Nehemiah 9
Amen. Turn in your copy of God’s
word to, uh, Nehemiah chapter nine. We’re coming down the backstretch, um, 13 chapters, maybe just a
couple more sermons. Uh, chapter nine, uh, is a continuation
of what we looked at last week. where Ezra read the law and the
hearing of the people, they began to mourn. And he said, no, wait,
hold up. You need to have joy first. And so for the next week,
while they celebrated the Feast of Booths, they came in for Sunday
school class, as it were, they read the Bible and they heard
the law of the Lord of God. This is about a month in. So
as we read chapter nine, think of it as a continuation. It’s
about a month later. And this is the effect of the
word of God on the people of God. And we pray that it would
have that same effect on each of us. So hear God’s word with
me. This is Nehemiah chapter nine,
beginning at verse one. Now on the 24th day of this month,
the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth
and with earth on their heads. And the Israelites separated
themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their
sins and the iniquities of their fathers. And they stood up in
their place and read from the book of the law of the Lord,
their God, for a quarter of the day. For another quarter of it,
they made confession and worshiped the Lord, their God. On the stairs
of the Levites stood Jeshua, Bani, Kadmel, Shebaniah, Buni,
Cherubiah, Bonnie, and Shani. And they cried with a loud voice
to the Lord, their God. Then the Levites, Jeshua, Cadmeo,
Bani, Ash, Shebaniah, Cherubiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah, and Pethahiah
said, stand up and bless the Lord, your God from everlasting
to everlasting. Blessed be your glorious name,
which is exalted above all blessing and praise. You are the Lord,
you alone, you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all
their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all
that is in them. And you preserve all of them
and the host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord, the God
who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans. You
gave him the name Abraham. You found his heart faithful
before you and made with him the covenant to give his offspring
the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite,
the Jebusite, and the Girgashite. And you have kept your promise
for you are righteous. And you saw the affliction of
our fathers in Egypt and heard their cry at the Red Sea and
performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants
and all the people of his land. For you knew that they acted
arrogantly against our fathers. And you made a name for yourself
as it is to this day. And you divided the sea before
them so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land
and you cast their pursuers into the depths as a stone into mighty
waters. By a pillar of cloud you led
them in the day and by a pillar of fire in the night to light
them the way in which they should go. You came down on Mount Sinai
and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and
true laws, good statutes and commandments. And you made known
to them your holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and
statutes and a law by Moses, your servant. You gave them bread
from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out
of the rock for their thirst. And you told them to go in to
possess the land that you had sworn to give them. But they
and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their necks and
did not obey your commandments. They refused to obey and were
not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but
they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return
to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive,
gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast
love. and you did not forsake them. Even when they had made
for themselves a golden calf and said, this is your God who
brought you up out of Egypt and had committed great blasphemies,
you and your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness.
The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart from
them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them
the way which they should go. You gave them your good spirit
to instruct them and did not withhold your manna from their
mouth. And you gave them water for their thirst. 40 years you
sustained them in the wilderness and they lacked nothing. Their
clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell. And
you gave them kingdoms and peoples and allotted to them every corner.
So they took possession of the land of Sihon, king of Heshbon,
and the land of Og, the king of Bashan. You multiplied their
children as the stars of heaven and you brought them into the
land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess.
So the descendants went in and possessed the land. And you subdued
before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and
gave them into their hand with their kings and the peoples of
the land, that they might do with them as they would. And
they captured fortified cities and a rich land and took possession
of houses full of good things, cisterns already hewn vineyards,
olive orchards, and fruit trees in abundance. So they ate and
were filled and became fat and delighted themselves in your
great goodness. Nevertheless, they were disobedient
and rebelled against you and cast your law behind their back
and killed your prophets who had warned them in order to turn
them back to you. And they committed great blasphemies.
Therefore you gave them into the hand of their enemies who
made them suffer. And in the time of their suffering,
they cried out to you and you heard them from heaven. And according
to your great mercies, you gave them saviors who saved them from
the hand of their enemies. But after they had rest, they
did evil again before you and you abandoned them to the hand
of their enemies. So they had dominion over them. Yet when
they turned and cried to you, you heard from heaven. And many
times you delivered them according to your mercies, and you warned
them in order to turn them back to your law. Yet they acted presumptuously
and did not obey your commandments, but sinned against your rules,
which if a person does them, he shall live by them. And turned
a stubborn shoulder and stiffened their neck and would not obey.
Many years you bore with them and warned them by your spirit
through your prophets, yet they would not give ear. Therefore,
you gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands. Nevertheless,
in your great mercies, you did not make an end of them or forsake
them, for you are a gracious and merciful God. Now, therefore,
our God, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who keeps
covenant and steadfast love, let not all the hardships, seem
little to you that has come upon us, upon our kings, our princes,
our priests, our prophets, our fathers, and all your people.
Since the time of the kings of Assyria until this day, yet you
have been righteous in all that has come upon us. For you have
dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly. Our kings, our
princes, our priests, and our fathers have not kept your law
or paid attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave
them. Even in their own kingdom, enjoying your great goodness
that you gave them and in the large and rich land that you
set before them, they did not serve you or turn from their
wicked works. Behold, we are slaves this day. in the land that you gave to
our fathers to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts. Behold, we
are slaves and its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have
set over us because of our sins. They rule our bodies and over
our livestock as they please. And we are in great distress.
Because of all this, we make a firm covenant in writing, On
the seal document are the names of our princes, our Levites and
our priests. Amen. The word of the living
God for us. I wonder if you can recall a
time in your life where the word of God came to you in a real
specific, targeted, surgical, pinpointed, acute, and meaningful
way. I mean, where what I just said,
the memory pops right up. You can say where you were. You
can say what you heard. You can say who said it. And
you can tell of the lasting effects that the word had on your life
because it pointed out to you who you are, what God was dealing
with in your life and how your life is different, it’s better,
it’s been transformed because of that particular event. I think
it’s rather amazing to be sitting under the word of God and by
God’s word and by God’s spirit to have such an effect on you
that it makes you walk from that place with a new desire to live
more for King Jesus. It’s as if he’s speaking directly
to you. It’s as if he knows what you
needed, when you needed it, and right then, right there, it came
to be. And ordinarily we find that to
be true under the preaching of God’s word. I think we can find
it to be true also in our personal devotions as we’re reading the
word, meditating on the word, thinking on the word, God’s word,
God’s spirit, can speak to us in a meaningful way that causes
us to want to live for him. Perhaps we’re convicted of a
sin. Perhaps we’re led to do something
like call someone and ask their forgiveness or we’re led to make
a list of things we ought to put to death in our lives because
they are sinful or they are out of order. They are not in accord
with God’s standard or God’s laws. Perhaps our understanding
has changed and we say, Lord, I’ve had a low view of this or
that, and your word has shaped me to believe more precisely
about something of God’s character, something of his church, or something
that we ought to believe ethically or morally in our Christian walk. Perhaps the weight of God’s word
the weight of his judgment, the weight of his correction, or
the weight of seeing the error of your ways and desiring to
walk with him has been evident in your life. I can think of
a couple occasions where this has been true for me. I think
one particular occasion way back in college when a teacher that
I had was giving a history of Reformation thinking, and this
man was perhaps saved or not, I don’t know. He was a minister. He was liberal. He had a PhD
from the school that I cheer for, but that’s not saying much
in the Department of Religion. Actually, it’s saying almost
nothing. But he was walking us through the history of Reformation
teaching, and he taught us one day out under the oak trees of
the college campus. And it was just before spring
break, I suppose, of my sophomore or junior year, I can’t remember
which. And he talked about total depravity. And he spoke of it
in an academic way. It’s the tea and tulip. You know,
total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement,
irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. Everybody who’s
not a Calvinist hates tulip. Right? Well, he’s talking about
total depravity and he’s speaking of it just very plainly black
and white academically. And I remember saying to myself,
uh, that’s a problem, isn’t it? Self? I said, that’s me. That’s what’s wrong with me.
I’m, I’m totally depraved. My, my life is riddled with Adam’s
original sin, his corruption. And so I can remember that very
specifically. You’ll probably think I’m strange
with this second anecdote, but probably in the summer of 2000,
I don’t know, 2007, we had a paint shop owner in our congregation,
and he donated to me all the exterior paint that I needed
to paint my windows and trim on my house. The rest of it was
brick. And so he owned a fancy paint store, gave me good brushes,
good paint. His son, who was an expert painter,
told me exactly what to do. And so I spent the early mornings
of one summer out there scraping and washing and scrubbing and
priming and painting and then scraping all of my windows. Well,
some of you will remember the Sony Walkman, the tape player,
right? That’s a thing of the past, a
relic of the past. a Sony Walkman that I could strap
on my hip, a couple of AA batteries, and that bad boy would play some
cassettes. Well, I had ordered up some Ligonier Ministries cassettes. And somewhere, by God’s providence,
I had received R.C. Sproul’s Meaning for Men. And
it was from a Mid-South men’s rally down in Jackson, Mississippi,
where he gave, I don’t know, four, five, six lectures to several
hundred thousand men, several hundred or a thousand men, something
like that. And I remember painting, I can tell you which window.
It was the bathroom window on the end of my house. And I’m
up on a ladder painting, listening to him preach a message to a
group of men about Abraham, being tested by God and being sent
to Mount Moriah with his son, his only son, Isaac, the son
whom he loved, the child of promise. And perhaps my son was about
a year old at the time. And I remember painting in tears
because God tested Abraham that way. And Abraham had the faith
to believe God because he believed that God could bring his son
back from the dead. That was a powerful and moving
thing. And you begin to get the picture that there are times
in our lives where the Word of God comes in a particular way
that’s mighty and strong. I’ll give you a third example,
I think, that may encourage you. For some years before I became
the preacher, I kept sermon notes. And I would have a spiral notebook,
and every Sunday, a new page, new notes. Next Sunday, new page,
new notes. Since I’ve become a pastor, I’ve
gone through those notebooks and I’ve torn out those pages
and I’ve tucked them in the right file, whether it’s with Genesis
or, you know, 2 Peter, or maybe under a certain topic. And I’ll
pull those files out to study, to prepare for a sermon. And
I’ll find those notebook pages with the date, with the preacher,
with the text, and perhaps a few notes. And some of those notes
go all the way back to my high school days. And maybe they mean
something, maybe it was a good note, it was useful, maybe it
was a bad note, but it shows God was at work. And I imagine
each of you have moments in your life where you remember where
you were, what you heard, and you said, this is just what the
doctor ordered. And I think God works like that. He sends periods of revival into
every one of our lives. And he does that by his word,
by his spirit. He gives you life again. He gives you the opportunity
to evaluate what is biblically true and what is unbiblical in
your life and gives you a chance to reform and to straighten it
out. We think of periods of revival
in history, Jonathan Edwards, or we think of the revival Williams
College up in New England, the Haystack revival, or the big
revival at Hampton Sydney College, or the revival of the late 1850s
in New York City when the stock market crashed. And we, of course,
pray for a revival now, and perhaps as we look at history, we can
see that, well, we’re due one, aren’t we? It’s ripe, a good
time for revival, the economy. the government, the events of
the world, the circumstances of life, perhaps the word and
spirit could come in to God’s people and could come into this
world at a very scary moment in this world. And people might
put their faith, their hope, their trust in Almighty God. Well, the scriptures tell us
there are these sorts of events. God told Jonah to go to Nineveh
and just say the word repent. and the whole wicked city would
turn to God. Or we think of Pentecost. Peter
simply got up and told the Old Testament story, how it had just
been fulfilled before their eyes in the person and work of the
Lord Jesus. And thousands came to faith in Jesus. Now, sometimes
we think revival has to be big, revival has to be widespread,
revival has to be massive. Well, sometimes it’s just a few
people. Sometimes it’s just one of us.
I think of Jesus on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. He’s walking
with his two disciples They’ve left Jerusalem after the Sabbath
and after the resurrection, and they’re talking about the events
of Jesus, and they don’t know it’s He who walks with them.
And it says, after He revealed themselves, we’re not our hearts
burning within us. And you can imagine the forever
change that came from Jesus’ presence with those two men.
It wasn’t a big revival, but it was for sure life-changing
for those two people. Well, revival ebbs and flows
in the life of the church, and perhaps it’s at an ebb right
now, and we would like it to be at a flow. And we want to
take just a moment to think through what pops up in our passage tonight
to show us what revival looks like. I know this is a long passage,
but I think we can zip through three things. The first is faith
in a faithful God. Faith in a faithful God. The
people of God in Ezra’s ministry had a steep learning curve. This
is a month. And they’re learning everything
they didn’t know in a month. And they’re getting to the business
of being faithful. You’ll remember that in our study
a week ago, they heard the law read and they wept. The people
said, nope, no weeping yet. And I think this is a good lesson
for us. They said, nope, weeping yet, because God had more to
reveal to them that they needed to weep for. If they said, you
know, this is enough to get us in tears. This is enough to get
us repenting. They would never have seen the
whole rest of their sin against God. And I think it’s a good
mercy to point out to us that sometimes we’ve got to sit through
the outpouring of God’s mercy that comes through his word and
spirit, revealing to us, perhaps in a slow moving picture show,
the horror of our sin, the horror of our wickedness, the horror
of all where we have fallen short of the glory of God. And so the
people are sitting together, they’re standing together, they’re
assembled together, fasting and in sackcloth. They’ve got dirt
on their heads. They’re reading the scriptures
for a quarter of the day. and they’re mourning for another
quarter of the day. They’ve separated themselves
from the rest of the people of the world, and they are together
before the law, which is doing two things for them. One is it’s
showing them a mirror of what they are and what they then need
to be, but it’s also giving them a compass to show them direction
in life. And they begin their prayer by
saying to God, you are creator, you are sustainer, you are redeemer,
your blessings to Abraham and your wonders and mercies to the
children of Israel out of Egypt are out of this world and breathtaking
before our minds eyes. And so in their extended Bible
reading, in their extended meditation, which is something we don’t often
do, but ought to, They realized their sin, their presumption.
They realized their stiff necks, their disobedience, their idolatry.
They realized they had cast God’s law behind their back. They had
killed prophets and committed blasphemies. Yet God was ready
to forgive. This is where faith and a faithful
God comes in very handy. God’s word can overwhelm us with
our sin. We can look in the mirror of
scripture and not like what we see and it can be horrifying.
You can feel looking in the God’s mirror like a teenager before
seventh grade with a whopper on his cheek. I can’t possibly
go out in public. Well, it’s far worse when it’s
our sin and it’s our shame against our creator, our sustainer. and
our Redeemer, but our God is ready to forgive. Our God does
not forsake. Our God is gracious. Our God
is merciful. He is slow to anger and he is
abounding in steadfast love. And so as we have faith in a
faithful God, we know that when he does the surgeon’s work by
his word and his spirit, when that two-edged sword of Hebrews
4.12 begins to cut up our lives and prove what we are, We know
that it’s a precision surgeon’s hand that will do precision,
helpful, and healing work. And that leads us to think of
the second thing this passage shows us about revival, not just
faith in a faithful God, but it shows us that we should repent
of our great sins. We should repent of our great
sins. Remember in the story of the
prodigal son, He’s eating pig pods. He’s at
his wits end. Everybody’s abandoned him. His
money’s run dry. He is not the party animal and
the life of the party that he once was. He’s eating pig pods.
He’s sleeping in a pig pen and he comes to his senses and he
realizes the servants in my father’s house are well-clothed and fed. I will arise and I will go to
my father and I will repent of my sins and say, make me a servant
in your household. He knows the character of his
father. He knows his own sins and how he sinned against heaven
and against his father. And he will go. Several years
ago, the church I served wrote a prayer list, a top 10 prayer
list for the congregation. And one of our elders wanted
and got it into this top 10, this particular prayer. that
God would give each of us an acute awareness of our sinfulness
before our holy God. That sounds a little introspective.
That sounds a little pious. But it’s a very good prayer and
I’ve never forgotten it because when we aren’t aware of our sin,
we aren’t aware of our savior. And we aren’t aware of our savior,
we become a savior ourselves or we begin to think self-righteously
that we’re doing just fine, thank you very much. But we need the
law of God, like they’re reading morning, they’re reading daily,
we need it to be a mirror. And it needs to be one of those
mirrors with lights. And you know the one I’m talking
about, it shows your blemishes. What’s the saying when we go
to try on clothes? You know, we look in the mirror
and we say, let’s look in the mirror that doesn’t make me look fat,
right? Well, sometimes as Christians, we want to look in the mirror
that doesn’t make me look unholy. Lord, don’t put the mirror in
front of me that shows me what I really am. Because you know
what it’s like as the word does its work. It’s sometimes horrifying
what we see in the mirror. And I believe that’s a grace
of God. And what we see in the mirror
drives us to change. It drives us to receive and rest
in Jesus alone. And it’s amazing, I think, to
look at the life of the people of God Their little covenant community
had unraveled really until Ezra the scribe showed up. And Ezra
the scribe showed up and fed these famished people the living
word of God. He brought to them the fat portions
of the scripture and it revealed to them who God is, what God
has done, what God requires of us and how he made provision
for these people. Yet they had been stiff necked.
They had been stubborn and they had been like their forefathers.
I think of Revelation chapter two and three, the seven letters
to the seven churches. And you could summarize those
seven letters to the seven churches this way. Quit your sinning,
read your Bible and do the right thing. Quit your sinning, read
your Bible and do the right thing. Do what you loved at first. Or I think of the shorter catechism
on repentance. What does God require of us that
we may escape his wrath and curse due to us for sin? He requires
faith in Jesus, repentance unto life, and a diligent use of the
means of grace. And repentance unto life says
a sinner out of a true sense of his sin, a sinner out of apprehension
of the mercy of God in Christ, a sinner with grief and with
hatred of his sin turns from it to God with full purpose of
and full endeavor after new obedience. And that leads us to the third
thing we want to think about in revival. And in chapter nine
of Ezra and Nehemiah, faith in a faithful God, repent of our
great sins because the father has his arms open waiting for
us. but we can’t just repent of our
sins. We’ve got to live a new life of obedience. That’s the
third thing, a new life of obedience. You know, the world, perhaps
the Christian world will sell you this bag of goods. Every Christian needs a mountain
top experience. And if you’ve not had a mountain
top experience, you’re not doing it right. That’s what the world
will tell you. And maybe, Maybe God will give
you a mountaintop experience, who knows? I don’t know that
I’ve ever really had one. I don’t think I need one to walk
more closely with Jesus. But I think what we need to not
miss is that very often the Christian life is lived in the mundane-ness,
the simplicity of life. It’s doing the dishes, it’s taking
out the trash, it’s changing diapers. It’s going to work. It’s paying the bills. It’s rinsing
and repeating for a really long time. I love how Eugene Peterson
titled his book on the Pilgrim Psalms. It was called A Long
Obedience in the Same Direction. We’re not good at that. We’re
not good at long things. We’re not good at obedience and
we’re not good at the same direction. We like to go a little here,
go a little there, dabble a little in this and dabble and a little
in that. And I think a lot of our failures
come because we want a big mountaintop experience and we don’t just
live faithful lives in the day-to-day mundane ordinariness of life. Well, when we fail, And as the
word for a month has gotten into the Israelites and proved what
they are, shown them in the mirror with lights, their blemishes,
it’s shown them to be failures. And they’re, I suppose, at rock
bottom. They’re tender. They’re eating
pig pods, if you will. They have come to the end of
themselves. And perhaps you’re in the thick of the Christian
life and God is being hard on you. And you say, Lord, I’ve
learned my lesson. Let’s get on with the program.
He may drag you on a little bit longer. He may get you lower
in a harder condition to bring about new obedience in your life. Well, repentance is turning,
going this way and now going that way. It’s taking God’s word,
God’s compass, God’s GPS, a fresh start. Remember it’s the new
year for them. And maybe it is a good thing
for us to remember that every day God’s mercies are new. Every
day when we get up out of bed is a resurrection. Every Sunday
is a fresh start. Every new day, every new seventh
day, one day each week, every morning as we wake is a fresh
start. And yes, we may weep, we may mourn, our posture may
be hands up or face down, but really God wants to see inward
change, doesn’t he? He wants to see a life of new
obedience. And so we experience his righteous
wrath, we experience his dark judgment, and perhaps it’s for
a long stretch of time, but it’s to get out of us the poison.
It’s to get out of us the pus of sin and to give us a greater
affection for serving him and walking with him and in his ways. King David experienced this.
really long time of suffering in God’s heavy hand. But you
can see in the progress of the Psalms, David had the scars and
the wounds of his own sin, but he had joy and faith in his faithful
God because God led him to the overwhelming sight and sense
of his sins. And he repented and he walked
in a life of new and humble obedience, the same with the prodigal son.
And it can be the same with you by God’s word and by God’s spirit. I want you to think for just
a moment as we come to the end of this, the contrast, the contrast
between God and man, God and his people. God is holy, we’re
impure. God is generous, but we are greedy. God is faithful, but we are disloyal. God loves, but we are self-centered. God is constant. but we are cyclical. And I don’t know if you caught
it, but in this chapter, chapter nine of Nehemiah, they pray what
I would call a redemptive historical prayer. They recount in their
prayer all of God’s goodness, all of God’s grace, all of God’s
provision, all of God’s, well, his Bible stories. They repeat
back to God what he’s taught them about himself and his actions,
his character and his promises. God is constant and its people
are cyclical. They obey. God blesses them. They get at ease in Zion and
they fall into sin. They cry out to God because they’re
oppressed. God hears and God comes. And
it’s that cycle of the judges, isn’t it, from the Old Testament.
Well, they come to a point at the end of our passage where
they want to make a covenant with God. Lord, you’ve been righteous in
your anger. You’ve been righteous in your
judgments. You’ve been righteous to do all these things to us. And so we want to make a covenant.
Now, if you’re playing God at the end of chapter nine, you
crossed your arms and you said, yeah, right. I’ve been there. I’ve played the game with you
Israelites. I’m not getting fooled again. Now that’s not our God’s
response. He’s a covenant-making, covenant-keeping,
promise-making, promise-keeping God. And he knows what they have
a glimmer of, a glimpse of, and that’s this, that in the days
to come, the people will fail. In the years to come, the people
will fall short. In the centuries to come, people
will cast God’s law behind their back. They will act presumptuously.
But in the days to come will come his son. And where Israel
has been unfaithful, his son will be faithful. Where Israel
has been the wayward son, Jesus will be the faithful one, the
Messiah, the covenant keeper. He will be true Israel. And as
we know from our New Testament, he lived, He obeyed, he suffered,
and he died in our place. And God justifies us. He takes
away our sin. He declares us righteous. We
have the obedience of Jesus. And when we now look in the mirror,
we can see what God sees, the perfect image of our dear son,
the Lord Jesus. And so, yes, we need to have
faith. Yes, we need to keep repenting
of our sins. And yes, we need to, by God’s
word and spirit, endeavor to live a faithful life in his son
and in what he has accomplished for us. Pray with me. Lord, we
thank you for this glimpse of the unfaithfulness of Israel,
but the faithfulness of your son, the Lord Jesus. And we pray
that we would tonight realize all that we have in Christ. and
realize that we’re very often living in the pigsty, we’re eating
the pig pods and we’ve squandered the riches of the father. But we thank you that you never
leave us, you never forsake us, you never reject us as your children.
We are forever your sons and daughters. Your eye is on the
roadway looking for us to return. Your arms are open and you’re
ready to put the ring on the finger, the calf, over the coals
and you are ready to robe us with your righteousness. Thank
you for this great gift. We pray your blessings on us
now as we go into the world to serve you. In Jesus name we pray,
amen.