Summary
Nehemiah 7
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In Christ alone is our only hope, and what a great reminder of that today. If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Nehemiah chapter 7. Nehemiah chapter 7.
If any of you read ahead, you're going to look and say, you know, Pastor James, as I was reading this week, there's 73 verses here. And we're going to cover all 73 verses this morning. So buckle in, get ready. We're going to have a good time. I will be brief,
trust me, as brief as I can be. I did make one spelling error, believe it or not, that never happens for me. I think people text me about weekly, all the errors that I make on my notes. It is not God knows his people, it's God knows his people.
There's supposed to be a K there. Somehow, in my printing, I forgot a K there. It's supposed to be God knows his people. And so that's what we're talking about this morning. God knowing his people and God being faithful. And so we're going to stand and read, not all 73 verses.
We're going to read the first seven verses and then skip to the last three verses. And we're not going to read all these names and dates and times and numbers here.
But hopefully you go back and read it on your own. So let's stand and we'll read these couple of verses out of reading of God's word.
The Bible says that when the walls had been rebuilt and I had the doors installed, the gatekeepers, singers, and Levites were appointed. Then I put my brother Hanani in charge of Jerusalem along with Hanani,
the commander of the fortress, because he was a faithful man who feared God more than most.
I said to them, do not open gates of Jerusalem until the sun is hot and let the doors be shut and securely fastened while the guards are on duty. Station the citizens of Jerusalem, its guards,
some as their post and some as their homes. The city was large and spacious, but there were few people in it and no houses had been built yet. Then my God put it in my mind to assemble the nobles,
the officials, and the people that registered by genealogy that I found in the genealogical record that those have come back first. And I found the following written in it.
These are the people of the providences who went among the captives and exiles deported by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Each of them returned to Jerusalem and Judah in his own town. They came with Zerubbabel, Joshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Ramahiah, Nehemiah, Mordecai, Balshan,
Mispred, Bigvia, Nehem, and Benaiah. This is why we're not reading all those names. Then we're going to skip down to verse 71. The Bible says after all those names were mentioned, it says that some of the family's heads gave 2,000 gold coins, 2,200 silver manas to the treasury for the project.
The rest of the people gave 20,000 gold coins, 2,000 silver manas, and 76 priestly garments.
The priests and the Levites, the gatekeepers, the temple singers, some of the people, temple servants in all of Israel settled in their towns.
Father, we thank you for the reading of your word. We thank you for what you've done for us.
Help us as we begin to walk through this passage to help us understand how we can apply it to our life, how we can know who you are and trust you more. In your name we pray.
Amen. You may be seated. As you look through scripture and as you look through all of the Old Testament and even in the New Testament, God commissions and tells his people that he will preserve a people all throughout history.
In the Old Testament, it was the Jewish nation. In the New Testament, it translates over to the church, and the church is who he has preserved. And one day,
as Terry and some of our Wednesday night people were talking through in their small groups,
one day the eastern side is going to be split. God's going to come back and he's going to gather his chosen people, his church that has believed in him, the death, burial, and resurrection, and called them home. He is preserving a people for a place that he has prepared for them.
And so in this passage of scripture, we see as we walk through the book of DMI, the wall is now finished, and some of us have this idea that just because the wall is finished, the work is over.
God is calling his people that, hey, just because the wall is finished doesn't mean that now you don't have anything to do. I want you to think back to maybe a major project.
I shared, I think it was last Sunday or maybe it was Wednesday night or was with a group of people, and Pat and Vicki and Hilda came to me and said, Pastor James, the new sign's in. If you didn't notice, the new sign's in, the new sign's in, the directories are done.
You're not going to have anything to do. We've got to find some more projects for you to do. Oftentimes, this can happen in our life, right?
We finish the work, the major project's done, and we sort of step back and we say, okay, now what am I going to do? What am I going to do now that I've got all this extra time?
Seven, six years ago, we built a house and we spent months working on the foundation and building the floor and building the walls and the sheetrock and everything that goes into it.
But what would have been good if we were to finish that house and they gave us the keys in November and said, hey, this is your house, and I never moved into the house.
If I just looked at the house and we rode by it and we said, man, that's a beautiful house we bought. Man, let's go ahead and furnish the house, Allison.
Let's go ahead and put all the beds in there. Let's go ahead and move all of our stuff in. But we're not going to live in the house. We're just going to admire the house from the outside.
We're never going to be a part of the house. We're never going to guard the house.
We're not going to do anything inside this house, but we're going to look and say, that's a great house. It would have been a pointless to build that project. And this is what happens here in Nehemiah.
Nehemiah comes in, they build the walls, they secure the city, and yet no one's guarding the gates, no one's keeping up with things. And he begins to say, you know what? We've got this problem. The city's large.
We've got a lot of things here, but no one's inside the city. People are still afraid to come back. People are still afraid to do the work of what's going on.
And he said, we've got to restore the life to the city inside the walls that we've spent these last 52 days building. And the last 52 days bringing up this wall and sacrificing and having the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other hand.
And we've done all this work. And now we've got to convince people and bring people back into this promise that God has said, listen, he is faithful to us. He's not going to abandon us. He provided this project.
And now we need to be the people who are going to fill up the city that God has brought us to. And so let's walk through quickly here a couple of ideas that we see here in this passage. The first is this in verses one through six.
God's promises are preserved through his people. As you begin to walk through these first verses that we read, we begin to see all the things that God has promised, the doors and the Levites and the gates and the men and the women that are here serving.
And he begins to give instructions. And one of the things that I began to ask myself is how often is it in my life that I do the work that God's called me to do?
And when the task is completed, we just sort of rest for a while. And we sort of can sometimes think back and just think, you know, is God going to be faithful in the next task? He brought me through this task.
He brought me through these things and these trials in my life. But now there's a new trial. And God, are you going to be faithful? Are you going to continue to preserve your people? And oftentimes the cynicalness of us, and I'm one of these,
that you begin to come back and say, God, I know you've given me in the past, but God, are you going to continue to provide for me? Are you going to continue to provide when the things are not looking the best that they could look?
And then I believe that Nehemiah lays out a couple of things here, that things that are going to be practical for us today.
The first is this, that the work must be guarded. Nehemiah begins by describing what happened after the wall was completed. He talks about how the doors were installed, the gatekeepers, the singers, the Levites that were all appointed. And Nehemiah, look at this, he doesn't just assume that yesterday's victory is guaranteeing tomorrow's security.
He says, listen, God provided yesterday, and that is not a reason for us to sit around and do nothing. It is a reason for us to step out and say, God, I know you're here. I know you're going to provide for me.
And I know you're going to provide so much. The Bible says that he anointed two people, appointed two people,
Hananiah and Hananiah, however you want to say these two names, to oversee all of Jerusalem. He said, listen, these are the procedures that you're going to do when you're going to open the gate, when you're going to close the gate, when you're going to lock the gate.
We've got to guard what God has given us. And oftentimes in our life, we'll come through a spiritual victory where God will answer prayers and we'll be praying for God to work in our life.
And we'll say, God, I don't know how I'm going to do this without you. I don't know how I'm going to solve this problem without you working in my life.
But yet on the other side, we have to be super vigilant to say, God, I'm going to protect what you've done for me. God, I want you to provide a family for me. I want you to think back.
Maybe you were asking the Lord to give you a family. I can remember back 13 years ago,
14 years ago, when we were praying for God to give us a family and for God to allow us to have a child. And all of a sudden we got Brody and then two years later he gave us Jade.
And then several years later he gave us Hudson. And, you know, I could have prayed then, God, give me children. And all of a sudden God gives me children. And then I could say, you know what, God, you gave me kids. There's nothing else I can do.
Or I could come in and set up guardrails. I could come in and set up things that I want my kids to do and how they're going to live their life. And I can begin to preserve and protect what God has given me. And we as a church are the same way.
God has given us spiritual victories and we can't always just continue to live forever on the previous victories that God gave us. We must continue to move forward and say, God, I want you to work through in my life. I want you to continue to work in our church and in our families.
Imagine a farmer that has the same farm for generations and generations and generations.
And the great grandfather had the farm and gave it to their grandfather and gave it to the father. And the son came along and the son said, you know what, this farm has been in our family for 150 years. Dad took care of it and grandpa took care of it.
And my great grandfather took care of it. You know, I don't need to worry about fixing the fences anymore. They've stood for 150 years. They'll stand for another 150 years.
And if the son came in with that attitude of saying, you know what, I'm not going to fix the fences. I'm not going to plant any more crops.
I'm not going to do anything to the farm because it's sustained itself for the last 150 years. I'm just going to trust that the farm is going to keep going.
Eventually, the barns are going to crumble and fall. The fences are going to decay and break down. The land is going to deteriorate.
Weeds are going to grow up because someone said, you know what, I had a good legacy. See, I'm admiring that legacy, but I don't want to do anything now to help that legacy continue on. And church, the same way happens with us. We can't be faithful by doing absolutely nothing.
We must guard the work. We must trust the work. And the Bible says, not only do we have to guard the work, we need to put leaders in charge that are faithful. The leaders must be faithful to the work of the Lord.
Nehemiah tells us that these two men, Hananiah and Hananiah, were given the responsibility to look over all of Jerusalem.
And the Bible says that he doesn't say that Nehemiah looked throughout the land and found someone with the best charisma, with the popularity of the people, with all the wealth.
You know what? It doesn't even say that Nehemiah said, hey, let's take all the resumes up and figure out who's got the best resume of all the people in Jerusalem. And those are the people that we're going to put in charge.
I want you to look with me in verse two. It says, then I put my brother Hananiah in Jerusalem, along with Hananiah,
commander of the fortress, because, ready? Because he was a faithful man who feared God more than most.
This is the requirement that God laid out for Nehemiah. And he said, look among you. Find those that are faithful.
Find those who can be trusted to fulfill the responsibilities that are there for us. And then he says, find the person that's going to fear God. That's going to recognize that ultimately he is accountable to the Lord and he's going to, he's going to trust in the Lord more than anything.
It brings me back to Nehemiah chapter five, verse 15, where Nehemiah says to the governors that says that he was the one who feared God and he was going to trust God rather than man in this project.
God's work must be entrusted to the people who are going to honor God with what they are doing.
It is a hard and a high calling. As Logan said, it is a heavy calling to be a pastor.
Every day of my life, I pray that I am faithful to my family, that I am faithful to this church, that I am faithful to the Lord in my own spiritual walk, in my own spiritual journey. This past weekend, after we had our revival on Wednesday,
I jumped in my car and I drove to Tennessee for Thursday and Friday and I came back home Saturday and I got to spend just a couple of days with John.
He came and did revival last year. We were sitting on the back porch and he said, James, he said, I'm just wore out. He said, the ministry that I'm in, I love it. I love every moment of it. He said, but I am just wore slap out.
He said, every event that I go to, I feel like I can't disconnect from being a pastor. I always have to be on the weight of the people. The church is growing. They're running almost a hundred now. And he said, it's just overwhelming.
And I just feel like I just can't just breathe it sometimes. And so we got to hang out and we talked.
And by the end of the Friday, he came to me and we were talking a little bit and he said, you know,
he said, my wife said that she can already tell a difference in just the last 24 hours of being able to be around good, faithful men, someone who I can just hang out with and forget about the responsibilities
for a moment and allow the weight of this pastoring to step off of him. And we got to talking about our personalities. And I think a lot of this is personality wise. He's a, he's an introvert. I'm an extrovert.
I was asking Allie this. I said, Allison, I said, when we come home last week, we had a revival. We had our homecoming on Sunday morning. And I don't know why this, none of this is in my notes. So I may go longer than what I was thinking. I don't know.
I said, we come home from Sunday morning. We had Sunday morning. We had our homecoming.
We had a wonderful crowd here. We had our meal. And I said, when we come home after that, I said, are you like wore out, ready to go to bed? Like you've got to get away from everything. And she said, James, I don't think you even have to ask that question.
Every Sunday, I got to take a nap with Hudson. Like I'm wore out. And I said, man, I come home. I said, this is just my personal. Cause John asked me this. He said, how are you when you leave an event like that? I said, man, I'm like jacked.
I'm like, I just had like a shot of cocaine or something. I'm, I've had a, I had an energy drink, something crazy. I've never done any cocaine or anything.
Don't get me wrong. But I just had all these things. And I said, I'm just, I can't wait to be around more people. And he said, that doesn't make sense at all.
It doesn't make sense in my mind how you can give, give, give. And now you want to be around people. I said, I don't understand it either. Like when I'm not around people is when I began to like,
is life even worth it? I got to be around people. I got to be in and around what people are doing and how things are going. That is the, how God has wired me.
And God tells us that when we begin to figure out the faithfulness of our ministry, we need to have leaders that are put in there, not the most gifted that can attract the crowd,
not the ones that can speak the best, but the ones that are going to be faithful to carry out the responsibility over time.
I promise you church, if you ever tell me that I'm not faithful to the ministry and I'm not faithful to my wife, I will step down because I want to be faithful.
I want to be a leader who is going to be faithful to what God has called us to do. And I want to carry out the responsibility of what God has called us to do for what the ministry has done.
Let me give you some cross references here. You can write down Exodus 18, 21. Moses is instructed to appoint capable men who feared God and hated dishonor game, dishonorable game.
First Corinthians four, two, the Bible says that stewards are to be required, found, be found faithful in their stewardship. First Timothy three, one through 13,
Paul was telling his people that the leadership of the church requires godly character. The leaders must be faithful.
And this is what Nehemiah is saying here. He found these two men. He didn't just pull two men out of a hat. He said, I found them faithful and I felt they feared God. Number three here, we see that the city must be filled. Now this is a very important question.
The Bible says that Jerusalem was large, but the people were few. There were houses that still need to be rebuilt.
The walls are now standing, but the city is not functioning as a city. It's just a place with walls around it. And he says, if we're going to do the work of the Lord,
not only do we need to have a city, but we need to have a city that's inhabited with people who have been participants in this restoration. And verse five tells us that God put it in Nehemiah's heart to gather the people and register them by their genealogy.
And this is where we begin to walk through all those verses we didn't read because God was telling him, listen, I have done this amazing work. Now it's your turn to step up and it's your turn to say, you know what, God, you've done this work.
Now I'm going to step up and I'm going to help us to accomplish what God has called us to do.
Nehemiah could have stood back and say, you know what, God, you did all this work. I'm just going to sit back and do nothing now.
He reminds us, if you're with me, we pray for people to be saved all the time. I've got a list of people who people have shared with me. Hey, pray for this person. I pray for my stepdad every single day for salvation to happen. The problem is,
do we pray for it? And then do we share the gospel? Are we praying for something that we never actually go out and do? We pray for the sick to be healed.
Are we actually going out and we minister to the sick? We pray in for the church to grow.
Are we reaching out and disciple and people in our church and saying, you know what, I'm in my sixties.
Who can I reach out to this younger me that I can begin to bring under my wing and disciple to be a next deacon, the next Sunday school teacher, the next lady that's going to be in charge of
the WMU, the next person that's going to be cooking for our fellowship meals. Am I discipling these people that are coming up after me so that when they get older, the church is going to continue to grow. Am I praying for the next generation? I pray that we are.
Are we investing in the children and the young people so that the next generation knows that we care about them? We pray for God to work in our community. Are we going in our community and serving our community so that God can work in the community?
There's many farmers in this room today and many of you know farmers in this room today.
I've never met a farmer in my life that prayed for rain, but didn't plant the crops in order for the rain to help accomplish the goal of raising the crops up. Every farmer is going to go out and they're going to plant the corn seed.
They're going to plant the tobacco seed. They're going to go out and they're going to plant all the seed, everything they need for the harvest, the corn and the tomatoes and all the different seeds that they need. And then they're going to go back and say, God, I've done my work. I'm praying for you to provide the rain.
If you don't provide the rain, we're not going to be able to pay the bills next week. And we're not going to be able to have a harvest next week and next month. And God, we need you to work in this area. But the farmer went out and did the work first.
When's the last time we prayed for God to do something, but then we failed to go and do the work. If the man, if the farmers didn't go out and plant the seeds, it would have been useless for the rain to come.
And we as a church, we pray for things and we have names that we're looking at and we have things that we're looking at. And we say, God, I want you to use the contributions that I'm giving. I want you to use the seeds that I'm planting. I'm going to do the work.
I'm going to pray as if it all depends on you. But God, I want you to come out and I want you to do the work so that people say this is only by your grace that this has happened. This is only by what you have done in and through my life.
Number next here, number two, I think I don't even know where I'm at in my notes. Number two, God's people are personally known by him. God's people are personally known by him. This is verse seven through 70. Now, we didn't read it for a reason.
If we read it, we would still be here reading this passage, but it's a lot of names and a lot of numbers. And these are names that oftentimes seem insignificant to us as we're reading.
Dale came to me a couple weeks ago when Allison got up and read all the different names. I want to do that for that service. I didn't feel led to do it like this. He said, hey, Pastor James.
He said, I know your wife or that. Wait till you get to chapter seven and chapter eight. I said, I know, Dale. I've been reading. I know what's coming.
And so it was a good, just a joke between me and him. But all of a sudden we read these names.
And if you're like me, listen, you get to your Bible reading and you want to read through the books of the Bible and you get to those names that are in Exodus and Leviticus.
And you're like, God, why did you put these names in here? This has nothing to do with me.
And oftentimes this is how we can feel. And if you're like me, this can be you as well. You get this point and you're like, okay, God, I don't really need to read these names. They're just descendants and numbers. And you just skip through it. God didn't forget these people.
He meant it so much that, you know, oftentimes we struggle to pronounce the names. But yet God said, you know what? I'm going to deliver a people named Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
And we know those names. And we're like, yeah, give me another story about Abraham. Give us another story about Moses being delivered from Egypt and the ribbit going through the wilderness and God providing for them. We like those names.
But then when it comes to this genealogy, we say, God, what does it even make sense?
How is it? Why are these names here? What's it for? Most of us in here can remember 9-11.
Okay, if you remember, if you were alive when the Twin Towers came down, raise your hand. Okay, that's the majority of the church. Some of our younger ones were not alive.
I've had the opportunity to go to New York and I've had the opportunity to go to the Twin Towers where the site is at and it's quiet, it's reverent, it's mystical in a sense because I remember seeing it.
And when you get to the site, there's the two towers that are outlined of where they would have been at. And if you look over, there's an eternal waterfall that goes over top of it.
And inside of each one of these Twin Towers spots is the names of every single person, the 1,997, I believe it is, the people that died in the Twin Towers that day.
Those names mean nothing to us. We remember back and we know that something happened there. We know that the Twin Towers fell and it was to change the world as we know it.
But when we look at it, it has a different sense to us because we understand that these people, they sacrificed their lives not because they were willing to sacrifice, but it represents a person and a family and a name behind it.
There are still cars parked in the parking decks surrounding there where people who never pick their cars up and they are still parked in those parking lots. But why is it significant that each one of those names are there so that we don't ever forget what happened 20-something years ago?
So we don't forget the contributions that those firefighters made so that we remember those people's names and families when we go and we see it.
We may not know who they're connected to, but we can look and say, okay, that's a family. That person and that family was impacted by what happened here.
And so when we read through these names, these are a list of names that say, and listen, God knows these people. He has a connection to these people. He remembers his people.
He knows what is going on. He has a very clear recollection of who they are. So number one, God remembers his people.
These names that have been given here are the promises that God said he was going to preserve his people. Each one of these names represents a real person, a real family, a real story that God has been given and writing.
Number two underneath this, I'm going to quickly move on. Every person has a place.
As we read through this list, we see different families and different names and different responsibilities, and not every family had the same size.
If you want to skim through here, you can see the families. Some had 42, some had 2,300, some had 760.
Each and every one of these families were a different size and a different place and a different role that happened in this community.
And they all had a part of the place that God had called them to be.
As I was thinking through this and studying, my mind went to the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 12, where Paul begins to write and he begins to say that every member has a place in the body of Christ. Stephen mentioned it this past week in Revival.
He said, you know, when your thumb hurts or your foot hurts or your chest hurts, your entire body aches.
Your entire body is in pain because if your leg hurts and you go to lay down and you lay wrong on your leg, you can't get sleep and you're rolling in bed and you're just trying to find a
comfortable spot. And your entire body is hurting because of one area of your body that's hurting.
And he says, this is the same way the church. We all have different places and we all have different things. We're all not an eye and we're all not a hand and we're all not a foot. But every single member of the body is needed.
The church is the same way. We need people to preach. We need people to teach children. We need people to sing.
We need some person to serve behind the scenes and just do this work of the security. We need some people to lead ministries and we need others to faithfully pray.
And we need to all give and we need to encourage and we need to say, how can I meet the needs of the local church? A healthy church is not built on one person doing all the work of the ministry.
A healthy work and a healthy church is everyone doing their part and everyone doing what they need to do and faithfully serving together and saying, how can I welcome a visitor? How can I teach the next generation?
How can I help this family? How can I serve in this area? How can I support a missionary? What are the things that I can do that God has called me to do? Now, trust me, church, not everyone's going to do the same thing. Some of you are introverts.
And if you did the things that I would do, you would be uncomfortable. You'd be like, Pastor James, how can you do that? Like, I don't even understand in my mind.
I'm the same way. I'll ask Allie some things. I'm like, hey, what do you think about this? And she's like, James, you're like the only person in the church that's going to do it.
You're the only one that thinks like that. You're the only one that has that energy. And I have to remind myself, we all have different gifts and we all serve in a different way. How is God calling us to serve? Number three, and finally, I'll be quickly here.
God's work is propelled by faithful investments. Last couple of verses we read here, the people, as they were listed all throughout here, were looking at the faithfulness that God had given them.
And they looked at the past and they said, you know, God works so much in the past and God has done these things. And then I begin to say, you know what? How can I faithfully invest in the future of the ministry?
You see, the chapter doesn't simply end with just a bunch of people who are counted, a bunch of names participating in the works.
He ends by saying, look at what God has done and look at how these people are being involved in the ministry and the work of what God is doing. Number one, remember God's faithfulness in everything we do.
Before we talk about the financial giving here, I think it's important that we talk about, but we have to first remember what God had done in the past. These people were descendants of people who the Bible says were carried away in exile by King Nebuchadnezzar, one of the hardest,
worst kings that's ever mentioned in the Old Testament. Later, God got a hold of his life. But for seven years, King Nebuchadnezzar ate grass as an animal outside.
And it says that his fur began to grow with animals and his nails began to grow out like a cow. And he began to eat the fur on the outside of there, eat the grass on the outside like a cow.
And I want you to understand that even while that happened with King Nebuchadnezzar, if you don't know the story, the people still did whatever he commanded before and never went against him because they were so afraid of him. And yet God got a hold of his life and changed his life.
And this is the king that took Israel out of Jerusalem and destroyed the walls.
And so they began to think back, man, God, there were consequences if we rebel against you, if we rebel against them. And all of a sudden we begin to think, you know what, God, you haven't abandoned your promises. You brought us back to Jerusalem like you told us to. We rebuilt the walls.
And they begin to remember the faithfulness that God had given them.
Church, we don't need to give because God was faithful to us. We need to give because God has always and will always be faithful to us.
And we oftentimes, I shared this in our revival two weeks ago when I preached at Stevens.
Oftentimes we give and we think, you know what, if I give, it's going to be like a cosmic vending machine. We're going to put the money in the vending machine and we're going to do the little bebop. We're going to put the buttons in.
And then we're going to say, God, I need this. And then all of a sudden it's going to pop out. We give because God has been faithful.
We do not give to earn God's favor. We invest in the next generation because God invested in us and people before us invested in each and every one of us. Number two here, respond with generosity.
Look at what it says in verses 70 through 72, that they brought the gifts by the leaders and among the people.
Our giving is a response to the grace that God has given us. Let me read a couple of verses in the New Testament because I want you to understand that this principle is not just in Nehemiah. It's all throughout scripture. Second Corinthians nine verses six and eight.
It says that we should be willing and a cheerful giver to the Lord and to the work of the Lord.
First Corinthians 16, one and two says that we should be a regular or planned participant in the giving of what God has called us to do. First Timothy five, 17 and 18 says that we should support those who labor in the teaching and preaching and the leadership of the local church.
You see, when we invest our resources, it shows what we truly value and what we truly have in valued in our life.
If the gospel matter to us, we should be willing to advance in the gospel and willing to invest in advancing the gospel.
This is through our Annie Armstrong and our Lottie Moon Christmas offerings. These are the ways we can give to missionaries. The next generation matters to us. We should be willing to say, I'm going to invest in the spiritual growth.
I'm going to invest in the spiritual maturity of our new and young Christians that are growing up in their faith. And if the local church mattered to us, we should be willing to support the ministry and the mission of the local church. Very lastly, number three, we should reinvest in the next generation.
The people here who were remembered by what God had done and what God is doing, they contributed to the work and they said they're going to lay aside some things for the ministry. The faithfulness here was not intended to benefit themselves.
The Bible says that they gave these things and they were willing to lay aside these things for the next generation that was coming up after them.
We must not only think about what God is doing for us and my goodness, God has so blessed us as a generation. He's blessed me and my family as a generation.
I look back and I say, God, there is no way these things could have been done outside of what you had done for us. Yet, oftentimes we fail to think about that next generation coming behind us. Discipling a teenager, encouraging a young family,
training the future leaders who are going to come behind us and say, God, these are the things that you've given us. The goal is not just simply to leave something behind, but the goal is to leave something that God is going to use for his honor and his glory.
As we looked at last week, as we looked at our homecoming,
1853, 173 years ago, this heritage that God gave us, not just simply to preserve a nice building or to remember the names of the previous pastors, but to say, God, are we going to be faithful to trust in
you and the new generation, the next generation? Are we going to continue reaching the people that are moving into the new houses that have been built? Are we going to continue to do the things that you have called us to do? I want to ask you this question as Terry comes.
What are you doing today that will benefit the next generation spiritually?
What are you doing today to say, God, I'm going to do these three things so that when I'm not here anymore, when you have taken me on from this life, people are going to say this was here because someone else invested.
The list of names that are in Nehemiah 7, they seem unimportant to us. We skipped over the reading because of sake of time today, but they should be a reminder to us that God has a history, he has an identity, and he has a future for each and every single one of
us. And we can say, God, don't forget your people because you have never forgotten your people and you will always remember your people and you always will be faithful to your people. And allow us to trust you with our future.
Allow us to be a people who are saying, you know what, God, I don't care about the blessings that you've given me. I thank you for those blessings, but how can I use the blessings that you've given me to bless other people?
How can I press other people to say, look at the hope that God has given us. Look at the hope that God has renewed our soul and renewed our life.
And look at how we can continue to look back and say, God, use us in a way to be part of something bigger than what we would just think we could be a part of.
Other people came before us and they shared and they sacrificed.
We should thank God for those people. You can walk down this hall and you can see pictures and you can see names down this hall of people who had gave. Is that all it's going to be?
Or are we going to say, God, I want to be the next generation. I want to be the one that comes alongside and guards the work. I want to be part of the people that are going to be faithful to come alongside of other people. I want to invest in the next generation.
I want to live in a way that is going to be so honoring to you that the people on the outside are going to say, he feared God. He was faithful. That's why God used him. The eventually, the buildings may eventually change. Our ministry may look different in the future.
Trust me, 150, 73 years ago, there weren't screens up here. They were looking at, there weren't padded pews.
We were sitting at a church just last week at Stephen's church. They didn't have the pat on the back. And some of our ladies were like, you preach too long, Pastor James, for one, but two, my back was hurting. Like I needed the pat on the back.
Years ago, you can look at these pictures and they didn't have a fellowship hall and they ate outside underneath a tree. Ministries changes. Things look different. Are we going to hold back on that?
Are we going to say, God, allow us to remain faithful in all that we do so that you can get the honor and glory? I just want to keep serving you. I just want to keep proclaiming your word. I want to invest in the work of the future.
We have to ask ourselves this question. Are we going to serve God faithfully because he's been faithful to us so that we can provide a future generation something they can be faithful in as well? Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Help my feeble words this morning.
I know I was scattered in a lot of areas, but help us to be faithful to you. Help us to trust in you.
Help us as we go in this time of communion in just a moment that you would be lifted high, that you would allow us to clear our hearts and minds so that we can faithfully trust in you. Be with this time of invitation. In your name we pray. Amen.
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