01 Why Nehemiah Matters for Christians in a Post-Christian Age (Nehemiah 1:1-3)

Speaker: Thank you for downloading the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta. We're starting the series on the Book of Nehemiah today. We'll be looking at chapter one, verses one through three. You can find links mentioned in the talk and lecture notes related to the podcast at wednesdayintheword.com slash Nehemiah1. Thank you for joining us. All right, we're going to spend then the fall session, the next 10 weeks, talking about Nehemiah. And I'm if you're like most people I talk to, you're probably wondering why did we pick this book? What why pick this, you know, historical, kind of dry, obscure book that happened 2,000 years ago or more? And how is that going to help me get through next week? How is that going to make any difference in my life? And that's what I'm going to talk about today is what can you expect to learn from this book and why should you care? And what difference will it make in your life? And there's a few things we're going to talk about a lot this fall. I should say we're going to do Nehemiah in the fall, and then in the winter quarter, we will be starting a study of the Psalms. And you are privileged because we're going to have a team of teachers, so you won't have to listen to me all the time. And we have some great women who are willing to teach. It's going to be wonderful. So make sure you come for the whole year because you don't want to miss Psalms. Okay, back to Nehemiah. One thing you can expect to learn this year, at least in the fall, is we're going to talk a lot about leadership. And you may think, oh, great, I'm not a leader. That's kind of trivial. I don't, I'm not involved in leadership. But I bet you are, even if you don't know. Because if you're a parent, you no doubt feel the responsibility of kind of passing on the torch to the next generation, not only keeping them safe, but teaching them family history, family values, teaching them biblical values, and passing on, kind of raising them up to the next generation. If you're in your later seasons of life, you may have heard there's read Titus II now and then that there's a command in them that says older women are to teach the younger women to be godly wives and women and mothers. So maybe it's been impressed upon you that I I'm in that time now, and let me tell you it comes sooner than you think. It's like it's not long before somebody will tap you on the shoulder and say, Would you mentor me? And you'll think, Me? I'm not old enough to do that yet. I still think that way. So if you're a younger woman, you may be preparing for that time when some woman younger than you is going to come along and want to sit at your feet and learn what you learned. And if you're an older woman, you can be in that stage now. Or if you're just beginning your career, you may be trying to make sense of a career you have, trying to figure out how do I supervise people or how do I respond to a supervisor. You may be an elder's wife or a deacon's wife or support staff for one of the leaders. And I'll bet at least half of you here are involved in some kind of leadership of the church somewhere, some committee or some program or some of the ministries. And if that doesn't, if I haven't hit you yet, I bet you'll you will have a role if you're a member of this church in praying for and selecting the leaders of the church because we all nominate officers and train them. So leadership may be more relevant to you than you think. And every generation needs to be looking for their replacements and looking to train the people who will come along to be the next generation of leaders, whether it's in your church or your family or your business or whatever. Now, leadership may change. Different eras may need different kinds of leaders. Sometimes you need strong, kind of powerful, firm voices in leadership. Sometimes you need more conciliatory or community building, vision casting kind of leaders. And as the culture changes or as churches or life changes, you may need different kinds of leaders. And we don't know in 15, 20 years what kind of leaders our children will need to be. But what we do know is there are certain principles of leadership that stay the same. There's kind of these core effective qualities that leaders need to have: wisdom, honesty, courage, and most important, of course, godliness. And that's what we're going to talk about a lot this year. What kind of traits make a good leader? What do you need? It's not your necessarily your degree or your uh you know pedigree or the letters after your name that make you a good leader, but more qualities that God instills in your heart. So as we go through Nehemiah, we're gonna talk about leadership and particularly in the area of building a community. So not just leading in terms of governing, but leading in how do you build a community out of a people who are scattered or broken? How do you build fellowship out of people that don't know each other? So we're gonna be looking at that. The second thing we're gonna learn in Nehemiah is prayer. And the book of Nehemiah has a lot to teach on prayer. It's got the longest prayers in the Bible outside of the Psalms. But you didn't know that. And the interesting thing is a lot of the book is written in the first person. So instead of being told, oh, Nehemiah prayed, we hear why he prayed and what he prayed and the circumstances around it, and we get his thoughts on it. So there's in addition to the prayers he prayed, we get his reasoning and his thoughts behind it. Um, which we wouldn't have in most of the other historical books that were written in in third person. Now, you're thinking, how could Nehemiah be written in first person if Ezra wrote it? Most people think that Ezra compiled it from Nehemiah's diaries. That as uh you'll see when we get into this, his position of state would have required him to keep a journal of sorts and diaries. And Ezra probably compiled the book from his first person accounts. The other thing that I think will be, in addition to leadership and prayer, the other thing I think that makes this book really relevant for today is it took place in a culture that's very similar to our own. And I'm gonna explain that in a minute. But the situation the exiles were facing is very similar to, I think, what we're facing today. Not that we live in a city without walls, but they faced a kind of multiculturalism that that is present today. And then finally, of course, this book's gonna teach us about God, how God works in history, how he acts in history, and how he deals with his people. That kind of goes without saying with a historical book. Um, but there's a lot to learn there. So let me set the stage of where this book takes place. Um, and that's this piece of paper that I handed out. That's what I'm gonna be talking about. This is my flyover of biblical history. Biblical history at a glance. So I'm going to assume that you know nothing about the Old Testament. So for some of you, this is probably going to be review, but for others of you it may be new. And what this little chart is, is the history of essentially biblical times. The line is the relative population. So you can see it reaches a peak during the captivity years, and then drops off, goes negative in the exile, and then comes back relatively constant. So that's why the line goes up and down. So the the history of God's people starts with Abraham, and that's kind of the beginning of the story of redemption, of God calling one man and one out of one family to lead a small tribe and become a nation. And that's the period of the patriarchs. The dates are approximate, so it's approximately 2000 BC. Um, and that leads to his twelve sons becoming the twelve tribes and moving being in Egypt because of a famine in Israel, they migrate to Egypt and stay. And that's the captivity in Egypt where they are slaves. And I since those of you who attended this church, since we did Exodus all last year, I'm not going to talk too much about that. But you can see that's where they reach their peak of population and become a threat to Pharaoh, so that he's concerned about all the Israelites and how powerful they could become. And that, of course, leads to Moses leaving them out of Egypt into the wilderness period, where they wander around in the wilderness for 40 years, and there the population declines some. So at the end of the wilderness, they cross over into the promised land, and they are a nation finally, a people, but they have no king. They are a nation under God. And that's the period we call the judges, because they didn't have a king like other countries around them. Instead, God would send judges or prophets at various times to correct them. So another very interesting book to study because if you read that book, the phrase that comes up over and over again is everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Which strikes me as today, doesn't it? I mean, that's kind of where our culture is headed. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. So at the end of the period of judges, the people are getting kind of frustrated and they say, We want to look like everybody else. We want to have a king. God, you have to give us a king. We don't want to be ruled just by judges. We want to be like all the other tribes around us. And God says, You don't want a king, but he gives them one anyway, because he has a lesson to teach them. And that leads to Saul becoming the first king, and then, of course, David and Solomon. And that's the period of that's often referred to as the united monarchy. And it was the high point. This is where they had the most peace, the most prosperity. They pushed the borders of their land to the biggest they ever had. Um, they had relative influence and power. Uh other kings and tribes and nations would come to the to the Jerusalem to meet with their kings. And that was kind of the high point in biblical history. Then at the end, uh when Solomon dies, there's a struggle for power among his sons over who's going to become king, and that results in a split, so that ten tribes become the northern kingdom, known as Israel, and two tribes, Benjamin and Judah, stay in the southern area, and they have a different king, and they're known as the southern kingdom or Judah. And that's the period, if you read Kings and Chronicles, um, covers the history in that dealing. In that period, of course, there's many more rebellious kings than there are faithful kings, and God warns them through the prophets that judgment is coming, and it eventually comes in 722. That date's fairly well known, when Assyria conquers the northern kingdom and takes them off into captivity. Then the southern tribe hangs on, what is that, a couple, about a 150-200 more years until they are captured by the Babylonians and overrun. And that begins the period of the exile. The Babylonians conquer the Palestine region, including Jerusalem. They carry all the Israelites off to their lands and make them slaves, and that's the period of the exile. Then eventually the Persian Empire becomes the strongest force in the region, and they take over and conquer Babylon. And they, when they take over, they allow the Israelites to return. So the exile ends, as the prophets predicted. And this is the period where Nehemiah takes place. It's after the exile. The Persians are now in power, and some of the Jews have been allowed to return to Palestine, but many have stayed because they've grown up there. They've lived there 70 years or whatever. I can't do the math that quickly, 40 years. Just to finish out history, to take you through the New Testament period, eventually the Macedonians will conquer the Persians and then rule Palestine. Egypt will then conquer Macedonia. Syrians will conquer Egypt, and finally, with Alexander the Great, the Romans will take over the whole region. And that's the period where the New Testament opens, when the Romans have are now the dominant force. And that leads to, of course, the destruction of Jerusalem in 78D when the Romans level it. So that's biblical history at a glance. Now, Scott Amos teaches a year-long class in that at the Study Center. Just think of the time I saved you. Actually, it's a great class. If you can ever take it, I highly recommend it. But the period we're going to be looking at is this period where it says under Persian rule. And it's, if you look in your books, whoops, there's a chart on the back that zeros in on that time period. It's about the second or third page. If you don't have it, that's okay. You can look at it later. But what I've given you is the approximate year, the king who's in power of Persia, and the various books of the Bible that relate to that time period. So you can see that Nehemiah is a contemporary of Ezra, of Hagi, and Esther. And the time period we're looking at is down here where he's under the role of Artaxerxes. So what you see with the exile then is they've come full circle at this point. They started where Abraham was called out of Ur. They go back into exile in Babylon, which is where Ur was, so God takes them back where they start. But they are not abandoned by God. He prophesies that the exile will end, and it does. So Nehemiah then is beginning the story of the exile's over, and how do we rebuild? How do we start and become a kingdom again? Nehemiah, let's see, he was a contemporary of Ezra and a contemporary of Malachi. Ezra was a priest, but Nehemiah was a governor, and the king who's on the throne would have been Esther's stepson. Just if that helps. More people are familiar with the Esther story. So, why did I say that this was relevant to us? And here's how I think their age and our age are similar, and why Nehemiah can be really a contemporary voice. The exiles were living in an age that was past their golden age. The golden age was under the united monarchy with David and Solomon as king. And in that time they had influence, they had national identity, they had some degree of power, they had prosperity, they had a voice among the nations and in the public square, and they have lost all that. Now they're this kind of ragtag band of exiles who've been shifted around and displaced through the nations, and they don't have that influence anymore. And that I think is true of us. There was a time when Christianity had a voice in the public square, when it was assumed that if you were an American, you were a Protestant Christian, and that was a good thing. Now it's a bad thing. There was a time when biblical values used to inform our country, and people would assume that's the way you behaved. Even if they weren't religious, they assumed kind of the Ten Commandments were normative, you ought to follow them, and that you had a place, that religion had a place in society. And we have lost that. So some of you may not remember, you may be too young, but some of us remember when when Christianity was the norm. You look at the way religion is portrayed in TV programs made in the 1950s versus the way it's portrayed today. It's amazingly different. We were watching an old movie on TV with my kids, and they they showed a dinner scene, and everyone sat down to pray before the meal, and my kids were shocked. They were like, why are they doing that? What happened? You know, what's the point? In in this movie, it wasn't relevant to the plot, it wasn't relevant to character, it was just like we're pr portraying everyday normal life, so of course they prayed, and that was shocking to my kids who were, you know, born in the 1990s. They like, whoo! Why aren't they the bad guys or the hypocrites? Because that's the only way they've ever seen religion portrayed on TV. If you're a religious person today, you're usually a lunatic or a hypocrite or somehow end up being the bad guy. So we, in a sense, I think, are living beyond our golden age. We are we are past that point where society accepted Christian views as normative. And that's the way that was true in Nehemiah's day. Another similarity is that they faced a kind of multiculturalism in Nehemiah's day that I think we face today. The Babylonians, when they were in charge, ruled with this kind of iron fist, you will be assimilated, you will take on our culture, you may not live in your land, you will give up all national identity. When the Persians came in, they were a little more enlightened and they were tolerant. They said, okay, you can worship whatever God you choose as long as you pay your taxes and you don't interfere with the emperor. So they allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Um that was okay. That was multicultural, that was tolerant. But the idea was every idea is equal. You can believe whatever you want because it doesn't matter. All ideas are the same. Right and wrong, they're all the same. They all have merit. So whatever God you believe in, that's okay. Just don't let it change your life. Don't let it interrupt your thinking. And that's the kind of attitude the Persians had. And I think that's very similar today to what we face, where our society says, you may believe whatever you want, just don't insist that it's true. I don't know if you remember a few years ago when John Ashcroft was nominated to be attorney general, there was this huge uproar in the media over his nomination precisely because he was religious. Not only was he religious, he's an ordained minister. And the media was outraged. And I remember seeing people on the press debating how could he keep separate his faith from his job? Like that was a requirement. And once he was confirmed, it was learned that he was holding voluntary prayer meetings outside of office hours before work. So you could come early if you wanted, completely voluntary. Any of the all of his staffers were invited to tend uh to pray, and the liberals were outraged. And there was this huge cry over how how can he govern and be religious? He's the attorney general. He's dispensing justice. I'm thinking, justice. Wouldn't you want someone who believes in the Ten Commandments to kind of have that maybe when they're like thinking about justice? But no, the attitude today is sing your songs to Jesus, but don't let it change your life. You know, uh leave your religion home in a box, don't bring it to the office. And that's the kind of situation that Nehemiah's people would have faced. You can have whatever religion you want, but don't let it influence your life. Tolerate everything, every idea is equal. All right. So we're gonna talk a lot about leadership, we're gonna talk about prayer, we're gonna learn about how to live in a multicultural society. And um, let's look at the opening verses, if you can find it in your Bible. You can look there if you can't, you can look at it's about the third or fourth page of your handout. And I'm just gonna read um the opening verses today. Next week we're gonna look at Nehemiah's prayer. So this is Nehemiah chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hechaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev, which would be November, December for us. In the 20th year, which would be about 445 or 446 BC, as I was in Susa, the capital, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah, and I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And he 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 with fire. So that's the setting that we open with. We talk a little bit about what's going on here, and then we'll talk about Nehemiah as a person. Hanani was a close relative of Nehemiah's. The word is in descript. It could be a full brother, or it could be a cousin, or uh it's somehow he's related to him, but we don't know exactly what the relation is. He comes to Susa and Nehemiah asks him about the people who had escaped, who had always had remained in Jerusalem during the exile, the people who've been allowed to return, and then how the city is doing, and he says, it's really bad. They're in great trouble, the wall is down, the gates have been burned. Now the question is, and you'll see as we go on, Nehemiah reacts with great, this is very distressing news to him. And the question is why? Why does this news break his heart? And I think part of it is a city without walls is vulnerable at every point. You have no boundaries, you have no way to defend yourself militarily, but you also have no way to protect your identity. So when the Jews had their United Kingdom, they had boundaries, they had a national identity. They could point to these lines and say, within this boundary, this is the nation of Israel, this is the people who follow Yahweh, and this is who we are. Without those boundaries, there's no national identity, and there's no way of saying this is us, that's them, this is our way of life, this is not. I think that's why in a recent the recent debate over illegal immigrants. Got so heavy and so fierce. Regardless of what position you take on the issue, most people think if you have a border, you have an identity. And you cross the border, you must want to assimilate, you must want to become American. And so the debate over illegal immigration often turned on you're crossing the border and you're not assimilating. What is that? And people reacted to that and said we've got to tighten the borders. So the Jews were living in a place with no borders and no boundaries. They had no defenses, they had no way to say, this is who we are and this is what we believe in. And for them, particularly, Jerusalem was their national identity. It housed the temple, it was the heart of their religion, it was a place where God dwelt and man could meet him. And they it was gone, it was leveled, and they had no ability to defend it. So what can we learn from that? Well, how um as in your see as we go through the book, I'm going to talk about this theme, and that is that our faith ought to have boundaries. If we our faith has no boundaries, then we're vulnerable to attack. We're vulnerable to being seduced by any philosophy, by any any whim, or any idea that comes along. And I think in our society today, that's especially dangerous because our culture is trying to say there is no difference between truth and lie. There is no difference between the profane and the holy, and there is no difference between divine and human, it's all the same. And our culture is trying to blur that and say every idea is of equal merit, every idea has worth, every philosophy is equal. And if you don't have boundaries in which you can stand on and say, no, this is what I believe, this is who I am, this is who my God is, then you don't have a way to defend against those kind of attacks. So you need to know who you are and what you stand for. And the walls, I think, in Jerusalem were a physical problem, but they also represented us that this was a spiritually broken people who needed to relearn who they are, what it means to be the people of faith. So we face that today, you know, our culture says, no, this isn't sin, this is an alternative lifestyle. And and there you how dare you tell me, you know, you must be narrow-minded or bigoted to tell me otherwise. Or free speech means I can call the profane art. Um, and you just turn on some radio stations, and it's amazing what you hear. And you can't suggest that there's any kind of moral right or wrong, or you're labeled intolerant. And actions are not judged by their consequences so much as my intentions. So you see, people say, well, no, that wasn't wrong, that wasn't a mistake, that wasn't sinful, because I had really good intentions, um, which I don't think is a distinction we can make. So there's kind of this religion is fine, tolerate everything as long as you don't let it change your life. Okay, so let's look. I'm sorry, you didn't ask me something. Oh. Let's look at Nehemiah then. Who was what do we know about him? That was the time in which this book takes place. Let's look at what we know about Nehemiah. He was a Jew. Um, his name means God comforts, and he's the son of Hakaliah, which is an unknown name. We don't, he's never mentioned any anywhere else in scripture. And he tells us that he's living in Susa, which was the winter capital of the Persian Empire. And if you skip all the way down to the end of the chapter, you'll notice the very last thing he says is, Oh, I was cupbearer to the king. Which is an amazing thing for him to say. Because that's like me saying, Okay, my name is Persan, my mother was Mary, and I have two children and two cats, and by the way, I'm one of President Bush's closest advisors. It's almost the throwaway line. He throws that in. The cupbearer was the person who tasted the king's wine and food before he ate or drank to make sure it wasn't poisoned. It's sometimes translated butler, so it's the same word you'll see in the accounts of Joseph when he's talking about the butler to Pharaoh. Um, it's the same position. It was typically a high position of state because you had very intimate access to the king. So that person not only tasted the food and drink, but he became one of the king's advisors because he was around him all the time, anytime the king needed to eat. So we can guess that Nehemiah must have been educated to have that position. He was probably wealthy and risen to enough stature to gain that position, and he certainly had political standing and influence in the court. Because this is a position of stature. This is like saying, you know, I'm in the cabinet. I'm I'm one of the president's cabinet advisors. Now, what struck me about, look at the way he introduces himself. He doesn't mention that up front. He doesn't mention that until the very end of the chapter. Last weekend we we took our oldest son to college. It was very traumatic, but I survived. He's having a great time. But as part of the orientation, they had a panel of all the dean, there are five schools that make up this college, and they had the dean of each school, and it was supposed to be a question and answer. So they had each of the deans introduce himself or herself, and it was we had an hour and a half, and an hour and fifteen minutes later they finished introducing themselves. I have never heard so many names dropped in my life. I don't even know who half these people were, but they were intent on telling us every famous person whose path they crossed ever, we heard about it. Um every book they'd written, every um, you know, award or honor they'd received, they mentioned. And granted, they had very impressive resumes. I mean, they were very impressive, but there were five of them, and it took like an hour and 15 minutes, and then she's like, Okay, parents, any questions? And it just struck me, with that's the way we introduce ourselves. We have to tell you where we went to college and what degrees we have after our name and what important people we know and how impressive we are. And then we look at Nehemiah and he says, Well, here's my unknown father. Nobody, you know, whoever who was he? And he tells us his commitment to being uh part of to the exiled people, where he lives. Then he gives us this wonderful prayer that we're going to look at next week, and finally at the very end, he gives us his resume. And that struck me because it made me think, how do I introduce myself? Do people know that I'm a passionate, have this passion for God before they know my college degree? Probably not. Or do people know about your prayer life before they get your business card? I mean, it's amazing to me. Nehemiah had this high position of state, this great resume star, and yet to him what was most important is I'm a member of the people of God. And that's what he tells us first. So when he gets this news from his brothers, it creates this problem because he's kinsman to the exiles and he's cupbearer to the king. So think about his situation. He's if you're in 445 BC and you want to live someplace, the capital of Susa was a good place to be. Because he is in the palace of the most powerful man in the world at the time, in the most powerful country. And in that position, he would have had luxuries no one else had, he would have had food choices no one else had, he would have had the best health care, the best education. I mean, this is, it doesn't get any better than this in 445 BC. So here he is, he's got station, he's got influence, he's got education, he's got power, he's got wealth, he's got this position next to the king, and his brothers come to him and say, We're living in famine and destitution. So I'm a rich Christian and my brothers are destitute. What do I do? And that's the dilemma he faces. And that's what we're going to talk about next week. Is how do I live with this tension of here I am in the lap of luxury when people, yea, even his brothers or people related to him, are living in peril and in destitution and in famine. And what do we do? Now, it must have occurred to him that he could stay, because he could look at recent history and see Daniel stayed. Daniel was in a similar position. He never never returned to Jerusalem. Esther stayed. She stayed married to the king. Um, she didn't leave. Um, also in the time recently, Obadiah, who was in the time of Elijah and Elisha, he was the evil king Ahab's right-hand man. He was serving an evil king, but God used him to shelter a hundred prophets from and keep them safe from Jezebel's um persecutions. So Nehemiah could have looked at his predecessors and said, They stayed. Should I stay or should I go? And that's the dilemma he faces. Do I give up what I have here, or am I called to the front lines? Um so he's got this tension. My brothers come to me, they're in disgrace, their hearts are sick, their walls are broken, their gates are burned, they're on the front lines, they need help, and here I am with everything. Now, I think that's probably something we can relate to. I bet for most of us, we live in this tension of being in two worlds. Some of us have probably, you know, we're farther down the path, you know, you've got those 401k accounts and college funds, and the mortgage is getting paid off, and you know, maybe the career is getting into this kind of projectable, predictable trajectory. I can say that. And so I look at that and I go, ooh, I'm happy in Sousa. Please don't send me to Jerusalem, you know. This is pretty good right here. Um, you know, because life is okay. Now I imagine some of you who are probably on the younger side are feeling closer to the exiles, you know, the money is not quite there, and you're feeling a little poor and destitute, and you're starting a family, starting a household, starting a new job. Maybe you've just moved and money is tight and you left all your support groups behind, and so you're wondering, okay, is there God in the midst of all this? Am I ever going to get there? So I think most of us have that tension. And in either case, all of us are probably better off just by virtue of the fact that we live in America than many of our brothers and sisters in the world, other Christians. And I bet almost everyone here knows someone who's uh on support or in a missionary in some capacity, whether it's a university campus or a developing country, you probably know someone who's made the choice to go be on the front lines. And they live with hardship or uncertainty. So that's the tension. Should I stay? Should I go? Do I give up what I have or do I go to the front lines? Do I keep it? Can I serve God here? Can I serve him there? How do I know what to do? So it'd be nice if I'd answer that, wouldn't it? Not going to. Actually, I am, but not today. We're going to answer that. It's going to take Nehemiah about two chapters to answer that question. So we are going to answer it, but not today. So, but that's the tension, that's the debate we're going to be discussing. I think we can see a little bit of the answer, though, in this first four verses, and that is become aware. Notice that Nehemiah does not take the ostrich approach and stick his head in the sand. He goes and asks, what's going on back there? What's going on in Jerusalem? And the one way to resolve the tension is the I see nothing, I hear nothing, I don't know. You know, I don't have to know what's going on in Jerusalem. Life is good here. That's probably the wrong way to resolve it. You want to find out, you want to be aware what's going on in missions, what's going on in our neighborhood, what's going on in my child's classroom or at the office, and find out where God is at work and where you might serve him. So the first step in answering the question is be aware, find out. Then we're going to look at how Nehemiah resolves that tension as we go through his prayer. So I'm not going to directly answer it today, but we will. And I just have to warn you, it's not going to be, I can't give you a here's four easy steps and always get the right answer. It's not going to be a quick, easy process. You'll see it takes Nehemiah four months to figure it out in his life. So it requires an honesty about ourselves and about our God and a willingness to go where he wants us to go, but it's not going to be a quick, easy answer. So that's Nehemiah. That's where we're going to start. Here's a man who's got everything life could offer in 445 BC. And he's faced with this choice of my brothers are in are destitute and in famine and in exile. Do I stay? Do I go? How do I help them? And we're going to look at how he faces that challenge in terms of rebuilding a community that's been broken and scattered, rebuilding the people who have lost their national identity and their heritage, and helping them find boundaries again so they can stand and say, we are the people of God and this is what we believe. So next week, you have questions? We're going to finish chapter one. Please read through them. We will focus on Nehemiah's Prayer, and I have to tell you, this is one of my favorite sections of the book. I actually have three favorite sections, and conveniently they're in the beginning, the middle, and the end. So that's just a little say, please keep coming because then you'll get to hear them all. But you don't have it, may not be your favorite section. I understand God deals with people differently. But when I first read this prayer, I thought, oh yeah, what's all the fuss about? I've read prayers like this before. They're all over the Bible. No big deal. Um been there, done that. And that was my first reaction. And then I realized I have to teach something on this prayer. Maybe I better study it some more. And God showed me there's a lot in here. So I'm very excited about next week. I hope you can come and hear it. Um homework, I expect it will take you maybe an hour, about an hour to do the homework. If you work an hour and you're not done, you have my permission to stop. Your small group leaders are not going to beat you if you only did the first two questions. So please don't feel like, oh no, I didn't do my homework, I can't come. Come, no matter if you've done it or not. We want to see you. And there's something new. This year I added up in the corner a little dig deeper section, which are passages that usually have the same theme, sometimes the same words, but more often the same theme. And those are optional. If you want to go look them up and study them, you may, but you don't have to. And some of them you may read and go, what was she thinking? There is absolutely no clue. So please let me know if it's way too abstract and you have no clue because I'll I will change it for next time I do this. And then you also notice there's a question, the very last question on each page is a reflection question, which is hopefully in my if I've succeeded, it should help you apply it more to your life and make you think about what will make a difference. And if you want to spend all your time on that, go ahead. Um did I miss anything? So if you if you don't have time to do the homework, come anyway. We want to see you. You don't feel like you have to spend hours and hours on it, do what you can. I know many of you have have kids and husbands and jobs and crazy nursing schedules, and that's okay, just come anyway because we want to see you. All right, let me pray, and then um we'll be done a few minutes early today. Father, thank you that you've given us this chance to be here and to study your word and to learn from your history and how you've dealt with your people over the years. And I pray for each one here that you would be knitting us into a community, into a into our small groups, into a large group, and into a fit church family in much the same way. You brought the exiles back and made them a community in Nehemiah's time. And I just thank you that we've had this chance and pray that over the coming weeks and months everything we say and do would be to your glory and in and uh according to your will in Jesus' name. Amen.