Nehemiah: When History Becomes Prayer | Student Pastor: Sam Rapp

Well again, good morning.

Um, again, happy memorial day.

In many circles, it's known as Youth Pastor Sunday.

So, welcome to Youth Pastor Sunday.

Uh, my name is Sam, and I am the Youth Pastor here, and I'm honored to be with you this morning and to bring God's word to you.

Uh so if you do have your Bibles, would encourage you to turn to Nehemiah 9.

That's gonna be where we're camped out this morning.

And as you turn there, I want to open up our time together with this question for us.

When you have an experience of something amazing, what do you do?

If you're anything like me, you'd probably answer something along the lines of, I want to get back to that.

Whatever it might have been, I want to get back to that.

I want more of that.

Some of the best examples are when maybe you're traveling and you're in a new city and you just randomly pick a new restaurant on a map, and you go there and it turns out to be amazing, and you're like, I just can't wait to get back there.

You rave about it to people, you can't wait to get back and visit that city and visit that restaurant again.

Or maybe, maybe your marriage has been in a bit of a dry spot, and you and your spouse are having trouble connecting on any deep level, and then to the surprise of both of you, you you go on a walk or you go to dinner together, and then you share laughs, you share deep joy together.

Joy that you haven't experienced in years, maybe, and you're like, man, where has this been?

And so maybe you long to return to that.

Maybe you even carve out a night to go on a walk again or go on a date night, or maybe you've been in a season of deep suffering.

And maybe it's been hard to get out of bed, and then maybe you wake up one morning and for whatever reason the sun is shining a bit brighter.

The colors of the world are more vibrant again, and you're like, okay, I can I can keep going.

I can keep doing this.

The sting of suffering is certainly still there, but maybe there's just a tinge of hope giving you life.

Well, the Israelites here in Nehemiah 9, they've tasted something amazing.

They've tasted something amazing because they have been far from the Lord.

They were exiled in Babylon because of their own covenant unfaithfulness, and yet God, through this man Nehemiah, has brought the people back.

They've rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and here they are back in the city again, back in their promised land.

And then as Russ hit last week, the people's first response once they get in the walls of the city is to return to the word of the Lord.

Where else would we go, O Lord?

They had for many years forgotten it, left it behind them, and as the priest stands before them, reading God's word to them, they weep.

Maybe you've been there.

Maybe when you stumbled in that sin again, maybe when you relapsed or when you sinned in maybe a surprising way, maybe you found yourself weeping as you return to the Lord.

And that's where God's people find themselves here.

The priest Ezra is reading the stories of old to them of Moses and Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, and they weep.

And yet, God's priest Ezra says this in Nehemiah 8 This day is holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn or weep.

For all the people wept as they heard the words of the law, and he said to them, Go your way, eat the fat and drink the sweet wine, and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready.

For this day is holy to the Lord, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

They just entered the gates.

They are soul crushed over their own sin.

And yet the priest Ezra says, Don't weep, feast today.

In other words, Israelites, today is a party.

And it's not because you hold yourselves together, it's because God is merciful.

So, hey, come and feast upon him.

They feasted for seven days, savoring the mercy of their Lord and beloved.

Our great high priest, the greater Ezra, stands offering the same thing to you today.

Come and feast.

Don't weep and mourn, but Jesus, the risen priest, says, Come and feast on me.

Come and eat your fill.

The Israelites have tasted something amazing, and they are returning over and over again.

So the people feast for seven full days.

And then on the eighth day of their party, they finally hold a fast.

And it's on this fast day that we pick up here in Nehemiah 9.

Look at verses 1 through 5 with me.

Now on the twenty-fourth day of the month, the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth and with earth on their heads.

And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.

And they stood up in their place and read from the book of the law of their Lord their God for a quarter of the day.

For another quarter of it they made confession and worship the Lord their God.

On the stairs of the Levites stood Jeshua, Bani, Kadmiel, Sheboniah, Abunai, Sherebiah, Bani, and Chennani, and they cried with a loud voice to the Lord their God.

Then the Levites, we're going to do it again.

Stand up and bless the Lord your God from everlasting to everlasting.

Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise.

Megan, I almost had you read that, but then I didn't want to put you through that, so we chose the last instead.

But in these first five verses, there's a lot we could glean, but I'm just going to pull out three points from this first paragraph to start.

So, point one, the church leads the charge of repentance.

We see that in verses one and two.

And you notice there, the word says that the people separated themselves from the foreigners.

And that's not because the people thought they were better than the foreigners.

No, it's because they were God's people.

They had received God's word.

God had spoken covenant to them.

And so they're owning up to all the ways that they had fallen short.

And so this is them knowing, hey, if we want the city of Jerusalem to experience spiritual awakening, revival has to start within the doors.

We don't point in judgment upon the culture.

Culture change happens as the church owns up to the sins within the walls and then move out in grace and love.

One of the best ways the church today can look attractive to the world and especially younger generation is not by being a judgy finger-pointing group of Christians on sinners, but rather to have a brutal honesty that we need Jesus and are not perfect.

That's why I love what we say every week, right?

What Russ just said.

We are more broken than we originally thought.

But in that more loved in Jesus and on his cross than we could dare to dream.

So therefore, churches are the places where people don't feel like they need to clean themselves up.

But churches ought to be the place where people can come, like a hospital in need of healing, right?

Number two, confession and worship go together.

We saw that from verse 3.

So when we say confession, we're saying the act of bringing our sin and unbelief to the Lord.

And then when we say worship, we're saying placing our weight of affections on another.

So when we say confession and worship go together, we're saying that it's in the act of confession that we are worshiping.

Because we're saying, Lord, I am trusting to you the sin that you have placed upon yourself.

I'm trusting that I can't hold it, so Lord, here is all of me, and I know that all of you is enough for me.

Again, that's why I love what we say in our confessional prayer.

This isn't us needing to grovel and guilt.

What that means is it's not like if you feel bad enough, then God will forgive you.

No, his cross is far sufficient for you to be forgiven.

Number three, and lastly, from this paragraph, confession, repentance, and worship starts with the leadership.

There's a lot to be said here, but what I'll say primarily is that the leaders and pastors of a church or community should be the forerunners of confession and repentance.

And that's not to say that the pastors and leaders of a church should be the most perfect.

What that's to say is that they should lead the charge of saying, I need Jesus.

Paul was an amazing example of this.

The older he got in his ministry, the more aware of his sin and shortcomings he became.

Look at this progression from the New Testament.

In 55 A.D., Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15, for I am the least of all the apostles.

And then in 60 A.D.

he goes on to say, For I am the least of all God's people.

And then in 63 A.D., near the end of his life, he says, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.

So it's not to say that Paul became more sinful as he grew older.

No, it's to say he grew more aware of the standing in his heart.

And more and more aware over the time of his life of him saying, Man, I just need Jesus so desperately.

He goes from the least of the apostles to the least of all God's people to the least of all human beings.

That's the progression we see in Paul.

And it's hard to look down on others when you view yourself as the chief of sinners.

The charge of the confession here in Nehemiah is led by the religious leaders.

It's not led by the lay people, it's led by the priests.

Paul David Tripp wrote in this book called Lead, which I would commend to you.

It's a really accessible, helpful book on Christian leadership and serving.

And you might not be here today as a pastor or leader of a big ministry, but all Christians are leaders to some degree.

And so I think this quote is really helpful in light of Nehemiah 9.

Listen to what Paul Tripp says.

Humility means that each leader's relationship to other leaders is characterized by an acknowledgement that he deserves none of the recognition, power, or influence that his position affords him.

It means knowing as a leader that as long as sin still lives inside of you, you will need to be rescued from you.

Humility means you love serving more than you crave leading.

It means owning your inability rather than boasting in your abilities.

It means always being committed to listen and learn.

Humility means seeing fellow leaders not so much as serving your success, but as serving the one who called each of you.

It means being more excited about your fellow leaders' commitment to Christ than you are about their loyalty to you.

It's about fearing the power of position rather than craving it.

It's about being more motivated to serve than to be seen.

The religious leaders of Nehemiah 9 are not pointing fingers of judgment and shame upon the culture.

No, they have themselves come face to face with the beauty of God's word and are leading the charge of returning to his face.

So the question is: how will this confession and repentance begin and look?

Look at verses six through eight with me.

They begin with the subject, you.

You are the Lord, you alone, you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve all of them.

And the host of heaven worships you.

You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and gave him the name Abraham.

You found his heart faithful before you and made with him the covenant to give his offspring the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amrite, the Parasite, the Jebusite, and the Gergeshite.

For you have kept your promises, for you are righteous.

From these verses all the way to the end of the chapter, these people will retell their entire story, beginning with creation and going all the way through the prophets.

In the rest of chapter 9, there are around 40 direct references to past events.

And this only makes sense, right?

The people just spent seven days hearing their story told over and over and over again.

So it was just overflowing out of them.

It was fresh on their minds.

And think about how important that is.

In our lives, how easy is it to forget the big story that God is weaving us into?

We get caught up in the day by day, and then we come back to church on Sunday, maybe collapsing into it.

And then we remember, yes, the cross is enough for me.

I am beloved.

And all the ways I fell short.

And then to go again, seven days just sort of forgetting what the story is.

And that's especially true when you have a hard day, when your kid is struggling, when you lose your job, when you suffer, when you doubt, when the family drama comes up again.

The Israelites, too, have forgotten their story.

And it's right in this place that when Ezra reads it over them, it is like the sweetest honey to their souls.

I think about the end of the book of Job.

This man who lost everything.

He spent then about 40 chapters dialoguing with God and kind of yelling at him and getting yelled at by his friends and all the all the things.

And finally, at the end of the book, Job gets a glimpse of the love of God more deeply than he had ever before.

And this is what Job says at the end of the book.

I love this.

He says, I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.

Isn't that rich?

I'd heard of you.

I knew all about you, Lord.

I heard the stories, but Lord, now my eye sees you.

And this is where the Israelites are again.

They had years of wandering, years of maybe never even hearing their Bibles again.

And this is why their confession starts with their Maker.

Because they're finally seeing him, the treasure of their souls, their beloved.

They move from hopeless to hopeful the more they gaze upon the beauty of their Maker.

Hopefully because God kept his word to them.

He is creator, he made all things.

And remember, Israelites, he made a covenant with us, so God's not gonna give up on us.

And then they close verse 8 with the promise of hope.

You have kept your promise, for you are righteous.

They are overflowing with hope.

We live in a unique moment of time right now in the church in America.

People in the younger generation are growing super uh interested in spiritual things, especially in the church.

Uh I don't know if you knew this, there are revivals breaking out all over college campuses right now.

There's a sermon I would encourage you to listen to uh called Revival by Matt Chandler, who did it uh yeah, about two months ago, and where he kind of explains a lot of these revivals and he he jokes about it.

It's not just like SEC schools, it's like all over the country, uh, which I think is helpful.

Um but I think that's I think the sermon is insightful to what's going on in our moment right now because the church is becoming increasingly more in the the rhythm of the culture.

Christian influences, influencers, and apologetic leaders are growing more and more in the scene.

So much so that one of them, his name's Wesley Huff, he was on Joe Rogan's podcast.

He's a Christian apologetic, and that is the most streamed podcast on Spotify.

And he spends three hours defending the validity of the Bible on the most streamed platform on Spotify.

And I think one of the biggest reasons why our culture is shifting in this way is this the hopefulness of Christianity is beautiful and attractive to the world.

And I think America is starting to get it.

I think Western Christianity is starting to get it.

Christianity, for her entire history, has been marked by a radical hope in spite of suffering.

That's what she's been marked by for 2,000 years.

And hope is not blind optimism.

Hope is rooted in reality.

I mean, think about the Israelites.

They had spent years enslaved in Babylon.

Think about the generational trauma they had experienced.

The hurts, the wounds that they were presently walking in, and it was due to their own failings.

And so when this leader, Nehemiah, rebuilds their walls, many of them, for the first time in their life, heard the word of the Lord.

And after they had steeped in it for seven full days, all they have left to do is pour out their story back to the Lord.

But remember, this wasn't just an individual person doing it, it was a cry of the people together doing it.

What's so cool is that the people of God can endure unimaginable things together when hope is the well that they drink from.

Here's the thing about hope.

Hope is future-oriented but rooted in history.

Meaning, hope exists because of past promises kept and future promises to look forward to.

So therefore, in Christ, we are set free to be a people of hope.

Hope can be hard, though, and hope is hard.

We are gospel amnesiacs, meaning we forget it so quickly, and that's why the story of God's one-way love to us in Jesus is so vital to retell to ourselves.

We must remind ourselves of the love that has poured itself upon our souls in Jesus.

We, like the Israelites, can look back on our own stories and trace all the different ways that we saw the hand of God in these different moments, bringing people into our lives, bringing us surprising joy in the face of grief, opening our eyes more deeply to maybe something in the Bible.

Or maybe hope could be when you lose the words to pray, and there's a really great worship song that is the only thing holding on to you.

And in all of it, hope is rooted in verse 8.

Again, you have kept your promises, for you are righteous.

They say trust can take a lifetime to earn and a moment to lose.

And so Paul says in Romans 5, 7, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die.

But God shows his love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So how confident can we be to be hopeful, maybe in spite of looking ridiculous for having hope?

Well, that God would write himself into the story.

That God is not some faraway master, but that he would become a human, that he would go through all the hardships and weirdness of being a human, and then that he would die on the behalf of his beloved.

That, beloved, is how confident we can be to have hope for the future.

Every other religious system in the world says, hey, if you're good enough, maybe God will approve of you.

Christianity is the only one that says, I see that you're not good enough.

Can I help?

And actually, it's even better than that.

Christianity says, in all the places you fall short, all the places you sin, all the places where you don't keep his commandments, God says, Can I stand in your place?

That is good news to bring hope to our soul.

So the rest of the confession unfolds.

And you remember the people start by staring at God in all his beauty.

They remember the covenant to Abram, the promise to bless him, and then they confess that God has kept his promise on one basis, that God is righteous.

So I'm gonna kind of outline the rest of the chapter for us here.

This is kind of the people retelling their story.

It begins with the Exodus, which is when God sees his suffering people, he frees them from Egypt, parts the Red Sea, gives them the Ten Commandments, and remains with them.

They go on, the wilderness wanderings.

Even though the people were freed, they kept sinning, and yet God kept being faithful.

Then at part three, it seems like God's covenant to Abraham is fulfilled.

The people are conquering other nations.

They're filling the earth and blessing it.

But then again, sin part two.

The people keep sinning, they kill their prophets, they're conquered, and yet God would not stop being merciful.

Honestly, I was thinking about it this week.

If like an alien came to me and said, Sam, what's the Old Testament about?

I would truly point them to Nehemiah 9.

It is a rich outline.

So if you're like, hey, I want to know more about what the Old Testament is all about, I would just say read Nehemiah 9.

It is a rich history of the whole of the Old Testament.

It covers creation.

It goes back to Abraham, to Moses.

Gets the prophets, the golden calf, so many moments in their story.

It is their whole story.

And in all of it, the reason I love it so much is because God is the main character.

The main character is God and his mercy.

And this is out of all of this where we get back to our scripture reading again.

The big ask of God.

Look at verses 32 through 38 as we finish out the chapter.

And all this in mind, now therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love, let not all the hardship seem little to you that has come upon us.

Upon our kings, our princes, our priests, our prophets, our fathers, and all your people, since the time of the kings of Assyria until this day.

Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully when we have acted wickedly.

Our kings, our princes, our priests, and our fathers have not kept your law or paid attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave them.

Even in their own kingdom, amid the great goodness that you gave them, and in the land large and rich land you set before him, they did not serve you or turn from their wicked works.

Behold, we are slaves this day.

In the land that you gave our fathers to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts, behold, we are slaves.

And its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over.

Us because of their sins.

They rule over our bodies and over our livestock as they please, and we are in great distress.

So, because of all this, we make a firm covenant in writing.

On the sealed document are the names of our princes, our priests, and our Levites.

They're saying, Lord, it's like we're back in Egypt.

We're slaves.

And Lord, we're not even slaves in a foreign land.

We're slaves in the promised land.

And Lord, it's our fault.

You've been righteous.

We've been wicked.

You've been faithful.

We've been unfaithful.

And so I love this.

Lord, they say, let not this hardship seem small to you.

I love the way it closes.

Because in this, in other words, Lord, you have been so stubbornly faithful to us.

We're going to make the covenant.

We're going to renew our covenant back to you.

We have tasted and seen, Lord, your mercy.

And so, Lord, where else would we go?

And this would seem like a great way to end the book of Nehemiah, wouldn't it?

But there's one big problem.

The Israelites, even the leader, Nehemiah, they're too much like me.

And so what we're going to see, in the words of Pastor Matt, what he said a few weeks ago, is that the book of Nehemiah ends with us waiting for another.

Nehemiah is not enough.

The walls being rebuilt are simply not enough.

But the good news is that the another that they were waiting for, and that this book leads us looking to, has come.

I love how the book of Hebrews opens.

Hebrews 1, 1 and 2 says, Long ago, at many times and in many ways, like Nehemiah, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

But in these last days he has spoken to us by his son.

The greater Nehemiah is here.

And he did not come just to rebuild the walls of an earthly kingdom.

No, he came to look at the rubble of your heart and rebuild it himself.

So remember my initial question.

They sprinted back.

And then they would fall away just like us, even just like a chapter or two later.

And what Jesus, by his death and resurrection, is offering to you and to me is to make you whole, for your restless heart to be rested, to be in relationship with your Maker.

When you no longer have to live your life in fear or hopelessness or having no meaning, where you're no longer defined by your success or suffering, but where you're defined by your maker who loves you.

We say this all the time at youth on Sunday nights.

I think it's helpful.

But it's just this maybe growth in Christ isn't sinning less, but running into the arms of Jesus faster when you do.

Maybe growth in Christ, by his grace and his word in us, is seeing him as more sweet, more accessible, more beautiful, and something we long to return to.

I'll close with this quick story from the Gospels.

In John 6, Jesus is teaching some really hard things because he wasn't interested in building a big crowd.

And John tells us that a lot of the disciples start leaving, like a noticeable amount.

And so Jesus looks at the 12 disciples, his boys, he's like, hey, they're all leaving.

You guys going too?

And then Peter, God bless him, this might be his peak, before he would go to make a mess of things, he says, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life.

Lord, where would we go?

So you have a choice this morning, beloved.

You can keep pretending that everything's okay when below the surface there is mess.

You're struggling maybe with an addiction, with an ongoing struggle, with a piercing doubt.

One way to go about that is just to suppress it, to pretend like it's not there.

Or you can bring yourself to the Lord who loves you today, the Lord who died for you, in your full mess, to the one who has the words of life for you.

There is a feast of grace waiting for you, beloved.

There's no doors to come through.

There's nothing lacking.

So come and feast this morning.

If you have any questions about this sermon or the text or anything about the Lord Jesus, there will be a pastor up front after the service and would love to talk with you and pray with you.

Let's pray together.

Lord, thank you that you meet us as we are this morning.

Thank you for this word from Nehemiah 9.

Lord, we see an invitation not to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but an invitation to collapse.

So, Father, we all come into this room this morning with mess, with sin, with doubt.

And yet, Lord, it's in that place that you meet us.

So, Father, I pray for each person in this room that they would feel the great relief of the cross of Christ.

Father, thank you for loving us, for meeting us this morning.

And in all of it, I pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.