The Book of Ezra & Nehemiah

Church.

Bad news.

I don't know how you guys handle bad news.

No one likes bad news, but bad news comes.

And how we respond to bad news, heartbreaking news, it gives us a picture of our own heart.

As we read Nehemiah chapter 1, there's a lot of bad news.

Nehemiah 1 · chapter mention

If you were with us last week as we wrapped up Ezra, Ezra ends in just a devastating situation.

Just heartbreaking.

There was so much sin among the people and even among the leaders intermarrying with pagan women.

The weight of their sin, the mess of their sin, and even the weight of their obedience, as they're instructed to divorce their pagan wives and send them away.

It's heartbreaking.

Just ends, as there ends on this downer.

Like, what is going on?

And then into Nehemiah and more bad news.

But how Nehemiah responds to the bad news is instructive for us.

It should be encouraging for us.

Ezra ends with heartbreak, Nehemiah begins with heartbreak.

But we see that Nehemiah has a rich hope in God.

His hope was fully in God, despite his connections and his own influence.

Let's read Ezra or Nehemiah chapter 1.

Nehemiah 1 · chapter mention

The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hechaliah.

Now it happened in the month of Cheslev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa, the citadel, that Hananiah, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah.

And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped and who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem.

And they said to me, The remnant there in the province who have survived the exile is in great trouble, in shame.

The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.

As soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourning for days.

I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven, and I said, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments.

Let your ear be attentive, and your ears open, and your eyes opened to hear the prayer of your servant, that I now pray before you, day and night for the people of Israel, your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you.

Even I and my father's house have sinned.

We have acted very corruptly against you, and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, the rules that you commanded your servant Moses.

Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples.

But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, then though your out though you are your outcasts are in the uttermost part of the heaven, from there I will gather them and bring them.

I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen to make my name dwell there.

They are your servants and your people, whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand.

O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants, who delight to fear your name, and give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.

Now I was a cupbearer to the king.

So you see this bad news coming.

Nehemiah picks up about 16 years after where Ezra 10 left off.

So there's this just awful situation at the end of Ezra, heartbreaking.

And yet people are seeking to be obedient.

They want to honor the Lord yet again.

Sixteen years pass, and Nehemiah gets a report from someone who's returning from Jerusalem.

He says, How are they doing?

Not well.

Now, this wasn't the destruction that was brought when Nebuchadnezzar originally carried off the people of Israel a hundred years ago-ish.

So it wasn't the same destruction.

The people had rebuilt, and yet they had come, the people of the land, and destroyed, burnt down the gates, destroyed the walls.

See the first thing is Nehemiah is so far removed from the situation.

He, to our knowledge, had never been to Jerusalem with all the exiles that went.

And he asks a brother, what's the condition?

And he hears the condition, he hears the information, and his heart is broken over this.

Now, for some of us, it's like, man, okay, so their walls are torn down and like the gates are burning.

Like, what's the big deal?

But see, Nehemiah cared, and he had eyes to see what was going on.

He had eyes to see the shame on God's people and the destruction that was brought.

God had been working in his heart to give him a heart for these people.

He cared about the exiles.

He had eyes to see their need.

And so often we read a text like this, and we say, okay, Nehemiah cares, and he weeps, and he cries, and he does all these things.

But then we have to ask ourselves, what does it kind of get to us?

What makes us kind of weep?

Does anything make us mourn?

Again, Ezra had or Nehemiah had eyes to see what was going on with God's people.

And oftentimes for us, we kind of grow separate.

We just begin to detach ourselves.

If there's a mess of a situation, whether it's a church, kind of things are blowing up, or whatever, or relationships, we kind of just pull back and we can harden our hearts.

We say, man, that's tough for them.

Man, that's tough.

That's a bummer.

Feel bad for them.

Let's pray for them.

And that's what, you know, Nehemiah could have said that.

Like, man, that's a bummer.

Like, let me talk to the king.

Maybe we'll send some more resources and we'll kind of get some financial aid out there and kind of subsidize some of the work.

And, you know, don't worry, we'll take care of that.

But he knew that the problem with the people wasn't just that their wall was broken down, but that their gates had been burnt.

It's that the people of God were struggling to obey the Lord.

They have been kind of trampled on, and shame was on them.

They were not living as God had called them to live.

And Nehemiah feels this.

He feels the weight of this.

His heart is broken.

We likewise should be a people who see things and we know how to mourn.

Our heart should be caring.

Do we mourn over the state of the church in our nation?

Are we broken about those things?

Or do we just complain?

Do we ask God to bring reformation to our hearts and our souls and bring revival to our churches that we may repent of our sin and turn and follow Him?

Or do we just say, man, I hope He shows up soon?

It's getting really bad out here.

I hope he's coming back soon.

We're not put on this earth to just stare at the sky, waiting for Jesus to come back.

We're going to be a people who are excited that he is returning, but who are living in a way that honors him and glorifies him, shares the truth of the gospel with others because he is coming back.

Don't just wait for that to happen.

We're seeking to be faithful as we wait.

We must have eyes that see, and a heart that responds to what God is doing, what he's called us to, and how we are to live.

So Nehemiah sees the situation and he responds.

He has a heart that responds well.

First, he responds with humility.

Look at verse 4.

As soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days.

I continued fasting, praying before the God of heaven.

So he begins this prayer, just saying, like he's weeping and mourning, humbling himself.

He's never been there.

This is a pattern we see.

These guys who, but they've never been to the land.

They have no connection at this point, this timeline, with people who lived there before they were conquered and carried off.

Let alone has he been there himself.

But he feels this brokenness.

He displays this humility, this mourning and weeping, fasting, praying.

So often we get bad news in our life.

It happens.

It's happening, it's gonna happen.

Some people this week will get bad news.

What are we to do with that?

This kind of, God, where are you?

I thought I was doing the right, like what's going on?

Here in Nehemiah, along with Ezra, they model this response.

We're to mourn these things.

Death, we mourn that.

Loss, we mourn that.

We don't just try to get past it.

It's a brother or sister who's who's living in sin or walking away from the things of the Lord.

We mourn that.

People who are lost and going to hell and who are rejecting God's love and mercy, we mourn that.

We pray, seeking the Lord and fasting.

See, in Nehemiah's response of humility, he puts God first.

He doesn't make this about him.

He doesn't say, Well, I'm in this position of authority and power, I can do something.

He doesn't say, well, that's a real bummer.

Like, and start kind of pointing the fingers at others.

If I was there, this is what I would have done.

And hey, if they just would have done this, if they just would have asked my opinion, if they would have just gotten some advice from me.

He doesn't do any of that.

He begins with God.

Oh Lord of heaven, oh Lord God of heaven and earth.

Verse 5.

The great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments.

He points his heart to Christ.

So we are to point our hearts to Christ.

So often things come in, we just kind of shut down.

It becomes just us and them.

What's the situation?

On this plane, he looks to heaven.

He looks to God.

He makes a clear declaration of who God is.

And then he says, Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant.

And I pray, he's praying this night and day and night and day.

We'll get into this more next time, literally, in chapter two of Nehemiah, but there's like a four to five month period from when Nehemiah gets the news to when Nehemiah goes and shares the news with King Artaxerxes.

Months he's seeking the Lord.

He's praying.

He's trying to petition the Lord, as we'll see.

He's crying out to his God to bring deliverance.

There's this humility here.

We see this with the confession.

He's confessing.

He's not withholding, like, well, if they would have done.

He's just confessing, Lord, we have acted wickedly.

Our forefathers have sinned.

Our fathers have sinned.

We have sinned.

They feel that.

So he begins his heart of response with humility.

And then he begins to transition into some doctrine, this confession of sin, now a confession of doctrine of who God is.

Verse 10.

Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples.

But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen to make my name dwell there.

So he begins, he moves from confession of sin to a confession of doctrine.

This is what we believe, God's promises.

If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you.

If you are faithful, if you are humble, if you repent, I will gather you together.

This is God's promise to them.

Then he says, They are your servants and your people.

Now we know that Nehemiah is not kind of getting into his prayer closet, if you will, and trying to convince God.

Alright, Lord, hey, remember, remember your covenant.

God, remember uh these are your people, and and remember, like he's not there just trying to like convince the guy and talk him into the thing.

But he's declaring the truth of God's word, reminding himself what God has said, and reminding the people around him what God has said.

This is God's promise.

He will be faithful to those who seek him.

He will be faithful to those who seek him.

He will gather them, they will be his people.

And they have been redeemed by his hand.

The second part of verse 10.

You have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand.

See, Nehemiah is not looking to some other source for salvation, a redemption, or aid.

He's just clearly laid out the situation.

You're God.

This is your word, your command.

For those who seek you, they will find you.

For those who want to follow you, you will be their Lord and their master, and you will prosper them and bless them.

For those who don't want you, you will scatter them.

You are God.

These are your people, whom you have redeemed with your mighty hand.

That's it.

He's just laying out the situation.

When crisis comes into our hearts, brokenness comes.

It's not that we have to kind of figure out new things.

Sure, people's kind of heads swirling, and they're like, I don't even know what to think, I don't know what to believe anymore.

Let Nehemiah encourage you.

It's the very basic, simple things of God.

He is God.

He is a sovereign God.

He is a good God.

If you're repentant and following Christ, you belong to Him.

You are His people.

He has redeemed you.

So that no matter what comes, what news comes, what information comes, whatever happens to your life, as bad as it gets, and it can get really, really bad.

These truths do not change.

He doesn't stop being God.

He doesn't stop being good.

He doesn't stop being sovereign.

As Nehemiah declares, he makes this confession.

This is who God is.

This is our rich hope.

And then Nehemiah seeks the Lord with a petition.

He asks the Lord.

Verse 8.

O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant.

And to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name.

And give success to your servant today.

And grant him mercy in the sight of this man.

He's talking about the king, King Araxerxes.

Now I was a cupbearer to the king.

So he begins with kind of this petition, verse 11.

Let your ear be attentive.

Lord, hear my prayer.

I know who you are, I know who your people are.

I know what you've done.

Hear my prayer.

Because he knows.

Those who delight to fear the Lord are those who bring honor to the Lord.

Now he's not saying those who tremble in this kind of like, just get away from me fear.

This isn't that kind of fear, like, I'm afraid he's gonna like hit me, or I'm afraid for my life, but rather this awe, this reverent, this magnificent fear, this weight of God and magnitude of God that creates in you a fear.

A kind of fear that means you you kind of delight in.

It's this better understanding of who God is.

You're thinking, man, how many times in your life?

Some people here are older and some younger, but how many times in your life have you met someone who feared God?

They live differently.

They have an understanding of who God is: the power, the majesty, the glory, the beauty of God.

There's a weight there that they understand.

They live in obedience to him.

It's the delight.

You know who God is.

And for so many of us, we just, we don't fear God.

We're not really concerned about it.

We want to honor him, we want to give him respect, but we're not fearful, we're not trembling before him.

Now there's a tension as Christians.

Hebrews 4 says, those who are in Christ come with bold assurance to the throne of grace.

Right?

To come quickly to him, but yet have this fear and this reverence.

That's what Nehemiah declares.

Those who fear the Lord.

He's praying to the Lord, hear him.

He mentions that he is a cupbearer.

This is a highly trusted position.

And it's it's it's so interesting.

He just drops like the last line, like, you know, like genuinely, not like a kind of passive-aggressive, like, eh, I'm the cupbearer.

You know, it's like just FY, this is my role, this is my job in life.

But so we understand a little bit of what's going on here.

A cupbearer was someone who would do that.

They were the king's cupbearer.

They would take a drink to make sure it wasn't poisoned, because everyone's trying to kill kings, you know, back then and still today.

And he was to test the food.

So this is someone who would have been really trusted.

Like the king would have trusted this person literally with his life.

What's interesting, obviously, is Nehemiah's not from Babylon.

He's not Babylonian.

He's Hebrew.

And so maybe there's this idea that, like, well, you know, I'd prefer a Hebrew to die if someone poisoned me.

But it's really odd that a king would trust a prisoner, a slave.

Right?

Like your land has been taken over.

And now finally, after all these years, you get a position to like test the king's food.

Like you could poison the king, right?

Like, you're the guy, you're in the position of power to like do something about all this.

But Nehemiah has been faithful and God has called him to, and he's served as a cupbearer, we don't know how long, but for a little while, long enough to gain a lot of confidence from the king.

And he has this position of influence.

Because you're there all the time.

The king's talking to you, he's taking you into his confidence, you're hearing the conversation, you're with the king when he's sober, you're with the king when he's not sober.

Like you're there all the time.

And Nehemiah could have done so many different things to solve the problem in Israel.

He could have just gone to the king and said, Hey, king, this is the situation.

This is kind of what he does in chapter 2.

He gets to that.

But his first move was to seek the Lord, to confess sin, to pray, to confess the truth of who God is.

And then, after months and months, he went to the king.

All this power, all this influence.

He didn't trust in those things.

We live in a part of the world that's really privileged.

We have a lot of wealth in our country.

We have all kinds of resources in our country.

We don't live.

Mount Vernanox County isn't just booming with just billionaires and millionaires.

This isn't like the richest place in the state or the country.

But we all have some resources.

We have family members.

You get in a bind, you have people you can call.

You need some help with some bills.

You just have so many resources.

We don't even think that way.

We don't kind of envision ourselves as just like uberly wealthy and have all the kind of resources.

But we have a ton of resources at our disposal.

No one's going hungry.

No one's really going unclothed.

So many things we have.

And we can quickly turn to the things around us, our savings account.

However big or however little it is.

Your own ability to work and earn money.

Your own intellect.

Your family name.

So quickly we turn to these things, thinking, well, we'll figure it out.

I'll make it work.

Instead of turning to the Lord.

Instead of having a fear of the Lord, a desire to obey him from a good and right place of fear, a desire to worship him.

And Nehemiah's petition to God that he would intervene and work.

He had so many more resources, so many more connections, but he's seeking God.

He is a fear of the Lord, and he's worshiping the Lord.

And we too should have a fear and worship the Lord.

Charles Spurgeon commenting on this passage, it's a lengthy quote I'm going to read here.

If you do not desire to fear God's name, there is nothing in worship that is acceptable to the Most High.

For God abhors the sacrifices where the heart is not found.

What blessing can result from your coming into his courts in rendering only hypocritical worship?

Your coat is here, your flesh is here, but not your very self.

Therefore, the form of worship is mere mockery.

There is no act of worship that can be performed aright unless it arises from desire.

A man can never really praise God until he desires to do so.

We must desire to do so.

Do you desire to worship God?

Are you calling out to him?

Are you calling out to other things?

Hoping that Christ will kind of stick around in case you need him or change your mind.

Christ did not come to rescue us from our sins, give us life eternal, die for our sins on the cross, defeat death, so that we could have kind of a reverence, kind of a respect for God, but not a genuine one, not a genuine love for Him.

And so even as Nehemiah is displaying for us, I mean, there's a bad news, there's mourning, there's prayer, there's fasting, there's an acknowledgement of who God is, and then there's a seeking the Lord with that knowledge.

We are to be a people who desire to worship him.

Not that we feel like we have to worship him, we desire to worship him.

In the mess that we see all through the Old Testament, the mess that we see all through Ezra, and even into Nehemiah, and in our own hearts are a people who want the kingdom of God, but they do not want the king.

They want the privileges of God, they want the access that he brings, they want the blessings, they want all the privileges of being a part of God's kingdom, but they do not want the king.

They don't want his commands, they don't want to be obedient to him.

God's not just saying, well, keep my commandments, do the letter of the law.

This is what Christ declared, the Sermon of the Mount.

It's not that you obey the letter of the law, it's that your heart desires to worship God and to seek Him and to enjoy Him forever.

Church, what do you desire?

What do you fear?

Where is your hope?

What do you desire?

What do you fear?

Where is your hope?

That's right.