Hard-Pressed but Not Crushed (Part 4 of 4)

We're taught in Scripture that as followers of Christ we are to be fully dependent on God.

What exactly does that look like? Today on Truth for Life we'll find out why dependence on the Lord doesn't mean we just sit back and wait for Him to work. Alistair Begg is teaching from chapters 3 and 4 in the book of Nehemiah. You will notice in verse 6 that the people were at the halfway mark. They had built the wall till all of it had reached half its heights. And the opposition has intensified.

And now Nehemiah faces a real challenge. Let me give you three words which continue our run of words ending in A-T-I-O-N. The agitation which is external is more than matched by the consternation—that's the second word—which is internal.

Furthermore, there was intimidation which came hard on the heels of this internal lack of security. Verse 11, all the enemies said, Before they know it, or before they see us, we'll get right in there among them, we'll kill them, and we'll put an end to the work. What you have here in verse 11 is essentially a whispering campaign. And so the word begins to go around. They're gonna get us. They're going to kill us.

They're gonna shut the project down. Bad news travels fast. And there were a little group of people, some of them, living close to these enemies. You'll notice that there in verse 12.

The Jews who lived near them. Principle—you get like the people you spend time with. If you're prone to discouragement, don't live amongst people who traffic always in discouraging news. When you hang around people who are negative, you'll catch the bug.

And the man or the woman who is jaundice eventually sees everything yellow. And what had happened was that the word that was coming through to these people who were closest to them had begun to permeate their thinking, and so they were coming to Nehemiah again and again and again. He tells us here that they came ten times over to us, saying, Whatever you turn, they're going to attack. So there is the challenge to leadership. Agitation on the outside, consternation on the inside, intimidation outside inside.

What's he gonna do? Verse 9, which we've jumped, provides us with a key statement in all of this. This is a fundamental, vital, biblical principle. But we prayed to our God, and we posted a guard day and night to meet this threat. Now, here we are arriving at what is a standard principle in Nehemiah's faith.

Nehemiah is a man of deep trust. His underlying focus and his gaze is on the reality of the Lord first. And having gained the perspective which comes from looking there, he is then able to look at the project around him and bring the perspective of heaven to bear upon the concerns of earth.

That is a principle that we need to learn. What does heaven have to say about what I'm going through this week? What does this equation mean once I introduce the X factor of God to it? How do I face the challenges of tomorrow in light of the fact that I may look up here and find the answers to my questions? He is a man of great trust. He is a man of skillful management. He encounters heaven. He defends on earth.

Now, you will remember, I hope, that this we've seen has already become a pattern. In chapter 1, he hears the news of the dreadful circumstances, and what does he do? He prays. In chapter 2, he takes action. When you go into chapter 2, into verse 4, and he's given a straightforward question from the king, what do you want, Nehemiah? He operates on the exact same basis. He prays, and then he asks.

When you get into chapter 4, to the section we dealt with last time, we find the same thing. The people come and ridicule him. What does he do? He prays. And after he has prayed, what does he do? He goes to work. You see—and this, I think, is something that we may well be missing in our day, some of us in our day-to-day Christian experience—to be humbly dependent upon God in prayer does not take us into a theological twilight zone. Does not take us into the realm of total sitting down, doing nothing.

Now, let me try and illustrate this in a very practical way. You know these things they call the club? Well, we thought they—these have been in Britain for years. I mean, they may have been here for years.

I'm not suggesting we thought of them first. But they've been around for a long time, and way back in 1970-something, maybe eighty, I went to Londonderry to stay for a week and to speak to young people for a week, and I stayed in the company of my little friend T.S. Mooney, the man that I've quoted many times.

The little bachelor man died at the age of eighty-one, a banker all his years, a funny little man, a godly little man. And when he picked me up from the ferry in Larn and drove me to Londonderry, it's the most perilous journey that I ever made in all of my life. In Britain, they have these things on the middle of the road called cat's eyes, which are in the center line, invented by a Yorkshireman, and they shine in the night. They pick up your headlights.

And they go up and down like that, because they were invented with a self-cleaning mechanism so that when the car tire goes over the top of it, it squirts down, cleans the little bit of glass or plastic that's in there, and then pops back up again. They're called cat's eyes. T.S. Mooney was reputed to be the only man who could drive from the ferry in Larn to Londonderry a distance of about a hundred and twenty miles and hit every single cat's eye on the road. When I say that it was terror, it was terror. And when I got to the end of the journey and sat outside of his apartment, before we got out, I said to him, I said, Mr. Mooney—and I'd only ever met him once before this in my life, and by this time he was probably seventy-six years old—I said, Mr. Mooney, I said, I've got to tell you something. I can't drive with you anymore. I'm going to be here for a whole week, and I cannot drive with you. I said, I'll drive you, but I can't drive with you. So you either let me drive, or I'm going on the bus, because you're scaring me to death. I've never been as scared in all my life as driving with you.

I was having a lot of risk involved in that, you've got to admit. He sat for a moment just looking straight out of the windscreen of the car, and then he took his car keys and he said, fine, you drive. So I drove for the whole week, but here was the problem. The jolly crew clock. The club. Everywhere I went, I had to put this club on. He insisted that you put it on at the strangest times. You stopped to go in the post office for like one minute. The club has to go on.

We went to Mr. and Mrs. McDonald's house for lunch. You go up the driveway, you open the gates, you drive up the driveway, you close the gates, you park outside their living room window where the car can be seen from all vantage points. You put the club on. Put the club on. I said, T.S., you know, don't you trust the Lord or whatever it is? He said, put the club on. I trust the Lord.

Put the club on. And he taught me a principle. Faith without works is dead.

You see, Nehemiah didn't start a big prayer meeting and say, that'll do. Okay, guys, we've got a major problem. We've got a forefront that'll attack on us. We've got guerrilla warfare. They're going to tear us apart.

They're going to pull us down. What we will do is we will pray. And once we've prayed, it will all be over, and we'll sit back, and we'll wait for God to act. Now, that's the way some people approach their Christian life. All I'm going to do is pray. And after I've prayed, then God somehow or another miraculously intervenes, and it's all over.

No, it's not. You're looking for a job? What do you do? You pray.

What else do you do? You go knock doors. If you're keen, you knock a lot of doors. You don't sit in your room and pray. You pray, and you knock doors. You're bringing up your children. In the work of parenting, what do you do? You pray for your children, and you post a guard around your children. And when you're tempted to believe that all you're doing for them is providing rules and regulations that are external so as to kill them and to break their spirit, you need to be constantly daily in prayer for your children so that the prayer may season and benefit them as they respond to the guard that you place around them.

Do you know how many naive parents there are with teenage kids? We'd better pray to God, and we'd better post a guard. Because all of our prayers without the guard will ultimately be ineffectual. Now, he employs a methodology in this, and this is where I want to end. There's a method one, there's a message, and then there's a method two.

I'll try and just go through it here. Verse 13. Therefore I station some of the people behind the lowest points of the wall at the exposed places, and I posted them by families with their swords, spears, and bows.

Nehemiah is a genius. He has the people take up places down behind the wall where the place is clear of rubble. He encourages them to defend as families.

Good strategy still is. Because the average man may not be prepared to defend just a piece of wall, no matter how much you tell him the wall is important. But if you put his wife and his children behind that bit of the wall, he's there. And that's exactly what he did. And he gave them bows that could fire a distance of some 400 yards to take the long scale onslaught. And he gave them swords and spears which could be used if they came to encounter the close-up combat. You will notice in verse 13 that he stationed them at the exposed places. Remember the words of Jesus in John 17, in his high priestly prayer? Father, I do not pray that you take my people out of the world, but that you leave them in the world and that you keep them from the evil one. God's purpose for his people is that we might live in exposed places. Not that we would be exposed without the guard and the prayer, but nevertheless, that we would be exposed. Isn't that what you feel yourself to be, Mr.

Businessman, as you head out on another Monday morning? Exposed? Isn't that what it feels like to go to school in a secular university and have the onslaught of all of that stuff coming at you? Exposed? And at the exposed places, there they were. You are, says Jesus, the light of the world. The city set on a hill can't be hidden. Neither do men light a lamp and put it under a tub.

But they put it on a lampstand that it might be seen, exposed. You are the salt of the earth. The salt is not to stay in the cellar but is to hit the streets.

The principle is clear, family by family, at the lowest points of the wall, at the exposed places. And in verse 14, he then conveys his message, which underpins his method. After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, don't be afraid of them. Now, if that's all he said, that's not a great deal of help. That's like you're standing out on the ledge of a building, and it's about to crumble underneath you, and somebody's shouting, Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid! So don't be so crazy. Don't tell me things like, Don't be afraid.

I'm about to fall to my death. So he doesn't say, Don't be afraid. He says, Don't be afraid of them. Remember the Lord who is great and awesome.

In other words, get your alignment right. Get back in focus. You see, they had lost their vision. They were on the rubble. They were listening to the seeds of discouragement. They had begun to believe that they would never finish the project.

They had begun to believe the notion that the task was so immense that it could never be configured in a way that would bring completion. They were listening to all this news about, They will certainly attack us. They will come in when we cannot see them.

They will kill us in the night. And he says to them, Listen, don't be afraid. Remember the Lord who is great and awesome. It's the same thing that Paul does to the church at Philippi in Philippians 4, where he begins with that statement, Rejoice in the Lord always.

And again I say, Rejoice. Philippians 4.4. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.

Don't be anxious about anything. But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. The picture there is the picture of the soldier on the wall of the garrison town of Philippi, and as the soldier stands guard on the city, to oversee it internally and to protect it from attack externally, so says Paul, allow the peace of God to stand guard in your hands. Now, there's a word of encouragement for us as we face a Monday, is it not? We need to be singing the children's song, Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing that he cannot do.

The rivers are his, the mountains are his, the fields are his handiwork too. Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing that he cannot do. Go out tomorrow morning, get in your car, pull it out of the garage, and you're facing the challenge of your day, agitation from without, consternation from within, intimidation from all fronts.

You want to live godly life in Christ Jesus. You say to yourself, It's so immense I can't do it. Sing the song. Sing it to yourself as you drive across 480. Who cares what the people think?

Be better than some of the sorry faces that are around you. Sing it out. Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty, careful on the hand actions, there's nothing that he cannot do. Now, this isn't rhetoric on Paul's part.

This isn't kind of pumping yourself up with fluff. Whenever we are tempted to discouragement because of the immensity of the task, because of the strength of the enemy, we need to realign our focus. We need to remember the Lord, who is great and awesome. Go home and read Isaiah 40. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breath of his hand marked off the heavens? Who's held the dust of the earth in a basket or weighed the mountains on the scales? Flying over those rocky mountains listening to that guy give me all this geological humbug, very nice man, the pilot, explaining to me, give me all this evolutionary geological jargon about how we got the Grand Canyon and how the Colorado River did this and everything else. I want to go up to him and say, Hey, buddy, it's not like that.

Isaiah 40 real easy. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy. He makes the mountains in an instant. Don't tell me about these billions and billions of years. You see, the worldview that sees God as a cosmic genie or as a force or as some alien entity cannot identify with this. And when Nehemiah says, Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, he's talking about a God who is perfect, who is powerful, who is plural, and who is praiseworthy. That's the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Remember him. Mahalia Jackson, in that great song, put it well, Who made the mountains, who made the trees, who made the rivers that run to the seas, and who placed the moon in the starry sky, somebody bigger than you and I? When I am weary—and I often am, aren't you?—filled with despair, I know about that, don't you? Who gives me courage to go on from there? And who gives me faith that I'll never die?

Somebody bigger than you and I. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight. Boy, isn't that a strange juxtaposition we finish here? Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight? You see, we might have thought he was gonna say, Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, sing a bunch of Scripture songs, and off you go home and have a lovely week.

No. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sisters, your moms, your dads, your family. If I was gonna build a family ministry, I'd build it right out of this text, right here.

Here it is. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your family. Because that's one of the great fights in our generation. Are you prepared to go into that struggle? I'll never forget, as a boy—and I've told you this before, and it rebukes my own heart as a dad today—but I'll never forget waking up thinking it was the middle of the night and I'd probably been in bed since nine o'clock, and it was only eleven o'clock, but I'll never forget hearing the voices of my father and mother intoning in a way that didn't sound as though they were talking to one another.

Because they weren't. And creeping to the outside of their bedroom door and hearing my name mentioned in prayer, O God. And then they would pray for me. They would fight for me.

They would struggle for me. You gonna struggle for your family this week? Are you prepared to do God's work, God's way, face agitation, intimidation, consternation? You gonna look at the rubble and say, It can't be done?

Or you gonna remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight? I had the privilege of marrying both my sisters to Christian men. One of the great joys of my life. But it didn't come easy. There was a lot of fight behind it. Some major fights between myself and my first sister, who's four and a half years younger than me. And I remember her getting roses—big bunch of roses, big red bow, fake crystal jar, whatever it was.

Same stuff. And how excited she was. I remember saying to her, Mo, you know what you ought to do is throw those roses in the garbage. She told me, Who do you think you are?

I said, I'm your brother. The guy who sent you the roses, I know him. He doesn't care tuppence for you. He doesn't share your faith.

He doesn't have an interest in your well-being. Throw the roses out. I remember how she would storm around and slam her bedroom door and tell me to go take a run and jump.

I remember coming around, though, and finding the roses in a waste paper basket or in a thing head down. It was a big fight that day. But I was fighting for biblical principles. I was fighting for my sister's purity. I was fighting for her well-being. I was fighting for the fact that today, under the guidance of a Christian husband, she will have been in worship, and her children are nurtured in the faith. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and go out and fight.

Fight. What do we need? We need the mind of Christ to fill us and to guide us.

You're listening to Truth for Life. That is Alistair Begg with a reminder that to be dependent on God requires prayer and action on our part. Our study in the book of Nehemiah gives us a clear picture of this reality. We see Nehemiah and his team praying and working hard, depending on the Lord, and seeing God's power in the world.

We see that in the book of Nehemiah. We see that in the book working hard, depending on the Lord, and seeing God's power at work. That's true for our salvation as well.

We pray and we are diligent, but it is by God's power alone that salvation occurs. That's at the heart of a book we want to encourage you to get a copy of today. It's called The Beauty of Divine Grace, and it explores five essential truths about salvation.

You may have heard these. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to the standard of scripture alone, for the glory of God alone. These five truths give us a helpful framework of Christian belief about God's saving grace. The book The Beauty of Divine Grace explores each of these extraordinary realities in depth and explains what it looks like to live trusting in the certainty of God's power to save. This is a terrific book, one we'd encourage you to read and to pass along to a friend who is trying to understand what it means to trust in Christ. Ask for your copy of The Beauty of Divine Grace today when you donate through the Truth for Life mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884. By the way, if you are in ministry, let me encourage you to mark your calendar for our annual conference for pastors and church leaders.

It's called Basics. It's a conference that Alistair hosts each year at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Registration for the May 2024 conference is now open. Alistair will be speaking.

He'll be joined by Rico Tice and Sinclair Ferguson. If you're in pastoral ministry, you can register online at basicsconference.org. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. You would think that after God's people had had their zeal renewed, they'd been able to resist the threats of their enemies, everything would be going well in Jerusalem. But tomorrow we'll hear about the new threat they encountered from a surprising source. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.