Nehemiah 1 | Gage Skivington

Hey everyone, welcome to the Downtown Communion Church podcast.

We're so glad that you decided to listen in today.

This Sunday, DCC's next gen director, Gage Givington, shared a message from Nehemiah about responding faithfully to the work God has called us to do.

When we begin stepping out in faith, discouragement is often one of the first obstacles we face.

The opinions of others or even our own feelings of inadequacy can make us question whether the work is worthwhile or whether we're capable of completing it.

Nehemiah's confidence did not come from having an easy path or gaining everyone's approval.

He knew God, trusted his character, and understood the purpose God had placed on his life.

His example reminds us that obedience is not rooted in our own strength.

We can continue moving forward because the one who called us is faithful.

The Great Commission places that same divine calling on every follower of Jesus.

We are invited to live out our faith, share the hope of the gospel, and serve the people God has placed around us.

And this connects directly to the mission of Downtown Community Church, to love God, make disciples, and be great neighbors.

In one practical way, we get to live that out is through generosity.

Giving includes our tithes and offerings, but generosity also includes our time, talents, energy, and the willingness to serve.

Every act of obedience can become part of the work God is doing through His church.

If you are ready to take your next step, find community, or discover a place to serve, visit our website, Downtown CommunityCurch.com, to learn more and get connected.

You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook to stay updated on everything happening here at DCC.

Thank you so much for tuning in today.

We pray this message encourages you to trust God's calling, remain faithful when discouragement comes, and confidently step into the work he has placed before you.

Now let's hear today's message from Gage Givington.

Please remain standing for the reading of God's Word.

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 eyes open 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 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 covenants, the statutes, and 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, though your outcasts are among 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.

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 by 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 the cupbearer to the king.

You're seated and the kids are dismissed.

Thank you, thank you.

Good morning, everybody.

If we have not had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Gage, and I get to serve here as the next generation director.

So if you haven't seen me on a Sunday morning, that's because I'm typically locked away in the kids' hallway.

Pray for me on those Sundays where you don't see me.

Know that I'm here, hopefully not struggling.

But this morning, I have the blessing of getting to share God's word with each of you.

And I'm super excited to do that.

Um I hope you guys have had a slow, chill morning, um, pretty smooth.

I'll tell you a little bit about my morning and how I got to be up here.

Um, usually on Sundays I wake up at around 6.30 to get here by 7.

Typically 7 means 7.30 to get things set up.

But this morning I rolled over and woke up to a text from Pastor Albert Benjamin Kempfer, um, and I learned that he was not feeling well this morning, so he asked me to come up and share a message with you all.

So that's why I'm up here and not him.

And that's also why you see Nehemiah on the screen and not Followers, or the series that we've been going through in the book of Luke.

So we're having a bit of a one-off Sunday, so we're gonna just kind of take a pause from Luke and jump into Nehemiah today, and then we'll go back to Luke starting next week, and it will be, I believe, Ben, but don't quote me on that.

And the reason we're going through Nehemiah is because in our Wednesday night youth services, we have been doing a deep study on the book of Nehemiah for the past several weeks, and we're wrapping that up in it should be about two weeks from now.

Um and it's been super awesome to walk with our students through a speech a specific piece of historical Old Testament literature, um, kind of giving them the tools to learn how to read it for themselves.

That's one of my big goals on Wednesdays.

So hopefully that will shine through this morning.

So, I say that to say, welcome to midweek.

I promise you won't have to eat anything weird in a game that we typically have.

Um but as I said, you guys can flip to Nehemiah chapter one.

And as you're getting there, um, today we're gonna talk a lot about the idea of calling.

What is a calling?

So, everybody in the room who's placed their faith in Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, that means that you look to him for saving grace, that you look at his death on the cross in your place.

It's what satisfied the punishment that you deserve for your sin, how he died that death, so that you don't have to, and then rose again and invites us into his resurrection life.

If you have made that decision, that profession of faith, I'm happy to tell you that you have a calling on your life.

You have a purpose on your life, you have a reason for living.

And that reason for living is so much bigger than yourself, but you were invited into it by Jesus himself.

And when I say this word calling, I don't mean it in the traditional sense that typically young people, but also everyone kind of views at it of what was God, what has God made me to do with my life?

What is the vocation that he created me to be able to do and to do well?

I'm not talking about what you're majoring in, I'm not talking about the job that you got or the internship that you got.

I'm talking about the root calling upon your life.

And we have those words from Jesus Himself in the scriptures.

It's called the Great Commission, the call to go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

That is the calling that every person who professes faith in Jesus has been called to.

It is a command.

We are to go and do this.

There are a million ways that we can do it, but the important thing is that you are actually doing that.

You're taking this gospel message that you have received, this freedom that you have received from Christ, this forgiveness from sins, this freedom from bondage, right?

And you are sharing that with people who do not know it.

People who are still living in the dark, who have not received this light and easy yoke that Jesus so freely wants to give us.

We are going to share that with others.

That is the call on your life if you've made Jesus your Lord and Savior.

Right?

That's a beautiful thing to say, and we can all cognitively assent to that, right?

We know that that is a calling that the Lord has given us on our life, but knowing something doesn't necessarily mean that you do it.

Those are two separate things, right?

And you can know it and you can do it, but while you do it, you can also face opposition that makes it more difficult to actually go there for it and make disciples.

Things come up, they get in your way, right?

It can make it challenging.

And so today, through the story of Nehemiah, I want to answer a couple of questions.

And those questions are what is opposition that we can face when we step out in faith and work to fulfill the Great Commission?

And what can we do about it?

So, what are those opposing forces that come about at us that we should expect as believers who are living out the Great Commission?

And what do we do about them?

So, I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna jump into the scriptures for this morning.

So if you guys would join me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for Sunday mornings.

We thank you that you have allowed us as a people to gather in your name.

We pray that as we read your scriptures, Lord, that you by your spirit would give us understanding, Lord, that you'd give us wisdom, that you would teach us something new and something fresh.

Lord, I pray for the person in the room who feels like there is just so much held against them, Lord, so much that is holding them back from what you have called them to do.

I pray that you would just give them a clear vision of you.

Lord, that you give them the endurance that they need to get through it, that you give them the um knowledge, the wisdom, whatever they need, Lord, that you would provide for them.

So, Father, as we enter into your word, we ask that you would meet us.

So in Jesus' name that we ask these things.

Amen.

All right.

Before we get too far into Nehemiah, right, I think it's really important for us to build context for what we're about to jump into.

The Bible, this book, it's a collection of 66 different books written over thousands of years by several different authors.

Um, and one thing I used to think growing up is that the Bible was like a journal that was passed from author to author, and they kind of just like added to it so they knew it was written before them, and it was kind of like one big work of literature.

That's not how it was done, right?

It was several separate books that have been brought together into one book that we call the scriptures.

Right?

And because of that, when we jump into a specific book, it's important for us to understand what was happening around the time of its composition so that we can understand what the author, the original author, intends to communicate to us still today.

So the book of Nehemiah falls somewhere in the history of the nation of Israel.

Israel is God's chosen people, right?

So going all the way back to the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, right?

God, the creator of the universe, spoke everything that is into existence.

He spoke every planet, every element, every atom, every cell, everything that exists was spoken into existence by God.

And he created man, he created us, you and me, humans, in his image.

And he said that they were very good.

He placed them in the garden and they lived together in a perfect, harmonious environment.

But one day the tempter, the enemy, the devil, came and he tempted the people to sin, to reject what God had told them was good.

See, God said, Don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because it's not good, right?

But then they did, right?

And that caused a separation, it caused a break in the relationship, and because of that, the Lord placed man outside of the garden, and there was a relational riff that was created.

That's just in the first three chapters of the book of Genesis.

The rest of the Bible tells the story of how the Lord has taken step after step after step to go about reconciling this broken relationship, bringing what was separated by sin back together.

And ultimately, on this side of the cross, we can look to Jesus and we know that it was him.

Jesus is the one who made a way for all to be brought back and reconciled together.

But Nehemiah is before Jesus.

Then eventually this man, Abraham, came along.

His original name was Abram, but the Lord chose Abraham and established a nation through him.

He said, Abraham, I will give you as many offspring as there are stars in the sky and sand on the beach.

Through you I will bless all nations, and he kept his word.

Abraham became the father of the nation of Israel.

This was God's chosen people.

It was the people that God was going to work through to restore all of creation back to himself.

And this nation grew and it grew.

And then it became captive, it became slaves in Egypt.

And while it was slaves enslaved in Egypt, it grew and grew and grew until eventually Moses pulled them out of Egypt and they became a nation of their own.

And this nation grew to be one of the most prominent powers in the Middle East under King David and King Solomon, kings of Israel.

This nation was doing what it could to seek after the Lord, keeping the commands that he gave them, but eventually they hit a point where their focus shifted from God to other things.

Things that were lesser, things that were not God.

And in doing that, there was some infighting, there was some strife amongst the peoples in the nation of Israel, so much so that it led to a civil war where the northern kingdom split from the southern kingdom.

So we have this what once was a prominent superpower that was so inwardly focused, fighting itself over things that truly didn't matter a ton, and that left them susceptible to attack from other neighboring nations.

So we have the Assyrians come in and they conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, wiped, but the southern kingdom still stood.

Then eventually the Babylonians came and they conquered the Assyrians, and then they had a second wave of attacks where they conquered the southern kingdom of Israel.

Now Israel was no more.

The Babylonians took the Israelites and they scattered them throughout the Babylonian Empire, separating them from what was once their holy land.

The place that was so tied to their faith and their culture, they were taken away from it and scattered throughout a foreign nation.

Their temple was broken down, the wall of Jerusalem was ransacked, left in rubble and ruins.

Then eventually the Persians came along, and the Persians conquered the Babylonians.

And when they did that, they told all of the Israelites that were scattered throughout the nation of Babylon that they could, if they so pleased, return to Israel, Jerusalem.

But they did not have to, if they didn't want to.

So we see several of the exiled Israelites return to Jerusalem, but we also see several that chose to remain in Persia.

And Nehemiah is one that chose to remain in Persia.

So we're going to jump into Nehemiah chapter 1, that's where we're left off.

Nehemiah 1 · chapter mention

I'm going to read verses 1 through 3.

It says the words of Nehemiah, the son of Hakaliah.

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

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

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

So one thing I want to point out in specifically Old Testament literature, but really all ancient literature, they didn't write like we write now.

See, now in modern investigative journalism, we try to include as many details as possible because details substantiate fact, and that is what we're looking for.

But back then they didn't think the same way.

The details that they included, they included because they were incredibly important, but they were not eager to include every detail like we wish they would have.

And sometimes that can be disappointing as a reader.

We want to know more.

But, other side of that coin, that means every detail they intentionally chose to include was intentional.

It's important.

It's worthy of our attention.

We should look at what is there.

And there is a lot of detail in these three verses that I want to point out.

See, first we hear of a man named Nehemiah.

This is a Jewish man who is living in a place called Susa.

Now, at the time of this writing, Susa was the capital of Persia.

It was the main center of commerce.

It was like their Washington, D.C., right?

Susa was the capital, and it describes Susa as being a citadel.

It's a weird word that I don't really ever use in my modern vernacular, but it basically means a fortified city.

Like this place, like Persia was a rich nation, and you could tell by looking at Susa.

It was fortified, it had walls, it had military, it was safe from external attacks.

And Nehemiah lives there.

We also see, oh, I'll give you a detail that we're gonna hear a little bit later.

Nehemiah had a job in Susa, and his job was to be cupbearer.

We heard it in the scripture reading.

What a cupbearer was, is somebody who worked very closely with a prominent individual, in this case to the king of Persia.

Nehemiah would take a drink of everything that the king would come to drink to make sure that it wasn't poisoned.

It's a very dangerous job.

But that also means that he was an incredibly trusted individual by the king.

The king trusted Nehemiah so much that he allowed everything that Nehemiah he was going to eat be drank by Nehemiah to test if it was poisonous.

He knew that Nehemiah wouldn't kill him, right?

He trusted Nehemiah.

Nehemiah was probably well compensated for this job.

He probably lived in the palace and had every need that he could possibly think of met by the Persian king.

He was living comfortably.

He was living in a fortified city, protected on all sides, having everything that he could possibly need.

But then we hear about his brother from Judah, from Jerusalem, from his home area, the area of his ancestors.

Talking about how Judah lies in ruins, how the wall was on the ground, burned by fire, beaten and bruised.

The temple was there, not there, right?

It was a city that had been demolished.

Nehemiah's home city demolished while he's living in a foreign land with everything that he could possibly ever want.

What do you think Nehemiah's response to hearing this was?

You don't have to wonder, it tells us in verse 4.

Says, As soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.

He's grieving.

He's struck by grief.

His people, his own people, are living in ruins while he is living in abundance.

He feels convicted.

He sees that this is not how it ought to be.

He was receiving a call on his life from the Lord.

His first thing was not immediately to jump to action, but his first thing was to receive clarity from the Lord through seeking him through prayer and fasting.

He spent time with God.

He looked to God.

He didn't look at the circumstance, he looked to the Lord before getting to work.

But eventually, he did.

And this next part talks about the specific prayer that Nehemiah prayed to the Lord.

I'm going to read it to all of us.

But what I want to point out with this prayer is this, understanding this, makes the entire rest of the book of Nehemiah make sense.

It makes us understand how Nehemiah was able to put up with everything that he put up with for the rest of it.

So I'm going to read verses five through eleven.

Nehemiah prays.

It says, And I sat 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 eyes be open 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 sin 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 were unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples, but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though you were outcast in the utmost 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.

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.

Experiment for another time, right?

Go through and circle every time that he says you in that prayer.

His focus is not on himself.

Yes, he confesses his sin before God, but he looks to the Lord.

You are the one who redeemed, you are the one who restored, you are the one who will regather your people together as chosen possession.

Nehemiah's eyes are fixed on God.

He's looking at the Lord.

His one focus, his one intention, his one desire is God.

Keep that in mind.

Everything here seems all good, right?

This is just a really difficult circumstance.

Nehemiah goes to the Lord in prayer.

Now it's actually time to get to work.

Nehemiah has received a call.

The Lord has called him to play a massive part in organizing the effort to rebuild the walls around the city of Jerusalem.

Back then you needed walls if you were going to become a city of any significance to protect you from invaders, right?

So that's the first step.

Rebuild the wall.

And that is what Nehemiah went to do.

So he goes to his boss, the king, and he says, King, I need to take a leave of absence to go help rebuild the wall.

And the king says yes, but he doesn't just say yes.

See, the favor of the Lord is upon Nehemiah.

The king says, I will write you letters so that you can get through every checkpoint without any issues at all.

And not only that, I will give you everything that you need to rebuild the wall, every resource, every piece of wood, right?

Everything you need, I will provide.

And he does.

So Nehemiah leaves and he gets to work.

Eventually he gets to Jerusalem and he starts to gather the people out after scoping out the situation, and he just encourages them in this work that's about to happen.

But then we're introduced to two, to three new characters who provide some sort of opposition.

I'm going to read chapter 2, verses 17 through 18.

It says, Then I, Nehemiah, said to them, the Jewish people, You see the trouble we're in now, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned.

Come, let us build the walls of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.

And I told them of the hand of my God has been upon me for good, and also of the words that the king had spoken to me, and they said, Let us rise up and build.

So they strengthened their hands for the good work.

Nehemiah recounts on the Lord's faithfulness up to that point, and then he spurs them into action.

It's time to start rebuilding.

Verse 19 But when Sambalat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite, servant, and Gishem the Arab heard of it, they jeered at us and despised us and said, What is this thing that you're doing?

Are you rebelling against the king?

So we meet these three men who were opposing the work of Nehemiah.

And how did they go about opposing him this first time?

So their discouragement.

They question him.

They pull the same trick that the enemy pulled in the Garden of Eden.

They ask a question that's meant to get these get Nehemiah and the other Jews to doubt their ability, their capacity to do what the Lord had called them to do.

And I think the enemy often works the same way in all of our lives still today.

The Lord has called you to do something great, and the first thing that happens is you start to doubt yourself.

And the Lord is the one who called you to it, knowing who you were.

This is exactly what's happening here.

Nehemiah had been called by God to rebuild the walls, and the first thing they're trying to do is to get him to question his ability to do that.

Did he really ask you to do that?

Are you really able to do that?

And we see Nehemiah's response in verse 20.

He says, Then I replied to them the God of heaven will make us prosper, and we, his servants, will arise and build, but you have no portion or right or claim in Jerusalem.

Nehemiah's response comes from very strong security in his identity in Christ.

He knew who he was, and he knew what his portion was.

He knew the Lord had called him to do this great work, and that if the Lord had called him to do this great work, he would not abandon him in the doing of the great work.

The Lord knew who he was asking to do what he'd asked him to do.

It sounds obvious, but it's true.

Right?

Nehemiah was secure in who he was in the Lord and what the Lord had called him to do.

So these this questioning, it was irrelevant to him.

It doesn't matter if he could or if he couldn't.

The Lord had called him to, so he would.

We continue.

This effort didn't work by Sam Balat, Tobiah, and Gishem, so they tried.

Again, we're going to skip to chapter 4, verses 7 through 9.

So at this point, they had made considerable work on the wall, right?

They had finished building the wall all the way around and they were starting to get some vertical growth to it, but they'd only gotten about halfway up to what they had planned to.

Verse 7, it says, But when Sambalat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that they were repairing the walls of Jerusalem and that it was going forward, and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry, and they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it.

So when discouragement did not work as their first form of opposition, the second form is a more active opposition.

They amounted an armed force to come up against Nehemiah and to physically block him from doing the work, to harm them so that they could not continue to do this work.

And again, I think that I've seen this in my life when it comes to living out this great commission that the Lord had called me to.

When the self-doubt and the enemy's lies cannot get me to give up before I've even started.

Once I start, I surely start to face opposition.

Things start to get hard, right?

Things don't work out the way that I would expect them to work out.

Weird things start to happen, and it kind of gets in the way, and it starts to still discourage me again, but it gets more difficult to move forward in this great commission call the Lord has placed on my life.

It's just another step.

It's another way he tries to get in the way.

And we can see Nehemiah's response again in verse 9.

It says, And we prayed to our God and set a guard as his protection against them day and night.

So his response here is yet again, hope we're noticing a pattern, to pray to the Lord, to go to him, to fix his eyes on the Lord.

But also he takes some practical steps, right?

He prays and he does.

They're coupled action, right?

We don't just lift up prayers and do nothing about it, right?

Sometimes the Lord calls us to be the answer to the prayers that we pray.

He'll equip us to do that.

This is what Nehemiah is doing.

He's praying, asking the Lord for continued favor, and then he's setting up a guard so that these physical efforts can't get in the way.

So it doesn't work.

Tobiah, Sambalat, and Geshem are persistent.

You have to give them that.

They continue yet again.

But before we talk about their next wave distraction, I want to talk about a third way that we can face opposition in our living out of the Great Commission, and that's from Nehemiah chapter 5.

Nehemiah 5 · chapter mention

Now I don't have time to go into the entirety of this chapter, but basically what's happening is the wall is coming to an end, right?

It's almost done being rebuilt.

The nation of Israel is ready to start rebuilding in other areas of life.

They're ready to start cultivating a crop and producing goods, right?

Things that every civilization does once it has its essential needs taken care of.

But the way it's doing this is concerning to Nehemiah.

And it's honestly concerning to us when we read it today.

The nation of Israel wasn't going about this in a way of unity.

There was division within the nation itself.

There was some self-division there.

The more wealthy Israelites were taking advantage of the poorer Israelites.

They were enslaving them and their children to do their work.

And Nehemiah knew that and he had an issue with it, so he called them out on it.

He said, if this is going to work, we need to be unified.

We can't complete this call that the Lord has placed if we are in division.

And yet, again, I turn the mirror into ourselves and I would say it's the same.

I would say when we're facing opposition, it's very easy for us to immediately go and explain it as being spiritual warfare, as an attack from the enemy.

But oftentimes I think that the biggest opposition to our work in the Great Commission is just our internal brokenness.

It's not the enemy, it's just us.

And that's just like a bunch of Christian buzzwords, but it basically just talked about what makes us.

And it split the heart into three separate categories.

One is our beliefs, one is our desires, and the other is our commitments.

Brokenness has gotten into all of those.

Brokenness is in our hearts, right?

Ideally, our beliefs, the things that we believe to be true and false, are in perfect agreement with the scriptures and what the Lord has created.

Ideally, the things that we desire are the same things that He desires.

The things that we commit our time to doing are the same things that he commits his time to doing, but you and I both know that we don't match up perfectly with the person of Jesus.

There are things that I believe about myself, others, and the world that are just simply not true according to Scripture.

There are things that I care a whole lot about that truly in a kingdom mindset don't matter.

There are things that I spend my time doing that I ought not, because again, they don't matter in an eternal perspective.

That's the effects of brokenness seeping into our hearts.

And when we allow that brokenness to speak over us, fulfilling the Great Commission is a whole lot more difficult, if not possible.

Right?

Our internal division plays a massive part in preventing us, in opposing us from fulfilling the call God has placed on our life.

The last thing that I want to talk about comes from Nehemiah chapter six, and that is distraction.

Verses, chapter six, verse one through two.

It says, Now when Sambalat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left in it, although at the time I had to set the doors in the gates.

Sambalat and Geshem sent to me, saying, Come and let us meet together at Hakimphir in the land of Onoh.

But they intended to do me harm.

So now we see these same opposers calling Nehemiah down from the wall where he's trying to finish up the last finishing touches, right?

Put the gates on, put the doors on, right?

They're finishing up.

He's almost done.

But his enemies simply say, No, no, come down here, we want to talk.

They distract him.

They call him away from the work that the Lord had clearly positioned him to do.

I think the last ditch effort that the enemy makes when we go about following the Lord, if he can't dissuade us from loving and serving Jesus, right, he'll dissuade us by distracting us from the call that the Lord has placed on our life.

There's a little part of a book that I want to read to you that I think beautifully articulates this thought.

It's called Screwtape Letters.

It's written by C.S.

Lewis, a brilliant author.

He wrote the Chronicles of Narnia series, if you know that.

And this book is a very interesting one, just conceptually.

So the whole idea behind it is they're a collection of letters.

Each chapter is a letter from a senior demon writing to a junior demon, his nephew.

Now, this whole point, like he's advising him on how to oppress a man, a Christian man, prevent this man from following Jesus.

So it's basically like him giving his like tips and tricks on how to make somebody not love Jesus.

Does that make sense?

Cool.

I'm gonna read a quick bit from chapter 27.

So at this point in the book, this man is a follower of Jesus.

He had made Jesus his Lord and his Savior.

Now, what they're trying to do is distract him away from actually living out the great commission call he has on his life.

First, they tried to do this through introducing him to a girl, one of the best ways to distract guys to give him a girl, right?

Um, and he does that.

But um it didn't quite work the way that they thought, so he's addressing it.

It says, My dear Wormwood, addressing the junior demon, you seem to be doing very little good at the present.

The use of his love to distract his mind from the enemy is, of course, obvious, but you reveal that what poor use you are making of it when you say that the whole question of distraction and the wandering mind has now become the one chief subject of his prayers.

See, whenever it says that word enemy, since it's from a demon's perspective, he's talking about the Lord.

He's saying, You tried to give this man a distraction, to call him away from what the Lord has placed him on this earth to do, but the distraction that you gave him is just driving him back into prayer.

That's not how it's supposed to work.

See, from their perspective, that distraction is supposed to turn his attention away from God and towards literally anything else, so that he doesn't continue walking in the direction the Lord has called him.

He continues.

He says, That means you have largely failed.

When this or any other distraction crosses his mind, you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer willpower and try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened.

Once he accepts the distraction at his present problem and lays that before the enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavors, then, so far as from doing good, you have done harm.

Anything, even sin, which is has the total effect of moving him close up to the enemy, makes against us in the long run.

Right?

So he's saying, in this ideal leading this man away from the Lord, right, the distraction will come into his mind when he's praying or when he's reading scripture, and by his sheer willpower, he will push that thought to the side.

I can't think about right now, right?

I can't think about that right now, I'm thinking about God.

It comes back, I can't think about that right now, I'm thinking about God.

Right?

That is the demon's goal here.

But what this man is doing, he says, is when this thought creeps into his mind as he's praying, he acknowledges the thought.

He receives the thought, and he lays it at the feet of Jesus.

Not to get it out of his mind or to stop thinking about it, but simply as a subject of his prayers.

Lord, this thought keeps coming into my mind, and I don't understand why, but what do I do about it?

What are you trying to speak to me through this?

How can I surrender this to you in a new way?

Right?

He's not trying to get rid of the thought, he's not feeling guilty about the thought.

He can't help the fact that it came into his mind, but he can help bringing it to Jesus.

The enemy try to distract, but our response can be to bring it to the Lord.

And that's exactly what we see Nehemiah do in verse 3.

Nehemiah's response to the distractions from these men.

It says, And I sent messengers to them, saying, I am doing a great work and I cannot come down.

Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?

See, he doesn't ignore the distraction, right?

He sends men to address the distraction, but he doesn't allow it to pull him away from being where the Lord had called him to be.

He remains there.

And I think there's beauty in that.

And I think that we can learn from that.

So I say all this to say there are several ways that the enemy tries to oppose our fulfillment of the great commission call that the Lord has placed on our life.

Namely, we talked about four discouragement, active opposition, internal division, and distraction.

The beauty of the gospel, right?

Nehemiah, when we look back to his first prayer to the Lord, he's remembering promises from God.

Deuteronomy 4 is where that text is pulled from.

He talks about how when we disobey, when we fall into rebellion, we will be scattered among nations.

But if we return to you, God, you will gather us together as a people united in you.

You will place us in the place that you have created for us.

Right?

He's holding the Lord to both ends of his promises, the punishment and the favor.

He's looking back on the Lord's promise.

I would say when we face opposition from the enemy, we are to do the same.

But the thing is, we don't look back to that same promise.

That's an old covenant promise, and we are not bound by the old covenant.

We have been given, grafted into the new covenant.

And what is that new covenant, you may ask?

It comes from Jeremiah chapter 31, and I'll read it to you.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

It says, Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

Not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.

I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord.

For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.

See, when we pray to the Lord, this is the promise that we are holding on to.

The fact that he will place his law in our hearts, he will write it on our hearts.

That is language that's talking about him giving us of his Holy Spirit through the sacrifice and resurrection of his son Jesus.

He has claimed us as his own in Christ.

We get to look back on the fact that he says he will remember our iniquity no more.

Notice how literally no element of that covenant has to do with your behavior.

He doesn't say, I will keep this covenant if they obey me.

No, there's no language like that at all.

He says, I will place these things in your heart.

I will make these truths of you when you are in me.

And I think that's beautiful.

I think that's freeing.

I think that is what the light and easy yoke sounds like.

That's what the true Sabbath rest is, a rest from works, the fact that there's nothing that we can do to add to or take away from this.

We just place our faith in him and we receive it.

See, we talked about discouragement, we talked about active opposition and distraction.

I think the beauty of that in light of the gospel is the fact that we serve a God who has conquered the world.

He says, Expect trials, expect tribulations, expect difficulty, accept opposition, but take heart because I have overcome the world.

Everything that opposes the work of the Great Commission that you were doing in your life, as called by God, has to bow at the feet of Jesus because of the cross.

Right?

On the cross, he died a death to sin.

He took all of the sin of the world on himself, and then he died with that sin.

That sin is gone, it is canceled, it is written away.

And then he rose again from the grave, inviting us with him in his resurrection.

He rose again.

That's like a fact.

That's final and done.

He rose again, and he's not going back down.

What is risen is risen indeed.

He's there.

He's seated high and lifted up, and he invites us with him.

Nothing can take away from that.

It's locked, it's secure.

And he's given it to us in him.

And then that bit about internal division.

That is the whole process of sanctification.

It's us walking with Jesus as guided by the Spirit day in, day out, and he takes those rough edges in our hearts.

He convicts us of those wrong beliefs and he rewrites our desires and he makes us have a desire to serve and commit our time to the things that he actually cares about.

Right?

That is just the fruit of a life lived with Jesus.

It figures itself out with him.

Jesus is a conquered, conquering king over each and every single one of these things.

All we have to do is look to him like Nehemiah looks to God.

And I'm not saying look to Jesus in some abstract way.

Don't picture like a person in your mind and think about that.

No, I'm saying look to the cross.

Look to the place where Jesus accomplished everything that he did on our behalf.

It's a very real thing.

Look to the cross of Jesus and look to the resurrection as well.

It's where it's all sealed.

We're going to finish this service out by taking communion together as a body of believers.

And I think that there's no better way to do that than taking the seat that the Lord has prepared for us at his table.

See, this practice has been done by Christians for thousands of years, and it's a way of remembering what Jesus has done for us.

Jesus initiated the Lord's Supper at the Last Supper, creatively named, right?

Before he was wrongfully arrested and crucified.

He took bread and he broke that bread and he said, This bread is my body which is broken for you.

When we eat of the bread through communion, we are remembering what Jesus did on our behalf.

The fact that he was broken so that we don't have to be.

When we drink the grape juice, right, Jesus poured out wine for his disciples and he said, Drink this.

This is the wine of the new covenant.

It is his blood.

This new covenant is what invites us into that promise of the Lord, that his law will be written on our hearts, that we would be his people and he would be our God, that iniquity would not be remembered, right?

It's the thing that seals that for us.

We do this in remembrance of him.

And this is also a time of reflection.

So as you take of the elements, I want you to seriously search your hearts.

Is there any sin that is not repented of?

If it is, now is the time.

And if you're scared to bring that to the Lord, I need to promise you that he will not meet the confession of sin and repentance with shame and condemnation and putting you down and being disappointed.

He expects sin.

That's why he sent Jesus.

But he will welcome you with merciful and gracious arms.

He will wash you of your iniquity as his promise says that he will.

So the way this is gonna work is we're gonna have a team come up and they're gonna have a cup of grape juice and a bowl of little matzah bread.

You're gonna come up and then dip the bread in the juice.

You guys can take it right there.

You can bring it back to your seats and pray and reflect.

You can take a minute before you walk up.

Whatever you need to do, right?

This is a time between you and the Lord.

Let it be what its name is.

Let it be communion between you and your Father, an encouragement to look unto him.

And this sacrament of communion is one that's reserved for the church, for God's people.

So if you are in here today and you have not made that confession of faith, Jesus is not your Lord and Savior, I would ask that you would just sit back and observe this as a time of the Lord's people communing with him.

And if you do want to make Jesus the Lord and Savior of your life, that is a thing that you are curious about.

You're tired of fighting this fight of life alone.

You want to know that there is somebody who has conquered all that could come against you in one act on the cross.

If you want to know that man, his name is Jesus, and he wants to know you too.

We would love to talk to you about that.

I will be standing back there during the whole last song and response time.

I'd love to pray with you.

Um, it's an open invite to anybody.

Um, but all that said, I would love to pray and then release you all to a time of communion.

If you guys would bow your heads and pray with me.

Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for the fact that your word has been preserved for thousands of years and that it is still profitable to be read today.

Lord, I thank you that your word does not return void.

Lord, I ask that you would give encouragement to anybody in this room that feels like there is so much opposing them and their following of you, Lord, um, that you would give them eyes to see you.

Lord, that you would give them um a desire to look to you.

And as they look to you, Lord, I ask that you would allow everything else to just fade away because you um you are everything that we need.

Um, Lord, for those who know you but are afraid to step out in faith to live out this great commission call that you placed on each of our lives.

Um, I ask that you would just give them comfort in knowing that you will be with them when they decide to make that step of faith, Lord, that you will hold them up when they are weary, Lord, that you will give them a light and an easy yoke, Lord, that you will give them rest when they need it because you are present.

You don't abandon your children.

You are a good father, Lord.

Um, I just pray that you would allow us to be a church, a group of people who are dedicated to knowing and loving and serving you.

And in doing that, we are dedicated to knowing and loving and serving our neighbor.

Lord, that there would be nothing that could come before us that would discourage us from living out the call you placed on our life because you are worth it.

And I ask you to help us to see that you're worth it.

So, Lord, we lift this morning up to you, we lift our weeks up to you, we lift our lives up to you, and we ask that you would have your way with them.

We love you, and it's in Jesus' name that we pray.

Amen.