Nehemiah 13
And so at the end of Chronicles,
we see that Israel has already been exiled by Assyria, maybe
75 years, 100 years earlier. But we find that Judah, the tribe
of Judah in Jerusalem, they’ve been exiled to Babylon. and also
the city of God and the temple have been destroyed. And so in
Ezra and Nehemiah we see that after some time God sends three
waves of people back to Judah, back to Jerusalem to repair the
city, to repair the ruins, to repair the reproach of God on
the city. And so Nehemiah would have been
the third wave of those who returned to rebuild Jerusalem. And Nehemiah’s
specific task was to be the governor of Jerusalem and to build the
wall. And so we read together Nehemiah
chapter 13. On that day they read from the
book of Moses in the hearing of the people. And in it was
found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter
the assembly of God. For they did not meet the people
of Israel with bread and water, but they hired Balaam against
them to curse them. Yet our God turned the curse
into a blessing. As soon as the people heard the
law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. Now before this, Eliashib the
priest who was appointed over the chambers of the house of
our God and who was related to Tobiah. prepared for Tobiah a
large chamber, where they had previously put the grain offering,
the frankincense, the vessels, and the tithes of grain, wine,
and oil, which were given by the commandment to the Levites,
the singers, and the gatekeepers, and the contributions for the
priests. And while this was taking place, I was not in Jerusalem,
for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I went to the
king. And after some time I asked Levi
the king and came to Jerusalem. I then discovered the evil that
Eliashib had done for Tobiah, preparing for him a chamber in
the courts of the house of God. And I was very angry and I threw
all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chambers. Then
I gave orders and they cleansed the chambers. And I brought back
there the vessels of the house of God with the grain offering
and the frankincense. I also found out that the portions
of the Levites had not been given to them, so that the Levites
and the singers who did the work had fled each to his field. So
I confronted the officials and I said, Why has the house of
God been forsaken? And I gathered them together
and set them in their stations. Then all Judah brought the tithe
of the grain, the wine, and the oil, and the storehouses. And
I appointed as treasurers over the storehouses Shalamiah the
priest, Zadok the scribe, and Padaiah of the Levites as their
assistant, and Hanan the son of Zachar, the son of Mataniah. For they were considered reliable,
and their duty was to distribute to their brothers. Remember me,
O my God, concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds
that I have done for the house of my God and for his service. In those days I saw in Judah
people treading the winepress on the Sabbath, and bringing
in heaps of grain and loading them on donkeys, and also wine,
grapes, figs, and all kinds of loads, which they brought into
Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I warned them on the day
when they sold food. The Tyrians also, who lived in
the city, brought in fish and all kinds of goods and sold them
on the Sabbath to the people of Judah in Jerusalem itself. And then I confronted the nobles
of Judah and said to them, What is this evil thing that you are
doing, profaning the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers act
in this way? And did not our God bring all
disaster on us and the city? Now you are bringing more wrath
on Israel by profaning the Sabbath. And as soon as it began to grow
dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I commanded
that the doors should be shut. And I gave the orders that they
should not be opened until after the Sabbath. I stationed some
of my servants at the gates so that no load might be brought
in on the Sabbath day. And then the merchants and sellers
of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice.
But I warned them, and I said to them, why do you lodge outside
the wall? If you do so again, I will lay
hands on you. From that time on, they did not
come on the Sabbath. And then I commanded the Levites
that they should purify themselves and come and guard the gates
to keep the Sabbath day holy. Remember this also in my favor,
oh my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast
love. In those days I also saw the
Jews who had married women of Ashdod, and Ammon, and Moab. And half of their children spoke
the language of Ashdod. And they could not speak the
language of Judah, but the language of each people. And I confronted
them, and cursed them, and beat some of them, and pulled out
their hair. And I made them take oath in the name of God, saying,
You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their
daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not Solomon,
the king of Israel, sin on account of such women? Among the many
nations, there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his
God, and God made him king over all Israel. Nevertheless, foreign
women made even him to sin. Shall we then listen to you and
do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God
by marrying foreign women? and one of the sons of Jehoiada,
the son of Eliashub, the high priest. He was the son-in-law
of Sanballat the Horonite. Therefore I chased him from me.
Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood
and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites. Thus I cleansed
from them everything foreign, and I established the duties
of the priest and the Levites, each in his work, and I provided
for the wood offering at appointed times and for the firstfruits. Remember me, oh my God, for good. Thus ends the reading of God’s
holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May he bless it. Let’s
ask now for his help that he might bless this word to our
life. Pray with me. Our God, thank you for your holy
word, and we pray now that your Holy Spirit would brightly shine
upon this word, that our eyes may see it, and that our hearts
may understand it, and that we might perceive it as you speaking.
and that we might go from this place ready to serve you. Thank
you for shining light into darkness, for scattering night, and for
exposing sin and giving the solution to sin, even your own son, Jesus,
who died in our place, that our sins might be forgiven and that
his obedience might, by faith, be ours. Bless us now, we pray
in Jesus’ name. Amen. I would venture to guess
that there are various methods and philosophies of housekeeping
in this church. Some of you probably have homes
that are very neat and orderly. You vacuum your carpets just
so the lines of the vacuum are straight. And if a footprint
were to enter the room, There would be great chastisement and
a reordering of things. Some of you may be a little more
free and you live and let live and let live and let live and
things may be a little disorderly, but whatever your style of housekeeping
might be, there’s one thing we all understand in common, that
we have a house and it must be in some sort of working order
in order to live. And you know how it is when you
clean your house, you get it ready for life, you vacuum, you
dust, you wipe, you clean, you shine, you rearrange all sorts
of things, you stuff things in the junk drawer, whatever it
is you do to bring order. We know that after one day, and
two days, and three days, and rain, and dogs, and cats, and
guests, and a lot of life coming our way, that things get a bit
out of order. And we say to ourselves, whatever
our style of housekeeping, I must get things in order. I must put
it back right so that I can live again. And we speak that way
of our houses. We speak that way of our homes,
our families, our work. We’ve got to get our house in
order. We’ve got to keep our house in order. Well, brothers
and sisters, it’s the same in the church. It is God’s house.
It is the household of faith. The church is the pillar and
buttress of the truth of our Lord Jesus, and sometimes, The
church of God gets out of order. Now here I’m not talking about
vacuuming and dusting and shining and polishing and maintaining
and all those things. They are important and have their
place. But the household of faith due to sin and other circumstances,
gets out of order. And God, from time to time, by
His Word, says to us, put my house in order. If you look at the front of your
bulletin, you’ll see a wonderful verse that’s printed from Revelation
chapter 5. Jesus gives seven letters to
the seven churches. And He tells these churches,
this one here is Ephesus, remember from where you have fallen repent,
and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you, and
I will remove your lampstand from its place.” And so you see,
there is an importance to getting the household of faith in order,
because God threatens judgment, does he not? when he comes and
finds things out of whack and out of place. But if we read
through the Bible, we see that in many different cases throughout
the history of the church, the church has been out of order
and God has had to come straighten it out. Remember Adam and Eve
in the garden don’t eat. And what did they do? They ate
and they hid and they sowed fig leaves. But what did God do?
He came and he shined the light of his word into their lives
and he said, these fig leaves won’t do, the sinful way won’t
do, and the danger of you eating from the tree of life and living
forever in sin, that won’t do either. And so what did he do?
He came and he cleaned house. He put it in order. Move on a
few centuries and Israel is in the wilderness and they don’t
believe God. They murmur, they whine, and God says, okay, fine,
I’ll get my house in order. And it’s going to be by letting
a generation of you die in the wilderness, and that second generation
that comes from you, they will be faithful and not faithless,
and they will enter the promised land. And then we go through
the many centuries of the kings of Israel, and God sends prophets
over and over to kings and says to them, live for God. He says
to priests, serve the house of God. He says to Israel, obey
me and live, disobey and die. And ultimately, he says, there’ll
come a day where my presence will leave Jerusalem. My hand
of protection will leave and your enemies will come in your
house and they will take you and your children and they will
carry you off to foreign lands. And it will be not good for you. There’s this passage we come
to today where there has been reformation in the life of God’s
people and it needs to come again. We look at Jesus cleansing the
temple in the New Testament or Paul writing difficult letters
to the Corinthians or Galatians saying, where have you gotten
off on the wrong path? Or we come to the history of
the Reformation in the 16th century. Or even in our own day, in our
own body, we say we have gotten off the path and we need to come
back to the Word of God. See, brothers and sisters, throughout
the history of God’s people, the church, the people of God,
it gets off mission. We make things up. We do it our
way. We follow the world instead of
the word. And God says, no, it cannot be
that way. And so we see patterns throughout
the history of God’s people. We see it in the scripture and
we read of it in church history where God forms his people and
says, these are my beloved. This is my church. But over time,
due to sin and other circumstances, what God has formed becomes deformed. And so God sends one, a preacher,
a prophet, a messenger to reform. And so today is what we observe
in the church as Reformation Sunday. And I want us to understand
that when God forms us due to our sin, we become deformed and
God has to send a reformer to put things back the way it is
supposed to be. You know, if we were to follow
the world instead of the Word, if we were to make things up
as we go and not follow our marching orders, if we get off mission,
we will find ourselves in great difficulty. Do you know that
there are a thousand years of church history before the Reformation?
And guess what we call that? The Dark Ages. But there is a
great Reformational theme that we say, after darkness, light. God graciously comes into the
world, into a dark world, and He shines His light brightly.
And that is what we see in the text of Scripture leading up
to Christmas. The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light. On them a light has dawned. And so we thank God for Reformation. We thank God for the light of
Scripture. And we thank God in His gracious
mercy that from time to time he sends a man, he sends a prophet,
he sends a preacher into real space and time, into human history,
and that person stands before the church and says, no more
of this. No more of this insanity, no
more of this craziness, no more walking our own way. This person
is bold and sane and says, we’re going to follow God. We’re going
to follow Christ. And so let us look at a couple
of these reformational themes that we find in scriptures and
some we find in today’s passage. First thing is this, what begins
reformation? What sparks reformation? What
starts reformation? That’s our question. What begins
reformation? Well, if you read verse 1 of
chapter 13, you’ll bump into a phrase that’s not unfamiliar
in the scriptures. And it simply says, On that day
they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people.
They read from the law, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers,
the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. They read from this
book. And what was their response?
They corrected their sin. They saw the error of their ways.
The light of God’s word shined into their covenant community
and said, we have allowed foreigners into the temple of God’s holy
worship. Now a little background. God
said to the nation of Israel, I’m going to give you this land.
It’s going to be your land. I’m going to clear out all the
enemies little by little. But it’s going to be a place
where you can live and you can serve and you can worship without
Philistines, without Canaanites, without whatever the iths and
the other peoples were. But Israel did not do that. And
so they were always plagued. They were always plagued by the
other nations. And here we have an example of the difficulty
it brought. But what happens? They read the
Law of Moses. You come to church and you hear
a sermon and you say, I’m not doing something right. God’s
word has shown me different. And so we turn, we let the scripture
turn our world right side up the way it’s supposed to be.
Paul speaks of this in second Corinthians or second Timothy
chapter three. He speaks of the word of God
as being profitable. He says, all scripture is breathed
out by God and is profitable. It is useful. It is useful to
you as Christians. It will teach you divine instruction
and doctrine and precepts. It will reprove. It will refute. It will rebuke error and sin. And then finally, it will correct.
It will restore. It will fix faults. It will put
things back the way they ought to be. Think back to what we
spoke of with housekeeping. Somebody in your house is the
keeper of order, right? I know where the magazines get
stacked. I know which closet the broom
goes in. Where do we put our shoes and our coats when we come
in the door? Where does the purse go? How should the bathroom counter
be arranged? Where do supplies go when we
come from that pilgrimage to Walmart or Sam’s Club? Where
do things go? We know how things go because we have things ordered.
Well, what orders the church? It is the Word of God. What begins
Reformation? It’s when we read the Word of
God and it shines its light into our life, into our church, family,
home life, marriage, whatever, work life, and it says what you’re
doing is not biblical. This is what is biblical, so
let’s go for it. Let’s do it. But it will teach.
It will reprove. It will correct. It will restore.
It will pick up what is laid over. It will fix what is false
and it will repair ruins. But it’s even bigger than that.
It’s more than just straightening up the house. God and His Word
comes into your life and He roots out sin and He implants His Word. He roots out what will grow weeds
in your life and He implants seeds that will grow into beautiful
fruit. And friends, that happens by
the Word. It happens by the Holy Spirit. God changes your desires
and you say, I will follow through. And I will let the Word of God
speak into my life, as painful as it may be, and I will reform
what is deformed so that God can form in me what He has intended
in Christ Jesus. The light of God’s Word shines
into the darkness. Maybe you’ve taken a flashlight
out at night and it’s been dark and you thought you heard a noise
and so you shine your light and the rodents and the pests scatter
into the night. Light does that. It exposes,
it dispels the darkness, and it reveals what is otherwise
hidden. And every one of you, every one
of you, not a one of us exempt, we have dark places in our hearts.
And the Word of God needs to shine brightly in there and say
to you, brother, sister, son, daughter, child, that is sin.
And for a child of God, that should not be. And so we let
the Word and the Spirit work and reveal We let the Word fix
us. We let it rebuke us. We let it
correct us. We let it teach us what is right. And we let it topple over our
idols, which will destroy us. Friends, that is what the Word
of God does. So what begins Reformation? It is the Word of God. They read
the Law of Moses. And they change their ways. They
change their practices. Now, second question is this.
Why do we need reformation? Why do we need to fix what is
broken? I mean, can’t we just go on like
we are, knowing that we’re on our way to heaven and things
are just fine now? We’re going to face the judge of the earth
and he’s going to say, I love you because I love my son. You’re
forgiven. I see you as if you’ve never
sinned. I see you as if you’ve always obeyed. Isn’t that enough?
No, God gives us new hearts. And he gives us the desire to
follow him, but why do we need reformation? It’s because we’re
sinners. It’s because we sin. It’s because,
as John Calvin said so well, our hearts are idol factories.
We build idols and we erect them and we worship them. I mean,
sure, we read of Israel at the foot of the mountain. Moses is
up there getting the law and what’s Aaron doing? He’s saying,
give me your earrings. Give me your gold, we’re going
to build an idol. We’re going to fashion something
that we can worship. And we say when we read a passage
like that, oh, I would never, I would never worship an idol.
Friends, you let the light of God’s Word shine in your life,
and you’ll see the idols, and you’ll see that they are standing
up, and that they are standing tall, and that you worship them,
and that you follow them, and that you live for them, and that
you would steal, and that you would kill, and you would destroy
in order to keep, and maintain, and worship those idols. It’s
true, isn’t it? And so why do we need reformation? Because
we are idolatrous, disobedient, faithless sinners. Yes, we are
saved, but we need daily grace to see our sin, to see our idolatry,
to see our greed, and to see all the sin in our lives, and
to say, no, God’s word says better, and by God’s grace and spirit,
I’m going to get over this. But why do we need reformation?
Why do our houses get out of order? Why is it that over and
over in the scripture, God tells his people, he says, if you obey,
you get blessing. But if you disobey, there’s curses.
If you obey, there’s life, and there’s life eternal. But if
you disobey, there’s death. And there’s effects on the generations
to come, as he says in the commandments. Well, here we have a story that
shows why we need reformation. It’s Nehemiah. It’s the governor
of Judah returning from a little visit to the king, Artaxerxes,
over in Susa in the great Babylon. He has brought a third wave of
refugees back from Babylon, and they’ve come to rebuild Jerusalem,
to build the temple, and to rebuild the city. And they’ve come to
repair the ruins of God’s judgment from a century past. And at this
point in Nehemiah chapter 13, three waves of people over a
period of several decades, they have had successes and failures
in doing what God planned. But Nehemiah has especially had
success. You remember that he came and
he rebuilt the city wall in something like seven weeks. Seven and a
half weeks, 49 days. They rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem.
Not as spectacular as back in Solomon and David’s day. But
nevertheless, they rebuilt the city of God that showed the presence
of God on the face of the earth. And they’ve had success. They’ve
established order. He’s been a very good governor.
We would have elected him for president next year if he was
available. He was a good manager. Had good
people skills, minus the plucking out of the beards and a few things
like that. But we could use a little of that, couldn’t we? But he’s
an electable guy. He’s a get-it-done kind of governor. And he comes back and he realizes,
while the cat’s away, the mice have been at play. And he finds
the city in disorder. And he finds what he would find
with us. We get restless with normal obedience. We get bored with normal, don’t
we? We get bored with mundane, daily
following God, taking up our cross and following Jesus. We
invent idols. We begin to do things our way.
We get creative. We fashion idols in our own way
and we become faithless. In fact, we become stupid, don’t
we? We do things that never in our right minds, as thinking
Christians, would we do these things. We get greedy and we
get worldly. And it’s because after a little
time of zeal and following God, there’s a little cooling off
period. Remember after 9-11, 14 years ago how we thought godliness
was on the rise. We’re going to wake up. We’re
going to recognize that there is something going on here greater
than I am, but how long did it take before a cooling off? At
least by my calculation, that didn’t last very long. But that’s
what happens is one day we are zealots, the other day we’re
in the lawn chair in the backyard asleep. And that’s what happens
to us. We cool off and there is what
God has formed and it becomes deformed because of our sin.
And this is true of other events in the past. The Great Awakening
was a great time in the life of our country. But the zeal
for the house of God would wane. There was a cooling down. It’s
what God speaks of in Revelation 2 and 3 to the seven letters
to the seven churches. He tells one, he says, you’re
neither hot nor cold. You’re just lukewarm. And so
from time to time we have to have these wake-up calls. We
have to realize that we have lapsed. And for Israel here in
the Promised Land, in Jerusalem, they are not separated from the
peoples of the land. They are conformed to the world.
They have neglected the house of God. They are desecrating
the Sabbath and they have defiled the institution of marriage.
A third question, what does Reformation look like? What starts at the
Scripture? Why do we need it? Because we’re
sinners. Third, what does Reformation look like? Well, it’s like getting
your house back in order. It’s picking up what’s been knocked
over. It’s cleaning up the dirt. It’s getting it spick and span
again. The Word of God shines. It exposes. The disorder is seen and we say
we’re going to put our house in order, whether it’s church
or home or family, whatever the case may be. We’re going to put
it in order according to God’s Word. It shows us the way of
how we ought to live. Now there are four areas where
there was needed reformation here in Nehemiah 13. They needed
to separate from the ungodly people of the world because they
would drag them down and cause them to worship other nations.
They would no longer speak the language of the Hebrews but speak
the language of the world. And this is true for us from
time to time. Do we speak the language of Paul or the Apostles? Or do we speak the language of
pop culture and cliche and Oprah and Dr. Phil and whatever the
wisdom of this age says to us? Are we speaking those things
or are we speaking the word? And so he says you must separate
from the other nations. And then secondly, the Reformation
takes place in the sanctity, the sanctity of God’s house.
Tobiah, if you read back through Ezra and Nehemiah, was an enemy
of God’s people. He hated God. He hated Israel,
and he did not want the city to rebuild. And he did all he
could, through every power possible, to stop the building of the city.
And guess where he’s now living? In the temple. Because Elisha,
the high priest, gave in and made some sort of sinful alliance
and said, for some reason, who knows why he got this way, this
wicked man can live in the house of God. Guess what that meant?
Not only was there an enemy of God, a foreigner living in the
temple, it meant there was nowhere to store the offerings. And if
you’ve got no offerings, guess what? You can’t keep the lights
on, the sacrifices going, the Levites fed, the priest paid.
It was chaos in the house of God. And what does Nehemiah do?
He comes in and says, no more of this. And not only does he
clean house, he establishes the working order of the church again.
Now this has echoes of Jesus cleansing the temple. Zeal for
the house of my God consumes me, Jesus says, and he clears
the money changers. He overturns their tables and
says, this shall be a house of God and not a den of robbers. So what does Reformation look
like? Well, it’s hard. It’s honest. And sometimes it
means you lose your economy and you lose your way because you
have sinfully and shamefully taken up residence in the house
of God. You are buying and selling on the Sabbath, all those things.
Well, there’s a third area. We got to separate from the ungodly
people of the world. We have to sanctify the house
of God. Well, the third is we’ve got
to be Sabbath keepers. If you read this passage, what
was the Sabbath day? Well, it looked like a market
day. And you remember in the Old Testament, God is pretty
strict about the Sabbath. Six days you shall labor. And
you shall do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath
to the Lord. I did it at creation, God says. I made the world and
everything in it, and six days on the seventh I rested. And
I’ve given you the day that you might delight in me and worship,
but you may rest, and that you may cease, you may stop, you
may catch your breath, your body and soul may catch up with the
realities of heaven. No fish. shall be sold. No carts will be brought in.”
And not only does he say no, but he says, I’m going to establish
some parameters so that you can keep Sabbath. The gates will
be shut the Sunday on the evening before. The Levites who are now
consecrated, they’ll stand guard and they will ensure that as
far as possible we can keep Sabbath. And then finally, Reformation
looks like the sanctity of marriage. Marriage was to be between one
man and one woman of the house of Israel. No way should any
Israelite ever marry a Canaanite or an Ashdodite, a Philistine,
whoever from other nations. No, the Israelites were to marry
Israelites. They were to keep the line of
Jesus. The nation of Israel, they were
to keep it pure. They were a people set apart
for God’s purposes. And friends, that comes to us
today and what Paul commands that we should not be unequally
yoked in marriage. Christians marry Christians.
We marry people of the faith. We never look at someone and
say, Oh, I love him so much. And I think because of my love
and affection toward him, he’ll come to Christ. No, you’ve married
a pagan. And that pagan may never come
to faith in Christ. You love him, you wait. And you see if the preaching
of the gospel effects change. Because you’ll wake up five years
later and guess what you’ll come running to mom and daddy saying,
I married a pagan and it’s hell. And so we remember, we remember
these commands of God, the reformation. It’s serious business. When God
says we should separate, or when we should marry this way, or
we should worship this way, keep Sabbath, it’s serious business. That’s what Reformation looks
like. A final question though for us, is it worth it? Yes,
it is. It is worth it because when we
lived a life that is governed by God’s word, when his word
governs our worship, when he works, when he governs our family,
when it governs our work, when it governs all our life, it shows
the glorious God of grace. We are outpost of heaven. We
show people a glimpse of what heaven must be like. We are blessed. We have light. We are happy and
holy instead of sinful and miserable. It’s a small picture of what
God in heaven must be like. And understand this, if you please
the God of the heavens and earth in your obedience now, you’re
going to please the judge of the earth. And it’s in front
of him we will stand one day and he’s going to say, how’s
your marriage? How’s your Sabbath keeping? How’s your worship?
How’s your work? How’s your separation or integration
into culture and life? Here is Nehemiah, a reformer,
a governor, and he was a reformer of institutions. He built walls
and gates and he established order in the church. But there
is one thing He can’t do, and that is change hearts. And friends,
that is left up to the great Reformer, and that is King Jesus.
And it is King Jesus alone who comes into our hearts, and He
says to you, I’m going to remove your sin and your condemnation.
I’m going to give you a heart of flesh, a heart that beats
for Jesus and His laws. Ephesians chapter 5 gloriously
tells us that Jesus saves us and He sanctifies us by washing
us with water and the Word. So friends, you want reformation,
you sit under the Word. And Jesus will wash you. He will
cleanse you. He will reform you. He will take
what is broken and fix it. And He will set up what has been
knocked over. Now about this business of being reformed and
always reforming. You know, you’ll clean your house.
For us, it’s Friday. We’re already two days in. There’s
a little dirt on the floor. A few leaves have been tracked
in. And so on Friday, we may have reformed our household,
right? But it is in continual need of
reformation, of cleaning and cleansing. And that is true for
the church. We are reformed. Yes, we stand in the vein of
Luther and Calvin and Knox and Zwingli and Paul and Augustine,
if you want to go that far back, which I think we should. And
we are reformed. But friends, we are always in
need of reforming, for we are idol builders. We are worshipers
of the world and culture. We want what we want when we
want it. But thanks be to God for his word so that we can be
reformed. But brothers and sisters, by
God’s grace and spirit, always reforming. We thank God for this. Let’s pray and ask for his help.
Our Lord, we pray that we would not be stubborn. We pray that
we would not be fixed and set in our ways, but that we would
be open by your grace and spirit to your word, that you would
speak into our lives and say, this is what is wrong and here
is what is right, fix it and see my blessing and grace come. Help us in this, we pray. And
may we do this in our own lives, may we do it together as a church,
may it affect our marriages and us as individuals. We ask for
it, Lord, even if it hurts. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen. Let’s stand together and sing
the wonderful hymn, Christ Has Made the Sure Foundation, number
276.