Establishing a Vision (Part 2 of 2)

We're sometimes tempted to think that the men and women of the Bible possessed superhuman qualities, but the fact is they were ordinary people just like you and me.

So where did a simple cupbearer get the courage to face an out-of-the-ordinary challenge? Find out now as Alistair Begg continues in the book of Nehemiah, today on Truth for Life. I don't think you can understand chapter 2 except for the fact that in the experience of prayer he was fashioning and forming certain convictions and practical factors that would be necessary if this sense of prayerful dependence upon God was going to be turned in to reality amongst those with whom he was going to minister. I don't want to take time to go through the prayer. I simply want you to note that if ever you want to preach through it, I think it falls nicely into the little acrostic acts, you know, which we often use with our young people, and we tell them, your praying should involve some adoration. It should begin with God. That's what you have in verse 5, O Lord, the great and awesome God of heaven who keeps his love, and so on. It should involve confession.

That's exactly what it has. We acknowledge, he says, that we have acted very wickedly toward you, verse 7. The Israelites have committed sin, and I myself have committed sin. It involves thanksgiving in verses 8 through 10 as he rehearses God's promises, and then it involves supplication—specific, reverent, and clear. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man. There would have been no doubt, if we had been in the company of Nehemiah, exactly what was going on. If we had observed him receive the news, and we had seen his heart broken, if we had been around him in those intervening days, we would have found him a man almost with another worldly dimension to his experience.

And if we had had the privilege of sitting and learning how to pray with him, we would have been made clearly aware of the fact that he was not tied up in any kind of theological knots about being absolutely specific in approaching God. Grant your servant success today. So, well, we don't believe in success, you know. Success is a dirty word. No, success is not a dirty word. Success that is self-focused, earth-bound, man-centered is futility. But the kind of success about which he was concerned was a success that would redound to the glory of God. It wasn't a success that would attach significance to the person of Nehemiah. That's where we don't want to be praying for success. It is important that the work of God succeeds, as it will. Reaction.

Counter-reaction. Number three, into action. Into action. He had a God-centered perspective that was going to manifest itself in a quite striking way. By him being bold in his initiative taking.

Chapter 2 begins one day in April, four months later. He'd been biding his time, waiting the right moment. When the door opened of opportunity, then he would be ready to enter, and open it did, there in verse 1. He's taking his wine in, the normal routine. Here's your wine, king. But he hadn't been sad in his presence before, and so the king said, why does your face look so sad when you're not ill? Very perceptive. Of course, the king needed to be perceptive as well, because any indication like this on the part of his cupbearer would tip him the nod that maybe he was going down with him. And so you would learn to read your eyes, and you would want a very happy cupbearer on on every occasion that he was bearing your cup. And any possibility of him looking squeamish may be on account of the fact that your enemies had got to him, and maybe he was seeking to cover up something that was deep down inside.

Why does your face look so sad when you're not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart. Now, I love the final phrase of verse 2. I love how realistic and honest it is. I was very much afraid.

I was very much afraid. This is maybe one of the most encouraging lines so far in the story of Nehemiah to me. Because usually, as I read the story of Nehemiah, I immediately have him in almost deified terms. You know, this guy is awesome. I mean, he was praying and fasting for 120 days.

I've never done that in my life. He was concerned about all these things. I don't even approximate to that.

I don't know. I'm so far removed from Nehemiah. But when he says, I was very much afraid, there's an immediate point of identification. I said, oh, I'm beginning to like this chat. I can identify here.

I was very much afraid. I remember just thinking obliquely about this in terms of people who are our heroes and our models. Eric Alexander has been a mentor and a friend over many years in Glasgow. And I remember him speaking at a conference similar to this in the borders of Scotland. And in a question and answer session, I said to him, Mr. Alexander, can you tell me how you spend your morning hours? And you see, I thought that he was going to say that he got up around four o'clock, and he prayed for two hours, and then he, you know, he took down a map of the world, and he prayed for another hour, and so on. And, man, was I encouraged when he told me. He said, well, he said, you know, I set my alarm.

I can't remember the time, but it was favorable for sleeping. He said, you know, I set my alarm. I get up, and I have a shower, and I drive my children to school, and I come back home, and Greta makes me a cup of coffee. I grab the mail. I read that.

I have a quick look at the Glasgow Herald, and then I get going on my study. Oh, I said, I like this man. This is good. Because, you see, we often imagine, and I don't mean that in any sense to denigrate, Eric. I'm saying it to acknowledge the rightness of it, the spiritual ordinariness of it, if you like. Because that's where we live our lives. I mean, we live our lives in humdrum days, and we must explode for those under our care the mythology of some drama that attends us.

Because it doesn't. And Nehemiah's ordinariness comes out here as any good leader's ordinariness must. I was very much afraid. The Pharisee in us is saying, oh, I don't think I would have been afraid. Not if I had been praying for 120 days. I would have been bold. I wouldn't have been afraid. Well, fine, you just go on by yourself.

The rest of you can stay over here with me in the afraid camp. What do you want? he says. What do you want? Can you imagine he's been for three or four months waiting for the day when the guy would ask this question? What do you want?

And it's now or never. Reaction. Overwhelmed. Counteraction. Prayer. Into action.

Well, thank you for asking and recognizing God's hand in it all and praying to the God of heaven, verse 5, he answers the king. Notice his intense practicality. Wonderful. In verse 7, if he could have some letters of safe conduct. And you can probably see the king's eyes in this, you know, going, it's not a problem. And so he advances it a little further, goes on a bit of a roll. And by the way, how about a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king's forest?

Because, you know, we've got some construction, it'd be nice to have some wood. And he's gauging the king's eyes that he knows well, and he says, it'd be nice to have safe passage. And so they throw in the officers and the cavalry, and Nehemiah is discovering that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we can ask or even imagine. It was a pipe dream that he would get to go back. He would have been lucky, as it were, providentially overruled, as it were, if he had simply been able to make that journey on his own. But here he's advancing and putting together all the bits and the pieces.

Let's just pause and ask the question. In establishing a vision of doing God's work in God's way, it seems to me that there's a great danger that is represented in the circles in which many of us move. And it's the classic danger of the pendulum swing. Most of the things that we have observed that have to do with methodology and strategy and vision setting and planning have emerged out of a theological seedbed with which many of us do not find ourselves immediately in harmony. But instead of recognizing that there is an essential place to thinking not only biblically but strategically, we allow the pendulum to swing way out on the other end, and we give up ground to the pragmatists, embracing a sort of unearthed theological posture. And I don't think that's the way of Scripture. I certainly don't believe that to be the way of Nehemiah.

Nehemiah is in absolutely no doubt about who does what. He would have understood 1 Corinthians 3, it is God who gives the task, it is God who gives the growth, and it is God who gets the glory. But that did not prevent the apostles from thinking strategically about the way in which they reached a city for Christ.

Nor should it us. And indeed, we who would want to come from a very biblical foundation need to take seriously the responsibility of establishing models in our day to which other young men and women can come in observation and then can implement in following our example. If there's going to be the establishing of vision, then first it has to be planted in our hearts by God's Spirit and through His Word. The ultimate vision for us, if you like, is Revelation, chapter 7. And after this, I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. That is the ultimate vision. That's the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, in your seed will all the nations of the earth be blessed. This is what we look forward to, and everything else is ultimately subservient to that amazing day when God will gather to himself those who are his own.

And we live along the continuum of God's unfolding plan. God put this in Nehemiah's heart. It wasn't dreamed up, it was prayed down. He didn't go in his room and just think for a while. He actually was in touch with God.

He was in touch with his community. And then he was prepared to establish, for those who were around him as we will see, the parameters in which he could do God's work. I went to Jerusalem, verse 11, and after staying there three days, I set out during the night with a few men.

I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem. Now, we don't need to be in any doubt about what God puts in the hearts of his servants to do in our day. It's all given to us here in the apostolic precept and in the apostolic pattern.

We know what we're to do. We're to edify the saints so that they might do the works of ministry. We are, in his words of Paul to Timothy and to Timothy 4-5, we are to keep our heads in all situations.

We're to endure hardship. We are to do the work of an evangelist, and we're to discharge all the duties of our ministry. So it's not as if we have to cast around to find out what it is that's supposed to be in the heart of a pastor. Within the heart of the pastor has got to be the intense longing for God and his glory, for the sheep under his care, for those as yet who have not been added to the fold, as with Jesus in John 17.

There are other sheep who are not yet added to this group, and, O God, I pray for them too. What's in your heart in these days? What are we doing? Keeping the doors open? Doing church? Fulfilling established routines? Is there anything of vision that our elders catch from us?

Is there any sense of forging a trail? I think, where it's lacking in my life, it lacks first because I don't react properly. Who will weep? Which of us will weep for the state of the contemporary church? It's easy to stand up and point fingers and say, this person and this and that, but in the private place, to drive to worship on Sunday evenings, after building, after building, after building in total darkness.

Not a light in the place, not a soul on the property, not a car in the car park. It ought to break our hearts. And then, the counter-action, O God, when you rend the heavens and come down, when you do in our day what you've done in another day, would you come, as it were, back on horseback, through these fair towns and cities, as in the Great Awakening? Will you fashion in our churches young boys, brought up within the framework of godly instruction, and stirred in their hearts in ways they can't fully understand, so that they might rise up in their day with a fire in their bellies concerning God and his glory, and a desire to preach the Bible in all of its fullness? Will you surprise us? And God, if all that we do in our generation is keep our feet in the door for another generation to come, will you make us prepare to live just with that, so that we see no dramatic fulfillment of the vision? If we see nothing, if we are nothing other than faithful to that which you've made known to us, that we would keep our heads when others are losing theirs, that we would endure hardship when people are bailing out and taking soft options, that we would be serious about the responsibility of evangelism, and that we would discharge all the duties of our ministries, and all in the conviction that I can't, but God can. See, many of us are suffering from the illusion that we can, and it's only when we face the fact that we can't, then that we can. It's that delicious paradox, isn't it?

The man with the withered hand could not stretch it out, and Jesus asked him to do what he couldn't do, and he did it, because his word is not only a life-giving word, it is a life-changing word. Now, just a final bizarre illustration. First time I saw an American football game was at an Air Force base in Hertfordshire in England, in a place called Bushey. I went there with this girl that I really liked a lot, and she's at home looking after my children just now, and I had not a clue in my mind what was happening in front of me in this very dramatic experience of American football.

I wasn't opposed to it in any way, I just couldn't fathom it, and she was absolutely no help to me at all, at least in terms of understanding what was going on. But the one indelibly fastened recollection that I have is of the cheerleaders. We had not been introduced to some of these American extravagances.

It was only to be found on Air Force bases, etc. But as the game proceeded, the particular team that we were there to support, which I think was the American School of London or something like that, they were being annihilated. The scoreboard did not have sufficient spaces on it to deal with the hiding they were sustaining.

But this is it. The cheerleaders proceeded with the one dramatic refrain. It went like this. They had these things, went, you can do it, you can do it, you can, you can, you can do it, you can do it, you can, you can. Now the problem was, they couldn't.

And no matter how dressed up they were, and no matter how loud that tuba guy went at it, no matter how that big fat guy banged that drum, they could not, for one moment, reverse the sad tale of what was happening on the field. And here we sit. And in terms of the work of God, it seems that we're sustaining a significant defeat. So what do we do? We take the methods of the world. We take the wisdom of the world.

We bring in the cheerleaders to stand on the sidelines and make us feel better, to blur the reality of what's going on. You can do it, you can do it, no you can't. Now then, at that moment of self-awareness, for as leaders and as pastors and as churches, at that moment, the door of opportunity swings wide. Because what did Jesus say?

Apart from me, you can do. He didn't say that our need was partial. He said that our need was total. And to the degree that I believe that my need is partial, I will not react as Nehemiah reacted. I will not counter-respond as he responded.

And I will not be able to go into action as he went into action. Are we convinced that we can do nothing apart from Christ? You've been listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Alistair will return in just a minute to close with prayer, so please keep listening. Our message today is part of a series titled The Pastors Study, and if you're in pastoral ministry, whether you're leading a congregation, working in youth ministry, or serving in church leadership, our team has compiled a list of some of our favorite books, articles, and sermons that we think you'll enjoy. Visit truthforlife.org slash pastor or look for the list on our mobile app. Also, we're excited to announce that registration is now open for Basics 2022. Basics is an annual conference that Alistair hosts for pastors and church leaders. If you're in pastoral ministry, mark your calendar from May 2nd through the 4th of 2022.

Alistair will be joined by special guests, Tony Morita and John Woodhouse. Registration is now open online at basicsconference.org. Strengthening the local church and encouraging pastors through the clear, relevant teaching of God's Word is what we're all about at Truth for Life. In fact, teaching the Bible is our mission. We know that it's through God's Word that unbelievers are converted and believers grow in their faith. If seeing others become committed followers of Jesus is something you're passionate about, we'd love for you to join us in this mission. You can do that by supporting Truth for Life, and when you give today, we'll say thanks by inviting you to request a book about the importance of church membership. It's titled Devoted to God's Church, and it explains why being part of a church isn't optional. It's actually vital for every believer.

Request your copy at truthforlife.org slash donate or call 888-588-7884. Now let's join with Alistair in prayer. Oh God our Father, we thank you that we're not left to our own devices when we think about doing your work in your way. We thank you that the pages of Scripture are littered with wonderful examples of those upon whose life you set your hand. Thank you for that lovely phrase that recurs again and again, and I told them, said Nehemiah, of the hand of God which rested on me. We do pray that we might know that experience again in these days, of your hand upon us for good. Help those of us who are downhearted to be picked up by the genuine concerns of others, some of us who need encouragement and answers to our questions. May these days surprise us with the evidences of your grace, for we pray to the glory of your great name, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine, we've all heard the expression, it's the thought that counts, but when God plants a vision, thoughts must be followed by action. How can a leader make that happen?

Find out tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.