Sermon Transcript
Now there arose a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish brothers. For there were those who said, with our sons and our daughters we are many, so let us get grain that we may eat and keep alive. There were also those who said, we are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses to get grain because of the famine. And there were those who said, we have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our fields and our vineyards. Now our flesh is as the flesh of our brothers, our children are as their children, yet we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have already been enslaved.
But it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards. I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and the officials. I said to them, You are exacting interest, each from his brother. And I held a great assembly against them and said to them, We, as far as we are able, have brought back our Jewish brothers who have been sold to the nations, but you even sell your brothers that they may be sold to us.
They were silent and could not find a word to say. So I said, the thing that you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of our God to prevent the taunts of the nations, our enemies? Moreover, I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us abandon this exacting of interest.
Return to them this very day their field their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the percentage of money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them. Then they said, we will restore these and require nothing from them. We will do as you say. And I called the priests and made them swear to do as they had promised. I also shook out the fold of my garment and said, so may God shake out every man from his house and from his labor, who does not keep this promise, so may he be shaken out and emptied.
And all the assembly said amen and praise the Lord. And the people did as they had promised. Well, thanks everybody for joining us today. I’m recording today’s message from Thursday, February the 11th, and I mentioned that specifically because I know some of you will be celebrating the Lunar New Year. For me, tomorrow, which is Friday, February the 12th.
By the time most of you watch this, it will have already passed, but the celebrations will continue. So I just want to say Happy Lunar New Year to all of our friends watching who will be celebrating that. I also want to say Happy Valentine’s Day because many of you, I’m assuming, will be watching this message on Sunday, February the 14th. If you didn’t know that, it’s Valentine’s Day, and I just want to let that register because I’m assuming, as I mentioned, that some of you just got a look of terror on your face because you’ve forgotten all about Valentine’s Day. So let me do this for you.
I’m happy to just sort of stay right here if you want to push pause, go run and scramble, go get some flowers or a present or a gift and act like you’d remembered Valentine’s Day all along. I won’t tell anybody and you just come on back and I’ll be right here. You can push play again. How about that? But I also was thinking about this holiday weekend because Monday, if you didn’t know, is President’s Day.
There’s— President’s Day falls on different days each each year. And normally on Presidents’ Day, I am away taking a mission trip with a group of people. At least that’s been the case for the last several Presidents’ Days that we’ve had. I had the privilege of taking teams down to Baja, Mexico, where we’ve built houses and done various forms of outreach. And I love taking mission trips, and I’m sad that we are not getting to do that right now at this point because of COVID And I’m looking forward to the day whenever we can go back to Baja or wherever the Lord may open up doors for us to go on mission trips.
I love taking trips. I love taking mission trips and then getting a group of people together and finding out what people’s talents and passions and gifts and experiences bring to the table, and then trying to navigate through those things as well as some obstacles to create a great team experience. And what I found most often is coming back from a trip where you’ve gone through some highs and some lows together with a team of people, you come back with a connection that’s just going to be with you for life with these particular individuals. I hope that you who are watching, if you’ve never gone on a mission trip or haven’t gone with me specifically, have the chance to join me in the future. But I do love coming up with a common goal and working together as part of a team and overcoming some of the curveballs that inevitably come our way.
And if you take a mission trip, you need to know there are going to be some curveballs thrown your way. Some are minor, like weather-related, or maybe showing up for a work site and the tools or the lumber isn’t there. We’ve had that happen. We’ve also had had minor scrapes and, and, and, and bumps and bruises and all those kinds of things, to also sometimes the obstacles are a little bit more daunting than that, and you have to work through that. I specifically remember a trip that I took to Morocco several years ago with a team of people, and we didn’t know it, but as we were flying from the United States to Morocco, everything changed about all of our plans, and we didn’t know it until we landed in Morocco in Casablanca.
And they told us plans have changed significantly and we had to just sort of adapt on the fly. I mentioned that because our guy Nehemiah that we’ve been studying for the past several weeks knew something about putting a team together and trying to work through obstacles and keeping focused on the goal. And when opposition comes, you got to keep the morale of the team high and focused on what needs to be done, the tasks that need to be done. And if you’ve missed the last few sermons, I just want to give a brief recap of where we are. This can be helpful for all of us as to where we are are right now in the book of Nehemiah chapter 5 and where we’ve come so far.
Here’s a brief recap. Jerusalem falls to Babylon and to Nebuchadnezzar, King Nebuchadnezzar, in the year 586 BC. Nebuchadnezzar was considered the greatest king of the Babylonian Empire, and God uses Babylon specifically as his agent of judgment against Israel for their sins of idolatry and rebellion against him. As a result of Babylon coming into Jerusalem, many people either died or fled or were exiled to Babylon, and Jerusalem was left in ruins, which included the walls around the city. Now, when we start reading Nehemiah 1, we’re fast-forwarding several years, and we’ll see that Nehemiah in chapter 1 of Nehemiah is an Israelite official serving in the Persian government.
You see, the Persian Empire overtook the Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, about 50 years after after Jerusalem’s walls fell. And when Nehemiah hears about the ruined state of Jerusalem’s walls, again, he’s not in Jerusalem, but he hears about the ruined state of Jerusalem’s walls, he’s heartbroken about it. He’s heartbroken, number one, because the walls offered, or were meant to offer, protection for the city. And so with the walls broken down, any enemy can just walk right in. But he’s even more torn up about the walls being down because Jerusalem was a holy city.
That was established to declare God’s greatness to the surrounding nations. And so broken walls in a way symbolized God’s reputation being brought into question in the eyes of others who were watching. So Nehemiah prays. He feels like God is leading him to go to the king that he serves, King Artaxerxes, and ask for permission to go back to Jerusalem. And he prays and prays and prays, and he finally— the right opportunity comes, and Nehemiah is given favor by God in the eyes of Artaxerxes, the Persian king, and Artaxerxes gives Nehemiah permission to go, and he even gives him an armed escort, and he gives him supplies and all of those things.
So the next few chapters show Nehemiah and his team going to Jerusalem and then starting this wall project. Chapters 3 and 4 detail, though, some of the opposition that Nehemiah and the workers encountered. The enemies of the wall project project had tried ridicule. They tried making fun of the workers. They had tried discouragement, telling them it was never going to work, they would never be able to finish.
The opposition had even physically threatened the team of builders and tried to scare them into quitting. And the project, just the sheer volume and size of it, was enormous. And you would imagine this would be a real challenge for a team of people trying to knock this out, all this opposition coming their way. But despite those challenges, Nehemiah chapter 4 ends on a note of optimism. Despite all of the obstacles, the people were building and doing the work that God wanted them to do.
They were determined not to let their enemies prevail or to stop the work. Chapter 5, though, as we just heard read a moment ago, there’s a new enemy, and it’s not one that people expected. It’s not opposition from the outside, it’s opposition from within. In. The internal strife described in chapter 5, I think there was so dangerous because it literally just stopped the work.
It just stopped the work in its tracks. They had pretty much contained these external threats, and there had been some growing momentum as time was going along, even though, yes, there had been some challenges. But now the work, as I said, just stops, and all of their energy now needs to be diverted and channeled and devoted to this internal battle, this internal opposition that had been brewing and was now just spilling over in chapter 5. I just wanna stop here and ask this question. Wouldn’t it be great if that kind of opposition and that kind of strife and that kind of turmoil never touched us as Christ followers?
Wouldn’t it be great if that stuff never was part of our relationships in, say, the church? Wouldn’t it be great if that kind of stuff just stopped at the doors of the church and we never dealt with that kind of turmoil? Well, if you’ve been a Christian for very long, you’ve likely seen a church or been a part of a church that has had some challenges whenever disagreement comes about. And disagreement is very natural when you have a diverse group of people, but sometimes that diversity can grow and can escalate. Now, we know that some disagreement is inevitable, right?
If you’re committed to sound biblical doctrine as a church, if you’re committed to certain standards or convictions around godly behavior, there will be some opposition, there will be some challenges. And difficulty in coming to agreement. If you seek to carefully follow the teachings of Scripture, even if you seek to do that and follow it to a T, there will almost always be some challenges and some disagreement and perhaps one or more people who will respond negatively, maybe question motives. Some people even just walk away. In the past year, we’ve seen this, right?
We’ve seen how the COVID crisis combined with heightened political and economic and racial tension has triggered unprecedented levels of conflict throughout the country. But it is also filtered into local churches. Churches have literally been dividing over masks and social policies and political divisions and political positions. So my question is, from this text, how do we keep that stuff— or how does Nehemiah keep that opposition that they were dealing with, the internal strife, from destroying our unity? How does— how are we going to be able to keep focused on the work that God wants us to do?
And this text, I think, can help us. Here’s why I think this matters so much. Here’s why I think it is so important for us to be clear on the value of unity and our expression of unity as we go about the work that God calls us to do. God wants to do a significant work. He wants to do a miraculous work in the lives of believers and in the lives of churches.
He wants to see his kingdom come and his will be done here on earth as it is being done in heaven. And that was also the case in Nehemiah 5. God wanted to do a miraculous work. But you can always be sure of this: anytime God wants to do a significant miraculous work through people, the enemy is always ready to pounce. And when I say the enemy, I’m not referring to one particular individual person or a group of people.
I’m specifically referring to who the Bible calls our great adversary, the father of lies, the devil himself, who comes to steal and kill and to destroy and to divide God’s people. And the enemy is just ready to pounce on people. And if he can’t get outside forces to stop the work that God wants to do, then he will readily and happily supply ammo to folks on the inside so that self-interest and selfishness take over, so that they begin turning against one another and people start picking sides, and then they’re off and running. Make no mistake about it, the enemy wants God’s work to stop and for God’s reputation to be damaged in the eyes of others. And internal strife is often what does the trick.
When a church is filled with internal strife, the kind that we see here in Nehemiah 5, when a church is filled with backbiting and opposition and people turning against each other. People who do not know the Lord want nothing to do with Christianity. That shouldn’t be new information for us, but it should be very sobering for us to remind ourselves. It gives people just another reason to doubt God’s existence or his goodness or their need for him. So again, the big question for us as we read this text and consider today, how do we maintain unity in spite of our diversity?
How do we maintain unity? How do we remain focused on what God wants us to do? That’s the big question for us, and we’re going to consider 3 aspects of this text today. We’re gonna look at specifically what happened, we’re gonna look at why it happened, and we’re gonna look at Nehemiah’s wise response to what happened. I like that we can do this with this story because usually when you’re in the middle of that kind of strife and disagreement and division in a group or in a church, it’s difficult to assess when you’re in the middle of it.
It’s difficult to figure out what exactly is happening and why it’s happening, but we have the opportunity and the privilege of looking back at Nehemiah and learning from his example. So we’re going to look at what happened, why it happened, and Nehemiah’s wise response to what happened. First, what happened? Verse 1 of chapter 5, you heard it just a moment ago, says the men and their wives, the workers on the wall, raised a great outcry against their fellow Jews, their own flesh and blood relatives. Well, what happened?
The wealthy were exploiting and ignoring the needs of the poor. The wealthy were exploiting and taking advantage of the poor. The haves were taking unfair advantage of the have-nots. Specifically, we heard about 4 groups of people who were being exploited. Verse 2, the first group are people who owned no land but who needed food.
There was not only a growing population, but there was also a food shortage. There were too many mouths to feed, too many people and too little food to go around. That’s one group that’s being exploited. Verse 3, we see a second group is a group of landowners who call out and complain that they are having to mortgage their property just to buy food, and they’re being exploited. There’s a third group, verse 4, that calls out and says that they’re having to borrow money just to pay the king’s taxes, and they’re struggling because the taxes were so high, and now they’re being forced to borrow money and to go into debt just in order to pay these taxes.
Even though they were more than 800 miles away from Persia, they were not exempt from paying the king’s taxes. And then there’s a fourth group that is being asked to consider selling their own children into slavery, verse 5, in order to pay for their debts, in order to get food for their family, to consider selling their own children into slavery. Imagine that. That was appalling in and of itself. But on top of that, they were concerned because, as we see there in the text, they were of the same flesh and blood as their fellow Jews who weren’t having to do that.
And they’re saying, your children are no better than our children. Our children have played together. We’re of the same same flesh and blood, and yet God’s people were doing this to one another. There was exploitation and unfair advantage being taken. In short, the rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, and there was overpopulation.
There was not enough food. There were high taxes. There were high interest rates and all sorts of inequities. And morale is just sinking. And as I mentioned, the work just stops.
And verse 5, I think, sums up the people’s feelings and position well. It says, we are powerless. That’s what they said. There was nothing they could do on their own to better their circumstances or their situation. And the bankers and lenders who were repossessing their things were their own flesh and blood.
And so they’re gonna need Nehemiah to step in here. But before we get there, we need to ask the question of why this was happening. We know what’s happening here, and we need to then ask why. And me personally, as I was studying this, I don’t think that that this particular text or circumstance was intended to be some sort of commentary to us on specific economic systems. I don’t, you know, certainly like we could talk about that.
We could talk about economic systems and we could talk about high taxes and high interest rates and all of those things. I think the problem was more than just simply financial. I think that misses the point. Just simply saying it’s financial misses the point of something deeper that’s going on. And so I’m going to suggest 2 sources of the problem?
Why was there a problem? The first one that I’m going to suggest is less obvious because it’s not specifically delineated in the text, but if you read the whole counsel of Scripture, you’re gonna know what I’m talking about here. And that is, I think one of the main reasons why they got into this mess in the first place, there’s such internal strife, is out of selfishness. Selfishness. And you may ask, well, where do you get that from?
Why selfishness? Well, let me ask you this: what is the source or the root root of almost all of the problems and conflicts that we face today. It’s selfishness. If not by you, then by somebody else. James 4:1-2 says this: What causes fights and quarrels among you?
There it is right there. Don’t they come from your desires? And I would add evil desires, fleshly desires, sinful desires that battle within you. You desire but you don’t have, so you You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and you fight. Selfishness is putting your own interests and concerns above the interests and concerns and needs of others.
To use the language of Philippians chapter 2, selfishness is akin to empty conceit. Selfishness is pride. It’s arrogance. It’s having an overly high opinion of yourself and again of your own needs, and it results in selfishness selfishness does in tearing down others out of self-protection. It, it results in greed and envy and stinginess and exploiting others and taking advantage of them, as we see here.
And of course, fractured relationships. The more well-to-do Jewish people were looking to their own interests first. And I think that this is something all of us are tempted to do in any disagreement or conflict, especially in a church, is to look out for our own interests, to work out of self-interest, to put my rights above your rights, to put my needs above your needs. Selfishness, I think, seems to find its way into just about every conflict we face. But if we just stop there, we’re going to miss something even deeper that I think led to selfishness.
And that is in verse 9. There’s a second why here. Nehemiah says that they, meaning those taking advantage of the vulnerable, were not walking in the fear of God. That’s there in verse 9. They’re not walking in the fear of God, and he’s calling them to begin walking in the fear of God.
Well, what does that mean, to walk in the fear of God? What does that mean, to live in the fear of God? When we read the book of Acts, the stories about the early church, the early Christian church, and the, the unity that they experienced in God’s power just coming down in an incredible way— it says in chapter 9 of Acts that the early church walked in and lived in the fear of God. What does that mean? Fearing God means living in constant awe, respect, and reverence of God, knowing that he, the eternal Creator, sees our every action.
He knows our every thought. He knows our every motive. And so in saying that the wealthy in chapter 5 were not walking in the fear of God, I think Nehemiah is saying that they were not revering God or respecting God through their actions, maybe with their words, they were respecting God and say that, yes, we follow God, but their actions said otherwise. They were not walking in the fear of God because they were forgetting about God’s generosity towards them, and they were not mirroring God’s generosity towards others when people were in need. They were not doing unto others as they would want done unto them.
They were not walking in the fear of God because they had forgotten God’s law. For instance, in Exodus 22:25, It says, if you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal. Charge no interest. Deuteronomy 23:19 says, do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. That sounds pretty point blank.
For the Jewish community, this was something that was instructed to them in the Old Testament, in God’s law. So for a Jewish person to charge interest to fellow Jewish people was wrong, but to do so charging such exorbitant interest was really wrong. Now some people might hear that and just say, well, that’s just good business, right? That’s what people go to business school to learn how to do. They learn exactly how to do that.
How do I make the most amount of money in the quickest amount of time? And if other people don’t make as much money, that’s okay because at least I’m making money, right? That’s what we learn how to do in business school. But again, I think the issue here is not simply about one group having more money than another group, because that’s bound to happen I think the larger issue is that they were not prioritizing people. They were not prioritizing their walk with God.
They were prioritizing money and their own security over people. They were prioritizing profit over God. And they were not walking in the fear of God. They were forgetting God’s law as it spoke to the Jewish people having to sell themselves into slavery. Leviticus 25:39, if any of your fellow Israelites become poor, and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves.
Again, it’s point-blank. Here’s the point: when there’s no fear of God within me, within you, or within a church, when, when we are not walking or living in the fear of God, there’s no awe of His sovereignty, there’s no respect of His power and authority, there’s no grasp of His specific will and the good that he works on behalf of those who love him, then we have no motivation. If we are not walking in the fear of God, we have no motivation and no basis for us to truly love others. Sooner or later, the good works will just go and we’ll just look out for ourselves. The compassion will dwindle.
Here’s what I know to be true from experience, and I’m sure you’ve probably experienced this, many of you as well. Is that how we treat other people as Christ followers, I believe, is an indication of whether or not we are walking in the fear of God. How we treat other people, those who are hurting, those who are in need, those who are forgotten and neglected and on the periphery, as well as those who are part of the church family, the body of Christ, how we treat other people is an indication of whether or not we are walking in the fear of God. I think that’s what Nehemiah is trying to say. I don’t think there’s any easy solutions here for Nehemiah because the problems they’re dealing with ultimately stemmed not from money and from economics but from people’s hearts, right?
The building of the wall didn’t create these problems. These problems already existed, but the building of the wall simply exposed these problems that were there the whole time. We’ve seen that happen with COVID We keep blaming COVID for all the different problems in our world. I think COVID has simply exposed some of the problems that have been there all along. And these root problems here in this story in Nehemiah 5, I think, stemmed from people ignoring God’s law.
It stemmed from them ignoring God’s instruction about how Israel was supposed to be unique among the nations and how they were to treat their Jewish brothers and sisters. They weren’t supposed to take advantage of them. They, they weren’t supposed to enslave them. Love for the family was supposed to supersede love for money. God’s law was intended to create equity and protection and blessing among them, but they were taking matters into their own hands and doing what was right in their own eyes.
They were not walking in the fear of God. So we have the what and we have the why, but what is Nehemiah’s response to this going to be? I think it’s a very wise response. We see that Nehemiah takes 3 steps wisely in response to this internal threat, and I personally like how Alistair Begg words this. It says that Nehemiah responded through first righteous indignation, then secondly careful contemplation, Then 3, direct confrontation.
First, righteous indignation. Verse 6, he got really angry, understandably so. But this wasn’t selfish anger, this was righteous anger. You see, there is an anger that the Bible says is okay. It’s saying— the New Testament says, be angry but do not sin.
There is an anger that leads to sin, and Nehemiah’s anger was righteous indignation. It wasn’t selfish anger, it wasn’t mere outrage. He wasn’t simply disagreeing about a personal preference that he had. No, he was righteously angry because he recognized that what was happening was wrong. Verse 9, he says, what you are doing is not right.
His righteous anger was driven by a sense of reverence for God and by compassion for the people as well. He was righteously angry because they had either forgotten or were deliberately disregarding God’s Word and what the law had said that they should and should not do. Do. He was righteously angry because what the Jewish people were doing was offensive to God, and so therefore it was offensive to Nehemiah himself. He was righteously angry because the work had stopped, and now nations who are looking on from the outside are ridiculing them, and ultimately they’re ridiculing God.
And Nehemiah was angry about that. He was righteously angry because the very things that were happening in chapter 5 had also taken place leading up to the Babylonian exile 70 years Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah had told and warned the people at that time to stop exploiting the poor, but they didn’t. And it became a reason that God allowed the Jewish people to go into exile. And now they’re doing it all over again to one another. They hadn’t learned.
And Nehemiah is upset about this. And I wonder if there were people listening to Nehemiah or watching him just saying, Nehemiah, calm down. What’s the big deal? Here. It is true that sometimes we have to pick our battles.
We have to decide, is this the hill worth dying on? And remember that not everything is worth fighting for. But this battle was worth fighting for because again, it was stopping the work. It was causing others to look on from the outside and say, this group is so messed up. And they were ridiculing them and ultimately ridiculing God.
So here’s a quick question, by the way, before we go any further. You may be wondering, how do I know if my anger is righteous or unrighteous? How do I know if whenever I’m angry, if that is that is pleasing to God or displeasing to God. And I’m gonna give you 2 quick litmus tests, just as an aside here. The first one is this, is when you’re angry, is your anger directed toward what angers God himself?
Is your anger directed toward what angers God himself? Like say, the influence of evil in society, or injustice, or as we see in today’s example, God’s people compromising and forgetting God’s word and not doing the things that God wanted them to do. If so, that may be righteous indignation your part if you find yourself angry about something that you know that also angers God. But there’s a second litmus test here that I think is even more probing. Is the primary goal of your anger to bring others into a loving and restorative relationship with God?
Ouch, that’s hard, right? Is the primary goal of your anger to bring others into a loving and restorative relationship with God? No, the primary goal of my anger is to win, right? It’s to get, it’s to get my point across so that other people can suffer and see how right I am. Actually, then I’m just having a temper tantrum if that’s my motivation.
How do you know? Those are 2 wonderful tests to gauge by. But the point is, we always have to check our attitudes and our motives, which brings us to the second thing that Nehemiah did. After righteous indignation, there was careful contemplation. Verse 7, he pondered the charges in his mind before making any accusations.
Nehemiah’s anger never reached out-of-control anger levels. He didn’t immediately launch into a speech that he would later regret. He didn’t send out a take-no-prisoners post and put it out on social media. Verse 10 indicates that he even evidently took time to consider his own personal example so that he wouldn’t be accused of being a hypocrite. He was saying, I lend things, but I don’t charge interest.
Interest. Follow my example. So this careful consideration— he’s even considering his own personal example. So it says after his initial anger, he consulted with himself and he exhibited self-control. As I think about that point, James 1:19 comes to mind.
Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. Quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. Angry. I don’t always do that well. Just the other day I was angry about something and I’d wished afterwards that I paused a bit longer before acting.
And I’m sure I’m the only one that has ever done that, but on the off chance you watching can possibly relate to what I’m talking about, I encourage you to memorize James 1:19. I’ve had it memorized for a while, but I don’t always apply it consistently, but I’m, I’m determined to keep working on it, and I hope that you are too. James 1:19.
So stop and think. Pray before you call, before you email, before you post, before you accuse. You may discover that you need to cool off or hold off until you cool off, or that you perhaps need to change your approach altogether. And then the third thing, after righteous indignation and careful contemplation, there was direct confrontation. Nehemiah directly confronted those who were in the wrong.
He called a large meeting to deal with the problem head-on and rebuke the leaders. They were the source of the immediate problem, so he didn’t go to other people to deal with it. He went to the source of the immediate problem, and he went to them first, and he called them to repent. Now notice, he didn’t just ask the nobles and the rulers to simply feel bad about what they had done. He didn’t tell them, hey, you guys knock it off and just cut it, you know, cut it out, stop what you’re doing.
He did more than that. He’s telling them they need to make things right. They need to make reparations. They need to restore that which they had unfairly taken from their Jewish brothers and sisters. If they had gotten into this mess through selfishness, then they needed to start by being unselfish.
If they got here by not walking in the fear of God, then they needed to repent of that. And now, this doesn’t always happen, but amazingly, the people actually went along with it after this direct confrontation, even taking a public oath to do what they had promised. They— it seems like a revival broke out. Team unity is restored. The work can now continue.
And verse 13 says a spontaneous worship service happened. They say, at this the whole assembly said amen and praised the Lord. That’s incredible. It doesn’t always work out that way, but this was a huge victory so that the work can continue. So again, I come back to our question I asked at the beginning.
How do we maintain unity in the face of disagreement and conflict and strife and challenges to our unity? How do we deal with that and maintain our witness in the eyes of others? I have 2 quick implications, sort of reminders that I think this text offers us. One is this. This account reminds me and hopefully reminds you that the way that God’s people live with and work with each other is meant to demonstrate the goodness of God to the world around us.
The way that we treat people who are hurting is meant to demonstrate God’s love and mercy and goodness to the world around us. Our actions, though, sadly often do just the opposite. And as I mentioned at the top, when a church or a group of Christ followers is filled with hypocrisy and internal strife and hardness of heart and a lack of compassion for people who are hurting and vulnerable, vulnerable, people who do not know the Lord, as I said at the beginning, really want nothing to do with Christianity. They look on and say, if that’s the church, then forget about it. I’m not interested.
If that’s who God is, forget about it. Therefore, maintaining the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace as brothers and sisters in Christ is imperative. The world is watching. We need to do our part, each individually, to contribute toward peace and preferring others and putting others’ needs above our own for the sake of unity and our witness. But there’s a second reminder here, and this is an even bigger one that I think we can take with us, and that is the ultimate solution to the internal conflict and the greed and the stinginess here, and the ultimate solution to the conflict that we deal with and greed and stinginess in our own lives, or to indifference about the plight of others is not becoming more religious.
That’s not the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution is not just redoubling your efforts to try to be a better person next time. That may work temporarily or on a superficial level, but what we need most, as the story indicates, are new hearts. We need new hearts. The kind of new hearts that change us into more generous and compassionate and Christlike people.
People who treat others the way that Jesus treated people. The kind of hearts that refuse to take advantage of others. The kind of hearts that are willing to aggressively confront selfishness and greed in our own lives before pointing it out in others. We address it in our own lives. The kind of hearts that are willing to speak up for and on behalf of the vulnerable.
The kind of hearts that are willing to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of unity in the church. Those kind of hearts can only come from one The gospel. You hear us use that word often. I just— the gospel is the good news, the announcement of how God has graciously accepted and forgiven us, forgiven us, made that possible for us to have a relationship with him. That is, that is what it means to be a Christ follower, to put your trust and your hope in what Jesus did for us as our sin substitute so that we can be accepted by God and forgiven.
And have eternal life. That’s, that’s what it means. That’s, that’s what the gospel provides. But on top of that, the gospel also has the power to make us into new people each and every day. It has the power to restructure our motivations and our view of the world.
And we need to reorient our life every day around the gospel, the truth of God’s generosity and mercy towards us, and to extend that to others.
Friends, I hope that we’re reminded of God’s great generosity this week towards us and that we would mirror that to the world. Around us for the sake of unity and the sake of our witness. May it be so. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I want to thank you for this text and that we can look back to learn so that hopefully we can have a better future in the way that we interact with one another.
And Lord, I want to take responsibility for areas where my heart, where my heart is hard and where I am greedy and where I am stingy and where I put myself above others. And I pray, God, God, that you would forgive me for that. And Lord, for those listening, Lord, where, where that is the case, where we turn a blind eye to people who are struggling and hurting, or where we are, whether knowingly or unknowingly, taking unfair advantage of others or exploiting them or elevating our needs above them or elevating money and security and our own, um, self-interest above you, God, I pray that we would turn away from that. Thank you, God, for providing us Jesus to be our sin bearer, the one who came to make peace with us. And I pray, God, that we in turn would receive that peace and make peace with others in the way, God, that we live.
May we be generous and open-handed and kind and Christlike in our interactions this week. God, we pray all these things not for our sake, but for your the sake of unity in the church, and even more, we pray it for your glory. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
