbath.

Every kind of load.

They're bringing it into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day.

I warned them on the day when they sold food.

So they are selling on the Sabbath.

And Nehemiah says, I'm I'm warning you.

This is hard for Americans to understand because we don't really appreciate what the Sabbath is like in Israel.

Because we have we have our weekends.

Okay.

Saturday, Sunday, it's two days.

Most people don't work on those two days.

You know, most Americans, the schools are out those two days, and most Americans take those two days off.

Uh believers will sometimes, you know, do Saturday to, you know, sports or whatever, and yard work and Sunday for church.

It's kind of the way our society works, you know, other than Chick-fil-A, which closes on Sunday, there's no real reminder of something being shut down on a day in our society.

I was recently in where South Carolina or someplace that has like some blue laws still.

I didn't know any place had this, and they had, you know, tape across the the beer section, and you can't buy more than 3.5% alcohol on Sunday because Jesus is resurrected, I guess.

I mean, they didn't say that, but that was the the implication on Sunday.

You know, 3.7% alcohol beer, very bad, um, because it's Sunday.

All right.

We don't have the ability to relate to what Jerusalem is like on the Sabbath.

If you've been there though, you do understand.

Friday, things start to shut down around noon.

Everybody closes work early on Friday.

The buses are all one direction on Friday.

Nobody's coming in, everybody's going out, everybody's going home.

Friday afternoon is spent in the markets, buying things, preparing the meal for uh Friday night and getting the food together for Saturday.

It's all supposed to be prepared before sundown Friday.

So things really shut down around Friday at noon.

Saturday, everything is shut down.

I mean, elevators don't work, for example.

Uh the roads, many of the roads are actually closed.

There's just so many obstacles to doing normal business.

Biz stores are closed, shops are closed, and and they're they're that way all day Saturday.

All day Saturday.

When it when I take groups to Israel, Deidre and I have always tried to go to Nazareth on Saturday, to go to an Arab-controlled place on the Sabbath so we can still do things and and skip that whole thing.

But if you're stuck in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, you can't really do anything.

You can't check into your hotel on Saturday night because they're not eager.

You know, once the sun is setting on Saturday is when things are supposedly allowed to open again.

But don't picture people rushing back to work.

I mean, everything is shut down all day Saturday into Saturday night.

It is really grinding the whole city to a halt.

So this is a huge economic disadvantage, is what you need to understand.

If your income is not based on investments, if you don't have an hourly job, if your income is based on farming and selling things in the market, you need to sell things on the Sabbath.

You get more money that way.

Most places are closed, you can sell on the Sabbath, you get more money.

Obviously, the Israelites' consciences did not bother them from buying things from people on the Sabbath.

They just were reluctant to do that themselves.

And so there are these kind of this black market that is popping up on the Sabbath for people to go buy things.

And Nehemiah is finding this on the Sabbath.

Everybody's making wine in their own houses, they're loading up their donkeys.

It's as if the Sabbath doesn't exist.

This is exactly why the Israelites are sent into exile so long ago.

This is why the time of their exile would be the 470 years.

They would be the time of the captivity.

There were time in Daniel's exile was 70 years because of the groups of seven, all of the Sabbath in the year of Jubilees that they had missed.

And now they are back there neglecting all of this.

And Nehemiah is stunned.

I warned them, the end of verse 15 says, I warned them that day when they sold food.

Tyrians also, so these aren't Jews, from Tyre, who lived in the city, brought in fish and all kinds of goods.

Remember, Tyre's up along the Lebanese coast, so they're bringing in fish and selling them on the Sabbath to the people of Judah in Jerusalem itself.

I love the ESV puts an exclamation mark there.

I mean, Nehemiah is shocked.

The fish market is open.

So I confronted the nobles of Judah and said, What is this evil thing you are doing?

You're profaning the Sabbath day.

Did not your fathers act in this way?

Did not our God bring all his disaster on us and on the city?

You're bringing more wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath.

As soon as it began to go dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, so this is Friday afternoon, I commanded that the doors be shut.

I gave orders that they should not be opened until after the Sabbath.

I stationed some of my servants at the gates, that no load may be brought in on the Sabbath day.

So Nehemiah's got his own personal soldiers with him.

He stations them there.

The merchants and the cellars are all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice.

So Nehemiah closes the gate on them.

They don't take the hand.

I mean, tire is a long way away.

So they're hanging out at the gates.

They're not going home.

They're going to just camp out at the gate.

Fine, Nehemiah, you got a new governor back in town.

I understand.

We'll just stay outside until things die down a little.

That's their attitude.

You haven't met Nehemiah if you think things are going to die down a little bit.

So Nehemiah, he sees them lined up outside, like they're, you know, at Best Buy on, you know, for a Christmas sale.

I warned them and said to them, Why do you lodge outside the wall?

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

From that time they did not come on the Sabbath.

I want to know what Nehemiah looked like.

I mean, these are fishermen.

These are burly dudes for sure.

And Nehemiah says, If I see you back in this place again, I will get physical with you.

And you'll remember.

I commanded the Levites that they should purify themselves and come in and guard the gates.

So he makes the Levites purify purification for Levites to be washing in the mikvas, the baptismal ponds there, their little baths that they would go in to purify themselves.

He says, I want the Levites to purify themselves on the Sabbath, so they're reminding themselves that they are defiled because of all that's been going on here.

And I want the Levites to guard the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

I'm putting the Levites in charge of guarding the gate.

Remember this also in my favor, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of the Lord.

Of your steadfast love, steadfast love there, of course, covenant love.

This is all tracing the rainbow through the rain, as I said.

This is all the sign of God's covenant.

You know, as the as the rainbow is the sign of the Noahic covenant, as the Davidic king is the sign of David's covenant, as the Torah is the sign of the Mosaic covenant, the Sabbath is the sign of that.

You look at the rainbow, you recognize this is God's favor on mankind.

He won't drown the earth again.

The Sabbath stands like that for the Jews.

It's a reminder that they are God's people.

And so he's telling the Levites, sanctify yourself.

Remember God's covenant love to us that is expressed through our Sabbath keeping.

That's worth me noting real quick here, just because people often ask about it.

Sunday is not the Christian Sabbath.

We are not under Sabbath.

Sabbath is something fulfilled in Christ.

It was given to the Jews.

The fourth commandment was given to the Jews.

Gentiles, unless they were dwelling in Old Testament Israel, were not subject to the Sabbath restrictions.

You know, Nehemiah is not telling the people from Tyre they can go home and not sell stuff on Saturday in Tyre.

Of course they can.

They're not Jewish.

This is a restriction given to the Jews.

Of course, we, in a sense, still find our Sabbath rest in Christ by ceasing from striving for our salvation, resting, knowing what Christ has accomplished.

Sunday is the Lord's day.

I know I'm talking to an evening worship service.

You're here morning and evening, you're bracketing this day in worship, and that's the way I think God has designed Sundays to function.

Not because it's a Sabbath day, but because it's a day set aside for worship that Jesus sanctified by rising on the grave on the first day of the week.

I just make that distinction so you don't read into here.

You know, you see your neighbor at church Sunday morning, they see him mowing grass Sunday afternoon, and you go lay hands on him.

Overreaction.

Sabbath is fulfilled in Christ.

But nevertheless, I love, I know several Christian business owners at Emmanuel that do close their shops on Sunday just so their employees can go to church and worship.

And I think that's a very uh righteous and noble thing to do.

Well, Nehemiah tells them, you know, stop this or this will get serious.

But the compromise isn't over here.

Verse 23.

In those days, I also saw the Jews who had married the women of Ashdod, Amon and Moab, and half their children spoke the language of Ashdod.

So they could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people.

So now as he's spending more time in Jerusalem, he's finding people are back to intermarrying.

This is the third time we've discovered this.

Once his first trip here, and he made them all uh divorced, and then Ezra at the end of the book of Ezra, same thing.

Remember out in the rain, they had to put away their foreign wives, they're back to it again, and there's no hiding it.

I mean, Nehemiah greets them in the street Shalom, and they're like, Como?

They don't speak Hebrew.

So there's no hiding it.

It's like, what is this?

Come on.

Um, so it's very obvious.

And so he's kind of miffed about this.

Uh kind of miffed.

Look what I mean by that, verse 25.

I confronted them, cursed them, beat some of them, and pulled out their hair.

So that's how he handled that.

Say shalom.

I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons, or your sons for yourself.

Because after the first two times that they had the kind of forced divorces, you think, is there anything else Nehemiah could do?

And his answer is yes, I can pull out their beards.

Which I imagine would hurt.

The word hair there is a word that's normally used for beard, I believe, and that's why uh I render it that way.

Reading it, so he went, but I don't know if it would hurt any less to pull out the head from your the hair from your head.

Made them take the oath not to intermarry their daughters.

Did not, verse 26, he tells them why Solomon, king of Israel, sinned on account of such women.

Among the many nations, there was no king like him.

He was beloved by his God.

God made him king over Israel.

Nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin.

I mean, Solomon was the favored son of David, and yet he fell into sin by marrying foreign women.

And it's like they're trying to ruin their whole nation again.

Don't they remember?

Haven't they read the book of first Kings?

Solomon intermarrying led to all-out civil war.

All-out war is what took place.

Don't they remember that?

I mean, our country had our own civil war.

Imagine how absurd it would be to go away for a generation and come back and find some people.

Yes, we should reintroduce slavery.

That'd be a good idea in our country.

Let's reintroduce slavery.

It went so well before, let's try it again.

That starts to get you into the mindset of what Nehemiah has here.

This caused their nation to divide in bloody war, never to be reunited again.

He goes away for a decade and he comes back and they are doing it again.

So he asked them.

Verse 27, shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?

And one of the sons of Jehoadiah, the son of Eliashab, the high priest, was the son-in-law of Sanbalat.

What?

I mean, this is the brother of the high priest married Sanbalat's daughter.

Remember, Sanbalat was Nehemiah's arch nemesis from earlier in the book.

Sanbalat and Tobiah were the two opponents.

One of them is living in the temple, and the other married his daughter to the high priest's brother.

This is shocking.

So Nehemiah is upset about this.

Therefore, I chased him from me.

Again, this is one of those, it just says there's a few words in English, so I really want to see that, what that looked like.

I want to see Nehemiah chasing Sandbalat's son-in-law through the streets of Jerusalem, chasing him out the city.

Remember then, my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.

Thus I cleansed from everything foreign.

I established the duties of the priests and the Levites, each in his work.

I provided for the wood offering at the appointed times and for the first fruit.

So that's kind of an overview of the chapter here.

Nehemiah restores everything.

I want to give you a quick outline to kind of close our time together, uh, to capture the main cycle.

Because there's five different events in this chapter, five different compromises.

All five of them are confronted by Nehemiah.

All five of them he confronts the same way, and he has kind of three steps with all five of them.

So I want to draw your attention to those three steps.

I say three steps to wash, rinse, repeat your sin away.

And that's because you know on the back of your shampoo bottle, you wash, you rinse, and you repeat.

I wonder why people need directions on shampoo, but there it is.

Don't get it in your eyes.

Thank you, and wash, rinse, and repeat.

And when are you supposed to repeat?

Today?

I mean, it's one of those cycles.

You need the number of times you're supposed to repeat, or you will be there perpetually.

I remember one of my children who I will not name because they're all here tonight when they were littler, telling me I don't need to take a shower today because I already took a shower this week.

And, you know, that's one of the things is that you understand, like wash, rinse, and then repeat.

Now the same thing is true with sanctification.

That's why I like this image.

You never arrive at sanctification.

You find sin in your life, you deal with it, and then guess what?

You're going to have to deal with it tomorrow also.

And then the day after that.

And then the day after that.

So Nehemiah gives you through these five different compromises.

Remember, the Ammonites and the Nobites was the first one, Tobiah was the second, the Levites with their grain, wine, and oil was the third, Sabbath was the fourth, and the intermarriage was the fifth.

He deals with all them in the same three-step process.

The first, you remove the sin.

And you should, I want you to write down these are three R's because they're very easy for you to apply to your own life as you come, as you're exposed with sin and compromise in your own life.

I'm not uh obviously the same categories of sin that you find in Nehemiah 13, you're not going to find in your own life because we're not under Torah.

Uh, nevertheless, there are still categories of sin in our life that you will find in your own heart.

How do you deal with sin in your life?

These are the three steps.

The first is you remove it.

That's the Nehemiah's first step here.

He doesn't mess around with any of these things.

He removes the Ammonites and the Moabites from the congregation, he kicks out Tobiah and all of his stuff, he uh cleans out the storerooms for the Levites with the grain and the wine and the oil.

He kicks out the people that are selling stuff on the Sabbath, and he kicks out everybody that had intermarried.

So he removes the sin present from Israel.

That's the first way to deal with sin in your own life.

You remove the presence of sin from your life.

You get sin out of your life, you excise it.

You know, if you're aware of areas of sin in your life, you take radical action to remove those areas from your life.

Obviously, sin is in your heart, not on the outside.

Nevertheless, you remove the things that are on the outside of it, that are outside of you that are leading you into sin so that you can work on your heart.

So as I go through this, I don't want you to hear kind of legalism in here.

I want you to hear a gospel application to your life.

If you sin in a way that you know you're looking at things you shouldn't look uh, uh you're looking at inappropriate things on your phone, the way you deal with that is you remove your phone from the places that you're tempted to look at inappropriate things.

And it's foolish to say, although sinners like to do this all the time, to say, you know, sin is inside my heart.

You know, my phone is just a manifestation of it, so I'm not going to do anything different with my phone because it's my heart I've got to deal with.

You know, you're treating your phone like a pet.

And you're caring for it and you're feeding it, and you're, but you're really caring for and feeding your sin.

You know, it's better for you to tie your phone to a brick and throw it out your window if it's causing you to sin, than it is to go through life with a working iPhone and sin.

You know, or Jesus says it this way, if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

It's better you lose one of your members that your whole body go into hell.

If things are causing you to sin in your life, then remove them from your life.

Just take drastic action on it.

It's uh it's okay.

Uh take your, you know, if your computer is causing you to sin, move it someplace where it's not a temptation to you.

If greed in certain areas of your life is causing you to sin, go to war against those areas of your life.

Remove the capacity for you to uh sin in those ways.

If you uh sin while you're traveling for work, then stop traveling for work.

You know, get a new job.

It's better to have a minimum wage job and go through life without having a job that gets you more money and a better car and such, but enables you to lead a life of sin.

I mean, that's what it comes down to.

Do you love sanctification and hate your sin more than you love the things that are feeding your sin?

There's a thousand different examples of this.

I'm sure you can think of them in your own life.

You can obsess about certain things in your life and go to war against those.

Remove them from temptation, remove them from areas uh in your life.

I was obsessed with my lawn for a little while.

I I I because I used to cut grass for a living back in my pre-seminary days, and I liked our grass, and I always wanted to make it better, and I was spending too much time, I think, in love with my grass.

And so I paid the neighbor kid to mow the grass for a year and to excise my love of grass out of my heart.

I have to first watch neighbor kid mowing it in directions that I would not have chosen to mow it, but that's okay.

This is sanctification on my life.

That's a very silly, silly example.

Just to make that point, be aware of areas of temptation in your life and remove those categories of sin from them.

Well, removing sin is only part of it.

The second step that Nehemiah does is he renews or he restores, replenishes, but I like the word renewed.

Did you notice in all of these things, he then sanctifies where the sin used to be?

He kicks Tobiah out and he purifies the room.

He expels the Ammonites and the Moabites and then he sanctifies.

He has a recommitment ceremony with the Israelites that are left.

On the Sabbath, he kicks everybody away, and then he reconsecrates the priests to guard the gates.

He reiterates the covenant again when the intermarriages.

He's following the same process.

In fact, you probably noticed the word as we read through it, the word refreshed or the word cleansed.

Verse 30, I cleansed from them everything foreign, is how this chapter ends.

I cleansed it.

That's the process.

So you don't just remove things from your life.

You then, to use the gospel analogy here, you confess your sins to the Lord.

You take your phone, you tie it to a brick, you throw it into the creek, and then you confess your sins to the Lord.

You confess how you've been sinning and you ask for forgiveness.

And the Lord is faithful and just to hear your confession and to forgive you.

That's what He's done.

The Lord hears your confession.

Such a process here.

You remove the sin from your presence, you confess it to God.

You can get help from friends, you confess your sin to your friends or your husband or your wife.

You know, it's a I think the whole concept of an accountability partner can be overdone, but if there is a serious sin in your life, I think it is very helpful for you to have somebody that you can confess it to who will keep you accountable.

Who will ask you spiritual questions, how you're doing in life, how you're doing your with your walk with the Lord.

And can challenge you on things.

I have people like that in my own life, and it's so helpful to me.

I can confess sin and they can hear what I'm dealing with, and they can encourage me.

And of course, you're really confessing your sin to the Lord.

You understand that?

But then you're applying the gospel to yourself by seeking forgiveness from God, who does sanctify your heart.

And then thirdly, you remember, and that's the phrase that's used all through this book.

You remember the Lord, you remember the gospel, you remember that He is faithful and just to forgive you of your sins.

I mean, there's a certain element of this that this final word could be replaced, because Nehemiah removed things out and then he brought the right stuff in.

You remove your phone from your life and you fill your mind with scripture instead.

You remove things that are tempting from your life, you confess them and you replace them with things that are righteous.

But I like the word remember because as you're filling up your life with righteous things, it's all rooted in the gospel.

It's rooted in remembering what Christ has done for you.

A very common word in this chapter, Nehemiah 13.

Remember, remember, remember.

Nehemiah says it over and over and over again.

He wants the Lord to remember him.

And as you're fighting sin in your own life and you follow that process, you remove sin from your presence, you confess it, you're sanctifying yourself, and then you remember that sin is what killed Christ.

You remember that Christ is the one you love, your sin put him to death, so you confess it.

You confess it to him.

Nehemiah wants to be remembered.

We understand this principle, Jesus says in Matthew 5 Blessed are you, and others revile you and persecute you, utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is in heaven.

Because they persecuted the prophets before you.

It's a positive motivating factor for sanctification.

You want to know why you should put off sin that's tempting you?

Because Jesus rewards you.

That's why.

Your sin is destroying you, your sin is robbing you of usefulness, so you get rid of it, you confess it, and then you remember that the Lord will reward you as you pursue sanctification.

That's the power of remembering.

It's a powerful motive for sanctification.

To remember that the Lord rewards those who pursue him.

Without faith, it's impossible to believe to be pleasing to God, right?

Because to have faith, you must first believe that God exists, and second, that he rewards those who seek him.

So don't pretend like the idea of rewards is a bad gospel modification.

No, it's the foundational element of faith.

You believe that God exists, and you believe that clinging to him is more valuable than clinging to the sins of this world.

That's why Moses could leave Pharaoh's household and be sufferer with God's people, and that's why Nehemiah could leave Arta Xerces' household and go be governor in forsaken Jerusalem.

Remember me.

Well, that wraps up Nehemiah 13.

Remember me, O my God, for my good.

You should not feel good at the end of this book.

We've now preached, I've now preached over the last, what, seven years, I think, through the book of Judges?

Through the book of Judges and Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, Ezra, Esther, and Nehemiah.

Those are the historical books.

Do any of them have a happy ending?

No.

The closest might be Ruth, but Ruth is putting its hope in David, who is coming into the future.

Judges ends with everybody going their own way, doing their own thing.

Judges ends very, very bad.

They almost kill one of their tribes accidentally.

What happened to the Benjamites?

Whoops.

1 Samuel, the wrong guy is king and he's dead.

2 Samuel, the right guy is king, and we accidentally threw him out of the country.

Whoops.

1 Kings, open civil.

1 Kings ends with Ahab and Jezebel getting pitched off the roof and eaten by dogs.

That's how 1 Kings ends.

2 Kings ends with the king getting led away into exile with a hook in his nose.

Ezra ends with everybody in the pouring rain divorcing their wives because they accidentally got all got remarried again.

Esther ends with a celebration scene, except it's in the wrong country.

And now Nehemiah ends with the Sabbath being profaned, with Tobiah living in the temple.

He's pitching him out.

And Nehemiah, you picture him, do you think it's going to be better?

If there was a Nehemiah 14, would it get better?

Like, did it just end too soon?

If we followed this out a little bit more, would it eventually have gotten better?

And of course not.

Of course it doesn't get better.

This is the point of the Old Testament.

We've now looked at all of the historical books in the Old Testament.

And none of them end well.

Because they're all designed to point you to Christ.

They're all designed to show you that there is no salvation through Israel apart from Christ who will come through Israel.

So the history books are guarding the seed of David until he is born as the Savior.

And they don't have a king in Nehemiah.

They don't have a king.

So it's fallen apart.

But even when they did have a king, it was falling apart because they didn't have faith in that king.

And he wasn't the promised seed, he wasn't the savior Jesus Christ.

But when Jesus does come, I want to go quickly through this, but when Jesus does come, do you recognize that he practically acts out Nehemiah chapter 13?

Nehemiah 13 · chapter mention

As we're reading this, did you have echoes of Christ in your mind as you went through this?

First of all, Jesus left the glory of heaven to come and take on the poverty of earth.

Just as Nehemiah left the glories of Persia to come and take on the poverty of Jerusalem to suffer with God's people, that's what Jesus did.

Obviously, to a much greater degree.

He is exalted.

He didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped or held onto, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.

Jesus humbled himself, becoming poor for our sake.

When Jesus comes to the temple, he doesn't come as the gentle, meek, and mild Jesus when he comes to the temple, does he?

He comes and he lays hands on people.

He takes a page out of Nehemiah's book.

He makes a whip and drives everybody out, cleanses the temple.

He gets serious with them.

They were profaning the temple by turning into profiteering.

It was as if San Bal and Tobiah had moved back in.

And Jesus cleanses it.

And we have often have problems with that because, you know, the Jesus I believe in is, you know, has long hair and looks moderately like a hippie and wears flip-flops and has flowers and children on his lap, kind of thing.

And that's not the Jesus you find in the New Testament who's got a whip and is tearing apart the temple.

They were making themselves rich in Jesus' day, and Jesus wouldn't have it.

It's the same thing in Nehemiah's day.

The people were profaning the Sabbath in the temple to make themselves rich, and Jesus comes and cleanses it.

Jesus creates in place a new temple.

Isaiah chapter 2, it'll come to pass in latter days that the mountain of the house of Yahweh will be established and all the nations will flow to it.

Isaiah 2 · chapter mention

The temple in the Old Testament was designed to be a light to the nations.

The temple that Jesus creates for us is also going to draw the nations to him.

The gospel is no longer a kingdom only for the Israelites or for the Jews, but is a kingdom for the nations where those from every tribe and every nation, every language are drawn to Jesus Christ.

And he says this after he cleanses out the temple.

They had to ask him in John chapter 2, they say, What sign would you do to what sign would you show us for doing these things?

John 2 · chapter mention

They want Jesus to prove that he has the right credentials to clear out the temple with a whip.

Like nice whip.

Do you have an ID for that?

And Jesus answers them, You want a sign?

How about this?

Destroy the temple, and in three days I'll raise it back up.

And the Jews said, It took 46 years to build the temple, you'll raise it in three days.

But he, of course, was speaking about the temple of his body.

He gives spiritual riches to people.

He doesn't take them, he doesn't make himself rich, he gives spiritual riches.

He creates a new temple, not to make wealth for himself, but he creates a new temple to give wealth for us.

So his body, of course, is the temple.

It was executed.

He did die on the cross for our sins.

He did resurrect on the third day.

He did rebuild the temple, so to speak.

And now he is still building the temple in this world because the church is the temple of God.

Every person who puts their faith in Christ is united to Christ.

We're all part of his body, which is another way of saying we're part of his temple.

We're part of his temple.

He creates something new.

And he gives spiritual riches, as we've been studying in the book of Esther.

He doesn't take them for himself, but he sends his spirit, who gives gifts to men, to build up his temple.

The New Testament has happy endings.

The New Testament, even when the book of Acts ends with Paul in jail, it's such optimism.

It's such excitement because the gospel is going forward into the world.

All the gospels end with this excitement.

The Bible is, the gospel is going forth into the world, except for Mark, where the people are just astonished about the resurrection.

They don't know what to do.

But the other gospels, it's this eagerness.

This is a great commission.

It's going to go into all the world.

So the New Testament history books are fundamentally different than the Old Testament history books, because the Old Testament ones are missing the main person that can make them successful, namely Christ, and who we have in the New Testament.

He is our new temple.

He, of course, calls us to purify ourselves from immorality.

He causes us to come out from the sexually immoral, to not be united to those that are sexually immoral, because by doing so, you're uniting the body of Christ to a harlot, he says in 2 Corinthians 6.

We're supposed to pursue sexual purity, much like Nehemiah does here.

Jesus commands that of us as well.

Leave the sexually immoral behind.

Because when you're committing sexually immoral acts, you're uniting the church to those acts, which is terrible.

So repent from sexual immorality as Jesus is building his temple in the world.

So as we finish the book of Nehemiah, I hope you see the despair here.

I hope you hear the despair in Nehemiah saying, Lord, remember me.

I don't know what else to do.

So remember me.

I can't ask anything else.

And I hope you see that that despair is brought to its zenith, its conclusion in Christ, as Christ comes and acts out this chapter in a much more profound and powerful way, bringing hope and gospel power to the earth.

Lord, we're thankful that you died on the cross for our sin, you rose from the grave, you give gifts to men.

We're thankful that you have built a new temple, a new priesthood.

We are all priests joined together in Christ.

We're all ministers of a new covenant, partaking through the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts.

Lord, I pray that you would guard our congregation from sexual immorality, that we would come out from the nations around us, that we would come out from the sexually immoral activities of our past, that we would sanctify ourselves through your Holy Spirit.

I pray for people in this congregation tonight that are dealing with sin in their life.

I pray they would have the courage to confess, the courage to remove the temptation to sin from their life, the courage to confess and apply the gospel to their hearts, and the courage to remember that you reward those who diligently seek you.

I give you thanks for these promises in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to meet you personally at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and other church information is on our website at ibc.church.

If you want information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been an encouragement to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.