Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Nehemiah 2, emphasizing how God opens doors for those who seek His will through prayer and preparation. He highlights Nehemiah's four months of prayer before approaching King Artaxerxes with a seemingly impossible request to rebuild Jerusalem's walls. The sermon underscores that while God provides opportunities and resources, believers should expect resistance when pursuing God's plans, reminding the congregation that God's gracious hand is upon those who trust in Him.
Welcome and Housekeeping
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms.
Amen. If you have a child who wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, that's available at this time. If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Nehemiah 2 this morning. Nehemiah 2. We started the book of Nehemiah last week. What a blessing this book has been for me, studying through it.
I like the New Testament. I'm just a New Testament guy.
Someone had said to me the other day when I had preached out of the Old Testament, man, you haven't been in the Old Testament in a long time. I really feel obligated to be a preacher of the whole gospel and the whole counsel of the Lord.
And so being in the Old Testament is healthy for us.
And so going through the book of Nehemiah, there are so many correlations that, as I've been studying through this,
that I did not ever make before, with even end times and Queen Esther that we're going to look at today.
But last week we started by looking at the whole first chapter and just looking at what happens when God gives us a burden and what Nehemiah did when he heard the news of Jerusalem.
And today in Nehemiah chapter 2, we're just going to look at the first 10 verses and we're going to look at what happens with Nehemiah here today.
So if you found your place there, let's stand and we'll read the first 10 verses of Nehemiah chapter 2. Bible says, It says, So I gave him a definite time and it pleased the king to send me. I also said to the king, Father, thank you for the reading of your word.
Help us to be faithful to your text this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated. I've titled the message today, When God opens doors. Oftentimes we get burdened and we have a burden about something and we want God to accomplish his work. We want him to accomplish his will.
And God, as we looked at this morning in Sunday school, he gives us wisdom. He gives us resources. And he gives us the opportunities necessary for us to accomplish his will.
And I want us to understand as we're going to look at the end of this passage, that there will be resistance. There will be opposition when we try to do what God wants us to do. Last week, as I mentioned, we received this devastating news that the walls were broken down.
The gates had been burned. The city was in ruin.
Nehemiah's Response to Bad News
And when Nehemiah heard the report, he didn't pull his phone out and call his best friend. He didn't go on social media and put a post about how horrible the walls were. He went before God Almighty and he said, I must pray.
And we looked at verse 4 and it says that he sat down, he wept, he mourned, he fasted, and he prayed. And today we come to chapter 2 and we see that we don't understand the calendar that the Persians were using.
And so we look at chapter 1 and it says that it was in the year of Chevelle. And then in chapter 2, it says it was in the month of Nisan. Now to us, that means absolutely nothing. It's like, what are these months? What does this mean?
And so if you have to go back and do the study, I did it for you.
So you don't have to worry about doing it right now. But the study here shows that it was about a four-month season that had passed.
So from the moment he got the news that the walls were torn down, he had been praying and fasting and mourning and weeping over the city for four months. And he began saying, God, I want this to happen.
I want these things to change. But give me the opportunity to be able to enact the change that needs to happen. So he prayed for four months. Prayer didn't change it immediately.
He was praying that the Lord would allow this to happen. And he was looking for opportunities. And he was preparing for these things to happen. And now four months later, this significant amount of time has passed. And he is merely saying, God, I am going to put everything in your corner.
I'm going to allow you to take over in all these areas of my life. And I've got to start planning for some things. I've got to start working for what's going to happen. Because the opportunity is going to come when God presents that opportunity in his life.
And so all of a sudden we get to this moment where Nehemiah is ready. And we know Nehemiah is ready because God put this opportunity in front of him.
If Nehemiah would have been ready after the first month, I believe the opportunity would have presented itself. But God waited for this four-month period for him to get physically,
spiritually, and everything right in his life for this to happen. So let's walk through this passage. We're going to lump this in the first nine verses to the beginning. In verse 10 at the very end, we see that God helps us accomplish what seems impossible.
God's Help in Impossible Situations
God comes in and helps us accomplish what seems impossible.
From the human standpoint, if you were to be an observer on the outside of this story, you would think that the request that Nehemiah was going to give would have been impossible for him to do. Think about what he's asking here.
I read all this, but I'm going to sort of give you the bullet points. He looks at the king and he says, King, will you reverse your policy?
There was a policy in Ezra where when they were taken into captivity, the king issued a decree that the walls and the gates in the city of Jerusalem to be left in ruins, lest there be a rebellion of the Israelites and they would come to overtake the throne.
And so they're in bondage and he says, hey, King Arxerxes, will you change the policy that you made 20 years ago?
I know you told us that you didn't want the walls rebuilt, but can you change that?
He looks at him and he says, I want to ask you if I can leave my position. I can't work under you for the next amount of time. I'm going to travel hundreds of miles away.
Hey, and on top of that, King, will you write a letter to all the people that I'm going to come in contact, granting me permission and safety to go here? Oh, you know, King, also, I need some build materials.
When I get there, the walls are in ruin. You made the law that the walls would stay in ruin.
Will you pay for the walls to get rebuilt? Like, think about how this is seeming to the outsider. And he says, you know, I need you to give me authority to rebuild all of Jerusalem.
I need you to come in. I need you to do these things because I know you previously ordered all this to stop. But now I'm asking you to come in and to work in this situation. It seems an impossible request.
It seems like this guy has completely lost his bonkers. He doesn't know what's going on. He's living in some la-la land of some make-believe land. And all of a sudden, he's coming for the most powerful man in the world. And he says, King,
will you work in this area? It reminds me of a verse in Proverbs chapter 21, verse 1. It says, the king's heart is like a stream of water in the Lord's hand. And he directs it wherever he chooses.
And we have to understand that God can do things that we don't even understand is possible in our own life, in our own families, in our own churches, in our own community.
That God will come in and he can work in things that we think are impossible. And Nehemiah understood that. Nehemiah understood that because he began with everything that he did with the very first thing, the prayer that he prayed before he proceeded. Nehemiah had waited for four months. This is difficult for me.
I do not have a lot of patience. You can ask my wife this. I like to rush things. I like to do things. I like to hit the ground running. I like to go zero to 60 in 1.3 seconds. I like to get things done.
And all of a sudden, Nehemiah said, I've got to wait on the Lord. I can't force this conversation with the king.
I can't force what's going on. I have to wait for when the Lord gives me the opportunity.
And the one day this happens, the king is here in the palace and the Bible says that he has his queen with him.
Nehemiah's Fear and Courage
And the king looks at him and says, your face is sad. Why are you sad? Why is there sadness in your heart? And Nehemiah said that he was terrified.
Why would he say that he is terrified in this moment? Because in this moment, he understands that he is about to do the most dangerous thing possible.
And it's speak before the king without ever having the permission to speak before the king.
If you just go to the king without the king granting this audience, he could immediately call for your head to be cut off. He could immediately call for you to be executed because you spoke without permission.
And the king looks at him and he almost looks at him and says, hey, buddy, you've been working under me for a long time. What's wrong? What's going on? You've always come before me with a good countenance.
You've all come before me serving me well. Are you dissatisfied in your job? Are you dissatisfied in what's going on?
And all the time when this would happen, it would be interpreted as a conspiracy to take over the kingdom. The sadness was not something that kings would tolerate in their realm. They wanted it to be a happy, joyful moment in their palace.
If you can think back with me, when Saul was ruling over the nation of Israel, when he was sad, he called in all the jesters and he called in David and everybody. And he said, I want you to make me happy. I want you to sing the songs.
I want you to do the dances. I want it to be a joyful time in my palace.
And all of a sudden, if Nehemiah is coming with a sad countenance, the king would not have liked that or would not have wanted it.
And in this moment, he understands the moment that he had been praying for for the last four months. God was giving him an opportunity to ask the king something that he had been praying for. The king says to him, what is your request? So he prayed in a little moment.
He prayed and he said to heaven, God, I want to come before this man in the right way. One commentary wrote like this, and I thought it was one of the most powerful things as I was studying this past week. He said it was an arrow prayer.
It wasn't a long drawn out. Hey, king, can you give me 10 minutes? I've got to walk in this back room. I've got to go pray before the Lord. Get down on my hands and knees in front of you and pray before the Lord. It was, Lord, give me wisdom.
I'm going to ask what I've been praying for. It was a pointed, direct prayer.
God, in this moment, allow it to be in your favor. And this is the moment that he had been praying for four months for it to quietly come true in this moment.
Oftentimes, we want the answer to prayer to happen in just a couple of seconds when God says, I've got to prepare you for four months for that moment to come to where prayer is so innate in your body
that you just simply throw up an arrow prayer and say, God, I've got to come to you in this moment because this situation is bigger than me. This situation is bigger than anything I can handle and I need you in this moment.
We cannot wait until we're standing in front of the king or we're standing in front of the obstacle that we're facing to then have a long drawn out prayer with God.
Sometimes the prayer can only be five seconds. We've got to be building our life before that on prayer so that when the moments come, we are saying, God, help me in this situation. You have given me this plan to come before you and you've given me this opportunity.
Sorry about that. I want you to think of it like this. This is the week before the NFL season starts. College football started this last week. All the fun plays that happen with all the drama of football. And I love football. I love analogizing things with sports.
I think I made that word up. My wife and kids tell me I make words up all the time. But I like to think of how like a quarterback would act.
A quarterback, he plans, he prepares, he studies the playbook, he gets up to the line of scrimmage, he sees what the defense is doing.
And all of a sudden he makes an audible to what's going on based on the other things in life. The quarterback doesn't get up. Now, some of our North Wilkes, West Wilkes guys, they may do this.
They may get up and as they're about to snap the ball, they look at the playbook the very first time. And they're like, you know what, I'm going to call play. I don't really know what's even going on out here.
We're going to throw out a play and just sort of see what happens and maybe study on the fly.
What happens is the quarterback has to study all the time behind the scenes so that when he steps out on the field, he is ready to execute the football and play the game the right way. The same thing happens in our life.
Private preparation produces the confidence that we need to stand before God and say, God, I'm coming to you in this prayer.
I'm asking you to do these things. I know it seems impossible, but I'm coming to you because you're the only one that can do it. And prepare me through this prayer so when the moment comes, I can proceed with what you have called me to do. Not only does Nehemiah pray before he proceeds,
Nehemiah plans before he proceeds as well. Number two, he plans before he ever proceeds. Nehemiah prayed, but Nehemiah also planned these things out.
He said, if it pleases the king and your servant is found to have favor with you,
send me to Judah and the city of my ancestors so that I may rebuild it. And he asks him, how long is it going to take? And he replies and tells him, it's probably going to be about a year. And Nehemiah had the answer.
Nehemiah was so in tune with what was going on.
He had planned out, if I got permission, if these things come true, if the king would grant me these things, it's going to take me this amount of time. He's going to ask me these questions. He knew what he wanted. He knew where he was going. And he knew what he needed.
He even begins to ask for the timber that was the king's timber, the king's forest that the king had.
Anytime he wanted to build a new house, if someone came in that was of some type of royalty or some type of a new thing, he would use his own timber, his own yard to be able to do this.
And he says, King, would you give me the best of the best? He says, I'm not just asking for the leftover scraps. I'm not asking for after you completed a project, all the leftover work.
I want you to grant me permission to go and cut down the king's trees, to go back to rebuild the walls and the gates of the city. Nehemiah did not just simply pray and sit back and say, God, whenever it happens, it'll happen. Nehemiah prayed.
And he began praying and saying, God, give me the ideas. Give me the thought that you have for me. Prepare my mind.
Prepare the endeavors that I'm going to go through. Not that just I'm waiting, but that I would wait in this specific time for a specific purpose. One commentator said like this, faith is not the opposite of planning. Faith is planning and is often expression of the faith that we have done.
He looks at this and he says, God, I am planning and I am praying. And I'm saying if these things were to happen, this is how I would do it.
This is how I would allow these things to happen. And God, I'm going to trust in you. And this is the plan that I have. And God, as I'm planning this, is this right, God?
And all of a sudden he goes, yeah, maybe I wouldn't ask for that. And he begins to edit the plans.
He begins to edit what's going on. He begins to edit some things because he's saying, God, I want to trust in you to do these things. Six years ago in November, we built our house.
When I told Allie, I said, hey, we want to build a house. If I would have looked at her and said, let's go build a house. And she said, James, do we have any land? No, we don't have any land.
James, do we have any money? No, we don't got any money. We'll be fine.
James, do you have a plan? Do you have an idea of how you can build your house? No, we don't need no plan. We don't need no money. We don't need no land.
We don't need any of these. Maybe she looked at me and said, James, do you have a contractor that you're thinking about? No, I don't need a contractor.
We'll just decide to build a house and hopefully it'll just begin to happen. No, when this happened six years ago, I said, I've already bought the land.
I've got an idea of who we're going to use. I've got an idea of how the house wants to be. We began to walk through all these things because we had began to prepare before the house was actually ever even built.
This is how faith is in our life. We build a biblical faith by saying, God, teach us to learn this as we're going through life.
Luke says it like this as Jesus is teaching in Luke 28, 14, verse 28. He says, before you ever go to build a building,
count the costs first so that you'll know if you'll be able to do it or not. Because a foolish man begins a project and can't finish it because he runs out of the funds to do it. This right here, this principle applies to our family.
Count the costs. Understand what it's going to take to have a good, healthy family. To have a good, healthy marriage. To have your finances right. To have your education right. To have a church that is built the way God has it to be done. Pray about it.
Plan for it and say, God, I am trusting in you as you go through this life that you're going through. We don't plan because we don't trust God.
Oftentimes people will say, Pastor James, I just have to trust God and he'll take care of the rest. And that's exactly what it would look like if you were to go through that example and say, I'm going to build a house. And just trust that God's going to take care of everything.
And never apply any human wisdom to it. God says, I'm going to give you the wisdom and you're going to pray for the wisdom. And I'm going to direct your mind and your thoughts so that you can move forward. Because we must be able to trust God fully and faithfully with what he has placed in our hands.
And saying, God, you have given me this responsibility. I'm going to entrust it to you. Give me direction as I plan for my family.
I want to be a faithful father as I'm planning for my family, a faithful husband as I'm planning for my family.
And it doesn't just happen by accident. We must be a people who are determined and planning to understand that he is there for us.
If God opens the door tomorrow for what you've been praying for, would you actually be ready to walk through it?
I've been praying for months and years for things and saying, God, if this were to happen, I'll be ready for it. But then all of a sudden the door comes up and God begins to open those doors. Would you be ready to walk through it?
I'll take you on the backside of my mind. I've got plans that God has given me and ideas that God has given me for this church that are bigger than if I told my wife. She'd be like, James, you are crazy.
But I am planning that God would do something great. I'm praying that God would work in this church so that he could reach this community and we would be able to do things for him.
And if I don't make those plans and saying, God, I want to see this thing happen. I want to see these things done and have these goals. I am shooting for nothing.
We must be a people like Nehemiah who are saying, God, I'm planning for you to do an amazing work.
And if I get to be a small part of it, maybe it's the generation after me that gets to see those things done. But we are planning and preparing and praying and saying, God, do your will in this life that you have given us.
And then look what happens in verses 8 and 9. Verses 8 and 9, Nehemiah begins to proceed with what God provides.
He takes the plan. He gives it before the king that he's prayed over. God grants these plans that he has been praying over. And now he says, this is what has happened.
God's Provision and Favor
God, who is sovereign, is unmistakably answering my prayers. The king said yes. Nehemiah got the letters. He got the timber. The king provided.
And verse 8 is probably the key verse that we're going to use all throughout this book. I want you to look at it, underline it, highlight it. If you're like Allie Green, you've got 17 different colored highlighters. I just have one. I use yellow.
Highlight this in your Bible. Write it down on a note card. Put it on your mirror. Put it on your daily notes that they'll pop up on your phone every day. This is what verse 8 says. The king granted my request. Ready? For the gracious hand of my God was on me.
Look at this key. The gracious hand of my God was on me. Nehemiah doesn't say this. He doesn't say, look at how well I was persuading the king.
Look at how great my speech was. I got it before the king and I laid out all my pros and cons and everything was doing great and I persuaded the king. Oh, he said, the gracious hand of my God was on me.
He didn't say, look at the leadership skills that I've got. Man, I can build walls.
I can build gates. I've got this visionary mind that I can go before the king and he's going to grant these things. He didn't say, you know what? I knew exactly what to say. Look at how great I was. He looks and he says, the gracious hand of my God was on me.
God gave Nehemiah permission. He was allowing him to go. God gave him provisions. He provided everything that he needed. He allowed the protection to happen. The king sent the officers ahead of him and he put him in the position to do things.
Nehemiah even made him a governor over the area. Have you ever looked back on your life and said, there is absolutely no way I could have orchestrated these things. There's no way I could have put together this situation or scenario for this to have happened.
Last night we had a family over. We were hanging out with them and they were asking us how me and Allison met. And I said, actually, she's from Arkansas and it's a weird place. You've probably never heard of it or seen there. A lot of weird things happen in Arkansas. It's beside Texas.
It's really above Louisiana. It's over there in the middle. It's a flyover state.
No one really goes there. I think there was a man from Hope that came from there. Bill Clinton came out of Arkansas.
And so all of a sudden you've got this lady from Arkansas and this weird backwards redheaded, four eyed, freckle faced guy from Rowan County, from North Carolina that somehow meet and get married.
And they're like, how did this thing happen? And so we're telling the story and like, there's no way I could have orchestrated it. There's no way I could have put these pieces together for these things to have happened. It had to be because God ordained these things and I could not have orchestrated it if I had tried.
Nehemiah realized that this wasn't luck. He realized that he wasn't in the right place at the right time.
He had been praying for the Lord to put him in the presence of the king in the proper timing of his ability to be able to answer the questions that he had. And the gracious hand of the Lord came on him and began to work in this way.
You see, he never celebrated the blessings. He recognized who the blesser was. And when we understand that God is the one that takes care of all these things, he gets the credit.
He's the one that we get to worship his ability as he's working in our lives.
And we begin to say, God, you are the one that's going to get the glory for everything that's said and done in anything that's said and done here in our church, in our family, in our community. 1 Corinthians 131 says this, So it is written,
let the one who boasts only boast in the Lord.
There's a reason that we can boast because God is the one that has had his gracious hand upon us. D.L.
Moody, one of my favorite people I read after and study after his life, he says this, We should work as though everything depends on us while praying as if everything depends on God. Because ultimately, everything depends on God.
And we must be a people who are saying, God, I don't understand how the finances are going to work.
I don't understand how this is going to be put together. I don't understand how this problem in the church is going to be solved. But I am going to trust in you. I'm going to pray for you.
And I'm going to do everything I can to work in order for it to depend on me. But pray as if you're the one that is handling the problem and the situation. Then we get to verse 10. All this has been great, right? Chapter 1, he hears the news. He prays.
Chapter 2, he goes before the king four months later. The king grants all of his requests.
And it's like, man, can Nehemiah, can anything bad happen to this guy? And then verse 10 gets thrown in and he goes like this. He says that Sanballat and Tobiah heard what was going on and that one had pursued the prosperity of the Israelites.
Expecting Opposition
And they were greatly displeased. Now the story begins to take a turn. Everything's going right. The king said yes. The letters were in his hand. The king even went a step further. I don't know if you noticed this little passage in there. This says in verse 8 that the king granted the military to escort Nehemiah to Jerusalem.
He said not only am I going to give you letters to protect you, I'm going to give you a military. I'm going to give you an infantry. You're going to go to Jerusalem and no one's going to hurt you. And all of a sudden the resources were provided and it's easy to think,
man, this is going to be easy. This is going to be so great. Everything's been provided for me. And now all of a sudden opposition comes in. And this is where we begin to learn some great lessons of Nehemiah.
God blesses him, but he does not mean that there's going to be an opposition. There's going to be an absence of opposition. In fact, one author said it like this. Opposition is evidence that you're moving in the right direction. Resistance often appears once God people actually begin working.
Difficulty does not automatically mean that we have stepped outside of God's will. It means we're going in God's direction and we're trying to work against the stream.
And the stream's coming against us and the fishes are coming against us that are just going down the stream. And all of a sudden we hit one. It's like, ah, I can't believe that happened, but I'm just going to keep moving forward. It's difficult. It's hard.
There's going to be resistance. The world's going to come against us, but we've got to push forward in the right direction. And God says that when we begin to work in his direction, in his will, there's going to be resistance.
There's going to be people that abandon ship. There's going to be people who think this direction you're going isn't the right way. It isn't the way that I wanted it to go. And why are we going that way? Jesus, the greatest teacher of all time,
the greatest pastor of all time, had 12 men that were his closest men. And the 12 men were around him. And one of them, Judas, wanted something different.
Jesus laid out his plan. He said, this is the way we're going to go. This is the covenant of the new kingdom. And Judas says,
I didn't sign up for this. I wanted a military ruler that was going to come in and overthrow the government. Jesus, who do you think you are and why are you doing that? And Jesus looked at him and said, Satan has overcome you. Go and depart from me.
And Judas leaves and betrays Jesus because he wasn't going the way that Judas wanted him to go. Peter, he sleaze and he looks at Jesus being beaten and hurt and being crucified.
And all of a sudden, this little girl comes up to him and he denounces Jesus. And he says, I don't even know that man. I'm not even one of his disciples. Who do you think you are?
All of a sudden, the things weren't going the way the disciples wanted them to go because the things got difficult. And they said, this isn't what we signed up for. I don't understand what is happening, Jesus.
You're supposed to be our Messiah. You're supposed to come in and rule and reign. And all of a sudden, now this is happening? When difficult times come,
people don't automatically say, let's just keep on going. Some people say, I didn't sign up for this.
I'm going to jump ship. There's two things I want us to understand here in verse 10. Number one, we must expect resistance.
Nehemiah has been praying. Nehemiah has been working as if it all depends on him. God now answers the prayers. Nehemiah plans. God provides. Nehemiah then goes forward with the plans and the prayers that he has been praying. And opposition shows up. In the middle of the opposition, God never abandons Nehemiah.
God continues to stay faithful beside him. He continues to see the work that he had been praying for mattered. And Sanball and Tiliad, they had these reasons to oppose these things. They were threatening their own political influence that they had been given.
This was not a random irritation. This was a specific threat that they were being benefited from the people being broken.
And they said, if these guys, if Nehemiah and this crew comes in and rebuild the walls, we're not going to have the authority that we once had.
And we've got to oppose this. And we've got to step in. And we've got to convince these people that they are comfortable with things being broken. The people living in Jerusalem, they were fine. Everything was broken down.
They had no protection. They had this false protection from the king. But yet the brothers came to Nehemiah and says, Our people are broken. Our people are hurting.
Will you do something to help us? They wouldn't have came to him if there wasn't something wrong. The people never wanted anything to be fixed.
And Nehemiah said, there is something wrong here and it must be fixed. My wife and kids, they like to watch this show called The Hoarders. Have anyone ever watched The Hoarders? AMC?
Okay. I've seen a couple of them. I think they're really like weird people. And if you're one of those hoarders, I'm not saying you're weird.
Trust me. But when you walk into someone's house and all of a sudden they can't get rid of something that's so little and so insignificant because they may need it one day in the future. And they've got boxes and boxes of things piled up. It's like, okay, maybe there's something wrong here.
Maybe we need to fix some of these things. The people can't get rid of them because they don't see there's a problem. My mom and stepdad live in a mobile double wide beside of a house.
The house, every single floor in the house has been caved in. This is how the people lived. It was a husband and wife. They lived in their bedroom. They had hoarded everything around their bed until literally the floor fell in.
And so they couldn't live in that room anymore. So they moved their bed into the living room.
And they lived in the living room until that floor fell in. And so they moved into one of the other bedrooms until that floor fell in. And until finally they're living in the kitchen, the entire house, everything's fallen in. But they can't not continue to hoard.
Even though they see the problem, they see these things are happening. And so that final bedroom falls in and they pull in a modular beside their house.
And they move into that and they continue the cycle over and over again. My mom said when she moved in, she found just stacks and stacks of things. The floor was once white.
It was black from dirt and grime that she said it took her weeks to scrub on her hands and knees to get the floor back clean. They were living in this despair because they thought that was just normal.
And the people of Israel were living in this despair.
And they said everything is broken around us, but we're just comfortable with how things are. And we don't want anything to be fixed because fixing it causes problems. And it causes pain to be able to set these things that are right. So they have to, we must expect resistance. I've got to hurry.
We must recognize the reality of resistance as well. My kids are upset because I didn't put an E there. They were so excited that everything was going to be alliterated. Recognize the reality of resistance.
As we continue through Nehemiah, opposition begins to take different forms. We're going to see ridicule. We're going to see discouragement. We're going to see accusation. We're going to see division. We're going to see the people fear and get fatigued.
And yet the source is the same. The enemy of God want to stop God's people from doing God's work.
It hasn't changed much since Nehemiah. The enemies of God want to stop God's people from doing God's work. And we must not get weary in well-doing as the Bible says. We're going to be ridiculed. There's going to be discouragement comes. There's going to be accusations that come against us. There's going to be division.
There's going to be fear. There's going to be fatigue. You're going to get tired of some things.
But God is telling us that the gracious hand of the Lord is upon us. As we go through, I want us to understand that this passage that we looked at has a greater meaning than just rebuilding walls. Humanity is a picture here in this city of Israel. Humanity is broken.
There is sin in this world. There is sin in our lives. And the only way for us to be fixed is not by fixing ourselves, but by allowing God to come in and him to step into our picture and to step into our life and repair us from the inside
Rebuilding Through Jesus
out. Through his hand of Jesus coming, he begins to rebuild our lives the same way Nehemiah rebuilds the story.
The gospel is about us rebuilding our lives through the work of Jesus so that we can look to him and say, it's all because of you, not because of me.
And we receive something infinitely greater than we can ever imagine, the forgiveness and the reconciliation and the eternal life that Jesus has promised us.
If we will do as Nehemiah does and humble himself and come before God and say, God, I can't do this on my own.
God, I need you in my life and I need you to work in my life. I don't understand how I'm going to have this relationship, but I can trust in you to work this out in my life. Maybe you're sitting here today and you say, my marriage is struggling.
My kids don't listen. Nothing is going right in my life. God is standing there saying, I am right in front of you and I am here to help you understand that God can work in our life and he can come into our life and he can repair these things that have been broken down. As Terry comes,
I want to give just a couple of closing statements. Perhaps you're here this morning and you've been saying, there's no way that I can do this. There's no way I can fix my family.
There's no way I can fix my own life. And I'm here to tell you that, yes, you are correct. There's no way that you yourself can do it. It is only through the help of God, through prayer,
through planning and saying, God, give me direction and allow me to step through those doors as they step open.
Nehemiah will remind us and he would say this, you are exactly right. You can never do this on your own strength. But yet he doesn't stop there. He prays. He plans. Opposition comes.
All of a sudden he gets to the city, his hometown, his brothers and sisters, and the opposition begins to come.
And I want you to imagine where Nehemiah was at. He was in the king's palace. He had everything. He had all the money. He had all the fancy things. Everything that anyone could ever imagine.
And he could have gotten there and the opposition would have came and he could have said, you know what? I didn't sign up for this. I'm going back to the palace.
I'm going back to where they take care of me. I'm going back to where the king shows favor on me. And all of a sudden, Queen Esther is there and she's sitting at the right hand of the king and she's pleading for the king because she had been through the same thing.
And all of a sudden he could have said that, but yet he didn't quit. The same God that opens the doors for us to walk through will be the same God that grants us grace to walk through those doors.
As difficult as it may be, we begin to see God is working in our life.
If you only remember one thing from today's message, I want you to remember the gracious hand of my God was on me. When the impossible seemed impossible to Nehemiah,
he looked and said, God was on me. When he had to wait for those four months, God's gracious hand was upon me. When he had to ask the king for this impossible request, the gracious hand of my God is upon me. When he needed provision,
when he needed necessities, when he needed to move forward when nothing else seemed possible, God's gracious hand was upon him.
God's Presence in Our Struggles
And when the opposition came, God's hand was still on him. Church, God is here with us. He is there through us if we believe in him. And he is saying, I am there through every single moment of your life. Are you praying? Are you planning?
Are you walking the way that I have asked you to walk? Because my hand will be upon you in ways that you'll never understand or see.
Whatever it may be today, let us pray for God to work in our life. God, we love you.
We thank you for who you are. Thank you for what you've done. Help us as we go through this study. As it has dramatically changed how I even view who you are as you look in deeply through Nehemiah.
As you look at how he is hurting, as he is just trying to figure out life.
And yet you step in and you give grace upon grace. Help us to be a people who are praying the same as Nehemiah. A people who are planning that you do something great. That you do something wonderful in our midst.
And that we would be able to walk through those doors as you continue to work in our lives. Help us as we respond to you this morning. In your name we pray. Amen.
Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week.
Auto-generated transcript · 7,342 words. May contain errors. Select a timestamp to play from that moment.
Listen to this sermon