Introduction
And
so, as we approach the completion of the renovation work on the roof, we reach
the end of the book of Nehemiah. After all the opposition Nehemiah faced, the
wall was built and the people recommitted themselves to the Lord.
All
that remains now in the final chapter is to hear about how they all lived
happily ever after. But that’s not what we find when we read
it. We find compromise. We find disobedience. We find backsliding.
When
I was putting this teaching series together, I was tempted at first to stop at
chapter 12. I wanted to end on a high. But I felt the Lord rebuke me. Chapter
13 is there for a reason and it contains a serious warning we need to hear.
Raymond
Brown puts it well in his commentary when he writes this; “Nehemiah’s closing
chapter shows how easily the most spiritual community can find its standards
subtly eroded as it gradually accommodates to the pressures of contemporary
worldliness.”
Yes,
the roof is as good as done, the money has come in and we’re going to recommit
ourselves to the Lord and celebrate a month from now. There’s a feel good
factor to that – but we are still in a
spiritual battle and the fight will go on until the Lord returns.
Did
you know that flat tyres on your car are rarely due to a sudden puncture? Most
tyres lose one or two pounds of air a month in cold weather, and slightly more
in warmer weather, due to a process called permeation, which is when air
escapes through tiny openings in the valves and by the wheel rim. So you’ve got
to keep inflating your tyres.
Similarly,
spiritual decline is rarely due to some big crisis. It’s what happens when the
Church gradually becomes complacent.
In
chapter 10, you’ll remember, the people had made four promises. They pledged to
submit to God’s Word, they vowed to shun spiritual compromise, they agreed to
support God’s work and they promised to keep the Sabbath special.
And
after that, Nehemiah returned to his home in Persia. We don’t know how long it
was before he came back to Jerusalem again but sadly, by the time he did in
chapter 13, each one of those four promises had been broken
and things were in disarray.
Now,
as it happens, each one of these four areas threatens to shift us too into
spiritual decline like a slowly deflating tyre. These are warnings for us.
So let’s look at them in turn.
1) Obeying God’s Word
(v1-3 and v23-28)
The
first concern is obedience to God’s word and it comes up at the beginning of
the chapter and at the end of it.
The
specific issue here was that members of God’s people were intermarrying with
foreigners.
Let
me say right away that this has nothing to do with ethnic prejudice. In
Deuteronomy 10.18 it says “God defends the cause of the fatherless and the
widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and
clothing.”
God loves the foreigner.
The
first three verses of Nehemiah 13 are a reference to Deuteronomy 23.3-5. It is not a
blanket ban on marrying foreigners but refers only to the Moabites and
Ammonites; two nations who were bitter enemies of Israel. It’s a specific
warning to stay away from particular people who are bent on evil.
It
isn’t even a blanket ban on intermarrying with them. You’ll
remember that Ruth was from Moab and she did marry into the people of God and
even became an ancestor of the Lord Jesus. But, crucially, she
had said to Naomi, her mother-in-law “Your God shall be my God.” She ditched
her Moabite idols and became a member, by faith, of God’s covenant community.
The
problem in Nehemiah is that the opposite was happening. God’s people were
inviting cultures that are adamantly opposed to the things of God into their
community. The children born to these mixed marriages were growing up more at
home with pagan ideas than with the ways of God’s chosen people.
Do
we want our children to be more at home with the values of the world than with
those of the kingdom, having never tasted the goodness of the Lord? Those of
you who are parents; your children will never have a heart for God if they
don’t see that you have.
But
the community in Nehemiah 13 started to say “We don’t need to obey the word of
God. It's too strict. It's harsh. Let’s supplement it with our good ideas and
human wisdom.” And so they went into spiritual decline.
Whenever
I see Christians indulge in doctrinal compromise, as sure as eggs is eggs, it’s
only a matter of time that they’ll slide into moral indifference and end up
spiritually lukewarm.
Whenever
churches downgrade the Bible they head towards decay and irrelevance.
All
the great revivals - from the mighty 16th Century Reformation
to the Great Awakening in New England, to the Methodism that changed the face
of 18th Century Britain, to the 1905 Welsh revival and Azusa Street Pentecostal
outpouring to the East African revival of the 1920s and 30’s - all of
them held to the inspiration and authority of Scripture.
You
see, Hosea 14.9 says “the ways of the Lord are right.” They’re right.
So the Holy Spirit always blesses obedience to the right Word he inspired and
he is always grieved when it is resisted.
Incidentally,
if anyone asks you the difference between Ezra and Nehemiah, it’s that Ezra
pulled out his own hair when his people intermarried with pagan nations (Ezra
9.3) and Nehemiah pulled out other people’s (Nehemiah 13.25). The Bible tells
you the truth - some leaders pull their own hair out and some leaders, sadly,
pull out other people’s. I think you can tell what kind of leader I am just by
looking at me!
2) Refusing
Compromise in the Church (v4-9)
If
the first issue was disobedience to God’s word in the home, the
second is spiritual compromise in the church.
Nehemiah
returns from Persia to find that a large temple storeroom has been emptied of
its supplies and one of the enemies who had given God’s people so much grief in
chapters 2-6 has moved in. This man Tobiah, let me remind you, had been a
constant thorn in Nehemiah’s side and now he is lounging around in the temple making
himself at home.
Now
obviously, we’re not going to shift the communion table and Bibles and band
instruments into the garage to make space for the nearest pagan druid to move
in. But don’t be deceived. There are clear parallels for us.
This is like what happens when the church begins to gradually accommodate things it would have once found totally unacceptable. Before you know it, the standards of the world get a stronghold on our thinking and decision making.
This
is like what happens when legalism begins to take the place of grace in the
life of the church. All these regulations and procedures, making religious
accessories central instead of decorative, wearing the right clothes and
observing certain rules to try an appease God instead of coming to Christ and
living in him. God forbid that we should ever prefer the religion of the
Pharisees to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This
is like when we allow impurity and worldliness to stifle the joy and the
freedom of the Holy Spirit out of our lives.
What
did Nehemiah do? He did what Jesus did to the money changers in the temple
courts. He started throwing furniture around. In v8-9 Nehemiah showed Tobiah
the door, threw his sofa, his pots and pans and his TV set into the street. He
had the room disinfected so that no one could even smell his after-shave after
he left. Then he had everything put back in its proper place.
We’ve
got to make sure that the enemy of the gospel is just as unwelcome here.
Everything that is not life-giving and that undermines the work of the Holy
Spirit has got to be shown the door. And everything that properly belongs to
God’s house has to be restored to its rightful place. This is a house of
prayer, a place of healing not a centre for accusation and condemnation.
3) Giving for God’s Work (v10-14)
The
third issue Nehemiah had to sort out was giving.
With
£60,000 of our total for the roof project coming from the pockets of this
congregation – on top of regular giving to finance the work of this church (not
to mention support for the mission trips to Chester and Tijuana Mexico last
year) I hardly need labour the theme of generosity. When we give to God, we are
just taking our hands off what already belongs to Him. Most people here
understand that.
But
in my pastoral work, including here, I’ve often heard tales of woe from people
who are struggling with debt and financial strain. In not one case, not one,
has someone told me it’s because they overextended themselves in charitable
giving.
Over
and over again, and I’ve found this in my own life, and I have no idea how it
works, but the more people give gladly to the Lord’s work, the more they find
themselves blessed and the less they find themselves wondering how they’re
going to get to the end of the month.
We
need to give to God what's right - not what's left. This generation in Nehemiah
13 were giving God what was left, if anything was left.
And
here's what was happening: the Levites were temple servants and they had no
source of income except the tithes from the eleven other tribes. But things had
drifted. Verses 10-14 show us that when Nehemiah got back he found half the
Levites, away from the temple, out on the farm, making ends meet. The Lord’s
work wasn’t getting done because the people were neglecting to support the
Levites with their tithes.
In
Christ we are under grace, not law. Giving is not a heavy obligation, it’s a
holy opportunity. We are free to give more. The New Testament teaching is that
those who serve in the church deserve a respectable wage and it ought to be
enough to supply their needs. They shouldn’t have to struggle or consider
leaving just because fellow believers who benefit from their ministry don’t
adequately assess and meet their needs.
Now
I know we live in the real world and since the banking crisis the world’s
economy has stagnated - but our paid staff here have had one, modest,
under-inflation pay rise in four years (and I am not talking about myself as my
remuneration is handled nationally).
With
the roof project now almost behind us, I think we should look at this area as a
church in the light of what God says to us in this chapter.
Our
financial giving often reflects our wholeheartedness – or our half-heartedness.
Or even our hard-heartedness. Our giving authenticates our devotion to Christ –
or it contradicts it. Let me encourage you to look realistically and radically
at your giving again as I promise you I will.
As
the New Testament says, “Just as you excel in everything, see that you excel in
this grace of giving.”
4) Honouring the
Sabbath (v15-22)
The
last issue Nehemiah had to deal with was the violation of the Sabbath. Instead
of setting aside Saturday as a day for rest and worship, as God had commanded,
people were living as on any other day, producing, manufacturing, travelling,
buying and selling.
Now,
again, we are not under the Law of Moses. Christ has fulfilled
that for us. He castigated the Pharisees for their burdensome, nit-picking
attitude to the Sabbath. If your donkey falls into a pit, for goodness’ sake
pull it out!
It’s
not a sin to nip into the shop on the way home and get a bottle of wine to go
with lunch. If the Lord has called you to work in the emergency services or
caring professions it’s not wrong to take your turn and work your share of
Sunday shifts.
But
on this day I believe every Christian should want to gather together with other
believers and worship Christ and make every reasonable effort to do so. And not
out of grim obligation but because you love Jesus and want to honour him above
everything and everyone else that competes for your affections.
If
you are spiritually healthy, gathering with other believers for worship will be
a no-brainer top priority for you. If you’re really converted to Christ and
serious about making him Lord of your life, it will be the first thing in your
diary. And if you have children, training them to put Christ before everything
else will be great investment in their future.
Sunday
is the weekly anniversary of Christ rising from the dead: the New Testament
says “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the
earth.”
Ending (v29-31)
And
so we reach the last verses of Nehemiah. And what a strange way to end!
“I
also made provision for contributions of wood at designated times, and for the
first fruits. Remember me with favour, my God” (v31).
And
that’s it. It’s abrupt. It doesn’t even say they all lived happily ever after.
It’s hardly what you’d call ending with a flourish is it?
So
let me finish by saying this; we are moving towards a moment when history will
suddenly end. The New Testament tells us that we shall be working, like
Nehemiah was making provision for contributions of wood, and suddenly the Lord
Jesus will be here. Finished!
Jesus
said it will be like in the days of Noah; people will be marrying, buying,
selling, working and then suddenly that will be it! It will all be over. You
might say “Well, can’t I just finish the extension on the house? Don't we get
to see who wins the FA Cup or Strictly Come Dancing?" No we
don't. "Or does that mean my holiday is cancelled next week?” Yes it does.
It
won’t be at the climax of some vast international conference. His return won't
be announced by a vast choir who will have been rehearsing for weeks.
No!
There will be no more time to change your mind. Jesus will be back.
“Look,
I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person
according to what they have done… Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord
Jesus! (Revelation 22.12 and 20).
Let’s
pray…
Sermon
preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 25th August 2013
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