Nehemiah’s Open Door

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Now, I’m not looking for specific answers here, so don’t feel like you’re going to be penalized if you buzz in and get it wrong. But what are some of the things that God has called us to do as Christians? Witness.

Witness. Okay. Make disciples.

Heard that a couple places. Serve. Serve.

Good. Pray. Pray.

Okay. Love. Forgive.

Forgive. Forgive. You know, that’s a hard one.

Worship. Worship. All right.

Any others? I know that covers a broad range of activities there. Okay.

So those are some of the things that God has called us as Christians to do. Now let’s take it a step in closer. What are some things that God has called you specifically to do?

Witness. Okay. I’m thinking something specific to you.

Is there anything that God has called you specifically to do, like witness to somebody in particular? Nothing wrong with that answer. Huh?

Okay. Okay. Witness to the people that he’s put around you.

Okay. Yeah. A lot of times we think to witness we have to go to some other country.

It’s honestly easier to go to another country and do that sort of thing than it is to go across the street. And I don’t know why that is. They know you.

Yeah, that’s probably a lot of truth to that. What else? Anybody in here been called by God to do something specific?

Okay. Have you felt God call you into some specific ministry or area of service? Yeah, that’s good.

That’s good. I know several of you in this room are working in particular ministries, both within the church and outside the church. Hopefully you’re doing that because you feel called to do it, not because you feel like you have to.

Nothing will wear you down quite so fast as working in a ministry because, well, if I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done. You know, it’s better to have a sense of call to those things. So thinking about the things that God has called us as Christians to do or called you specifically to do it, have there been times in your life when it’s been difficult to do that?

Yes. Okay. Probably more times that it’s been difficult than been easy, right?

Sometimes it can be difficult to do the things that God’s called us to do really because we forget how dependent we are on God to do those things. I think sometimes we get into this mindset where God’s called me to do this and so God now has just given me the job and said, I’m turning you loose. Go do it.

It’s all on you. When really it’s not on us. Nothing is on us except obedience.

God is the one that delivers the results. God is the one who empowers all of it. And one of the things that makes Nehemiah’s story so incredible is that Nehemiah never seems to have forgotten that it was God that was responsible for the results.

Nehemiah never seems to have forgotten how dependent on God he was for the job that he was called to do. Nehemiah never seems to have slipped into the mindset of saying, well, God gave me the job, so I guess it’s all on my shoulders. We’re going to see tonight that at every step, Nehemiah remembered how dependent he was on God.

Nehemiah relied on God to do what only God could do. So in chapter one, we studied two weeks ago how Nehemiah wept to discover that Jerusalem was still in ruins. If you remember back to chapter one, I told you Nehemiah’s reaction wasn’t to the news that Jerusalem had just been destroyed.

Everybody knew Jerusalem had been destroyed. It had happened years earlier, but there had gone out a decree that the work of rebuilding was supposed to start. And then it was abruptly stopped because there were rumors circulating by people who hated the Jews.

They were circulating rumors about the Jews and got the Persian kings to put a stop to it. And once the news got back that Jerusalem was still in ruins, that’s what got Nehemiah so upset. And he wept, he cried out to God over the spiritual condition that led to the destruction of the city.

If you remember from two weeks ago, I pointed out to you that when Nehemiah began to pray and began to cry out to God, I don’t recall once in his prayer seeing anything about God help me build the wall. It was all about the spiritual condition of the people because that was at the root of Israel’s problems. So now we come to chapter 2 and Nehemiah having in chapter 1 realized that there’s a spiritual problem at the root and it led to the physical problem of the wall being destroyed and remaining destroyed. In chapter 2 Nehemiah senses God’s call for him to do something about the situation.

You know a lot of times we’ll see something wrong and think, oh, somebody ought to do something about that. Nehemiah in chapter 2 realized, oh wait, it’s God telling me. I’m the one who needs to step up and do something about it.

And so he goes and he gains an audience with King Artaxerxes and he asks for permission and supplies that he’ll need for the project. And one thing that we need to really understand is, we’re going to read this chapter in just a second. One thing that we really need to understand and keep in mind as we’re reading this chapter and trying to understand what’s going on here, is that none of the requests that he makes in this chapter are normal. We think, oh, you go into your boss, you ask for some time off, you ask for some help.

That’s not how this worked under normal circumstances. For Nehemiah to have gone and made these requests was not normal. This was not something that happened just on a typical day. The whole exchange between him and King Artaxerxes is just weird.

And what I mean by that is it wasn’t the kind of thing that you would have expected to happen in his day and age. People just simply didn’t ask the king for the things that Nehemiah asked for, and the king didn’t just typically grant them to some random servant. So keep that in mind when we read this.

All right, so Nehemiah chapter 2, starting in verse 1, it says, And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the 20th year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him that I took the wine and gave it to the king. Now I had never been sad in his presence before. Therefore the king said to me, why is your face sad since you are not sick?

This is nothing but sorrow of heart. So I became dreadfully afraid. I’m going to stop there for just a second.

This period of time when he comes before the king and asks him, begins to make his request to the king, was four months after he had found out that Jerusalem still lay in ruins. We really don’t know why it took that long, but historians, Bible scholars speculate. I’m content just to say that’s the way God orchestrated it.

There may have been other reasons, but it was God’s timing. So he came to the king, and it really doesn’t tell the whole story even to call Artaxerxes a king. In the Persian Empire, they would call their ruler the Shahanshah, which is the king of kings.

And we as Christians look at that and say, wait a minute, there’s somebody else called the king of kings. They called themselves that before the time of Christ. Even up until 1979 when the Shah was overthrown, they would address him as the Shahan Shah, the king of kings. That gives you some idea of how they saw their king and how the king saw himself.

And everything was expected to be perfect. Everybody was expected to treat the king with absolute deference. He had absolute authority.

And they were supposed to come in and, I mean, they were just supposed to be at the top of their game every time they came into the presence of the king. So it’s unusual for Nehemiah even to slip up, if you want to call it that, and let the king see that he was sad. He was supposed to go through this perfect ritual, you know, to be a great waiter for the king.

It should have been seamless where he’s not even noticed, but he stands out. And the king asks, what’s wrong with you? Because I see nothing but sadness right here.

And he says, I became dreadfully afraid. Well, yeah, because the king has noticed he’s not really up to snuff in the way he’s performing tonight. And that could be the end of Nehemiah under normal circumstances.

So he said, I became dreadfully afraid, verse 3, and said to the king, May the king live forever. Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my father’s tombs, lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire? So he begins to talk about what’s wrong, and he starts out with expressing his loyalty to the king.

And some Bible scholars have pointed out the fact that he doesn’t mention Jerusalem. He says the city of my fathers. Because there’s a possibility that if he’d gone in immediately talking about Jerusalem, it would have sent things working in the king’s mind about the perceived disloyalty of the Jewish people back in Jerusalem that had been the caught.

The perception of disloyalty had been why they had shut down the rebuilding to begin with. But he said, the city of my father’s, the place where my father’s tombs, it lies waste and the gates are burned with fire. Verse 4, then the king said to me, What do you request?

So I prayed to the God of heaven. So he just in that moment, I don’t think this was even visible to the king. Because you didn’t want to do anything that was going to even appear disrespectful to the king.

So it’s not, hold on a minute while I talk to God. But the king asks him, what do you want? And Nehemiah, maybe out of shock, maybe out of relief, just sends up a quick silent prayer, probably something like, Lord, help me get this right.

And then he answers. So I prayed to the God of heaven, verse 5, and I said to the king, if it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my father’s tombs, that I may rebuild it. Then the king said to me, the queen also sitting beside him, how long will your journey be?

And when will you return? So it pleased the king to send me, and I set him a time. Now, some have pointed out how unusual it is that they would mention the queen being there and that the queen wasn’t even always there on state occasions.

This might have been a private ceremony. Some Bible scholars have even suggested it might have been Queen Esther sitting there with him, which would be an interesting reason for. .

. I don’t know that, but that would make it an interesting reason for them mentioning. .

. And by the way, the queen was also there. And we know that God orchestrated events in Esther’s life for the protection of his people.

It wouldn’t be out of God’s character to do the same thing here. God might have used Esther even to soften the king’s heart toward Nehemiah. So he said, how long will your journey be and when will you return?

And it pleased the king to send me and I set him a time. Verse 7 says, furthermore, I said to the king, if it pleases the king, he goes on and he starts asking for more things. Furthermore, I said to the king, if it pleases the king, let letters be given to me for the governors of the region beyond the river, that they must permit me to pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he must give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel, which pertains to the temple, for the city wall, and for the house that I will occupy.

And the king granted them to me according to the good hand of my God upon me. Then I went to the governors in the region beyond the river, and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent captains of the army and horsemen with me.

When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official, the Ammonite official, excuse me, heard of it, they were deeply disturbed that a man had come to seek the well-being of the children of Israel. So he asks the king for everything he’s going to need, for some of the things that he’s going to need in the rebuilding of the city that he can’t procure elsewhere. The king grants all of it to him.

The king gives him letters of safe conduct. Bob and I were talking about this before people showed up. The Persian empire was kind of divided down the Euphrates River, and when you passed from one side to the other, you needed permission.

You certainly needed to let the guys on the other side of the river know why you were coming over. So he had all the letters, he had all the paperwork, all the forms, and the king sent him there. When he arrived, there were people who were not happy to see him because there were people that were only too happy to continue to see the Jews vulnerable, to see their capital city and their temple lie in ruins, and were happy to see the God of Israel blasphemed on account of they thought, well, clearly he can’t protect his people, so he’s not much of a God.

And so he says in verse 11, So I came to Jerusalem, and was there three days. Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. I told no one what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem, nor was there any animal with me except the one on which I rode.

So he waited three days and he went out under cover of darkness, and he went out with a pretty small group so that people aren’t seeing this massive gathering of people and wondering what’s going on. He’s trying to fly under the radar. And I went out by night through the valley gate to the serpent wall and the refuse gate and viewed the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and its gates, which were burned with fire.

Then I went on to the fountain gate and to the king’s pool, but there was no room for the animal under me to pass. And that just kind of indicates how much rubble there was piled up from these walls that he couldn’t even get his donkey through there. Then I went on to the fountain gate, oh, excuse me, verse 15.

So I went up in the night by the valley and viewed the wall. Then I turned back and entered by the valley gate and so returned. and the officials did not know where I had gone or what I had done.

I had not yet told the Jews, the priests, the nobles, the officials, or the others who did the work. So he went out, he started on the west side of the city, and he kind of worked counterclockwise until he had gone around the whole city. He said, nobody knew.

Nobody knew what I was doing. And finally I came back and told them, verse 17, Then I said to them, You see the distress that we are in, how Jerusalem lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire. Come and let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer be a reproach.

And I told them of the hand of my God, which had been good upon me, and also of the king’s words that he had spoken to me. So they said, Let us rise up and build. Then they set their hands to this good work.

But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they laughed at us and despised us and said, What is this thing that you are doing? Will you rebel against the king? So the people that Nehemiah does eventually tell first, they said, this is a great idea.

And by the way, Nehemiah now has worked out a plan because he was able to go out and survey it on his own without everybody else putting their two cents in. And he says, God’s put it on my heart to rebuild the walls. And they say, great, let’s do it.

Let’s get to it. But then there were some who were opposed, Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem. And they said, oh, really, you’re going to rebel against the king this way?

See, they’re trying to stir up that old rumor again, that old fake news about them being disloyal to King Artaxerxes. Verse 20 says, So I answered them and said to them, The God of heaven will prosper us. Therefore we his servants will arise and build, but you have no heritage or right or memorial in Jerusalem.

And I love that line in Scripture because he’s telling them, you know, God is going to do what God wants to do. This is his project. He’s going to prosper it as he sees fit.

It’s up to him. It’s not up to you. When he says this about them having no heritage or right or memorial, he’s basically saying, it’s not your city.

You don’t belong here. Your opinion doesn’t matter. So, and I like the way that he shuts them down over that.

All right. So having read that, when we study through the book of Nehemiah, people tend to focus pretty heavily on the story of what Nehemiah accomplished and how he accomplished it. We tend to focus on Nehemiah.

And we tend to look at the steps. Well, here’s how you formulate a good plan to do a project for God. And there’s some good principles that come out of the book of Nehemiah.

But I told you last time, I think we missed something if we read this as Nehemiah’s story and forget that it’s actually God’s story of working through Nehemiah. Just like if we focus on the physical aspect of the wall and forget about the spiritual condition that needed to be corrected that led to the breakdown in the wall, we miss an important part of the story. I think the bigger story here, the more incredible story, the story that made Nehemiah’s work possible, is the story of what God was doing in the background the whole time.

All through this chapter, we see unlikely things happen time after time after time for one reason. God. This chapter is filled with unlikely events that happened in spite of how unlikely they were, they happened all because of God.

Let’s look at a few of the examples. Nehemiah is a Jewish exile. He’s not even Persian.

He’s from a foreign country that has been taken over by these people. Actually, they were taken over by the people that they took over. Did I say that right?

The Babylonians defeated the Israelites, took them captive, and then the Persians defeated the Babylonians. So the Israelites are way down here, defeated by the defeated. And one of them happens to be the cupbearer to the king of kings, one of the most trusted positions, because he was the guy that brought the wine and poured it for him, and then he drank it first to make sure it wasn’t poisoned.

It doesn’t seem likely that somebody, and maybe I need to study the history of it more, but it just seems unlikely to me that somebody from that background would have been given such a trusted position, especially when he comes from a nation of people that were considered disloyal, falsely considered disloyal. But he’s been given this position where he’s responsible for the life of Artaxerxes. To me, that just seems really unlikely other than God orchestrating events for this to happen. And then Artaxerxes noticed the trouble of this lowly servant and had compassion on him.

How many times do powerful people walk by and not even notice their underlings? You know, you’re having a bad day and they could not care less if they tried. But he noticed.

I don’t think he did this with everybody and I don’t think this happened every day. But he noticed this guy’s got personal problems. The king of kings noticed that Nehemiah had personal problems. And verse 2 describes how he had compassion on him. He asked him, what’s wrong?

what’s wrong with you? Why is your face so sad? He cared enough to ask about it.

He noticed him. One of the most powerful things we can do with somebody is notice them. And he took the time to notice.

Again, that’s not a regular occurrence. I see the fingerprints of God right there again. And then for the cupbearer, for Nehemiah to summon the courage to share his personal problems with the king.

Remember, this is a guy that if you step out of line at all. He can have your head taken off and not even think a thing about it. That’s his right.

But Nehemiah somehow summoned up the courage to say, here’s what my problem is. And I think in that situation, I would have said, forgive me, your majesty. I’ll do better.

God gave him the courage in verse 3 to share his problems. And then more incredibly, it builds up every time, But more incredibly, in verse 4, the king offered to help with the problem of this lowly servant. He said in verse 4, what do you request? It’s like the king taking out his checkbook and writing a blank check and saying, what do you need?

I’m telling you, this stuff doesn’t happen every day. Verses 5 through 8, Nehemiah asked Artaxerxes to reverse a previous decree that halted the work on the wall in the first place. And I mentioned two weeks ago that the Medes and Persians, their leaders, would sign decrees into law, and those could not be reversed.

They could not be overridden. I don’t know that this decree to stop work on the wall was one of those kinds of laws that couldn’t be overridden. I don’t know if it’s a difference between laws passed by Congress and the Constitution, where one’s much harder to change than the other.

But it tells me that the kings of Persia were not used to being asked to reconsider. Because he’s the king of kings when he says it. Clearly he knows and who are we mere mortals to ask him to change his mind.

Nehemiah asked Artaxerxes to reverse that decree that halted the rebuilding of Jerusalem. He asked him to command the work to proceed. When he says give me the authority to go, give me letters, he’s asking the king to put his stamp on there and say under my authority let the work continue.

So he’s asking him to command the rebuilding of Jerusalem to proceed. He’s asking him to fund the project himself. He’s asking him to release Nehemiah, his servant, the guy who keeps him alive every time he wants a cup of wine, to go and oversee the work.

That’s some supernatural boldness from Nehemiah. And then in verse 8, the king agreed. The king granted them to me according to the good hand of my God upon me.

And then we see in verses 9 through 20 that this cupbearer goes and undertakes the major task of rebuilding the city. He’s not a construction expert, but he goes and he undertakes this. He puts together a plan that evidently convinced the leaders of the city to go along with it.

He got all these politicians and all these leaders to get behind him and say, yeah, let’s do it. And he had the wisdom, he had the foresight, the thinking like a spy to figure out how to do it without drumming up too much unnecessary opposition and drawing too much attention to himself. He was able to deal skillfully with this hostile opposition.

That’s a lot for somebody who’s a waiter to the king. All over this. I mean, is any of this impossible?

No. But again, each of these things that happen seem incredibly unlikely to me because it’s not how things work, other than that God intervened. And Nehemiah laid all the credit for what happened at God’s feet.

And as I said, we tend to look at this, how skilled Nehemiah was, how wise Nehemiah was. Nehemiah gives the credit for every bit of this to God. Verse 4, he says, so I prayed to the God of heaven.

In the middle of this, he stops and says, I need God to guide me. Verse 8, the king granted them these things to me according to the good hand of my God upon me. He says, yes, the king granted my request, but he did it because God compelled him to.

God put it on his heart. God was ultimately responsible. In verse 18, he tells the leaders of the city, I told them of the hand of my God, which had been good upon me.

He goes and tells them, hey, it’s not me that convinced Artaxerxes. So I’m sure there was some question, how did you get him to agree to all this? It was God.

And then he tells Sanballat and the other opponents, the God of heaven himself will prosper us in verse 20. From first to last, Nehemiah says, this is God. Yes, I’m here and I’m overseeing the work and I’m getting things done, but it’s really God opening all these doors.

I couldn’t do this. It’s God opening the door every single time. And so Nehemiah’s role was important.

I mean, we don’t discount Nehemiah altogether. Nehemiah’s role was important because God, after all, had called him. to oversee the construction.

God had sent him. He talks in verse 12 about how God had put it in his heart to go to Jerusalem. Many times when God calls us to do something, though, we think it’s all on us.

And we talked about that a little bit at the beginning. We think, okay, God gave me the job. Now I’ve got to figure out how to do it.

Not really. We’ve just got to be obedient. Because when we think it’s all on us, it leads us either to cut God out of the equation thinking we can do it all ourselves, or it leads us to give up thinking we can’t do it at all when we cut God out of it.

But Nehemiah recognized that God was the one responsible for the results. And we have to be careful on the other hand too, just as we don’t want to think it all depends on us, so I’ve got to do it myself and I’ve got to be self-sufficient. We’ve got to be careful on the other hand, not to assume that because it’s all up to God, we can just sit back and do nothing.

We’ve got to be careful of both of those extremes. And Nehemiah’s assignment was to oversee the physical renewal of the city with the building of the walls and the spiritual renewal of the city. Don’t forget as we go through this whole book that those two things are tied together.

Nehemiah could not accomplish the physical renewal. At least the way it happened, he couldn’t have orchestrated all these events. And he certainly couldn’t accomplish the spiritual renewal of the people. That’s something only God can do.

God just called Him to be obedient while trusting God to open all the doors. And when God calls us to do anything, I think that’s the lesson here. We’ve got to remember that.

God just calls us to be obedient, but trust Him to open the doors. We just have to be obedient enough to step through them when He opens them. And this shouldn’t surprise any of us.

This is how God works. And take the whole plan of salvation as a case in point about this. You know, God calls us to be reconciled to Him.

God calls us to walk with Him. God calls us to come into a relationship with Him and experience eternal life. But you and I could not make that happen, right?

We could not open that door. He had to open that door at the cross. There was not a bit of good that you or I could do that would have accomplished eternal life.

They wouldn’t have moved us one step closer to God. I think it was Adrian Rogers who said, I wouldn’t trust my best 15 minutes on this earth to get me to heaven. He’s right about that.

God had to open that door and He did it through the cross because we couldn’t, this thing we’d been called to do, be reconciled to God. We couldn’t do that. We couldn’t build a relationship with Him, but the door was open because Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins in full.

God did all the work there. God opened the door. He kicked the door wide open.

And God did what only He could do. And our response then is to be obedient and believe. Be obedient and trust God to open the door and do what only He can do.

That’s how God works. It’s how He works in salvation. It’s how He works in the things that He calls us to do.

So Nehemiah’s job was just to trust God to open the doors, to open the doors that only God could open, and then to walk through those doors in obedience once God did it. And God moved some powerful forces to open the door, and He sent Nehemiah through those doors to gather the people and get to work. So Nehemiah could have easily bragged and said, look at all this stuff that’s happened.

Really, it was just God orchestrating all this. God opening the doors. Nehemiah just walked through once God opened it.

So the lesson for us tonight from Nehemiah, from his experience with God here in chapter 2, is that when God calls us to do anything, we have to avoid thinking either that it depends on us or that we don’t need to respond at all because we can fall into either one. Well, if God’s called me to do it, I must be responsible for all of it. No, God’s going to do the work.

You just be obedient. Well, if God’s going to do the work, and there’s nothing for me to do. No, we still are called to be obedient when God’s doing what only He can do.

We prepare and we work out of obedience while we trust Him for the results. I’ve thought a lot this week about Charles Stanley because he just announced that he was stepping down at First Baptist Atlanta. And I was thinking about, I think he even closed out his resignation video with this, but I’ve heard him say several times over the years, Obey God and leave all the consequences to Him.

And I thought, what a perfect summary of what Nehemiah experienced. Obey God and leave all the consequences to Him. Let God take care of what only God can do.

You just do what He told you to do. So I’m going to leave you with this tonight. When God calls you to do something, it requires your obedience.

When God calls you to do something, it requires your obedience. But it depends on God’s faithfulness. For what God wants to accomplish through us, it requires us to be obedient.

But it doesn’t depend on us. It depends on God to do what only God can do and for God to be what only He can be.