Persistent Faith To Keep Going
I’ve quite so many things. I started out the year telling my wife that I’d get the washboard abs I know she secretly wants me to have, so I committed to eating paleo and going to the gym 5 days a week. First of all, no human being can survive on the paleo diet. Secondly, no human being can run 4 days in a row. It’s never happened. You can’t prove it. I quit. I gave up both of those things pretty quickly. I’ve told myself I’m going to sure everyday so that I can get inside a barrel. I bought a guitar to learn to be the next Carlos Santana (I would have taken Jack Johnson). All of those things got too hard and I quit. I’ve never quit watching a Netflix series once I put my mind to it though. Those I follow through on.
What leads to people being persistent when things get tough? What causes a person to endure when other people would have given up? Nehemiah had the incredibly impossible task of rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem, and it got really tough. There was external pressure from enemies, internal fighting and mistreatment from the people working with him, and he was far from home and didn’t exactly have the qualifications to be a building foreman. What led to Nehemiah persistence? Here were the keys to his persistent faith, which will help us follow through in the amazing things that God has called each of us to do as we follow Him:
WISDOM (Nehemiah 6:1-4)
First, we see that Nehemiah was wise. He wasn’t naive, just going along with how each person was pulling him and asking for his time and energy. He was wise and understood when things would get him off track from what God was calling him to do. He looked at these letters from Sanballat and Geshem and realized that he’d have to travel a whole day to meet them, and the place they wanted to meet bordered Samaria and Ashdod, which were super sketch and dangerous places. At best, this trip would waste time and at worst, it could totally remove Nehemiah from the picture.
The way he responds almost seems arrogant or rude, right? “I’m doing a great work and I can’t come see you. Why should I leave my work to come see you?” Seems kind of full of himself huh? But, what he’s saying is true. He is really busy doing a great work for God. And he knows that these guys are trying to get him off track.
That takes a ton of wisdom, to know where to invest your time, energy, your money and your focus. How do we get the same kind of wisdom that Nehemiah had, to know how best to follow God each day? James 1:5-6 says: If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. If you know you need this kind of wisdom that Nehemiah had, it says that God will give it to you if you ask him. From what we know about Nehemiah, that guy was always praying. He must have been praying daily for God to give him wisdom to know what decisions are best. So we need to be a people who are praying, asking God for wisdom.
We need wisdom to know where the vulnerable places are where we might be attacked. That’s what was happening to Nehemiah. He would have gone to this place where he was vulnerable and could be killed. But he had the wisdom to realize that, so he didn’t go. Are there places that you’re invited to go where you’d be vulnerable? You know if you go there, you’re going to be tempted to sin, tempted to look, tempted to do that thing you know you shouldn’t? Maybe it’s a TV show or a movie, or an app for your phone that you just know is going to lead you to make purchases you shouldn’t make, daydream about things you shouldn’t be daydreaming about. Maybe there’s that person at the gym that you can’t keep your eyes off of and now they’re on your mind all the time.
Nehemiah just wouldn’t go there. He had the wisdom to say no and not put himself in a situation where he could be destroyed. Pray, and ask God for wisdom. We’ll have to if we’re going to be persistent and not give up.
FOCUS (Nehemiah 6:5-9)
Nehemiah was so focused. I mean Sanballat just keeps coming. And now he writes this open letter. This would have been read in public, for everyone to hear, and in it he’s accusing Nehemiah of treason! Wanting to be the king would have been treasonous and Nehemiah could be killed. That would cause most of us to stop doing whatever we’re doing, right? Not Nehemiah. Sanballat was persistent in trying to distract Nehemiah, and Nehemiah was persistent in staying focused on what God had called him to do.
What has God called you to be focused on as you follow him? If you follow God and you’re married, then one thing God wants you to be focused on is your marriage. He said that our marriages are a picture of Jesus and the church, and that he wants us to be in joy-filled marriages of loving and serving each other. What distracts you from that? What gets you heading in another direction?
If you follow God and you’re single, then one thing God wants you to be focused on is purity. God designed sex and the pursuit of sex to be for a marriage relationship and not before and one way you can show the world that God is more satisfying than sex to you is by waiting. What distracts you from that? What gets you heading in another direction?
If you have kids, God’s given you little disciples who He wants you to invest in and teach them about Him and love them well. What distracts you from that? What gets you to head in another direction?
The enemy is going to keep coming. Sanballat and those guys, kept coming. Kept trying to distract. Kept trying to disrupt, Kept trying to stop the work of God. So we need this kind of focus.
That’s why at Harbor we literally have what we call FOCUS GROUPS. We have a group getting ready to start up where for 5 weeks where couples are going to commit time to learning and growing and staying laser focused on following Jesus in their marriage. We’re hoping to do a group on Family Planning and Parenting and Finances and Evangelism and Global Missions—the things God wants us to be focused on as we follow him. Because it’s really easy to get distracted, and the enemy keeps coming.
Where do you need to recommit to be focused?
READINESS (Nehemiah 6:10-13)
Nehemiah had prepared ahead of time for the ways that he could fail. Here’s what happened: this guy, Shemaiah, was probably someone who Nehemiah knew and had trusted in the past. And so when Nehemiah comes into his house, and he gives him this advice of going into the temple to save his life, you’d think Nehemiah would be cool with that idea. But he wasn’t, because he was ready for stuff like this.
You see, Nehemiah knew Scripture. He knew what God had said in the first 5 books of the Bible that only priests can go into the temple, and only at certain times. That’s why he says, “how can I go into the temple and live?” God cared about that law so much that he said if a non-priest goes into the temple he should be put to death. So Nehemiah recognized that this dude, possibly his friend, Shemaiah wasn’t really trying to help him. He’d been hired by those jokers to work against him; to tell Nehemiah to do something that God never said to do. If someone tells you to do exactly what the Bible says not to do, you can know for certain that that person doesn’t speak for God. God doesn’t contradict himself. Nehemiah compared what his friend said with what God said in the Bible and they didn’t match up. Nehemiah had to of known the Bible really well.
How are you doing at preparing for trial? Preparing for temptation? The degree to which you’re ready when your tempted is the degree to which you’re storing God’s Word in your heart right now. Psalm 119 says: “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” Storing up God’s Word in your heart; reading it, meditating on it, hearing it preached, singing it, talking with others about it, it’s all preparation for when the battles comes. That’s why we see Jesus quoting the Bible each time Satan tempted him. He had stored up God’s word in his heart, and he was ready for the battle when it came.
How do you view your time in God’s Word? Necessary? Or, can skip it if it’s inconvenient? Doesn’t match up with my plans this weekend.
DEPENDENCE (Nehemiah 6:15-16)
Nehemiah was dependent on God to build this wall. You know how we know that? Because once it was built, the people and even the enemies of God looked at it and decided that there was no other way it could have been accomplished unless God had done it. They couldn’t figure out any other way that this amazingly impossible thing could have come about.
Nehemiah could have trusted in his own wisdom, his own strength, his own strategy and resources. But then these people would have perceived that this work had been accomplished by Nehemiah. They looked at Nehemiah, and then at the wall, and then back at Nehemiah, and realized that God had to have done this thing. That tells me first that Nehemiah was no one extraordinarily special. He was a normal dude. God uses normal people to do the amazingly impossible because you know who gets the glory for it when it’s done? God alone. That’s why the people praised God when David killed Goliath. It was obvious that God had done it, not this scrawny boy. Had David been all yoked and swole, he’d have been praised for his strength.
We want to be a church that does things that can only be done because God is helping us. We want to be people who do things that can’t be explained by ordinary human effort. We want people looking at our church saying, “Only God could bring those people together. Only God could make these people so loving, so sacrificial.”
So what in your life are you dependent on God for? Or, have you set your life up in such a comfortable way that someone could look at it, and not ascribe anything to God? They’d praise your hard work, or your financial savy, or your cutting edge parenting…but they wouldn’t see anything that only God could do in your life? That may be because many of us have set our lives up in such a way that we don’t need to be dependent on God. Getting through life without seeing that there are walls to be built. Many of us might need to pray and ask God what we can pursue that only He could do through us and then actually follow him into something we know we can’t do without him.
VISION (Nehemiah 7:1-5)
Nehemiah looked forward to what would happen after the walls were built. I mean, his job was to build the walls, right? And those walls got built. 52 days. Done. Ready to go home and drink some wine in his mansion. Yes, the wall was done, but it was never about the wall. The city needed to be populated and the people needed to figure out how to live together. So Nehemiah needs to figure out who they have, so creates this massive genealogy for the rest of the chapter. They need to know what people are on this mission with them; this mission to be a beautiful city and a light to the nations for God.
And among those members of the city, in verse 2 Nehemiah sets up his brother and another guy to be governors, leaders. They’re going to need strong leaders to be this city together. That’s why Nehemiah appointed guards. Walls and gates weren’t enough, they needed trusted guards. The strength of a city wasn’t in it’s walls but in it’s people. And they needed strong people to invest in keeping the city safe.
The same is true at our church. The strength of our church isn’t in our structure or our programs, or our finances, it’s in our people. We need strong people to invest in this church. We need strong leaders at Harbor West. We need what the Bible calls deacons—men and women who are willing to commit to serve and lead different ministries of our church. We need what the Bible calls elders or shepherds or pastors—men who are committed to pastoring or shepherding this church.
We need all of this because the gathering of the church isn’t the end goal. We don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for those who haven’t heard. God help us never to say that we’ve done it. We’ve arrived because we exist as a church. The objective is to make Jesus known in the whole world. So we need to prepare to go forward. Nehemiah does that by raising up new leaders: gatekeepers who are loyal and committed; the worshippers; the levites; his brother, etc.
Will you be a part of that process with us at our church? Maybe God’s calling you to join our church in membership so that we know that you are on this mission with us. Maybe He’s calling you to take steps to pursue leadership in our church because we need good leaders moving forward. Maybe he’s calling you to serve, to faithfully be loyal and committed.
THE SNOWBALL (Nehemiah 7:66-73)
In verse 66 Nehemiah had finished counting the people: “The whole assembly together was 42,360.” These are the people who would rebuild Jerusalem, who were going to do the work. And work they did. In verse 70ff, we see that the people gave, sacrificed, they planted roots in their city and lived as the people on mission for their King. The work went on, the work of building a city where God is worshipped and people can see his beauty went on, because Nehemiah’s persistent faith snowballed and led to more people on mission for Jesus.
Your persistent faith will snowball and lead to more people living on mission for Jesus, just like it did in Jerusalem. Let’s beg God to give us the same kind of persistent faith that Nehemiah had.