Grace Community Church Clarksville, TN
Nehemiah “Remember the Lord" July 21, 2024
This week, we will continue our study in the book of Nehemiah by taking a closer look at the opposition that Nehemiah faced in chapter 4. God’s people were continuing to accomplish the task that He had given them to do, yet they were in growing danger and battling doubt. As a result, they wrestled with a potent question we still face today- what can we do when we face overwhelming discouragement? This sermon focuses on Nehemiah’s profound answer- we must remember the Lord and respond according to His great and glorious character. Key Verses: Nehemiah 4:1-14
(light music) - The following is a production of Grace Community Church. Check us out at graceclarksville.com. - Good morning church. Our scripture today is Nehemiah chapter four verses one through 14. Sam ballot was very angry when he heard that we were rebuilding the wall. He flew into a rage and mocked the Jews, saying in front of his friends and the Samarian army officers, what does this bunch of poor feeble Jews think they're doing? Do they think they can build the wall in a single day by just offering a few sacrifices? Do they actually think they can make something of stones from a rubbish heap and charred ones at that? To buy the Ammonite who was standing beside him or Mart, that stone wall would collapse if even a fox walked along the top of it. Then I prayed, here is our God for we are being mocked. May their scoffing fall back on their own heads and may they make themselves more, make themselves become captives in a foreign land. Do not ignore their guilt. Do not blot out their sins for they have provoked you to anger here in front of the builders. At last, the wall was completed to half its height around the entire city. For the people had worked with enthusiasm, but when Sam ballot and Tabiah, and the Arabs, Ammonites, Ash Dedites heard that the work was going ahead and that the gaps in the wall of the Jerusalem were being repaired, they were furious. They all had made plans to come and fight against Jerusalem and throw us into confusion. But we prayed to our God and guarded the city day and night to protect ourselves. Then the people of Judah began to complain. The workers are getting tired and there is so much rubble to be moved. We will never be able to build the wall by ourselves. Meanwhile, our enemies were saying, before they know what's happening, we will swoop down on them and kill them and end their work. The Jews who lived near the enemy came and told us again and again, they will come from all directions and attack us. So I placed armed guards behind the lowest parts of the wall in the exposed areas. I stationed the people to go to stand guard by families, armed with swords, spears, and bows. Then as I looked over the situation, I called together the nobles and the rest of the people and said to them, don't be afraid of the enemy. Remember the Lord who was great and glorious and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes. - I feel a little bit like we should cheer for Barry for making it through all those forces. Good job, man. Good morning, my name is Drew. I'm one of the pastors here and I'm excited to be with you all. You may have noticed, if you've been attending Grace for the Wild, I'm a lot shorter than the guy who's normally up here. His name is Adam. Adam is doing what he normally does this time of year where he gets a couple weeks to kind of take a step back from preaching and take a break and spend time with his family. And so don't panic if you haven't seen him for a little while. That's normal, he'll be back with us soon. But I've just got to tell you, I'm so grateful for his leadership of our church. And I'm really grateful specifically that he's a lead pastor who gives opportunities for other people on our staff team to be able to come up here and preach. 'Cause without it, I wouldn't be able to share with you guys. So I'll be excited to see him again back with us in a little bit with some renewed energy, I know. So look forward to that. But in the meantime, let's continue this series in Nehemiah where Jonathan has done a great job the last two weeks setting the stage for what's taking place in the story. So if you've not had a chance to be with us, let me catch you up on what's happened. And if you have, it's always good to get a reminder, right? So in Nehemiah chapter one, there's this stage set for this crisis that's happening in the lives of the people of God where they've been taken over by another nation. They're now exiled in Babylon. And so Nehemiah, who's cut bare to the king, has become aware of this problem where the city walls around Jerusalem are down. And this is a problem because the walls in that day and age would be a sign of the strength of the city. And because these are God's chosen people in their city, the fact that their walls were down also would have looked to the people around in that area like God was either not with them or God must not be that powerful if they can't even keep their city walls up. And so Nehemiah has burdened his heart breaks for this. And so he prays, and this is gonna be a theme we see all throughout this book. He prays to God over a long period of time, many hours spent in prayer. And eventually the king gives him an audience with him where Nehemiah is before the king and the king notices that he's sad and he asks Nehemiah about that. And this is a treacherous spot to be in for Nehemiah because you weren't supposed to go to the king with sadness. And so the king, knowing Nehemiah and having spent time with him, asked him what's wrong. And so Nehemiah tells him about the walls. The king says, "Well, what can I do to help?" And where we left off last week is, as Jonathan explained for us, is Nehemiah basically asked for everything. He asked for all the materials, he would need to go build the wall. He asked for time away to be able to go lead it himself. He asked for papers that would protect him and the other people gathering the resources. He asked the king to foot the bill. I mean, he asked for everything. And the king said, "Yes, go and do that." And so Nehemiah goes and he scouts out the walls and he's making his plan on how they're gonna build it. And then we left off, the very last thing Jonathan shared with us is that Nehemiah went before the city leaders and said, "The Lord is with me." Let me tell you how he's been with me so far. Let's do this thing. Let's build these walls. That's my translation. He doesn't say, "Let's do this thing." That would be funny. He says, "Let's build the walls." And so the people are on board and they're ready to start. And then chapter three happens. Now, chapter three, if you are someone who loves details and you like live your life in the weeds and you're happy about it, go back and read Nehemiah chapter three. There's so many names of the people there and what they're doing. There are details about which parts of the wall they're going to build, how it's all gonna happen. We're skipping that today. We're moving on to Nehemiah chapter four. But again, go back and read it if you'd like to. What you need to know though, is progress is happening. And with the progress is coming success and with the success is coming opposition. And louder and louder are the voices of the men that we read about today in chapter four, where they are upset that Nehemiah is doing what he's doing. All the way back in chapter two, we see glimpses of this opposition where these people were frustrated. They were disheartened to hear that Jerusalem was getting their walls built. They did not like it. And so it starts there and then it builds past that to now they're threatening violence. And in a few minutes we'll talk about kind of how they escalated this opposition. But what we need to know is that chapter four is driven largely by this conflict between people who are opposing Nehemiah and his plan and then Nehemiah and the people of God that are trying to build this wall. And as we go through it, what I wanna do today is look at three different groups of people, the ones we just talked about. One being the opposition, one being the people of Jerusalem and then also Nehemiah himself. And see what we can learn from their parts in this story. 'Cause for each one of them, it can teach us something about ourselves. And then I'm gonna go ahead and tell you the main idea for today's message. You're gonna hear me say it a lot. It's found in the last verse that was read for us. Nehemiah 4.14, remember he says, I'm looking out over the situation. And so I called together the nobles and the rest of the people. And I told them and hear the words that are gonna guide us today. Remember the Lord who is great and glorious. He says, "Remember the Lord who's great and glorious." And so for each of those people, as we go through all three of them, we're gonna learn something about them and then we're gonna see what it might have looked like for them to remember the Lord who is great and glorious. And even if they didn't model that for us, what would it mean for us to do this in our lives today? So if you walk away today, remembering nothing else, remember this, remember the Lord who is great and glorious. Nehemiah knows something that we would do well to learn. God's character is worth remembering. He is great and glorious. And when we know his character and we know that it's good and we know that we can remember him and what he's done for us, it can change our lives. So let's jump into the first group of people that we're gonna look at today to guide our time, the opposition. These are the people that openly opposed Nehemiah and his building plan and everything that God was doing. And that opposition shows us the futility of opposing God, the futility of it because they were never going to be successful. They thought they were. They thought that they could control it and manage it. But what they were gonna learn is that because God was with Nehemiah and the people of Israel, their opposition of him was in vain. It was never going to work. That didn't stop them from trying though. And I wanna say something here at this point in the story that is important. Hopefully a lot of what I say is gonna be important today. But I think as we get into talking about the opposition, there's this thing that happens in my brain that you may be tempted to fall into as well. And that is, well, yeah, yeah. They were the people that were against God. I'm with God. I'm Nehemiah in this story. We do this, right? We read ourselves into the story as the hero. That's why when we read David and Goliath, we get excited to go slay some giants in our lives. We wanna be the person that God is with and that he's for and that because we view our lives as we're the hero and then there are villains that we have to go and conquer. But what if, more often than not, we have things in our lives that are villain-like? What if, like the opposition that we're gonna learn about today, we are selfish and we make plans that oppose God's plans? Could you be open to that fact that maybe God has something to teach us from their example because we're more like them than we care to admit? And so with that in mind, what were their plans and what were they trying to do? Well, these men were selfish. They were approaching the situation and saying, "You know what, Jerusalem doesn't have walls right now. "That means we as their neighbors. "These are leaders in Samaria." They said, "We can now rise to prominence. "We're gonna be more powerful. "This could generate more wealth for us. "It does really good things for us "if our enemies stay with their walls down." And so they weren't the ones who tore down the walls. They weren't the ones that put the Israelite people in exile but they definitely have benefited from it. And now the thought of the Israelites coming back in and restoring order is bad news for them. So what do they do? Well, they start by complaining about it. So it's kind of small at first. They just essentially say in chapter two, they didn't like it. They were greatly displeased. Chapter two, verse 10 describes. And then when their great displeasure did nothing to change the situation, they moved on in verse 19 by asking a serious question of the Israelites. They said, "Hey, are you doing this "to oppose the king?" Because they knew if the king got word that the Israelites were doing this and the king hadn't approved it, the king would say, "Hey, these people are rebelling against me. "We need to squash this rebellion." So them calling into question the king was so that they would stop and they were trying to control the situation and manipulate it and make it look like the king didn't know what was going on. Now, you know and I know from Nehemiah chapter one and two that the king was on board with all this. He had signed off on it. So this was not going to stop them. So they were like, "Well, shoot, that didn't work. "What can we try next?" I know, let's openly mock them. And so now they started mocking the people in their building efforts. They made fun of it. We read some of that today. There was like recorded trash talk in the Bible about if a fox climbed on that wall, it would fall down. I'm sure his buddies were like, "Oh!" It means nothing to me, the fox trash talk. But I'm assuming it's the equivalent of like, if you've seen basketball players after they dunk on somebody, they do the two small. It's like, the wall's too small. Anyway, that would have gone better with students. All right. So they mocked them. And then when that didn't work, the wall continued to be built. Now it's at half of its height. They went on and escalated further to the threat of physical violence. They said, "I know, let's get our armies together. "Let's kill them while they're building this wall, "while they're distracted with everything that they're doing." That did get their attention, by the way. All of these things, the Israelites had to respond to them. And Nehemiah gives us a master class in how to respond to opposition, and that he constantly prayed to God, and then kept going, is what he did. Because, again, he was on the side of what God wanted to be done. But what about the opposition? They were being selfish in their plans. They saw the situation as a way to make money for themselves or establish their nation to prominence. And so to do that, they were putting down the plan that God had in place. They never stopped to consider for a second. Maybe we're not up against the Israelites, maybe we're up against God himself, and we should stop. So what can we learn from this? Well, it depends. What plans do we have in place that are selfish? What schemes are we putting on? How are we escalating in our lives when we can't control something? What do we go to next? When we find ourselves yelling at the top of our lungs at our kids because we can't control their behaviors, what's going on in our hearts or in our lives that is kind of like this opposition, where we realize we're not in control and we don't like it. And so we yell and we threaten. What can we do? Well, the lesson I told you was gonna be remember the Lord. Remember the Lord who is great and glorious. And so from them, from the opposition, we can see that his plan is better than ours. His plan is better than mine. So I need to remember the Lord who is great and glorious. When I find myself in this situation where I'm opposing God's plan, or maybe not even that, I'm just making selfish plans. And I'm doing things my way. I'm not listening to God. I'm not letting him weigh in on this. I'm not listening to the wise counsel of people around me. I'm just deciding things for myself. And I'm getting frustrated at the lack of control I have. And so I escalate it, and I escalate it. And eventually I blow up. What if I stop and remember the Lord instead? He is great, he is glorious, he is God, and I am not. And so in my plans that are puny and flailing about and not working and not bringing the results that I desire, when they aren't working, what would it mean to stop and remember the Lord who is great and glorious? Because he's great, his plans are perfect. And because he's glorious through Jesus Christ, he's with us and he's for us. His character is second to none. It is perfect and holy. And so even though Nehemiah was predating Jesus' time on this earth when he came as an infant and grew up and lived a perfect life and died a sacrificial death and rose again from the dead, Nehemiah hadn't seen all that. And yet this story points ahead to the time that it will happen. For us, we get the benefit of looking back and saying God's plan is perfect. Right at the very beginning, when Adam and Eve sinned and fellowship with God was broken for them, God prophesied about Jesus in Genesis chapter three, his plans are perfect. They're good and they can be trusted. And so when we are planning and we're making mistakes and falling short, it does us good to stop and remember that God is great and he's glorious and his plan is better than mine. It reminds me of rock climbing. I know it seems like a strange thing for it to remind me of, right? But in my role with students over the years, I've gotten to go on a number of student ministry trips and one of the activities that I've gotten to watch students take part in over the years is rock climbing. Like certain camps will have rock walls on their properties. And I remember one particular day a number of years ago that we were watching students climb this wall and one of them got about halfway up and got stuck. And they were probably in some kind of pose like this, right? Like on the wall. So they're stuck and they're hanging on. They've got the rope attached to them and the person's bling them and the people that run the camp are yelling encouragement up to them and they're like, I don't like it. And so they're on the wall and the person down below tells them like, hey, there's a hold right there where your right knee is. Just pick up your foot and get there. And if you can get there, you can make it up the rest of the wall. And the person on the wall is like, I can't reach it. And they're like, you can, just push up, reach up, get your foot there and then you'll make it, I promise. And so eventually one of two things happens. Either the person crumbles and we bring them back down and there are probably some tears involved and yet we still love on them and give mugs. Or they do get their foot on that rock and they step up and they go the rest of the way. Why does this remind me of this story? Because sometimes we're like the student that's up on the rock wall, totally stuck. And we don't see the plan that God has for us. We can't see where we're supposed to put our foot next. We can't see where we're supposed to go or how we're supposed to do it. But God does and he's telling us, it's right there. Just keep going, it's right there. And the question becomes, do we trust God? Do we understand his voice enough that when he calls to us and he tells us his plan, we follow through with it. Sometimes yes, maybe, sometimes no, maybe, but praise be to God who is great and glorious. His plan is better than ours. And he's not a distant God who stays far from us. His plan doesn't always make us happy. It doesn't always follow the way that we want but it is always good because he is always trustworthy. So what do we do? We remember the Lord. That's the opposition. Next I wanna talk about the people of God. The Israelites in this story. What they show us, what they reveal to us in the way that they respond in chapter four is the reality of discouragement. The reality of discouragement. Now, if the opposition is experiencing discouragement because of their opposition, because they're not listening to God's plan and so they're frustrated by their inability to create things out of their plans, the people of Israel are different in that they're doing exactly what they're supposed to be. So why are they discouraged? We think that from a young age, sometimes growing up in church, we can have this false idea that following God means everything works out. So if I follow God, everything goes perfectly and if I don't follow God, everything goes terribly. And so if something goes terribly in my life, it means that I'm not following God well enough and I need to go back and change how I'm living. But the people of Israel and the story show us they were doing exactly what they were supposed to be and they were still facing discouragement. Sometimes we get discouraged because of our own choices and consequences. And when that happens, we should definitely repent. Other times, we face discouragement just because we live in a broken world. It may be someone else's sin. It may just be a reality. It may be a failing in our own body that leads us to be discouraged. It may be a job position that we either don't get or we do get and it's not all it's cracked up to be. Maybe it's a discouragement in our family where we can't control our sons or our daughters or how they respond in situations. Maybe it's a discouragement from our friend group that it falls apart in a way that we never would have imagined that it could have. We face discouragement everywhere in our lives and for them, they were doing what they were supposed to be doing and yet still faced it. What caused their discouragement? Well, of course they were discouraged because of the people trying to discourage them from building the wall. But if you dig a little deeper, there's two categories of discouragement that they fall into the first is that they were discouraged because they were burned out. They were physically tired. They had been working on this wall and they got to where it's half its height that it's gonna be and they had been going at this a while and they were just tired. The initial excitement of we're building the wall has now worn off to where now they're facing this opposition and they're hearing the voices and so they're just having to kind of persevere through this discouragement. They're tired. The second type that we see is discouragement through isolation. The people that lived closest to the opposition were hearing every day, we're gonna come kill you. We're going to stop this wall. You're not gonna be able to finish it. What are you even doing trying? And so they would come and report back to Nehemiah and the others who were doing the building and they would get more and more discouraged. Why? Because they were isolated from the people that were believing and doing what God had called them to do. And so in their proximity to the loud voices that were calling against God's work, they were experiencing discouragement. So what does this mean for us? Because we don't have that exact situation obviously and yet we do have similar situations in that we experience discouragement. So one is if you're feeling overworked, overtired, sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do, the most holy thing you can do is go take a nap. If you have a physical need that is taking place and causing discouragement, do your best to take care of that physical need. It's like when I got married, my mom's last advice to my wife, Sarah, before we got married was make sure that he never gets hungry because he turns into a different person. If you do that, I hope you're a great husband to you. And I think that largely that's been true, that I get hangry unlike the Snickers commercial. You're not you when you're hungry, grab a Snickers. They base that on my life work, I think. And once I eat, it's just everything gets better. Colors are brighter. I can hear birds singing. God is good or like everything's better in that moment. But up until that point, I'm just not, like no amount of prayer is gonna help when I'm hungry. I've tried, I just have to eat and pray. Like it's not an either or in that situation, it's both and. Sometimes we're physically needing to take care of something so that we don't have as much discouragement. And that is a reasonable response. Sometimes though, it's isolation. It's not something that we can fix physically in our bodies. It's something we need in community. This is why church is so important. That's why we set up grace around these ideas of being in a body of believers, pursuing Jesus together. We have small groups that do this. We have ministry areas. We have people that serve and volunteer. And it's not just that we need things from you guys to be able to pull off the things that we do here. It's because when we serve, when we engage in community, when we come to worship together, it builds community that we desperately need and we're designed for. Because sometimes when we're discouraged, we just need to know that someone else is with us. It's why when you're a small child and something scary happens, the first instinct is to grab and hug an adult that you trust or to grab a hand, why? Because the discouragement is there and you just need to feel close to someone else in that moment to feel safe. This is why community is so important. Isolation caused discouragement. But again, neither of these things were really avoidable. It wasn't that they were doing something wrong. It was just kind of the natural state of things in their lives. They had to keep working on the wall so they were gonna be tired. And they lived close to the opposition. So that wasn't gonna change either. So then what do we do with this? When we experienced discouragement that we didn't cause and then we can't really change, how do we persevere through it? It's not just a physical response. Taking a nap isn't enough. Eating a Snickers bar isn't enough. We must look to God. Remember the Lord who is great and glorious. He is working in my situation. And he's working in yours too. When you feel discouraged, remember that God is at work in your situation. He hasn't abandoned you. He hasn't given up on you. In fact, for the Israelites, they were experiencing success. Isn't it interesting that they felt the biggest failure in the middle of their biggest success? The wall was half built. They were seeing the progress and yet were still discouraged. When we experienced discouragement, we need to look no further than the Lord. Remember the Lord who is great and glorious. And he is at work in my situation. There's an example elsewhere in scripture that's really helpful for this specific idea. It's in Joshua chapter one. Joshua was a leader of the nation of Israel at a time in its history where Moses had been the leader and he had seen the people leave Egypt. He had brought the people out of Egypt at God's direction. Make no mistake, God was the one doing all this. And yet he was allowing Moses to be the leader of the people at that time. They get out and now God has the promised land for them to walk into. And yet he has them wander around a desert for a very long time before they're ready to go into the promised land. You may ask like, why is this? Well, because the people had left Egypt at this point in the story, but Egypt had not yet left the people and that their hearts needed to be turned back to God fully before he was ready to bring them in to the promised land. And so Moses dies before experiencing the promised land. And so now it falls to Joshua to be the one to lead them. And he knew this was coming like Moses had been preparing him to be that leader and God had called him to it. And yet imagine the terror of you're responsible for this huge thing in the life of your nation and the guy who you've looked to for years now is gone. So everyone turns and looks at you. This would have been what Joshua was feeling. And so in Joshua chapter one, we see a pep talk that God gives to him. And in it, he says, be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. So if we feel discouraged, what do we do? Do not be afraid or discouraged for the Lord your God will be with you wherever we go. We remember that we serve a God who is with us and who is for us. God is not far away from Joshua. He's not far away from Nehemiah. He's not far away from the people of Israel. He is right there working in their situation. And so there are going to be times in our lives when we're discouraged. What do we do? We do remember that God is with us. He promises as much through Jesus. He says that he'll never leave or forsake us, that when we sin and we fall short of the glory of God, he forgives us. He says that when we succeed, he's with us and he's celebrating us. God is with us and he's for us. And so we remember that truth when we feel discouraged. So what would it look like for you to carve out some time, to think about your discouragement? There are times in my life that I don't even realize I'm discouraged. I have a blow up moment where I get really frustrated about something that doesn't matter. And I'm like, whoa, where did that come from? What's going on in my heart that brought this about? What if we stop and pause and look at the discouragement in our lives before it ever reaches that critical moment? What if we're proactive about our discouragement? So I would just invite you today. This is an exciting prospect, right? Go home and think about your discouragement. And then when you allow God to speak to it, when you reflect on it a little bit, when you bring it to the light of day, ask God to show you how he's working in the middle of that situation. Ask him to give you eyes to see the work that he's doing. Be honest with yourself, where am I discouraged? And then pay attention to what God is doing. Ask God to work in you, not just around you, but in you. When I was in high school, I was a freshman in high school and going into that, the summer going into that year, we had a project that we did at school and it was called the Bug Project. And we had heard other classes had to do this. And what it was was kind of what it sounds like. You have to catch, I don't know, like a billion bugs over the summer. You had to catch a whole bunch of them and then you had to eventually present them all in such a way as you had to pin them and put them on this board thing and then present all the different types of bugs. Now, I will tell you, I noticed bugs if they bite me or if they're flying around me or things like that. And that's kind of it. That summer, my eyes were open. I was like, there are so many bugs. Like you would just be outside and you'd see them everywhere. Now, was there an influx of bugs of insects in the summer of, I'm not even gonna guess the year when I was going into freshmen? No, no, there weren't more bugs in Greensboro, North Carolina that year. What it was was I was paying attention to them. And so I saw them everywhere because my eyes were opened and I was looking for them. What would it look like for us to pay that level of attention to how God's working in our discouragement? I get really good at finding ways that I can complain to God about how he's not working in my discouragement. I can make great lists of those, God, you're not doing this, you're not doing that. I'm dealing with this, I'm dealing with that. What if I took that same energy and said, Lord, show me how you're at work in my discouragement? I know that you are, that's a given, why? Because I remember your great and glorious character. I know that you're at work, help me see how you are. It would change our lives if we did that. So this is what we can learn from the people of Israel in this chapter. And now the last one I wanna look at is Nehemiah. Nehemiah himself, the leader here who God has called to do this, he shows us the tenacity of faith. He has a tenacious faith time and time again throughout this story. Nehemiah has been praying. He starts it at the very beginning with this long season of prayer where he prayed daily for God and when his heart was broken over the status of the walls and what that meant for his people, he prayed. He prays again in this chapter. Every time the opposition raises up against him, he prays, sometimes he prays very aggressive prayers against the opposition. But what does he do in his tenacity of faith, Nehemiah prays, he stays connected with God. In verse four, he says, "Hear us, God." This is what we can do as well. We can fight to stay connected to God. Faith means that we fight to stay connected to God. He also, again, remembers God's character. This verse that we've been quoting over and over throughout this sermon is from Nehemiah himself. He also fights to stay connected with others. He calls everyone together and the nobles and the people and he gives them the words of remembering God and then the immediate next words after that are, now go and fight for your mothers and your fathers and your brothers and your sisters. He gives them and for your homes themselves. He gives them a charge. He gives them a calling. He says, "Our faith is not enough "to just kind of stay within itself. "Our faith goes outward as well. "Our faith acts." I love Nehemiah's example of faith that prays and faith that believes that God's gonna make a difference and that God is the one who ultimately allows all of us to happen and also goes and does something. I can fall into the trap sometimes of praying and then being apathetic or maybe not even praying at all, just jumping right to apathy. But Nehemiah shows us that faith is active. He prays and he goes and does something as well. What can we learn from Nehemiah? We learn to remember the Lord who is great and glorious. He calls me to turn to him. This is Nehemiah's example. He turns towards God and he invites us to do the same. Our application here is to turn towards God. I wanna give you something really practical to try 'cause there's kind of the philosophical idea that we need to pay more attention to how God's working in our lives. And that's good and it's important, but it can be hard to sink our teeth into that. So let me give you just a really practical next step that you might take to turn towards God. What if every single one of us this week took 30 minutes every day and turned off our phones? I've already lost some of you. Turned off our phones and turned towards God. Through prayer, through the study of his word, through diving into our discouragement, asking him to meet us in the middle of it. How would it change our lives if we were willing to just kind of silence everything else and rest and who God is? Sometimes when we're facing discouragement, this is all it takes. Now, it may be that the things that are discouraging you are still there when that 30 minutes are over. In fact, I'll tell you secret, they probably will still be there. Sometimes God does miraculous things and takes things away, and that's beautiful. But other times, he just promises to be with us right in the middle of it. But at the end of that 30 minutes, our problems that seem so big before we turn to God seem a lot smaller because we see God. We remember how great he is, how glorious he is, and the problems of this world seem to shrink in comparison to that. What would it look like for us to turn towards God this week to reflect on his presence? Now, if that's not your next step, I just invite you to take one. Spend time with God asking him, "What can my next step be?" Because faith continues to move. It is active, and God calls us to take next steps. So today, are you opposing God's plan, like we talked about at the beginning of this passage? Remember the Lord, who is great and glorious, and stop, stop opposing him. Or, like the people of Israel, are you facing discouragement today? Remember the Lord, who is great and glorious. Or, like Nehemiah, are you just holding on to your faith, trying to have tenacious faith. Remember the Lord, who is great and glorious, and stay the course. I wanna close with a quote that, to be honest with you, I just, it kind of found me this morning, and so it's not gonna be up on the screens or anything, but it's a Cory Timboom quote. I think it's so powerful. Cory Timboom is part of a Dutch family. She was part of a Dutch family, who helped harbor safety for, and provide safety, for Jewish people during the Holocaust. And she and her family were taken into a concentration camp, and their strong Christian faith helped them stay the course in just impossible situations, and painful situations, and suffering that I can't even imagine. And here's what she had to say, that I think fits so well with Nehemiah for, that we talked about today. She said, if you look at the world, you will be distressed. If that discouragement we're talking about. If you look within, you will be depressed. If you look at God, you will be at rest. I thought that was so powerful. We'd look at God, we remember the Lord, great and glorious, and that's where we find our hope, that's where we find our peace, that's where we find the ability to keep going in the face of discouragement. Let me pray for us today and ask God for some help, bringing this to life for us. Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you. I thank you for your goodness, and your mercy, and your love, and your tenderness. I thank you that your plans are good, that you are righteous and holy and just. Your character is good, Father, it's perfect, in fact, and your plans are good too. So I pray for anyone who's facing discouragement today, that they would find hope in you, that they would be able to persevere, that they would trust you and look to you, and experience you more fully as they do it. I thank you for loving us. I thank you for the example of this passage of Scripture. Help us take whatever next step of faith you have us to take. We love you, Father. It's in Jesus' name, I pray. Amen, amen. Hope you guys have a fantastic week. I look forward to seeing you back next week. (upbeat music) Thanks for listening. For more about Grace Community Church, check out graceclarksville.com. (gentle music) (gentle music)