Sermon Transcript
Before this, Elisha the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain new wine, and olive oil prescribed for the Levites, musicians, and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had returned to the king. Sometime later I asked his permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Elishib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God, I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room.
I gave orders to purify the rooms, and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God, with the grain offerings and the incense. I also learned that the portions assigned to the Levites had not been given to them, and that all the Levites and musicians responsible for the service, had gone back to their own fields. So I rebuked the officials and asked them, Why is the house of God neglected? Then I called them together and stationed them at their posts. All Judah brought the tithes of grain, new wine, and olive oil into the storerooms.
I put Shelamiah the priest, Zadok the scribe, and a Levite named Pedadiah in charge of the storerooms and made Hanan son of the son of Mattaniah, their assistant, because they were considered trustworthy. They were made responsible for distributing the supplies to their fellow Levites. Remember me for this, my God, and do not blot out what I have so faithfully done for the house of my God and its services. In those days I saw people in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys. Together with wine, grapes, figs, and all other kinds of loads.
And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day. People from Tyre who lived in Jerusalem were bringing in fish and all kinds of merchandise and selling them in Jerusalem on the Sabbath to the people of Judah. I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, What is this wicked thing you are doing, desecrating the Sabbath day? Didn’t your ancestors do the same thing, so that our God brought all this calamity on us and on this city?
Now you are stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath. When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem, but I warned them and said, Why do you spend the night by the wall? If you do this again, I will arrest you.
From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath. Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy. Remember me for this also, my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love. Moreover, in those days I saw men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah.
I rebuked them and called curses down on them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair. I made them take an oath in God’s name and said, you are not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves. Was it not because of marriages like these that Solomon king of Israel sinned? Among the many nations there was no king like him.
Him. He was loved by his God, and God made him king all over Israel. But even he was led into sin by foreign women. Must we hear now that you too are doing all this terrible wickedness and are being unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign, foreign women? One of the sons of Joedah son of Eliashib the high priest was son-in-law to Sanballat the Horonite, and I drove him away from me.
Remember them, my God, because they defiled the priestly office and the covenant of the priesthood and of the Levites. So I purified the priests and the Levites of everything foreign and assigned them duties, each to his own task. I also made provision for contributions of wood at designated times and for the firstfruits. Remember me with favor, my God.
You know, reading Nehemiah chapter 13, I have to say, this is not really a good way to end a story. I mean, where’s the, and they all lived happily ever after, at the end? If you had written this version of Nehemiah as a novel and you’d sent it to a publisher for their consideration, they would reject it right away for the depressing, anticlimactic ending alone, and they would conclude that you as a writer have a really twisted sense of humor or that you were clearly having a bad day when you wrote it. Or let’s say that you wanted to make a feel-good movie about the events in Nehemiah. You certainly wouldn’t include what happens in chapter 13.
You would probably just stop with chapter 12, maybe verse 43, where it says, and on that day they offered great sacrifices, rejoicing because God had given them great joy. The women and children also rejoiced, and the sound of their rejoicing could be heard from far away. So in your feel-good movie about Nehemiah, you’d probably wanna end with that scene, maybe include a big musical number at the end. Maybe there’d be whichever actor is playing Nehemiah, I’m thinking maybe Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, whichever one is available and whichever one will take less money to do it, off to the side, perhaps leaning up against a palm tree, watching the whole scene unfold and just shaking their head with a smile on their face. And one of the Israelites would come up to Nehemiah and say, hey, Nehemiah, you did it.
You rebuilt the walls. And then Nehemiah would say, no, we did it. And then they would both laugh and maybe bro hug or high five one another. And then there would be closing credits as the music continues, maybe throwing some bloopers, hilarious outtakes from the film. Everyone leaves the theater happy and demands a sequel.
That’s how you end a story. That’s not how Nehemiah ends. Chapter 12 ends with rejoicing and celebration over all that God had done, but chapter 13 actually ends with the people undoing every significant accomplishment in the book. The newly restored temple, they defiled it. The Torah, they’d committed to it at first, but not for very long, and then they ignored it.
The walls of Jerusalem, they let merchants and sellers gather and sleep outside by the walls in order to sell their goods on the Sabbath. On top of that, Nehemiah himself seems to change throughout the course of the book. We had first met him pouring out his heart to God and waiting on God’s perfect timing in chapter 1, and then the book ends with him becoming violent and forcefully coercing the people to repent. What exactly happened between chapter 12 and chapter 13? And that’s a really, really important question, and I think it’s one that has great import and implication for our lives today.
If you haven’t been tracking with us throughout our sermon series from the book of Nehemiah, let me catch you up to speed. Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian Empire and to King Nebuchadnezzar in the year 586 BC. Why? Well, despite repeated warnings from various prophets of God within Israel, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of, of the survivors to Babylon was a direct consequence of Israel’s idolatry and rebellion against God. The book of Nehemiah then picks up several years later in chapter 1, when Nehemiah, an Israelite official serving in the Persian government, because Babylon had fallen to the Persian Empire in the year 539 BC, hears about the ruined state of Jerusalem and of its walls.
And Nehemiah prayerfully petitions the Persian King Artaxerxes to let him and a wave of other Israelites return to Jerusalem. So they return. They deal with lots of opposition and ridicule and physical threats. Threats, and even some infighting among the Israelites themselves. You may remember in chapter 5 in which the haves were exploiting the have-nots and it just stopped the work on the wall altogether.
But despite those obstacles, they did rebuild the wall, and in 52 days they did it. Then in chapters 7 through 12, Ezra and Nehemiah worked to rebuild the people. In chapter 8, Ezra reads the Law of Moses aloud to the people, which then convicted the people of their sinfulness and rebellion against God. The people confessed and repented of their sin, cried out for God to be merciful in chapter 9. Then in chapter 10, the people express their recommitment to God by making a binding agreement, a binding agreement to do what?
First, to follow and obey the law of God. 2, to no longer intermarry with the people outside of Israel. 3, to honor the Sabbath and to keep the sabbatical year. And 4, to financially contribute towards the priesthood and towards the ministry of the temple. They committed those things.
Then chapters 11 and 12 end on a high note with the dedication of the walls, purification of the leaders, songs of thanksgiving sung by the people walking around the top of the walls, complete with marching bands and everything. It was a raucous celebration and it was a spiritual revival. And again, that’s how you end a story, but that’s not how chapter 13 ends. In chapter 13, what we see is a picture of spiritual entropy. The term entropy comes from the world of physics.
It’s related to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Essentially, entropy speaks to the fact that unless some type of energy is applied effectively from the outside, everything left to itself has a natural tendency toward decay, decline, disorder, degeneration, deterioration. It’s true that in the physical world that is the case, but it’s also true in our spiritual lives. We don’t always call it entropy though, we call it backsliding. We resort back to our old habits and our old ways.
Most of the time if you trip and you fall physically, it’s unintentional. You didn’t mean to do it, but you did it. And that happens spiritually as well. People fall back spiritually and they weren’t planning on doing it, but maybe in a way, though they weren’t planning on it, they were setting themselves up for it. When a person falls away spiritually, it’s because there’s been a neglect in their spiritual life.
And because they’re failing to move forward, they nudge, if ever so slowly, inch by inch backward. Because if you’re not moving forward spiritually, you’re moving automatically backward. There is no standing still. You’re either progressing or you’re regressing. So then you wake up one day and you say, how did I end up in this state?
I don’t know. I don’t remember when this happened. Well, that’s because it’s usually gradual. And the Bible warns about this in Jeremiah 2:19, where it says, your wickedness will punish you. Your backsliding will rebuke you.
Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the Lord your God and have no awe of me, declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty. So every Christ follower, every church, every Christian organization can lose its focus over time. We drift spiritually. We become spiritually lethargic, apathetic, negligent, inattentive, desensitized, and what used to be important stops being so important. And like a slow leak in a tire, it happens so subtly and so gradually and so imperceptibly that we usually don’t even notice it as it’s happening.
When my kids were little, we used to take them to water parks and we always loved a good lazy river. You know, where you sit in tubes and you ride along with the current and you just float. It’s fantastic. I’ve always wanted my own lazy river at the house, by the way. And if we had that though, you people would never really see me around here.
The key word in the phrase lazy river is the word lazy. You don’t really have to do anything. You just sit in your tube and you go wherever the current happens to take you. And if you wanna specifically go somewhere other than where the current is taking you, you have to do a little bit of work. You either have to paddle hard or physically get out of your tube and walk to where you want to go.
And if you miss your exit because you weren’t paying attention or because you weren’t paddling hard enough or exerting enough energy, you usually just have to go around the entire lazy river circuit again, which, let’s be honest, it’s not such a bad deal if you’re talking about a lazy river. But it’s a much, much bigger deal when you’re talking about the Christian life. The Christian life Life is not described in the Bible as a lazy river. It’s not like laying out on the beach. It’s a battle.
It’s a struggle. It’s a war against the current of the world and against our sinful nature that naturally drifts towards disobedience to God and to his word. And you need the Spirit of God and you need the help of God to keep you from naturally inching away from him, away from holiness, and away from his preferred future. For your life, and no one is excluded. So an important question to ask is, how do we maintain our vigilance?
How do we maintain our focus? How do we prevent entropy and backsliding in our spiritual lives? We’re going to look today at 3 aspects of spiritual entropy from chapter 13 to help us address these questions. First, we’ll look at the utter predictability of spiritual entropy. Then we’ll look at the pervasive nature of it, and then we’ll consider the prescription for it.
The predictability of it, the pervasiveness of spiritual entropy, and then the prescription. First, the utter predictability of spiritual entropy. In verse 6, Nehemiah says, but while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem. And when you read that, that should immediately set off alarm bells. You’ve probably heard this said before.
When the cat’s away, the mice will play. Every schoolteacher knows this. You step out of the classroom for just a moment and there’s no guarantee of what things will look like when you get back into the classroom. Every parent has the same experience. I’ve had the same experience.
When your kids get old enough and you first begin letting them stay at home by themselves without a sitter and you wonder, what exactly am I going to walk into when I get back home? So one of the obvious reasons why spiritual entropy and backsliding set in among this people was that their leader, Nehemiah, wasn’t around. Nehemiah’s first term as governor, according to chapter 5, lasted for 12 years. He then returned to Babylon to report back to the king for an unspecified period of time. And when he got back to Jerusalem, the people were not living up to the vows that they had made to God just a couple chapters before in chapter 2.
In fact, they were doing the exact opposite of what they had vowed. You remember when they had vowed to not neglect the temple? They had literally promised, quote, we will not neglect the house of our God, in chapter 10. But while Nehemiah was away, verse 4 of chapter 13 here tells us that Eliashib, the priest who was responsible for the vessels, the rooms, and the worship in the temple, he made the unthinkable decision to turn the temple into an Airbnb and to allow Tobiah to occupy a room or possibly multiple rooms in the temple. And you might be thinking, um, Tobiah, wasn’t Tobiah Israel’s enemy?
Wasn’t Tobiah one of the guys we met earlier in the book who was a thorn in Nehemiah’s side during this whole wall project? Didn’t Tobiah stand against, resolutely against, Israel’s success? And the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes. Yes, that Tobiah. Tobiah had personally criticized, attacked, and assaulted Nehemiah and had tried every way to thwart the work of God.
And now he’s living in the temple because of Eliashib the priest. And it was bad enough that Tobiah was living in the temple. And it was bad enough that a priest, a spiritual leader in Israel no less, was the one who let him in, but that this intruder was using a room that was supposed to be dedicated to God. And when Tobiah moved in, they had to throw out the grain and the oil and the incense that the Levites which meant they would not have any supplies to work with. And since they couldn’t perform their ministry, and since verse 10 tells us that the people were no longer contributing financially to the temple, which by the way, they had promised would not be the case back in chapter 10, the priests and the Levites are no longer adequately supported.
So they had to go back to their own fields in order to find other work and to make a living. And you remember back in chapter 10, when the people had vowed to no longer dishonor the Sabbath, By chapter 13, grain is being sold on the Sabbath. Loads are being brought in on the Sabbath through the city gates and taken back out. People were conducting business on the Sabbath just like it was any other day. And you remember when the people back in chapter 10 had vowed to no longer intermarry with the pagan nations around them?
I pointed out at that time in that message that when God told the people in the law not to intermarry with other nations, it was not intended to be a discriminatory prohibition. Nor was it intended to be about Israel preserving their ethnic distinction. It was an issue of spiritual compromise because intermarrying with non-believers inevitably turned the people’s hearts away from following God. It caused them to backslide. So they had made a promise in chapter 10 to only marry others within Israel, and yet we see right here in chapter 13 and verse 23 that they reverted back to their old ways, to intermarriage.
But why would we be surprised by that? Because verse 4 had told us that one of their spiritual leaders, Eliashib the priest, was a relative of Tobiah, who was not an Israelite, which means that someone in Eliashib’s household had intermarried with someone from Tobiah’s line. And verse 28 tells us that one of the sons of Eliashib had married into the family of another one of the enemies of the wall project, Sanballat. You remember him? And Sanballat was also not an Israelite.
Well, what was Nehemiah’s response to all of this? We’ll get to that in just a moment, but I think we have to admit right now that it’s at least a bit humorous, somewhat, in verse 6 that Nehemiah is quick to point out, hey, don’t look at me. I wasn’t in Jerusalem at this time, okay? I knew nothing about this. It is true that when Nehemiah left town, the people lacked some accountability.
That is true. And maybe Maybe, maybe it’s possible that had Nehemiah been around, the people would have kept on the straight and narrow. Maybe, possibly, but I wouldn’t bet on it, would you? I mean, this is exactly what spiritual entropy does to all of us. It causes us to let our guard down, to lower our defenses and our resistance to sin.
A little decision here, a small compromise a minor rationalization over here, and maybe the specific struggles and temptations that you encounter every day are altogether different from what Nehemiah returned to whenever he came back here in chapter 13, but it’s all rooted in the same place, all of it. It’s our sin-sick hearts. It’s the most predictable thing ever. Here’s what I know. We are like the Apostle Paul.
We are slaves to sin, all of us, slaves to sin. Paul says in Romans 7, I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. In other words, we’re a mess. You know that hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, and that line that says, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it? That’s us, that’s me, that’s you.
All of our drifting, all our wandering and our compromising and all our rationalizing does is just confirm that we’re really good at getting off track. We’re experts at it, just like Israel here in chapter 13. It’s utterly predictable. Secondly, the pervasiveness of spiritual entropy and backsliding. There’s a principle in Scripture found in 1 Corinthians 5:6.
It says this, a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough. Throughout the Bible, and especially in the New Testament, yeast is used as a metaphor for something very small that causes great consequences. When added to a lump of bread dough, the yeast ferments the starches in the dough and causes the dough to increase in size. And without yeast to leaven the dough, the loaf that comes out of the oven is flat. So it takes just a little bit of yeast to leaven dough thoroughly and to make it rise.
And in the same way, what we see in Nehemiah chapter 13 is how the compromise of one or two people spreads like a wildfire and it impacts the entire community. See, we have this mistaken belief that as long as my sin doesn’t harm anybody else, it’s none of your business. What do you care? It’s private. But personal sin is very rarely an isolated event.
Our sin always seems to have a ripple effect that ends up eventually touching others. Like Eliashib the priest, choice to allow Tobiah to move into the temple. That harmed the Levites and the musicians and the gatekeepers and the priests. Or like the people’s failure to prioritize financial giving to the temple. That forced the Levites and the musicians responsible for the temple service to move outside of the city with their families and to try to find some other type of work.
Or like the decision to desecrate the Sabbath by bringing in grain and wine and fish and all kinds of merchandise into Jerusalem, that led others who were buying and consuming these products to desecrate the Sabbath as well. We’re like the Israelite fathers who were giving their daughters to non-Israelite men in marriage. One of the unfortunate byproducts of Israel returning to its former ways of intermarriage was that now a generation of children were growing up in families in which they no longer learned or practiced speaking Hebrew. And this was concerning to Nehemiah Nehemiah because the children needed to be able to speak Hebrew if they were to be able to read the scriptures on their own. And if the children didn’t know the language of Israel, how were they going to be able to participate in the services at the temple?
You’re talking about a generation that was going to be lost to the faith. And what might that mean for the future of the nation? Once again, make no mistake, spiritual entropy is pervasive, left unchecked, it eventually starts impacting others around you. I think you could even make a case that Nehemiah was not immune to all of this, by the way. Now, I don’t wanna make too much of this, but I also don’t wanna make too little of it either.
I’m just gonna point it out. You may have noticed that in chapter 13, Nehemiah records 4 separate little mini prayers in this chapter. Verse 14, he says, remember me for this, my God, and do not blot out what I have so faithfully done for the house of my God, and its services. Verse 22, remember me for this also, my God, he prays, and show mercy to me according to your great love. Then in verse 29, he prays, remember them, my God, because they defiled the priestly office and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.
And then verse 31, remember me with favor, my God. Now, if you just took any one of those prayers in isolation, you might think these are the faithful utterances of a godly man looking to God alone for his commendation. But Don Carson points out something interesting here, that when these types of statements or prayers show up to this degree of concentration in one chapter here, in chapter 13, it takes on an entirely different tone and it no longer sounds any more like the Nehemiah that we first encountered back in chapter 1. Don Carson goes on to suggest that Nehemiah seems to be saying here in chapter 13 something to the effect of, God, remember me. I’ve done a lot of work and I’ve done a pretty good job.
Those people, they failed, so remember that too, but mostly remember me, God. Don’t judge me for their sins. At least I tried. So I’m just gonna ask, is it possible, could it be that Nehemiah’s focus is changing a bit too? Over time, just like the people.
We certainly don’t know all that was in his mind and his heart when he prayed these things. It just stands out in this particular setting. The point is that, again, individual entropy and individual compromise frequently comes back to impact the larger body, the community. When a parent compromises in their relationship with God, it impacts the children. When a spouse compromises in their relationship with God, it impacts When a spiritual leader or a church member compromises in their relationship with God, it doesn’t take long for it to impact others in the church or in the community.
Spiritual entropy is pervasive. It’s like a cancer that slowly works its way through the entire body unless you take drastic measures to stop it from spreading. So what should be done about this cancer, this entropy? That brings us to the prescription for spiritual entropy. I just wanna start with this idea that it’s important for us to know.
First and foremost, spiritual entropy is only ever corrected by the initiative and the appeal and the mercy of God. Throughout Scripture, we see God appealing, pleading with his people, pleading, saying, return to me and I will receive you. Return to me and I will restore you. Return to me and I will heal you. You, and it’s a gracious invitation.
But it should also be said, God won’t do your repentance for you. He waits for you and for me to respond to His appeal. And as He waits, He often uses a variety of means to get our attention. He uses His Word. He uses a sermon, maybe even this one today.
He uses the prayers of one or more people on your behalf. He uses an encouraging conversation with a friend or maybe even a stranger, maybe a divinely orchestrated circumstance, a miracle, or perhaps even strong rebuke and admonishment from someone else who really, really cares about you and is concerned about the direction that you’re heading. That’s certainly what we see here in chapter 13, where Nehemiah deals with each of the threats to spiritual wholeness in this chapter in a very, shall we say, aggressive manner. Start with Tobiah living in the temple. Nehemiah did not give him a 30-day notice to vacate the premises.
He threw him out immediately. He then called the guys from 1-800-JUNK and threw all of Tobiah’s things out, and then he gave orders to completely cleanse the rooms, verse 9. Well, why did he do that? Because Tobiah’s contaminated life was contaminating the temple. And that it would eventually contaminate the people.
They didn’t even want the smell of Tobiah to linger around the place. They just said, fumigate this place, cleanse it, purify it. We want nothing to do with that type of spiritual compromise around here. What about desecrating the Sabbath? Not on Nehemiah’s watch.
So when Friday evening rolled around and the sun was setting, Nehemiah said, shut the gates, the Sabbath is coming. He then stations his own men at the gates to make sure that no merchant tries to bring in any loads on the Sabbath. And when the merchants and the sellers would gather outside the gates, Nehemiah threatened to have them arrested. The English Standard Version of verse 21 says that Nehemiah threatened to, quote, lay hands on them. In the Bible, you may know this, but there’s 2 kinds of laying on of hands.
There’s the good kind and there’s the bad kind. And this wasn’t the good kind. I don’t think Nehemiah was laying hands on them in order to pray for them or to anoint them for service, to commend them. No, I think he was laying hands on them to deal harshly with them. Well, what about those fathers who were giving their daughters in marriage to non-Israelites?
To quote from Nehemiah himself in verse 25, I rebuked them and I called down curses on them. I beat some of the men and I pulled out their hair.
Okay. You know, as a quick aside, I have to say that I used to read out of a little children’s Bible to my kids when they were younger. And this story, sadly, was not in there. I’m disappointed about that. There was no colorful pictures of Nehemiah grabbing people and yanking out their hair.
But I digress. When it says here in Nehemiah 13 that Nehemiah was cursing the people, it probably doesn’t mean that he was shouting expletives and foul language at them. He was probably calling down, actually, the curses of God of the covenant from Deuteronomy chapter 28. In other words, he was likely speaking over the people the very curses that God had pronounced over such sinful behavior. And when it says that Nehemiah was pulling people’s hair out, he most likely wasn’t just grabbing people at random.
It was likely more of a public shaming ritual or a ceremony where certain people, or perhaps community leaders, were being disciplined for their shameful conduct. But you get the point. He wasn’t just going to sit around and tolerate spiritual entropy. And each time he rebuked the people, he intervened and he took drastic steps in the hopes that people would hear through his actions the gracious appeal of God for them to stop doing what had gotten them into this mess in the first place, to turn and to repent.
Regardless of the means that God uses to break the tide of spiritual entropy in your life, you eventually, I eventually have to make a conscious personal choice. Again, God’s not gonna do it for us to respond to God’s gracious appeal to us and to take action, drastic action if necessary. Jerry Bridges tells the story in his great little book, The Pursuit of Holiness. And if you’ve never read The Pursuit of Holiness, I highly recommend you read Jerry Bridges’ book, The Pursuit of Holiness. But in that book, about an uncomfortable conversation that he once had with someone who had a particular sin problem and was saying, I’ve been praying that God would motivate me to stop.
And Jerry Bridges stopped the person and said, motivate you to stop? What you’re saying in effect is that God isn’t doing enough, that he hasn’t done enough. You’re just asking God to do something more because you’re postponing facing up to your own responsibility. First of all, ouch. Second of all, we have to understand that may sound harsh to some of us, but isn’t it also loving?
Nehemiah takes a similar approach here. He doesn’t waste time. He doesn’t listen to excuses. He doesn’t ponder these things in his heart. He doesn’t try to curry favor.
He doesn’t just let it go. He reacts. He confronts. He brings correction. He rebukes.
And it was good and right and necessary that Nehemiah responded in this way with righteous indignation. ‘Cause that’s how seriously God takes spiritual entropy. In fact, Nehemiah, if you think about it, is actually foreshadowing one that we can read about in the Gospels in the New Testament who would come to the temple and find rather than the worship of God being upheld there, the temple had turned into an indoor-outdoor market. You remember that story? And on that occasion, that man who was righteously indignant about what was happening in the temple made a whip overturned tables, dumped out bags of money, and drove people out of the place to call the people back to their worship of God.
He, this individual, like Nehemiah, was cleansing the temple and appealing for the people to return to God. And I’m talking, of course, about Jesus. When Jesus came to earth, when he literally gave his life as a substitutionary sacrifice to pay the penalty for your sins and for my sins, That was God’s ultimate appeal to humanity. It was his ultimate demonstration of love. It was the ultimate appeal for you and me to draw back to him.
And his appeal remains the same today. Return to me, come to me, and I will receive you. Return to me, confess your sins, and I will forgive. Return and follow me, and I will give you new life. And a new heart.
That appeal still exists today. There’s so many lessons we could take from the book of Nehemiah as we’ve gone through all 13 chapters now. I just want to say on the heels of this message today, if there is spiritual entropy in your relationship with God, if there are areas where you have gradually drifted away from where you know that God wants you to be, there is no better time to respond to God’s appeal than right now. Don’t wait another moment. Stop wandering, stop drifting, and return to Him.
Let’s pray.
Father, we thank You that You care enough about us that You would send Your Son Jesus to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins, taking our sins upon Himself, the one who knew no sin becoming sin so that we could be made right with And we thank you that you love us so much that you pursue us and invite us to know you. You don’t want us to stay where we are. You appeal to us, and it’s your kindness and your patience and your love that leads us and draws us and causes us to repent. And we thank you for your faithfulness, for not giving up on us. And even today, the fact that we have breath, the fact that we have life, is a sign of your mercy, and I pray that before it’s too late, that I and anyone who might potentially, Lord, be drifting from where you want us to be, that you would call us back, that we would repent and receive your grace and your forgiveness.
We thank you for that. Lord, I pray that if we need to intervene in other people’s lives to call them back to you, as your Spirit speaks through us, lead us to those circumstances. May we do so lovingly and compassionately with your zeal and with your great love.
Thank you, God, for this study in Nehemiah. We’ve learned so much. I pray that we would, as always, Lord, be hearers and doers of the word. Thank you for your faithfulness. We pray in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
