Re-Build - Getting Started by Steve Craig

Let's pray.

Father, thanks for being such a great God.

Thank you for literally adopting us as your very own children.

And we uh we praise you and we thank you for that.

And the Holy Spirit, thank you for being our teacher and counselor.

Please teach us this morning.

Translate what I say right into our hearts.

God, please let each one of us leave today with a direct word from you.

And Jesus, we thank you for showing us what God's really like, for making this all possible.

We praise you and thank you.

And it's in your name we pray.

Amen.

This morning we're going to start looking at a book that was written almost 2,500 years ago.

It's a book in the Old Testament, it's part of the Bible.

When we think of the Bible, a lot of times we think of one big book.

You know, it's the Bible, but the Bible actually is just a bunch of little books that are put together, and it's all it's all kinds of books.

Some of the books are history, some of the books are letters to individuals, some of the groups are letters to people.

One of the books is a the whole book's a vision that's just uh written down.

Some of the books are are uh dreams, and and several of the books are autobiographies.

They're just like a memoir, someone writing an autobiography today.

Um of these autobiographies is is perhaps the greatest book on leadership and God-focused achievement that's ever been written.

It was written by a man named Nehemiah, and we're gonna learn a lot from him.

We're all in positions of leadership.

Kind of leadership is one of those misunderstood things where leadership is about, you know, authority and telling people what to do and that type of thing.

And that's not leadership at all.

Leadership is about taking individual responsibility and taking ownership and giving and serving and helping and caring.

That's what uh leadership is, and that's what Nehemiah demonstrates.

So we're all leaders, every one of us.

We're we we another way to look at leadership is just being in a position where you have an opportunity to influence.

You know, we all have opportunities to influence, you know, in our in our homes, with our spouses, with our children, with our parents at school, with fellow students and and with teachers at work, with our with our coworkers.

Um we're all in positions of influence.

We're all um leaders.

And Nehemiah is gonna teach us how God's power combines with our efforts and with our attitudes, and unimaginable things can happen.

I think you're gonna like Nehemiah.

Nehemiah is a very cool guy, and uh we're gonna learn a lot from him.

His memoir starts this way: these are the memoirs of Nehemiah, son of Hakaliah.

In late autumn in the month of Kislev, in the 20th year of King Artaxerxes' reign, I was at the fortress of Susa.

Hananiah, one of my brothers, came to visit me with some other men who had just arrived from Judah.

I asked them about the Jews who had returned there from captivity and about how things were going in Jerusalem.

This is roughly 450 years before Jesus was born.

It's 125 years earlier.

Babylon was the world power.

You might remember King Nebuchadnezzar.

He was the most powerful, influential person uh in the world.

He destroyed the city of Jerusalem.

He flattened it, he burned it, he took anything of value from Jerusalem.

And he took a lot of people as captives and took them to uh um Babylon.

But after that, Persia came along, and Persia conquered Babylon.

And now Persia is the world um power.

Under King Cyrus, the first Persian king, some of the Jewish people were allowed to return um to the city of Jerusalem.

Right now, a guy named Artaxerxes is king.

Um he is the one who is the most powerful person in the world.

You can go to museums in Europe and you can go to museums in the Middle East, and they've got these tremendous artifacts from.

One of Artaxerxes was king of um Persia.

Nehemiah lived in a city that was was uh named uh Susa.

Uh it's in modern day Iran, where Persia was at that time.

It's about 800 miles from the city of Jerusalem.

Now, Nehemiah has an interesting job in Susa, but we'll wait and we'll let him tell us about it when he gets to that point in his memoir.

So one day his brother and and some of uh their friends come to visit uh Nehemiah.

They make the 800-mile trip all the way um from Susa to uh, I mean from Jerusalem to to Susa, and Nehemiah asked them how everything's going back in Jerusalem, and they said to me, Things are not going well for those who return to the province of Judah.

They are in great trouble and disgrace.

The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down, and the gates have been destroyed by fire.

When I heard this, I sat down and wept.

In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven.

Well, roll around the city was critical.

All important cities in those days had big walls that that surrounded them.

It was their main source of uh protection.

And the Jewish people in Jerusalem lived in tremendous or in tremendously dangerous times.

They were constantly under attack, and Persia had allowed the Jewish people to return to the city, but they certainly weren't going to protect them.

They felt like they were doing a favor just to let them go back at all.

And so things were terrible in Jerusalem.

The wall that was supposed to be around the city of Jerusalem was four and a half miles long.

It was about 20 feet wide on average, and it was about uh, I mean, it was about 20 feet tall on average, it's about 16 feet wide on average.

Huge wall surrounding this um big city of Jerusalem.

And right now, that wall is nothing but rubble.

Nothing but stones and dirt and burnt wood and piles of rubble.

Without that wall, the people in Jerusalem had nothing.

They had not a moment's peace, they were constantly under attack, they didn't have any joy, they had no excitement about their future.

We'll see and we'll read in this story that they were the butts of all the jokes in the region.

They were constantly mocked by the people around them.

As Nehemiah's brother said, they are in great trouble and disgrace.

So Nehemiah hears this, and he sits down and cries.

I think this happens to all of us at different times and and over different situations.

This isn't the first time Nehemiah's ever heard that the wall was down in Jerusalem.

You know, maybe it's something that he had just hadn't really thought about that much, maybe it's something he had just chosen to ignore, but there's something about this time when his brother and his friends come and tell him there's just something about it that he can't ignore.

And he sits down and he cries.

You know, it might be our marriage.

You know, maybe it's just been kind of you know going along and we just don't want to.

We know it's not good, but we don't want to deal.

And then something happens and reality hits us.

We're faced with the ruin of a wall.

And it can be true in our school at school, it can be true in our finances, it can be true in our our careers, it can be true with addictions and other types of stuff.

There's a time where it just hits us, and we've got to face the situation.

And so Nehemiah faces it.

He sits down, he cries, and then he decides to do something about it.

He decides to do something about it.

And we're gonna read an amazing story.

It's how a group of ordinary people rebuilt this huge wall, four and a half miles long, around an entire city.

They were up against sworn enemies, organized opposition.

It was all on the line for every one of them.

It threats and attacks and lies.

But the people banded together.

They weren't trained builders, they were jewelers and perfume makers, bosses and employees, grandfathers with their grandsons, fathers with their daughters, men and women all working side by side together, rebuilding this wall.

And what Nehemiah doesn't know at this very moment when he is sitting down crying about the situation, what he doesn't know is six months from that very day, it will be done.

The wall will be rebuilt.

Jerusalem will have been transformed from despair and rubble to safety and joy.

And we can do it too.

We can do it too.

I mean, if there's a part of our life that needs rebuilt, maybe there's a part of our life that is literally in ruins, our marriage, our finances, our job, our children, whatever it is, God can rebuild it.

He is in the restoration business.

Nehemiah is going to show us how God works with us on these life-changing projects.

And maybe you're not at a rebuilding stage.

Maybe you just want to build on what God's already done.

Well, we'll learn how to do that too.

And Nehemiah starts off the only way to start anything important.

He asked God to help him.

Then I said, O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of unfailing love with those who love him and obey his commands, listen to my prayer.

Look down and see me praying night and day for your people Israel.

I confess that we have sinned against you.

Yes, even my own family and I have sinned.

We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, decrees, and regulations that you gave us through your servant Moses.

Nehemiah acknowledges God's greatness and he acknowledges God's love.

Then he did something really unusual.

He took responsibility.

Nehemiah took responsibility.

That wall had been destroyed 125 years ago.

The Jewish people had turned completely away from God.

God had pleaded with them.

Please don't, please.

But they had.

Nebuchadnezzar came and he destroys the city, flattens it, takes everything.

125 years later, Nehemiah on his knees before God, it's me.

It's me.

I'm part of the problem.

I'm part of the problem.

I've ignored it.

I've disobeyed you.

I'm part of the problem.

He takes responsibility.

And if we're going to rebuild our lives, if we're going to rebuild our marriages, rebuild our finances, our families, already Nehemiah is showing us what leaders do.

Take responsibility.

Take ownership.

You know, the first time Susan and I went to marriage counseling, I uh practically drug her there.

Almost literally, almost physically.

I mean, I practically uh drug her there.

She had all but given up, you know, on our on our relationship, and I wanted to make one last gasp, you know, try.

And I knew if I could just get her there, if I could just get her fixed, we could have a good marriage.

And what I learned to my amazement, I was part of the problem.

At least half of it.

You know, and then when our finances kind of crashed around us years later, you know, our industry down was down, and bonuses didn't get uh paid that year.

But the problem wasn't our industry, and the problem wasn't that my bonus didn't get paid.

The problem was me.

It was where I was getting my value, what things I felt like I needed to have, how I tried to hoard, how I didn't give.

Different aspects.

It was me.

It was me.

And if you need to rebuild, it's true for you too.

We need to get with God and admit that we are part of the problem.

It's true with our jobs.

You know, it's just not mathematically possible to have 17 bad bosses in a row.

At some point I gotta say, okay, maybe I'm part of this.

Maybe I need to make a change or true.

It's true in our home.

It's true with it's true with addictions for sure.

You know, of course stuff happened to us.

Of course, we did the best we could in trying to figure out how to cope.

But at some point we got to get before God and say, I am doing this to me.

I need your help.

I gotta change.

I'm part of the problem.

And he will help.

He will more than help.

He'll do the heavy lifting.

We just have to do what one man was willing to do 2,500 years ago.

Admit that we're part of the problem and ask God to help us.

Nehemiah keeps praying.

Please remember what you told your servant Moses.

If you're unfaithful to me, I'll scatter you among the nations.

But if you return to me and obey my commands and live by them, then even if you are excelled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored.

The people you rescue by your great power and strong hand are your servants.

O Lord, please hear my prayer.

Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you.

Nehemiah reminds God that he had said that if they returned to him, he would restore them.

And then he asks God one thing.

Now, this one thing is one of the things God used to change my life.

In Nehemiah 1, verse 11, Nehemiah says, Please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me.

Nehemiah 1:11

Put it into his heart to be kind to me.

I first read Nehemiah years ago.

It was before we had a business that uh was real successful.

Most of you know that, some of you don't, that for most of my life it was more in the the business world.

Worked for a big corporation for 10 years, and then we we started a business.

It was a uh a card table, a phone, and a crummy computer in the basement of uh of our house.

And we struggled for years, and then things started to get better.

We ended up making the Inc.

500 three years in a row, and when we we sold the company, um we were the largest company in our industry that did what we did.

Um and it was the money from that that allowed us to do next what God wanted us to do, which is to start this and do this together.

God taught me a lot in my business career.

There was one thing that had a tremendous impact, and it was this one relatively obscure verse that was written over 2,500 years ago.

It was a prayer from Nehemiah.

I talked about this once before, but it was this exact verse that we're talking about today that jumped off the page of me.

So I need to mention it again.

Nehemiah asked God to make the king favorable to him, to put it into his heart, the kings, put it into his heart to be kind to me.

He is asking God to affect the most influential man on earth at that time, that God would do something supernatural on his behalf inside of that person, to put something inside of his heart to make him favorable to Nehemiah.

I didn't know you could ask that.

Can we ask God to affect other people's hearts so they will be favorable to us?

Absolutely, we can.

And he does.

He does it.

Now there's at least one caveat that I'll explain in a minute, but he does it.

Um until I read this verse, I had never thought of such a thing.

I don't think I'd ever even heard of such a thing.

I was just learning that God is real, that he is actually real, that he is supernatural, that he is for me.

And so I sat down and I just thought about this verse.

What does this mean?

How could I apply this verse?

Who is my Arta Xerxes?

You know, we all have people in our lives in that kind of role that have power and influence and those those types of things.

Who would that be in my life?

And the person I thought of was the chairman of the North American Division of the second largest insurance company in the world.

That was the person I could think of.

Okay, maybe he would be that guy to me.

Our company distributed their products.

They had about 50 companies that did that.

We were maybe ranked 33 on the low end.

There were 32 that did more than us.

We did less than 10 percent of what their largest um distributors did.

And so I'd met the chairman of this company only twice, really brief interactions.

Um he would barely know who I am.

And so I sit down, I'm like, okay, God, would you put it in this guy's heart to be kind to me?

Would you give me favor with this specific person?

And so when I thought of it, you know how it is.

When I thought of it, I would I would ask again, less than two weeks later, I get a call from his secretary.

The chairman of this company wanted to know if I could go meet with him for a couple days at his vacation home in Florida.

Um he was inviting two other guys and me, they were going to play golf and and and talk about uh business.

He'd wanted to get to know someone who was in with one of their smaller distributors, and for some reason she said he thought of me.

And so I go down there and I have a I have a terrible cold.

I mean, I I should not have gone, but I, you know, I I figured I wasn't gonna get another opportunity.

And so um so I went down there, barely could think straight the whole uh the whole time, got back, I was feeling pretty disappointed, like, man, what an opportunity God gave me, and I really uh um blew that.

And uh that Friday get a call and he asked me to be on their board of directors.

And they would later have a marketing board, and I was on that, but this was actually their board of directors.

And he thought it would be good for their company to have someone that represented a fast-growing younger company on their board, and so um it went from there.

It was it was such a defining moment in my life.

The uh Susan in our marriage group talked uh Wednesday about the time that that that God uh really delivered her from depression for a time.

And uh then later helped her walk back uh um through it to be to be completely um removed from that.

But but the effect it had on her was not just the depression, it was like, whoa, God's supernatural.

He really cares.

God can do things.

And that was the impact this had on me.

Good night.

God cares about me, he cares about my business, he can really do what he says.

The Bible isn't just some dusty old book.

This is the real deal.

We serve a supernatural God that does supernatural things on our behalf.

And it changed the way I thought about life, it changed the way I thought about my business, and from then on, anytime I had an important meeting, an important appointment, an important phone call, I asked God to put it in that person's heart to have favor for me.

And he did.

He did.

Now we wouldn't always get the deal because that's part of God taking care of us too, you know?

But he did.

It was a supernatural thing.

This was the first time I'd ever thought to ask God for such a thing.

The chairman of that insurance company ended up being the one that wanted to buy our company that allowed us to start this church.

It started in this verse in Nehemiah.

Now I know that might seem a little outside the box, but if our lives are centered around God, every single thing we do matters to God.

And He wants to be involved in all of it.

God will supernaturally soften people's hearts to us.

In our work, at school, even with our family members.

Here's the caveat, and it has to do with our own commitment.

I'm going to make two applications.

And the first is giving.

Please don't tense up on this one.

But Ken hit it pretty hard last week.

But it's important in understanding, not just giving, it's important in understanding God.

At the time that I started asking God to help me with people in our company and in and uh in my business, we were already giving.

God had convicted Susan and I of that a couple years ago.

And so so we started, and this is this was our conviction.

This is not your rule.

This was Susan and I's conviction that God gave us.

We started by giving a minimum of 10% off the top of everything to God.

And then we sat down, we said, Well, you know, this is what we made last year.

You can still relax.

There's no pledge cards taped under your seats.

We said, this is what we made last year.

God, we're gonna give you.

And so we didn't have enough money to pay our bills at the time, but this is what happened.

We said, we're gonna give you 10% off the top of everything, and we're gonna trust you to take care of us.

And then we figured out what we made the year before, and we said, you know what, we're gonna give you 10% up to that point, then we're gonna give you 15% on anything more you decide to bless us with this year.

And then the next year we did the same thing, except it was 20, and then it was 25, and then it was almost 50.

And that's the way we lived our lives, that's the way we live our lives now.

But if we had not already done that, I don't think God could have answered my prayer.

And this is why.

Many of you know John and uh Stephanie.

I'm gonna tell you a whole nother story, but they're gonna come back together.

Um, Stephanie's Susan's twin sister.

Um, the last Christmas time they adopted two grown children from Latvia.

You know, a lot of us have been involved.

We know um, we know Val and David, we know the story.

Um their desire and our desire, and everybody's desire that knows them is to lavish on these kids, to give them more than they that they could uh um possibly need.

They were had a terrible childhood before they were abandoned.

And then they lived the rest of their lives up to last Christmas uh in an orphanage.

Here's the problem.

In all that hurt and all the pain, they learned independence and self-reliance.

Nobody's gonna be there for them.

They've got to do it themselves, they've got to figure out a way.

John and Stephanie, the first thing they do is they have to help them establish dependence and trust with John and Stephanie so they can really be their parents.

So for a time, they can only provide the minimum, the bare minimum of what of what they need.

And they had a sweet 16 birthday party for Val uh last Sunday night.

As a family, we were only allowed to spend$20 maximum.

See, if David or Val start saving up a bunch of money or a bunch of things, it just fuels their self-reliance.

It just fuels their independence.

The counselor that is helping Steph and John told them to the kids only hope is to go back and be like little kids where they are dependent on John and Steph and learn that they can trust them.

See, then it won't just be a legal adoption, it will be a true adoption where they are part of a family, and they know that they have parents who love them, and they know they have parents who they can trust.

A real adoption, a real family.

We are adopted by God as grown children.

We have learned self-reliance, we have learned independence.

He cannot give us more than we need until we have learned that we can trust him, that we can trust him for everything.

And so when we give, we're demonstrating that.

And we're learning that at the same time.

You see, we're demonstrating it and we're stepping out in faith and all that type of stuff, and we're acknowledging, okay, this is all his, but we're also learning it.

Because when we start doing it and he starts taking care of us, it just builds and builds and builds faith and trust and faith and trust.

It's why Jesus talks so much about money.

He talked more about money than he did prayer.

It's not that money's more important than prayer, it's that this is the issue for us.

Independence and self-reliance is our issue.

If we can just get past that, if we can just learn to trust, then we can have a real adoption.

A real adoption, not just a legal adoption.

A real adoption, a real family, a real father who really does love us.

And we can depend on him and we can trust him and we can live our lives and forever with him.

He wants to spoil us when he can, but he can't if it's just gonna make us independent and self-reliant.

He can't.

Because he loves us.

It's our only hope.

It's our only hope is to go back like children and learn dependence and trust with our Father.

God is real.

We're not playing church.

God is real.

He really loves you, he's really for you.

You can really trust him, you can really depend on him.

You know, the idea of God affecting people's hearts applies to our relationships too.

You know, you might be in a marriage where you just don't love each other anymore.

That's not that unusual.

You know, you might definitely not be attracted to each other.

That's not unusual.

Do you know that you can ask God to change that?

You can ask him to change that.

It's the same basic prayer as Nehemiah's.

Do something in somebody's heart, please.

Help them to look differently at me.

We can do it in our own hearts.

Change my heart.

Help me to fall back in love.

Help my spouse to fall back in in love with me.

A lot of what God does is in people's hearts.

Now, the same principle applies as far as this whole independence thing and the giving thing and business and that type of stuff.

Is that if we're gonna ask God something like that, we've got to be committed.

You know, I can't say, oh God, please make Susan fall in love with me.

Then, you know, down at work, I'm Mr.

Wander and I, whatever it is.

I've got to be committed to the relationship.

He's not gonna do that to Susan.

He loves her.

She's his daughter.

You know, but it comes with that commitment and getting rid of that independence.

You know, at some point we just gotta quit messing around with God and get all in.

And say, okay, God, I am gonna trust you.

I am gonna trust you.

And he is supernatural and he is for you.

Nehemiah was all in.

He was all in.

Next week we're gonna see that one of the first things he does next week is he literally risks his entire life.

He is all in.

And God was all in with him.

He was all in with him, and he is all in with you.

You just gotta trust him.

Nehemiah knows it.

He's got confidence.

He says, please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me.

Put it into his heart to be kind to me.

And we'll see next week that that's exactly what God does.

Big time.

He big time answers that prayer.

Well, Nehemiah finishes this first chapter in his autobiography with one sentence.

In those days I was the king's cupbearer.

Now he tells us.

See, if I had been writing my memoir, I would have started with that.

I would have said, In those days I was the cupbearer to the king, and then I would have told the story.

But that's not what Nehemiah does.

He starts, he tells a story, and then just as a throwaway, by the way, I was cupbearer to the king.

He was the wine steward, the psalmier.

He was the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes.

Now a cupbearer was a big deal.

Um, you know, the it was part wine steward, it was part personal security.

I mean, the kings were always worried about being poisoned, and that was the cupbearer's job.

It was to make sure that the king didn't get poisoned.

So what he would do is drink the wine before the king.

You know, they'd wait a few minutes, make sure he didn't kill over.

And if he didn't it, then the king would.

But it was a very responsible position.

It was one of the highest positions of trust in the whole kingdom.

And that's what he did.

He was the uh cupbearer to the king.

He had trust, he had responsibility, he had direct access.

And so when Nehemiah's brother makes that 800-mile trip, comes to Susa, tells Nehemiah about what's going on in Jerusalem, Nehemiah not only cares, but he is in a unique position to do something about it.

God's got him in a unique position to do something about it.

He has direct access to the person that could help the most.

He has put you in a unique position.

You are in a unique position, a unique position to rebuild, a unique position to build.

You are in a unique position.

Your career, your finances, your marriage.

God has us all in unique positions to build something together.

He's gonna show us how.

We can do it with God.

His supernatural power, our caring, his power.

We can do it.

But if we're gonna do something with him, we first got to get connected with him.

You know, and it's just like uh it's like Nathan described earlier.

Um, it's it's turning to it's turning to Jesus.

He really does want to adopt us as his children.

Many of us have never had a real parent that really loved us, that we could really trust, that we could really depend on.

God is that parent.

He wants to adopt us.

And so we turn to Jesus.

And we get adopted as grown children.

We say, okay, enough of my self-reliance, enough of my independence.

I'm gonna trust you, I'm gonna depend on you.

And when we do that in our own words, something happens, something supernatural happens.

Our spirit comes alive inside of us, his spirit joins with that spirit, and God starts transforming us from the from the inside out.

And he does most of the work.

Our job is to learn and to pand and to trust and to follow.

And he'll do it.

He's a great God.

If you haven't done that, you can do it now.

You can do it during this last song.

You don't have to walk an aisle, you don't need to get anything notarized.

There's no formula.

You know, it's just turning your heart to God.

It's the most important, best choice I ever made.

Will be for you too.

Let's pray.

Father, we praise you.

Thank you for being such a great God.

Thank you for loving us so much that you would adopt each of us as your own children.

We just praise you for that.

We thank you for that.

God, teach us to be dependent.

Teach us to trust you.

Help us to walk that out.

God, we want to rebuild.

We want to rebuild and we want to build.

We need your help.

We need your power.

We need to learn your ways.

Teach us, show us, help us.

We trust you with that.

In Jesus' great name.

Amen.