Stand Up to Act

Welcome back to church. I missed a lot of you the past few weeks because of all the craziness that’s been going on in the children’s church over the last few weeks and boy, is it good to be back here one month later. To officially kick off our summer because the kids kicked off two weeks ago, I’m going to try something really radically different. I’m running a parallel series in the 1:30PM service and in the 10:30AM service. Which just means, for the next 4 weeks or so, you and the kids will be learning about Nehemiah, but if you come to both services, you will not get the same message twice, you’ll get everything you didn’t hear at the 10:30AM service in the 1:30PM service and likewise things you won’t hear in the 1:30PM service, you’ll hear at the 10:30AM service. It’s total craziness that I am doing this but I think this will be interesting when the summer is over and the kids part ways with Space Quest and we embark on a study of the Book of Ephesians, where we are when 2012 finishes. So the name of the series is “Change Your World in 52 Days.” And this series originally came to me in my quiet times a few years back when I read Nehemiah 6:15, “So the wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty-two days.” Yes, there is a guy in the Bible whose name is Nehemiah, who was not a priest, prophet, warrior or even a king that took it upon himself to do one of the most amazing things in Scripture—rebuild a city destroyed in less than two months. This is the work most hedge funds dream of when they plot their hostile takeovers and make a public company go private. More importantly, his story reminds us that in our lives, we can’t do everything, but we can do something and that’ll be enough to change our worlds! The title of today’s message is, “Stand up to Act.” Nehemiah was a butler. I want you to write this down. The walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt by a butler. I know this means nothing to you yet, but let me give you some historical context of what’s going on here. The city of Jerusalem had been lying in ruins for about 140 years. There was a nakedness to the city because it was a complete embarrassment. In fact, what had happened was that the last king of Judah, whose name was Zedekiah, as was basically an idiot who ignored the prophet Jeremiah, I’m not saying that just because I have a bias towards angry prophets like Jeremiah, but I’m saying that because Zedekiah was made king over Judah after Nebuchadnezzar 2 of Babylon already conquered Judah and made Zedekiah promise not to build an army and pay taxes to Babylon and be taken care of, went and tried to rebel against the king of the most powerful nation at the time. I know I’m digressing, but long story short, Zedekiah was an idiot and Nebuchadnezzar starved Zedekiah out of Jerusalem and then ripped his eyes out after he had killed his entire family before him and then was an amusement for his parties and a piece of the king collection he was amassing. Oh, after Zedekiah fled his own city, ditching his own people, Nebuchadnezzar came and burned it to the ground and knocked down the walls. Now another empire was the most powerful, the Persian empire conquered Babylon and Artaxerxes was king and Jerusalem was an afterthought. Nehemiah lived in the capital of Susa, modern day Iran and about 1,000 miles away from Jerusalem. For a butler, he lived in relative comfort, had a status and probably a little influence. He was the butler for the king afterall. If you don’t know, it was also the butler’s job to taste the food/drink for the king before the king drank it—you know, you didn’t want to die of poisoning, so that was one of his duties that he happily performed. But here’s what is super intriguing to me about this man Nehemiah—he was especially ordinary! He couldn’t be any less special! In fact, he was a little bit like us—middle class and anonymous at best! But unlike us, there is one thing that separates him from you and even me; he was a man who saw something that bothered him and decided to stand up to act! He said to himself, somebody has got to do something and it might as well be me! Let’s read Nehemiah 1:1-4. 1The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the citadel, 2 that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. 3 And they said to me, “The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.” 4 As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. – Nehemiah 1:1-4 I want to look at verse 3. If you read the quiet time on the church website on Friday, you’d know this is a familiar verse with huge implications for our lives because it parallels what our lives and world views are like—broken down walls and gates destroyed by fire. If you don’t know what metaphor I’m getting into here, then you can read the quiet time post. But here’s what I mean very generally and specifically for our lives: there are walls broken down, not only in Nehemiah’s time, but in our lives, we have broken governments, churches, and families (our families in particular); we have: poverty, wealth disparities, slavery, curable diseases and a lack of drinking water. Just examples of things in our present world that should be like walls, that is pillars of a functional society, which are broken down making our society look like an embarrassment to a troupe of clowns coming out of a ‘77 Beatle at a circus. Verse 4. Nehemiah heard this and was so moved by it, that he cried! Here’s our problem, we don’t care about anything that doesn’t directly affect us! That’s how desensitized and worthlessly compassionless and loveless we are! We just don’t care enough about anything to cry over it unless it’s about our loser boyfriend dumping us to take a half wit job connecting cellphones at AT&T in Idaho! I know that’s ridiculous right? What about us facebook fiends who read, thumb and then just move on with our news feed? It’s sad, but it’s not my problem! That is our excuse—it’s not our problem. And we keep telling ourselves this in order to help us sleep at night, but at a certain point and on a certain day, not your problem is exactly your problem! When was the last time we heard something that made us sit down and cry that has nothing to do with our failures to achieve academically, socially or economically? That’s right, probably never. Maybe never is too harsh, maybe one time, a long time ago before we were jaded and before we knew any better we were moved to tears for a cause or a problem; but not now, not anymore. I mean, if you are deeply bothered by things then don’t worry, only worry if you are not bothered by anything. Listen to what Matthew writes about Jesus in Matthew 9:35-36: 35 And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. If are to be Christ followers in a real way, then we have to start being more like Christ and caring about what we hear and what we see. I want to ask you—what breaks your heart? Is it broken families? Poverty? Irreligious? Uneducated? The elderly? Disabled? Orphans? Exploited? What is it that breaks your heart? I want you to think about this right now. I want you to let in the pain and embrace that burden! Let me tell you what breaks my heart every single time: modern day slavery, the generationally poor and impoverished and uneducated, and orphans bother me. That’s why we are in this church business—because here at church, in Christ’s church we give orphans a family, we educate the uneducated and we dare to lash out against modern day slave traders. This church building we’re in, according to the local historian was part of the underground railroad. Do you think we have a problem, with that being the legacy of the building we’re in, to go out of our way to change the world? Of course not! I know what you’re thinking though: I’m only one person. What can I do? Look at what Nehemiah did while he was crying—he was fasting and praying! When we invoke the name of God, we know that we have power. You heard this in the morning at the children’s service, but “God + 1 always equals a majority!” If you really think about what bothers your heart, you have to know that some of the things you are facing look flat out impossible. But with God all things are possible and it’s possible if you share your burden by praying. Let’s go to Nehemiah 2:1-5 1In the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, I took up the wine and gave it to the king. Now I had not been sad in his presence. 2 And the king said to me, “Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart.” Then I was very much afraid. 3 I said to the king, “Let the king live forever! Why should not my face be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ graves, lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” 4 Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. 5 And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.” – Nehemiah 2:1-5 You know there were hundreds of other problems in the world at the time, but Nehemiah chose this one. I said this earlier as the impetus for this series: you can’t do everything, but you can do something. Guess what, you are the one that has to do something, not me, not the person sitting next to you, but you! I want you to highlight that phrase, “that I may rebuild it.” Your greatest burden will open the door to your greatest blessing. Did you see what happened when Nehemiah decided to stand up and act? The King of Persia noticed and if you don’t know how this ends, I’ll remind you, in 52 days, with equipment, supplies and manpower from the king of Persia, Nehemiah rebuilds what burdened him. Find what burdens you and go do something about it. As a church, we are bothered by the multitude of people who live life without hope as a result of being far from Jesus, everything we do, we do so that they may come closer to Him and have a renewed hope. We don’t do the crazy things we do because we have nothing better to do. I got better things to do trust me. I don’t work at the Dept of Homeless Services because it’s the only job I can get, trust me, I can make a lot more money if wanted to somewhere else, I’m there because I care about the poor. We all need to do something about the burden we have in our hearts and act instead of retweeting a factoid nobody cares about. Let’s pray.