From Failure to Success (Part 1 of 2)

Music playing We reveal a lot about ourselves by how we respond to bad news. Today on Truth for Life we'll see how Nehemiah reacted when he got bad news about Jerusalem, news that was not what he'd hoped for. So what does his reaction reveal about his character, about his priorities?

Alistair Begg is teaching a message titled From Failure to Success. I invite you once again to take your Bible, and we'll turn to Nehemiah chapter 1. Now, in the opening three verses, we have the record of his inquiry of his brother Hanani concerning the circumstances of his countrymen in Jerusalem.

It may well be that Nehemiah had been a wee bit idealistic. After all, he knew that a party had already gone by, recorded in the first six chapters of the book of Ezra, who had gone up to Jerusalem, and they were beginning the restructuring of the temple area, particularly sacrificial system, and word of that had filtered back to those who remained in exile. And now as he inquires as to how it's all going on, he discovers that there had been subsequent intervention, and the project has once again come to a grinding halt. And in halting, as with every other work, it does not simply sit stationary or idle, but it begins to disintegrate.

For it is either going forward or it is going back, but it certainly isn't staying still. And so the word is that the circumstances can be described in terms of—and you'll note the words here in verse 3—"trouble, disgrace, broken, burned." And to whatever degree Nehemiah was marked by idealism, this report gives him a fairly large dose of realism. While he may have hoped to hear news of the secrets of the success back in Jerusalem, he is reminded of the facts of their failure. And where we pick it up in the fourth verse this morning is just to the point where we're about to observe the reaction of Nehemiah to this news.

And what we'll do is we will note his reaction, and then his counteraction, and then just look as we anticipate Nehemiah going into action. Reaction. We always teach our children, we try to teach ourselves, that we are responsible for our reactions, right? That we cannot control the actions of other people. They cut us off in traffic, we're the ones who react.

They're unkind to us at parties, we're the ones who react. We don't get what we think we deserve, we're the ones who react. And indeed, that principle is so right that we reveal a tremendous amount about ourselves in the way in which we react to any given set of circumstances.

And no less is this true in relationship to Nehemiah as he responds to the information that he has received. It's vitally important that we are clear concerning this, especially as it relates to the responsibility of leadership. None of us lives to ourselves, none of us dies to ourselves. The way in which we react to circumstances impinges upon the people around us, whoever they may be.

My wife, my husband, my girlfriend, my kids, my teacher, whatever it is. And especially so if we're placed in a position of leadership. Because those who are being led are going to take a read from the leader. At least, under normal circumstances is the case. If you are flying at 33,000 feet and the plane hits a major air pocket and drops instantaneously 150 or 200 feet or even worse, you do not expect to hear from the cockpit the sound of, whoa, you know. The only reason you don't hear that most of the time in talking with pilots is simply because they don't have the thing turned on.

True or false? No acknowledgement from the air traffic control this morning. All right. But the fact of the matter is we love to hear those deep tones of the voice saying, ladies and gentlemen, everything is absolutely wonderful. And you go, oh, that's good.

Because I was beginning to wonder there for a moment. You don't want the kind of reaction that instills fear on the part of those who are under the care of leadership. And in the same way, in the record of biblical history, the response of leadership to circumstances determined the way in which the people of God moved. It's true of nations. It's true of churches. It's certainly true of the history of the people of God.

Let me illustrate it for you back in the book of Numbers. If you take a moment and turn back, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, the fourth book of the Old Testament, you've got this wonderful record there of Moses being told by the Lord to send up a group of spies into the land of Canaan. Canaan is where they're going. The Lord has promised that they're going to Canaan. So the question is not, will we be going to Canaan? The question is, what is Canaan going to be like when we get there?

They didn't have the responsibility to determine whether they were going or not. They were just up there to do a reconnaissance mission. And so they are sent out, verse 3 of Numbers 13, into the desert of Paran, and all of the chaps who went were leaders of the Israelites, and their names follow, verse 4, round through verse 15.

Their mission was clear. They were to go up through the Negev and on into the hill country, see what the land is like—this is verse 18—what the people who live there are like, whether they're strong or weak, fewer many. What kind of land do they live in?

Is it good or bad? What kind of towns do they live in? Do they have walls? Are they fortified? How is the soil? Is it fertile or poor? Is there irrigation? Are there trees? And bring some fruit back if you get the chance.

Okay? So off they went to fulfill their grief, and they came back. Verse 26, then they came back to Moses and Aaron, the whole Israelite community at Kadesh. Now we're going to find out what their reaction to the journey was. And there they reported to them and to the whole assembly, so that there's not a sense where they are in a tent, as it were, at the level of leadership, but the whole assembly is hearing the news of the report.

Therefore, the way in which they are about to react is going to have an impact on all the people who are gathered. And so they gave Moses this account. We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey. Exclamation mark. Here is its fruit.

So far, so good. But—and you'll notice there is a but here, verse 28—but. And then they launch into a very negative statement concerning the potential of living in this country. And their reaction is not solid.

It's certainly not positive, and it's going to impact the people, as we're about to see. Caleb, in contrast, reacts to the reaction. And in reacting to the reaction, we're told he silenced the people, verse 30, before Moses, and he said, We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it. Caleb marks himself out as distinct from the others, insofar as he has a concept of what God is able to accomplish. The other ten were only able to see the problems that were there.

And it is necessary that God raises up individuals who can look at all of the circumstances as they are faced and still say, We're going forward here. Now, the ten people who don't like that idea get ticked, because they start to say, Who does Caleb think he is? Who does Joshua think he is? After all, there were twelve of us went up. We haven't all had a chance to give our report. We're only on report number four. Caleb sticks his big foot in it and says, Hey, chill out.

We can do it. Who does he think he is? He's somebody in whose heart God has instilled a sense of his greatness and his glory. Now, did it matter that the leadership reacted in this way? Absolutely. You read from verse 31 to the end of the chapter, and again the leadership, the ten out of the twelve, sow seeds of discouragement and discord. Verse 32, And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored, and they scared them with talk of giants and various other things. Consequently, that night, verse 1 of chapter 14, all the people of the community raised their voices, and they wept aloud, and all the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly. So they were crying in their beds, and they were grumbling on their feet, and it was an account of the reaction of leadership.

Make no mistake about it, loved ones. Whether you are leading a group of three people in your office, leading your Sunday school class, or whatever else it is, our colleagues and our friends gain more from the way in which we react than from many times our public pronouncements of what is about to take place. One of the things there are to strengthen convictions on the part of the people in relationship to leadership is, apart from anything else, sheer persistence, stickability. The fact that day after day and week after week and month after month, there is still a commitment on the part of leadership. They may not be brilliant, but they're committed.

They may not be the most advanced, progressive, organizational thinkers. But for the time being, like Caleb and Joshua and Nehemiah, they were committed. Now, if you go on into chapter 14—we'll go back to Nehemiah in just a moment—you will notice that in verse 10 of chapter 14, the whole assembly talked about stoning the leaders.

Why? The answer is back in verse 4 of chapter 14. They said to each other, We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.

We want to go back. See, the agitators had won the day. They got them all mixed up talking about giants. They got them all concerned about how they wouldn't be able to cope. They got them so confused that they began to think that the place out of which they'd come, where they were getting literally beaten to death, was more attractive than the prospect of going to live in Canaan. It's quite unbelievable that that can happen. But that is the impact of the wrong kind of reaction on the part of leadership. And Nehemiah's day had presumably seen much of that.

Back to Nehemiah. His reaction is described for us in one poignant sentence. When I heard these things, I sat down and I wept. This reveals to us the depth of his devotion, the extent of his compassion. Passion and compassion are usually linked. If you care passionately about something or someone and you lose that something or the someone, you are more than likely to be very compassionately involved in its loss. If you don't care about the thing or the individual, then its loss will not mean that much to you. If you have fifteen pens and you lose one pen out of fifteen and they're all the same, you lost a pen.

There are fourteen more. But if you have a pen that was given to you twenty-five years ago by your mother or your great-uncle or something that is very significant, then your reaction to its loss will be directly related to the passion with which you cared for that thing. So when you get superficial responses to great predicaments confronting the people of God, by our reaction we reveal just the depth of our understanding. And that's why we need people like Nehemiah to respond in such a way that we say, You know what?

He's right! You see, Nehemiah wasn't concerned about architecture primarily. It's not that he was a builder and he didn't like to see things messy, but rather that the mess of the broken-down walls in Jerusalem was indicative of the beleaguered situation in relationship to God's glory. He wasn't a he wasn't a professional mourner.

He genuinely cared, and he expresses it here. The desolation of the people of God makes him cry. Do tears come easily to you?

Are you a crier? Would you cry when you watch Anne of Green Gables? Would you cry at old James Stewart movies?

Or are you of the stiff Upper Lip Brigade? You don't cry about much. You don't cry about funerals. You don't cry when you see dogs run over in the street. You just don't cry. Okay, well, whether you cry a lot or you don't cry much, whether you are a natural tearjerker or not, let me ask you the question that I asked myself this week. Apart from the natural reaction to circumstances that may pain us in our lives, when, if ever, did we sit down and weep out of a spiritual concern for God's glory?

Now, this is a realistic question. When, if ever, did we find ourselves reduced to tears because of the predicament facing the church of God and the work of God? Well, we've read about it. We've read about it in biblical history. We know that Paul was moved in this way. We know that Christ certainly was. We've read in missionary biographies of others who did. We have heard that Spurgeon preached through tears. We have listened to the cries of others.

But how about us? Sunday afternoons, my father used to play these horrible—well, I shouldn't say horrible—he played these dreadful long-playing records in our house in Scotland. We had one of those new-fangled wonderful stereos that had that prong that stuck up further than for the 45 rpm single, so that you could load these babies on, you know, you could get—I think you could get six on, a bit like a contemporary CD changer. And so, Sunday afternoons, he would drag these puppies out—unbelievable groups like the Crystal River Boys and names that are just unimaginable, with music that was even worse than the names. And then he got really hip at one point and got into Jim Reeves, and a gospel album by Jim Reeves. And he never, ever heard the things.

That was what galled me. He would fall asleep within about three tracks, and he would stay asleep as long as the music played. If you ever turned it off, he woke up instantaneously, so you were stuck with it. And so I know all these words off by heart. And just when you thought it was over, another one would drop down and start up again.

It's like a nightmare. But anyway, it was a song by Jim Reeves. It said, How long has it been since you talked with the Lord and told him your heart's hidden secrets? How long since you prayed?

How long since you stayed on your knees till the dawn broke through? I used to think about it then, and I thought about it again this week in relationship to prayer, in relationship to reaction. I think it's fairly safe to say that there never will be a revival amongst the people of God without tears.

There never has been, and there never will be. They can't be the tears of human ingenuity or external manufacture. They've got to be God-created tears. Therefore, we actually need to pray that God would make us cry about the right things if he's going to make us do the right kind of things in response to the cries of our hearts.

So let me ask you again. When, if ever, have you wept for God and for his glory? When, if ever, have we wept for our friends who are lost who are lost without Christ?

When have we realistically wept for the unbelievable perplexity of the nation in which we live, where it is increasingly impossible even to watch television commercials, let alone programs, without the invasion of the private moral purity of our children and beyond? Now, we can get up on our hind legs and shout about it, but does it make us cry? Does it make us cry out to God?

I don't think that we should get very far from this question, because if it is as foundational as the Scriptures appear to say it is, then until we answer it, there's no real sense in going forward. Somebody listening to George Whitefield preach on one occasion, heard him preach on John 3.16 on the Monday night. The Tuesday night, they came back, he preached on John 3.16. On the Wednesday night, they came back, he preached on John 3.16. They asked him, Mr. Whitefield, are you planning on doing another sermon anytime? Whitefield said, I will start a new sermon when you start doing what I told you about in the first sermon. I find myself greatly challenged by the fact that it is very difficult to identify with Nehemiah 1.4 and far too easy to identify with Luke 18 and the description that is provided there. You may want to turn to it with me.

I'll read it for you. Luke 18. Jesus is moving through the crowd. He's on his way. He's heading towards Jericho.

He's not there yet. He's on the outskirts of Jericho, and a blind man was sitting by the roadside, and he was begging. The man was helpless. The man was hopeless.

He could do nothing to change his circumstances unless somebody else intervened on his part. And given the fact that he couldn't see, any kind of commotion caused by a crowd would be a matter of intrigue to him. And so verse 36 of Luke 18, when he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening, and they told him, Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.

And so he called out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. That's the honest cry of someone's heart. Now look at the response. Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet. See, half the time we don't hear the cries of the crowd, because we're so caught up in the march. We got our church thing down so good we can't hear people shouting in the streets. We can't hear the cries in the music of our day.

We don't hear the cries in the young people's voices. We're missing the cries of the things that made Christ weep. See, reaction reveals it all. And when Jesus saw the crowd, he was what? Moved with compassion. For when he saw them, he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. He saw them in need of that which he came to provide.

He didn't just simply see a crowd. And when the people in Jerusalem had been living there all that time, look to the walls, all they saw were walls. Hey, what's going on in Jerusalem? How are the walls doing? Man, they're all falling down.

Picture the scene. They've all broken down. Weeds have begun to grow up in them. Part of them have actually started to form lawns in them.

If you go to ruins in Britain, go to the bust up castle in Carlisle in between Scotland and England, you can have a wonderful picnic there on those broken down walls. And the walls have been broken for so long that they're all filled in with grass and with shrubbery, and they actually started to plant flowers in them. And what they were saying was, they're broken, and they're broken for good, so we may as well join it.

And the people had grown accustomed to it. But when Nehemiah heard about it, he hadn't even saw it yet, he started to cry. I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip on you or induce a guilt trip on myself, but I can't get past the question. How much of the spirit of Nehemiah is in me for the glory of God and for his purposes, and how much of the spirit of the guys that led the charge at the beginning of Luke 18 pervades my heart? And what about our church? What about our church? Do you think that we exist simply to listen to sermons, gather in groups to study the Bible, scratch each other's backs and turn us all into wonderful little families?

Did God put you in the face of the earth to become a good dad? The reaction reveals the heart. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life.

We'll hear more tomorrow. I'm wondering if you share Nehemiah's passion for God's glory and his love for God's people. Truth for Life, strengthening local churches, is a vital part of our mission. In fact, we often hear from pastors who tell us how much they value the Bible teaching and encouragement they receive from this program.

So as you give a donation to Truth for Life, keep in mind you are helping to encourage local church pastors. And today, when you make a donation, we want to say thank you by offering what we think is an excellent video, a documentary titled Revival, The Work of God. This will take you on an engaging journey through church history. The film explores periods of great awakening beginning all the way back at Pentecost and up through modern day. As you watch this documentary, you'll learn about men and women who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the gospel. Pastors and historians like Sinclair Ferguson, Joel Beekie, and Steve Lawson will lead you on this encouraging look at how God works through his people to revive his church in times of spiritual darkness. The film is perfect to watch with your family or your Bible study.

You can watch it on a DVD or there's a streaming option. The streaming option contains bonus material, including a conference session with Ian Murray presenting lessons on revival. Request the revival documentary when you make a donation to Truth for Life today, and keep in mind your financial support goes directly to the production and distribution of this daily program and toward making all of Alistair's online teaching entirely free to access and share. You can give a one-time gift at truthforlife.org slash donate or you can arrange an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org slash truthpartner. I'm Bob Lapine. When Nehemiah heard about Jerusalem's ruin he mourned but he didn't get stuck there. Tomorrow we'll see the crucial steps he needed to take before he took any action. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.