Nehemiah - Chapter 4: Opposition to the Rebuilding
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
We are in our Nehemiah series. So if you are here live streaming or you're listening later, welcome. Sorry you're going to miss out on the food, but we are diving into chapter four. So the first week, Pastor Chris talks about Nehemiah kind of set us up for the whole story and talks about prayer and what that looked like in Nehemiah's life and how he constantly turned to prayer first. And then in week two, Pastor Andre talked about being put in places of influence and how we can leverage those positions, whether it's at work or it's in our homes or even just our position in relationship with God and what that looks like to pray for other people and to leverage that relationship. And then week three, we talked about unity within the group, how the Jews had to come together and be unified and they had a common purpose of rebuilding the wall. And they were unified in that despite their differences, their different statuses, their different positions, their different jobs, they all had different skills. And so they came together and were unified in that. Well today, they are going to come up, we're going to see in chapter four, that they're going to come up against some more opposition. And we're going to talk about what it looks like when we come up against roadblocks and opposition and discouragement. So that's our main focus today. I realized as I was reading through this, I say the word discourage or discouragement a lot today. So if someone wants to keep a running tally, you know, if you're bored, you can just tally up and let me know how many times I say it, because it's probably going to be a lot today. But I think that there's a lot of truth in Nehemiah that we can draw from, that we see how he responds to it, how he encourages the people and how we can respond to it in our own lives.
So we're going to just start off in Nehemiah four. So if you want to turn there or scroll on your phones, it'll be up on the screens as well. But we're going to just start right at verse one. When Sambalat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became angry and was greatly incensed. He ridiculed the Jews. And in the presence of his associates and the army of Samaria, he said, "What are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble, burned as they are?" Tobiah, the Ammonite, who was at his side, said, "What are they building? Even a fox climbing up on it would break down their wall of stones. Hear us, our God, for we are despised. Turn their insults back on their own heads. Give them over as plunder in a land of captivity. Do not cover up their guilt or blot out their sins from your sight, for they have thrown insults in the face of the builders." So we rebuilt the wall till all of it reached half its height, for the people worked with all their hearts. We were introduced to Sambalat and Tobiah in chapter 2, and they were from a nearby country and they had some feelings about this wall being rebuilt. They did not want it to happen. When the wall had been destroyed and the Jews were in captivity, the remnant that was there were pretty easily manipulated, and the idea of this nation becoming strong again threatened the way of life of these other surrounding nations. And so they did not want it to come to fruition. They did not want this plan to work out. So they started off of just dissenting to the idea, and then they turned to ridicule and criticism. They thought, "If we can discourage them enough, maybe they'll quit. Maybe they'll give up on this project." And we see here in verse 4, "Nehemiah didn't even give them the time of day." He did not engage at all. He went immediately to God. As he has done, as we've seen in earlier chapters, he's done in the past. He immediately goes to God in prayer. One commentary I read said he didn't debate. He didn't form a committee.
How many times have we done that? Try to get everybody else on our side, right? He didn't form a committee. He didn't even deal with the two enemies directly. He took it to God in prayer. See, he knew God was in on this project. It was God's idea. It was God's plan. So when he prayed for God to intervene, he said, "God, fight this battle for us. Come against our enemies." Some may even be shocked by some of the words that Nehemiah was using. He said things like, "Turn their insults back on their own heads. Give them over as plunder in a land of captivity." That may seem a little shocking or aggressive, but it wasn't about revenge. It was about justice. Nehemiah was asking God to be God. He was asking God to be who he said he is. God is just. God is righteous. And he's saying, "God, be those things. Be who you are and go fight for us." God had this plan. So when the enemies were coming against the people of God, they were coming against God. So he had a reason to push back, which is why Nehemiah prayed the way that he did. And then in verse six, we see that the people just kept working. They kept their heads down and they kept working. Their work was not without problems. They came up against issues, roadblocks, problems within their own community. But we see right off the bat here that the was trying to discourage them.
And the enemy of our souls in our lives discourages, distorts, and distracts. He discourages with words, with circumstances, with trying times that we're going through, maybe even with other people in our lives, he discourages. And then he distorts the truth. He takes maybe kernels of truth and he twists it. He distorts it. And then he distracts us, whether that's through other things in our lives. Maybe it's through our phones. Maybe it's through, again, the circumstances we're going through. Maybe it's through just the discouragement itself. That's distracting enough as it is. If you look at the specific insults and criticism that Sambalat and Tobiah were giving, they were attacking them on multiple fronts with their words. They were talking about their ability. Can they even do this? The integrity, their skill, perseverance. Are they going to be able to even complete this wall? A fox will knock it down. They were trying to hit any and all insecurities and weaknesses that they could. And if you think about it, some of the things they were saying actually started in truth. They weren't all skilled in building a wall. They were kind of making it up as they went along and praying that the Lord just made it sturdy. But they had God on their side, so it didn't matter their skill level. So while maybe there was some truth in there, they twisted it just enough to distort what was actually true. When we are discouraged, when other people's words or our circumstances have even a kernel of truth, we're tempted to believe them. We're tempted to take that on as real and as truth in our own lives. Satan loves partial truths and to twist things around just to make them just enough that they're not true. Listening to these half-truths and these distortions can cause us to neglect the actual truth that God is with us. He's with us in our circumstances. He's with us in our trials and in our discouragement.
Deuteronomy 3:1 says, "He will never leave us or forsake us." So if we start to believe the lie that He's not in it with us, we know immediately that that is not a lie because it goes against what His Word says. Something else that I think Nehemiah knew and that we should consider is who's this criticism coming from? The people that were criticizing them were not allies, they were not friends, they were not trying to be helpful. When we come up against criticism and ridicule in our own lives, even from ourselves sometimes, we can ask ourselves, "Do we trust that person? Does that person trust God? Does that person have our best interests in mind?" Now, there is a time and a place where we need to be open and receive criticism and maybe course correct as needed. But we have to consider the source first. We have to think about who it is that is bringing this criticism so that we don't forget that it is actually God who equips us. It is God who's giving us what we need to do, what we need in order to do what He has called us to do. So instead of engaging with them or being distracted by it or believing these half-truths, Nehemiah prayed to God and he got back to work. Essentially, he was saying, "You have your opinion, but you just watch what my God can do." So we have discouragement. We have the truth distorted. We have distractions.
But the counteract to that is that we live differently when we live by faith. We can combat the discouragement and the enemy's tactics when we are living by faith. We will just behave differently when we live by faith versus living out of a place of discouragement. Ultimately, when we are operating from a place of discouragement, we become ineffective. We become ineffective in our Christian life. We become ineffective for the building of the kingdom. We are no longer pointing people to Jesus. It is no wonder that our enemy, our spiritual enemy, uses discouragement time and time and time again because it's an effective tactic. I mean, honestly, discouragement can lead to just apathy because you're just frustrated and tired of it. It can lead to stronger things like depression or just tapping out and saying, "I can't do this anymore," whatever this thing is. Satan's tactic of discouragement is to inhibit the Christian from working with all their heart like it said in verse 6. God didn't answer Nehemiah's prayer the way Nehemiah prayed it. Nehemiah had some strong words and some strong suggestions for God. And God didn't answer it that way, but what he did do is he gave the people a mind to work. He had them working with their whole heart. He gave them intention and focus. He gave them the ability to combat the discouragement by getting to work, by doing what he had already called them to do.
Deuteronomy 6:5 says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all of your strength." When we live in discouragement, when we just sit in it, we become divided in our own hearts. We may want to serve God, we may want to live for him, but we're so stuck in our discouragement that it divides our attention and we become ineffective. God helped the people work with their whole hearts, and he can do the same for us. Just like the enemy was hitting them on all sides with their verbal attacks and their ridicule, Satan loves to hit us on all sides. He knows our weaknesses, he knows where we're vulnerable, and he will exploit that. But when we trust God and we operate out of faith in him, we can combat the discouragement. So we see how the enemy, both in our story and in our own lives, uses discouragement. But when that stopped working, and they saw that it wasn't going to be effective, things started escalating.
So we're going to look in verse 7 here. But when Sambalat and Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the people of Ashtod heard that the repairs to Jerusalem's walls had gone ahead and that the gaps were being closed, they were very angry. They all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and stir up trouble against it. But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat. Meanwhile, the people in Judah said, "The strength of the laborers is giving out, and there is so much rubble that we cannot rebuild the wall." Also, our enemies said, "Before they know it or see us, we will be right there among them and we'll kill them and put an end to the work." Then the Jews who lived near them came and told us ten times over, "Wherever you turn, they will attack us." So there's almost like a lot of dialogue happening here. Sambalat and Tobiah go from mockery to threatening, and they rally their people and the other nations and they make plots and threats against the people. Then you have the people of Judah who, they're doing the work and they're tired. They're saying, "There's too much going on. We're just exhausted." And then you have the other Jews who live close to the other countries, the other enemy lines that have heard these plans, and they're coming to Nehemiah and they're coming to the leader saying, "They're going to attack us on every side." You can hear the panic in their voice. It says they said it ten times over. "They're going to attack. They're going to attack. It's going to happen." Fear can be paralyzing. The threat alone were making the people afraid and it could have kept them from working. So now we have the enemy of the people making threats. We have the Jews getting tired and discouraged, and we have other Jews just panicking. Here's the thing though, nothing actually happened. There was no attack. It was just the threat of attack. How many times do we let our thoughts spiral out of control? We think about what could be, what might happen. How many of us, don't raise your hand, how many of us play out future conversations or scenarios? And we think, "Well, if they say this, I'm going to say this." We plan. Anxiety and spiraling thoughts are another really effective tactic of the enemy because it makes us ineffective. It keeps us from doing the work we've been called to do.
We talked about how the enemy discourages, distorts, and distracts, but he also, or he does this, he discourages us through fear, fatigue, and failure. Let me some alliteration. Fear, fatigue, and failure. The enemies used fear, threats. They didn't actually attack, they were just threatening it. But the fear was enough, the panic set in. The enemy uses fatigue. I don't know how many times people ask me, "How are you doing?" "Good, I'm just tired." Right? We're all tired, whether it's because of our life or our circumstances or the state of the world or whatever, we're just tired. And failure, even just the sense that we might fail or the fear of failure, he can use that too. And once he uses those things to tear us down and weaken us, he attacks us in our weakened state. It puts us in a really vulnerable place. So, we've got a half of a built wall, which means they're not fully protected yet. There were gaps in it, it wasn't tall enough yet. We have tired workers and panic and discouraged people. Being halfway done with the project might sound good, but they knew how much more work they still had to do on top of already being tired from the work that they did. Again, that can lead to being stuck, to quitting, just throwing in the towel. Can lead to the spiraling thoughts, the fear of failing, and so then we just do, we give up. So the thing is here, the Israelites had a lot to be fearful and tired about. They had enemies threatening attack. They had a lot of work behind and ahead of them. If you look at verse 10, the people from Judah were saying there was so much rubble that we can't rebuild the wall. It was taxing and it was hard work, but it had to be done. The rubble from the previous wall had to be removed before they could start building the actual wall, the new wall. The same thing can be applied to our spiritual lives. We have to clear out the junk before the Lord can rebuild anything in our own hearts. Maybe it's a sin issue or lingering shame from your past. Maybe it's beliefs that you have deconstructed that you grew up with or were put on you, and you need the Lord to clear those out before he can rebuild in you what is true. But we have to clear that out in order to have a clear and clean foundation and a solid foundation to build from. But that was really hard work for them.
So to combat some of the fear and fatigue and the failure, we have to allow God to clean out the rubble. Building the wall, honestly, was probably more fun or at least satisfying than the cleaning out part, than the removing and clearing out all the rubble. It was painstaking work. And honestly, a lot of these people were cleaning up a mess they didn't even make. A lot of these workers were born in captivity before they came back. They were even there when the wall fell the first time. There is rubble in our own lives that we didn't put there. Someone else caused problems. Someone else caused hurt. But thankfully, we're not the ones who have to clean it out. We just have to be willing to let the Lord do it. I don't know if we have any DIYers in here, but I've been threatening to repaint our bedroom furniture for a couple years now. And then I think about all the work that I have to do before I actually get to start painting and I don't do it. Because I think, "Okay, so then I got to take all the hardware off and I got to clean out all the drawers and I got to move it somewhere where I can actually paint it. Then I got to sand it and then I got to prime it and then I probably, I might need to prime it again." And all that time waiting for it to dry in between and then I get to paint it. That does not sound fun to me. Some of y'all are like, "Yes, that is my jam. Give me a project. I want to work." That is not my thing. I want the end result. I want the final coat of paint. You give me a paintbrush for the final coat of paint, I am your girl. So I can see the end result. But it's all the work leading up to it that makes me want to quick before I even start. It's the nitty gritty. It's the painstaking slowness of the process. See the devil doesn't have to completely take us out. He doesn't need us to completely renounce God. He just needs to make us ineffective. He needs us to say, "That's too hard. I'm not going to let God do the work he needs to do in my life. That hurts too much." And often that is just simply done through discouragement. We will stay stuck in discouragement and spiraling thoughts if we don't clear out the rubble and make room for the renovation. I'm going to say that one more time. We will stay stuck in discouragement and spiraling thoughts if we don't clear out the rubble to make room for the renovation. And when you are in a state of discouragement, that sounds even harder. But it's got to be done. So let's look at what Nehemiah actually did in order to defend against the discouragement so that we are equipped as well to combat the enemy and to be ready for when discouragement comes.
We're going to jump back to verse 9 because it starts up there. It says, "But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat." So the first thing he said, a guard. Then jumping to verse 13, "Therefore, I stationed some of the people behind the lowest points of the wall at the exposed places, posting them by families with their swords, spears, and bows. After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people, 'Don't be afraid of them. Remember the Lord who's great and awesome and fight for your families, your sons and your daughters, your wives, and your homes.' When our enemies heard that we were aware of their plot and that God had frustrated it, we all returned to the wall, each to our own work. From that day on, half of my men did the work while the other half were equipped with spears, shields, bows, and armor. The officers posted themselves behind all the people of Judah who were building the wall. Those who carried materials did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other. And each of the builders wore his sword at his side as he worked. But the man who sounded the trumpet stayed with me. Then I said to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people, 'The work is extensive and spread out, and we are widely separated from each other along the wall. Wherever you hear the sound of the trumpet, join us there. Our God will fight for us.' So we continued the work with half the men holding spears from the first light of dawn till the stars came out. At that time I also said to the people, 'Have every man and his helper stay inside Jerusalem at night so they can serve as guards by night and as workers by day.' Neither I nor my brothers nor my men nor the guards with me took off our clothes. Each had his weapon, even when he went for water." So he first set a guard, the very first thing he did. Now, setting a guard didn't mean that he lacked faith that God could protect him. He took action and he prayed for God's help. He did both.
One commentator I read wrote, "Our prayers do not replace our actions. They make our actions effective for God's work." We are conduits that God can use, but we got to get up and do something when we have a job to do. He set a guard day and night. This showed their commitment to not only the work, but also to protecting their city. It sent a message to their enemy that they and God would not be thwarted. Their plan would continue. It was a faith that was full of action. He had faith in God. He prayed to him. It says he prayed and set a guard. But he protected the weak spots. He made sure those things, those people were in place. He wasn't naive to their weaknesses. He didn't ignore them. He didn't say, "Ah, it'll be fine over there." He set the people in the weak spots to make sure they were protected. We too must set a guard. We have to know our own weak spots because the enemy does too.
Proverbs 4:23 says, "Above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it." Maybe those weak spots for you are you're just tired and overwhelmed. And when you're feeling that way, you're weakened. Maybe it's a particular struggle that needs some accountability put around it. You need to bring in some other people in on it. Maybe it's a particular relationship or person that needs some, you know that that's a weak spot for you and you need to be aware of that. Ask the Lord if you don't know or aren't sure, ask him to reveal that to you so that you can set up a guard against it.
Secondly, we must be prepared. The Jews who were working had a sword at their side and the other ones had a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. They were working, but they were ready. Commentator David Guzik wrote, "The kingdom of God is built with both a sword and a trowel, a sword to come against every spiritual force of wickedness in high places and a trowel to do the work of building up the people of God." We have a work to do as the body of Christ. As the church, we've got work to do. Not only in our own family, our own church family, but in the people out there who don't know Jesus that we come in contact with every day, we have work to do. But we also must be prepared for spiritual battle. They were armored up. In order to be prepared, they had to have their weapons. They had to be carrying their armor. They had to be ready.
Ephesians 6.10 says, "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power, put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes." And then Paul goes on to list how we do that. Putting on the spiritual armor means protecting our minds and our hearts. It means knowing truth and wearing it like a belt. Being ready to move when he says, "Move," and to carry his peace with us wherever we go. It's having faith that protects us like a shield, and it's knowing the word of God so fully that we can use it to attack the enemy. We put our heads down to work, and we stay on the defensive. We let God fight our battles for us, but we are not caught unprepared. So Nehemiah set a guard. He protected the weak spots.
And lastly, he remembered the greatness of God. So for us, we need to remember the character of God. He didn't want his people to forget who God said he was. He said, "We have to remember this. We have almighty God on our side." There's some power there. First John 4.4 says, "He who is in you is greater than he that is in the world." We have a real spiritual enemy, but we know the end of the story. We have God on our side. Verse 14 in our chapter today says, "Remember the Lord who is great and awesome." And then later in verse 20, it says, "Our God will fight for us." We often forget who God is. We forget how big he is, that he is good, that he is just, that he is righteous, that he loves us, that he is kind, that he will protect us and be our defender. But when we remember God's character, we are more likely to break free from the discouragement that weighs us down. We're more likely to be set free from the fear that keeps us trapped and paralyzed and to get back to operating from a place of faith and trust in him. Guys, discouragement is going to come. Fear will stop us in our tracks from time to time. The enemy of our souls will exploit our weak spots if he's given the chance. But we have Almighty God on our side. So we need to always be ready. We need to always be on our guard. We need to be clothed in our spiritual armor, and we need to be reminding ourselves over and over and over sometimes, daily, minute by minute, who God says he is, so that we can be confident in that and build our trust in him.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for who you are. We thank you that you are a big and awesome God, that you care so deeply for us, that you will fight our battles for us, and you will equip us to come against the enemy of our souls that wants to destroy us, that wants us to become ineffective, that wants us to stay in a state of discouragement. God, I pray that you will help us to dig into your word, to dig into community, to rely so heavily on you that we will not be surprised by attacks, that we will be prepared, we'll be armored up, we will be ready. God, we thank you for who you are. We thank you for the things that you have given us to equip us to do the work you have called us to do. Pray a blessing over our family today. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.