The Village Church
Follow Through - Audio
Bibles, open them to Nehemiah chapter three. Well, if any of you ever played basketball, baseball, tennis or golf, then there's one phrase that you would hear a lot of from coaches, and that is follow through. You got to follow through on the swing. You got to follow through on the jump shot, because if you don't, it's gonna be a bad shot, a bad swing. And so the concept of follow through is very important in a lot of sports, but also in life, because we all have responsibilities, right, daily responsibilities, daily things that we are in charge of, and if we don't follow through on those things, there can be consequences. So the question, a couple of questions for myself and for you is, do you follow through on your verbal commitments? If you commit to do something, do you follow through on it? Or do you commit to things known in your heart, you have no intentions on ever doing them? Which one are you? Which one am I? Yes, I'll serve there, but will I? Yeah, I'll hand that up, but will I? I get that done, ASAP. Will I? Will you follow through, will I follow through? The same question, the same concept of follow through, not only applies to us, but also to the people that Nehemiah went to serve. Remember the last time we were there, the people all agreed to help Nehemiah, right? Yeah, Nehemiah, we're gonna rise up and build. We're gonna strengthen our hands for the work. We're behind you, really. You can talk a good game, but did that back it up? They say that we're gonna be there. They say that had us back, but did that, really? Was it genuine? Was there a commitment to him genuine? Or was it some spurting moment decision that was not gonna bear any fruit? It was true. They just didn't call up in some type of emotional moment. It was real. Yes, it was real. And all the chapter three, you see the people rise up as a community of people following through on their commitment to Nehemiah, to rise up, to help build, to participate in their own restoration. So it's a community working together, a community working under Nehemiah's leadership. And that's what we see here in chapter three. So who, who was these people? Who were the people that stood up to work? It's interesting that the chapter begins by highlighting the fact that the high priests and the other priests were the first ones to stand up to help Nehemiah build. The priests got their hands dirty first. You see the high priests and the priests, they had a very important role in this, this community. They were spiritual leaders. They were in charge of the temple, the sacrifices, all minors of worship within the community. And by them standing up first, by them standing up first to come alongside Nehemiah, it helped Nehemiah to have the spiritual leaders of the community on their side. Yes, Nehemiah, we with you. I'm gonna get dirty first, I'm gonna start building first. Don't miss that importance, many importance of that. And I believe they also gave validation to Nehemiah as well because the spiritual leaders of the community stood up. They stood up after Nehemiah told them this, what did he tell them in chapter two? He says, you see the trouble we are in people. How Jerusalem lies and ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build a wall of Jerusalem that we may no longer suffer this grace, this grace. I told them the hand of my God, how the hand of my God had been a part of me for good. And also the words of the king. And the people said, let us rise up and build. You see the priests support that. They believe that Nehemiah was sent by God. And by them standing up first, it encouraged other people as well. 'Cause if they weren't on that side, the spiritual leaders, where other people follow, really, I don't think so. So what this chapter three has to do with us. You see, once the priests stood up, all these other groups of people followed, diverse groups of people, rulers, men and women, craftsmen, merchants, people who lived in different areas of the area, who lived outside Jerusalem, came back into Jerusalem to help build. They left what they were doing to come back to do this work, which was a good work to rebuild the wall. They were diverse, but yet they were unified. What was their unity? They were Jewish people. What men or Jew meant, it meant you were a people of God. You were part of the people of God. That's their unity. That's what held them together. That's why they came back to help restore the wall. Not only that, they were diverse, they were in unity, but they also stayed in their row. Something Mark always said. What do you mean by that, Alex? Every person that worked on the same part of the wall, did they? Different people worked on different sections of the wall. They were spread out and they stayed in their area, worked in their area, their row. They didn't interfere with each other. Everyone had their own responsibilities. And as you know, our city, parts of our state are also in restoration mode, trying to restore what was destroyed by the tornadoes. And many people, some of us have followed through and volunteered efforts to aid in the recovery. Law of churches, a lot of other parts of the city have stood up to the plate and come. Other states have come to help us restore what was broken. So we have a real pitch in our state of what this looks like right now. Or even right over in harvest, about 20 minutes away of being something that's broken, being restored. People who are in distress, people who have suffered loss. And a lot of folks have come to help. And that's a good thing. Some of whom may not even be Christian, it's still a good thing. And some of you last week have served meal here last week for the community. And that's a good thing. And I thank y'all for doing that. Thank y'all for doing that. And I thank you as a church. You are a church that follows through. We are a ministry that follows through. We made, when I first came on board with the ministry, Mark told me that we made a 20-year commitment to this community. 20-year commitment. Which means we ain't ever going nowhere. Which means every year, for 20 years, we're going to follow through. We're not if we're going to follow through. Maybe we're going to follow through, but we will follow through in our ministry here. In all that we do, in the power to hold a spirit back in us. No matter what storms come, no matter what step backs we have, we're going to stay the course, right, right. Not just in the community, but you serve one another as well. You follow through with love one another as well. And I thank you for that too. It's an honor for me to be your pastor, to be partners with you in this ministry. Because it's not me, it's not Alex's church, it's Christ's church. You know, we're partners in this together. I need grace just like you. I need a gospel just like you. I'm hella accountable just like you. So we're in this together. We follow through together and we have been. I love that. We are a diverse group of people. And by God's grace, we're going to continue to be a diverse group of people. But what happens, the more people we get, the more issues may come up. But we can't ever forget what unifies us is the fact that we are part of the people of God. The work does not unify us. You do know the difference, right? The work doesn't. The work cannot unify us. Christ unifies us. That's the source of our unity. We're the people of God. The rest of the race they were doing, the rules was not their unity. It was not the source of their unity. The source of their unity was the fact that they were the people of God. And so they went back to the rules from the cost of that. We are unified in Christ. And when we start forgetting that, we're building on sand. We're building on sand. What's going to keep us together? What's going to help us persevere through these 20 years is we don't ever forget the source of our unity. We stay firm in that. If that empowers you, you are people of God, a child of God. You got to live that out. So we hold firm to those things. Remember I said that these people, they worked on different sections of the wall. Not everyone worked in the same place. Everyone stayed in their role. Learn from that. Learn from that. You're not going to be able to do everything. You shouldn't be jealous of other people who will do more than you. Do the thing that God has called you to do. And do it faithfully. And don't try to tell other people how to do what God has called them to do. You can offer advice. You can give them counsel. But stay in your role. And that stay in their role. And we support one another through the process. Everyone has gifts. Everyone has talents. Use that for the building up with the body to go out to the gospel in the community and let the spirit use you. If it's just planting seeds, then so be it. Be content with planting seeds and you're still doing what God has called you to do. Because He is the one that causes the growth. Not us. Not my preaching. Not our ministry style. Not our money. Not our lack of money. It's always the spirit. That's it. Things get done because God's spirit has taken what was used and grew it. Not us. It's always the spirit. I don't want us to replace now. Okay. So, what else that means? If you give to what happened kids, help with kids, man. Hospitality. Do hospitality. If it's tutoring in the schools, do tutoring in the schools. If it's teaching Bible study, teaching Sunday school, do that. Just do that. Just be faithful. And one thing that God has called you to do. We are as a church getting ready to move into a different phase of our existence. What I mean by that? We got six men who will be starting an officer training next week and you need to pray for these men. Like I said, you need to pray for the families. They're going to be, hopefully these men will be elders and deacons and I'm here to tell you, they will follow through on what they're supposed to do and if you don't want to follow through, then you need to do some heart checking as an officer in this church. We will faithfully and humility follow through on serving you. We're going to do that. Now, we ain't going to be perfect. We're going to follow short, but we will serve you faithfully. We will get our hands dirty too. Just like those priests did. We'll be the first. We're going to get dirty with you. We're not going to be governing this church from a high office. We're going to be governing the field, baby, with you and that's a guarantee as long as I'm here. We're going to get dirty too. Now, don't think all this applies just to church life and ministry in terms of falling through. It also applies to every other area of your life. Falling through and being a good mom, falling through and being a good spouse, a good husband, a good neighbor, a good friend, that's where that applies to every area, a good brother, a good sister, a good child, to your parents, a good boss, a good employee. You see, the follow through is you're faithfully living out your personal responsibilities in all humility and the bond of peace and unity. It's faithfully living out your responsibilities in all humility, in the bond of peace and unity. What does that look like? It means you're going to get sweaty and sometimes bruised to have a good marriage. If you don't think that, you ain't ever going to have a good marriage. It ain't just going to happen. To raise your kids, you're going to get sweaty and you're going to get bruised. You will. If you don't think so, then you in denial. To do ministry, to do anything in his life, you're going to get sweaty because you're going to get bruised. You're going to have to be effort. That's going to be effort. We do all those things underneath the gospel, underneath the cross, underneath the grace, but we never abandon our responsibilities to what God has called us to do. I never should say, "Well, I guess I could be a good husband, but I don't feel like being a good husband today." I don't really feel like spending time on my kids today. Is that something a good dad would live and do, a good husband would do? No. You don't say those things. Through the power of the Spirit, I want to faithfully be a good husband to Waikita, faithfully be a good father to man's in the tracing, through God's Spirit. That goes for each of us, all of us. A month ago, I met a guy in front of the church. He told me he was homeless, and he wanted, if we had, I had any food that we can give him. I said, "Sure, man. Come with me to the kitchen." We went to the kitchen, and I packed him up some food, and then we started talking. He told me a little bit about his story, about how he got in the place that he is, and the bad decisions that he made. I asked him if he had family here in Huntsville. He said he had a sister, and he sleeps on her couch sometimes. I told him, I said, "You need to talk to your sister, man. Ask her to let her take you in so you get on your feet." He told me, "I don't want to burden her, I don't want her, I don't want to be a burden to my sister." She was a single mom, and I don't want to be a burden to her. I continued to, he's been by a couple of times, and each time he comes by I asked him, "Have you talked to your sister yet?" He said, "No, I have not told her yet." From those conversations with him, I've been thinking about that, "Why won't he follow through? Why won't he talk to her? Why won't he talk to his family?" I'm homeless, please take me in. For some reason, wherever it may be, people just won't follow through. For some reason, people just won't follow through, no matter if they need to. They won't follow through on some good things that they need to do. His family will probably take him in, but for some reason, he feels like he's a burden until that prevents him from asking. You know, all of us have those things in our life that prevents us from following through all of us do, all of us do, and even here near Maya, everybody didn't get dirty. Chapter three, not everybody worked. Some people thought they were too good to work. Some people thought they were too good to get their hands dirty. Because in verse five here, we see, it says that "The next sedental, the turquoise types were paired, but that nobles were not stooped to serve the Lord. That one verse of all the people that's working, you've got this one group of people who were not stooped to serve the Lord. Turquoise was a town located 11 miles outside Jerusalem, and so their residents, along with other people from other locations, came back to Jerusalem to work. These other turquoise men, they repaired two sections of the wall, not just one, two, but their nobles were not stooped to do anything, were not been their necks enough that hands to do nothing. Now, the text, it doesn't give us a particular reason why they didn't work, it just says they were not. It could have been the cost of their status, that they were too good to get their hands dirty. It could be because they didn't want to follow near my leadership. There's no way to know for sure, but the point is that no matter how convinced you are that the Lord is behind the work, there would be some people who would not work. There are going to be some people who ain't going to support it. No matter how good the vision is, they ain't going to participate for whatever reason it may be, that's the reality. Not everyone's going to do it. This is a reality in every church and every ministry. Let me ask you, do you think we have some turquoise heightened nobles in our church, or do you think we will? Do you think we have any right now? Yes, I'm one of them. So are you. What do you mean by the Alex? I mean, no matter how strong you are, how convinced you are or what God has called you to do, no matter how passionate you are about your responsibilities, all of us have our crypto night, all of us do, all of us have those things that can knock us out of the battle. Forgive you. Do you know yours? Is it easy to spot fear, self-righteousness, selfishness, laziness, what about hopelessness? Can that knock you out, can that prevent you from falling through? It can. You're in church like ours, over commitment, can easily burn us out. And when you burn out, guess what's going to happen? You will no longer stoop to serve the Lord because you over-communit yourself. You see, easiness, thank it, warning it to be easy is a crypto night because you don't want to come up with no, you don't want to have any opposition, you want things just to be a street of gold, man. Just because you show up with the gospel, the streets ain't going to be gold, man. It's not. Just because you come up and say, we're going to have, we got this good work, everyone is not going to be excited about it. It's not going to be easy. You're going to have people working against you, this church, this ministry. Not everyone like us. Just because we raved a Christian flag doesn't mean it's going to be easy. And there's no, and there's no such thing as having the staples easy button that's going to change it. It's not going to change that. Do you think it was easy for them to repair the wall? Isn't it was easy work? They didn't have the stuff that we have today. No, it was sweaty, it was tiring. I'm pretty sure they got on each other's nerves too at some point. It was hard work, but yet it was good, near mindset was a good work. So just like what we're doing in this ministry, just like the recovery efforts that are going on in our city, it's going to take time. It's going to be hard work. It's going to take sweat and bruises to get it all done, but you don't give up. You see as a father, a husband, a pastor, a son, a brother, grandson, a friend, it's a battle for me to be faithful and follow through with all those things. It's a battle. There are days when I'm just tired, days when I'm selfish, days when I'm thinking only about Alex, it's a battle to the balance, spending time in the community, trying to shepherd this church. It's a battle for me, no, it wasn't my crypt tonight and it's going to prevent me from falling through, it's fear, fear of not having control, overworking, not taking my day off, burning out. I'll share with you all three weeks ago, I was just close to my own shame that I have not been taking better care of myself, been a slave to trying to fix everybody's problems. Taking every criticism about the church personal, if this is the personal attack against me, those things are crypt tonight to me and if I ever get, when I give into them, I'm going down a dangerous path, trusting in my gifts alone, lack of patience. On Wednesday, I went to no Starbucks and to finish writing this sermon. I got me a green tea, I sat down, as soon as I sat down, the wave of sorrow came. See, for five days, I went out of town and doing things and had thought about ministry, but as soon as I sat down, it came. It was like it was just waiting for me to get back in town and that morning, all of it came, powerlessness, hopelessness, feeling like I was missing the mark on my order to loop about everything. Oh, no, God, here it comes, it's all coming down now and what did I do? I ran a Psalm 139 to remind myself that God is still at work and in my journal, my prayer journal, this is what I wrote to God, I said, I'm not doing well right now. My heart just went into a state of sorrow, spirit, please don't let me go down this path of despair and feeling sorry for myself. I feel the pressures to be great and yet I see how far from great I'm truly am. Spirit helped me to believe and embrace the words I preach every week. I'm not as strong as I pretend to be. I am a weak man who struggles to be the man I need to be in this life. Listen to me by your grace, comfort me with your promises of internal faithfulness. You know me and have searched me. You are mindful that I am nothing but dust, nothing but dust. He is faithful and I praise God that he was there, that he, the Spirit didn't let me go because I was headed down that path. I saw Mark, at Starbucks that day, I didn't tell what was going on. I think I lied to you and I said I was okay and I wasn't. Don't forget me brother. But I wanted to, you know, I had the process stuff, that's what I mean when I had the process to figure out what's going on. But it's the battle. No one professor said, in one of my seminary classes, he says, "Praise God for the man who never gives up on having family devotion." And I've been thinking about that for years now. What did he really mean by that? He meant, "Praise God for the man who never gives up. Praise God for us who never gives up on falling through to be good parents, to be a good minister, to be a good elder or a deacon, a good friend, a good neighbor. Praise God for those who don't give up fighting to do those things." And that's it. It's never perfection. You just get back up. I know you don't listen to hip-hop, but all that JC has a son says, "Get that dirt off your shoulders." That's what you do. Do the spirit. You get up, the dirt off your shoulders and move on. You're going to fall. You're going to get beat down. You're going to get kicked sometime, but you have the power to always rise up, to rise up above what you're going through. We have that, because God's spirit lives in you. God's people is with you, and so you can tap into those sources of power. Remember, it was like friends. They were knocked down. They were kicked around. Before Nehemiah went to Jerusalem, his brother told them what was going on, shame and distress. Right here, they rise up to help him, and they miss what was going on, and they miss of all their chaos. You see, Nehemiah's presence in the community, it reinforced this one truth that God had not forgotten now, that their God was still at work, still on working on their behalf, despite their circumstances. What empowered the people to join Nehemiah, that he had to use shame, that he used guilt, that he used deception to get them to work, no, what did he do? He testified to what God has already done. What God had already done to bring him to Jerusalem, and so the people saw that as the Lord had worked, and so they stood up and rose up and fought, and to help build. You see, in chapter 2 verse 20, I says, "Then God of heaven would make us prosper, but we his servants would rise and build." That's faith, people, faith that God is at work on behalf of his people. Do you believe your God will make you prosper in what he has called you to do in this life? Or do you think that doesn't apply to me out? Not for me. For some other person, yes, but not for me. That's for you, that's a promise for you. He would make you prosper. He would bring you out of the storms. When the tornadoes came through, when it's the night, Madison and Trace were in the basement and I said, Madison, bad, storms are coming through, you know what she said? Jesus can calm the storm, Daddy. He can calm the storms in your life. If my little four-year-old daughter understands that, how much should we, that the storms you go through, Jesus will calm them in his timing, but he will calm people. He will calm. And so the question is always this question, do you know him? Do you know Jesus? And if you know him, are you growing in your walk with him? The prior to the day is that we have to take serious our spiritual life, your spiritual health. It's more than just non-stuff, more than just reading theology books and sitting around the table talking about theology. Do you love Christ? Do you? Is his Word, is it really the air you breathe? It has to be your air that you breathe, time and prayer, time with God's people. That's what it has to be. If what you do, if your work, if that's your milking honey, then you're building on sand. You're building your life on sand and it ain't going to stand up. You have to build on a firm foundation. The Jews were completely confident that the Lord was going to make them prosper. So they worked and they pressed on and they missed the opposition. And we can do the same. We can do the same. One of my student professors told the group of pastors, he says, "As pastors, you have an audience of one and that is Jesus. And as God's people, you have an audience of one and that's God and he is well pleased with you. You have all of his attention, he is well pleased with you. And all your responsibilities are an audience of one." Think about it like this. Let's say a little child, a parent give the child a coloring book. The child colors the coloring book and color this little page. She's excited about the picture and that she's going to color this page for her dad. It's real, she spends maybe 30 minutes coloring this page. So she tears it out. She runs up to her dad and says, "Here daddy, here daddy, I color this for you." The dad gets the picture, he looks at it, he sees that it's not perfect. She didn't stay within the lines, she says blurry, but does a good father say, "I don't like this, go back and color me another one and stay within the lines this time." Does a good dad do that? Why do you think God will do that to you? Why? All your life, you're going to be coloring outside the lines. All your life. You ain't ever going to be within the lines and every time the father takes it and it goes up on the fridge. Not because of what you do, but because you already have sons and daughters in Christ, in Christ, that empowers you people when you understand that. When you understand that's the gospel, that's the grace and that's what each of us have. So as you go out and have your imperfect coloring, know that the father is with you, it be confident that whatever you do, you do it as unto the Lord, knowing that from Christ you will receive your inheritance. You are serving Christ in all that you do in this life. For the life you live in this life, you live by faith in Christ. And it's no longer you who lives, but Christ lives in you through His Spirit. Amen? Let's pray. Father God, thank you for the awesomeness of your grace, the magnificence of it. Now as we go out, we got a lot on our plates, we got a lot to do, we have a lot of responsibilities, but we go out knowing that we are empowered by our God and we do it as unto you and you will give us what we need to do that. Help us to be more sensitive to the Spirit's leading in this life that He lives in us and I pray to the Lord we'll be sensitive to that and I pray for all that's going on in this community, all that we got going on in this church, the Lord you receive all the glory for it. It's not us. It's our God. And that when people see us, they'll get praises to our God and King in Christ and my prayer. [BLANK_AUDIO]