The Power of Negative Thinking (Part 2 of 2)

When Nehemiah led the charge to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, he demonstrated strong faith and principled leadership.

He ruled out bad ideas, even some good options, in favor of the best choices. Today on Truth for Life, we'll hear a challenging message from Alistair Begg that helps us determine when to say no. Alistair is teaching from Nehemiah beginning in chapter 5, verse 14. Now I want to suggest this morning that there are five areas in which we see Nehemiah saying no, and hopefully we can learn from them.

First of all, in verses 14 to the end of the fifth chapter, we see Nehemiah saying no to undue privilege—saying no, then, to privilege—secondly, saying no to pride. There's nothing reveals our hearts more than our prayer life or the absence of it. You see, if we think that we're really good at talking, we'll never pray for God to bless the ministry of his word. We'll just rely on our ability to talk. If we think we're very good at music, we'll never get down on our knees and sacrifice our lives to God afresh and say, make my life, my hands, my music an offering to you. We'll just get on our feet and let everybody know how wonderful we are as musicians. If we think that we have all the requisite abilities in this church, there's no reason to have a prayer meeting.

What we'll do is just mobilize people according to principle, we'll use the management strategies of the world, we'll employ the latest marketing techniques of the day, and we'll go out and we'll reach the world. But if we know that we can't do that, then we'll pray. And Nehemiah's prayers are the key to the absence of his pride. And the absence of his pride is on the basis of the presence of his prayers.

We'll say more about this tonight. First Peter chapter 5, Peter's wrapping it up, and he says, you know, if you're going to live together in harmony with one another, one of the very important elements is going to be an absence of pride. And so in verse 5 he says, all of you, wear humility towards one another. Don't be going around bristling with pride and cleaning your feathers and acting smart.

Don't do that. Because, he says, quoting the Old Testament, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And on the basis of that, he then applies it. He says, humble yourselves, therefore under God's mighty hand that he may lift you up in due time. It means learning to keep silent and allow the work which God has chosen to do in you and through you speak for itself. See, Nehemiah lived in the awareness that God was sovereignly involved in his life. He was providentially dealing with him.

And for all of his initiative, he doesn't display the kind of unhealthy self-assertiveness which so often marks those who are successful. There was none, if you like, of the spirit of the Olympics 94 in Nehemiah's response. Oh, what do you mean by that, says somebody?

Well, I don't know if it's just me, but I've picked something up this time around that I don't remember quite before. Nowhere did he come across more forcefully than the other evening while the whole world watched the figure skating. And when the focus of all of America's affections and hopes and dreams finally took her place in front of the camera and was asked, How do you feel? Do you remember her response? I am very proud of myself.

Excuse me? Wasn't there something supposed to be about, I am greatly humbled by the immense privilege entrusted to me to represent the United States of America in this arena? Again, what do you think about this? I am very pleased with what I have been able to achieve.

And all the little girls of America, down there in that place at Shaker Heights where I have to go with my girls, are watching this. They're watching this, and they're saying, That's just what I want to be. Nehemiah, we just wanted to have a moment with you to interview you about your wall. How do you feel about your wall?

I am very proud of myself and what I have been able to achieve. It's the spirit of the age. It all spills over from silly psychology manifest in the realm of sports. I would want to say, in defense of the individual to whom I am alluding, that she is speaking out soundbites, pumped to her by sports psychologists who told her, You've got to believe in yourself. You've got to think of the next thing. You've got to believe. And all of that's true, but all of that is not the essence of it. All of that is a means to an end, and all of that obscures the overarching purpose.

We are breathing a generation of brats in a society that has exalted narcissism to the throne. But not Nehemiah. He said no to undue privilege. That's a hard one. He said no to rising pride.

That's just as hard. Thirdly, he said no to mindlessness. You say, Well, what is this all about?

Well, let me try and explain. It may not be immediately apparent. In order for God's people to be effective, there needs to be leadership that isn't mindless.

It's alert. If you've still got your finger in 1 Peter 5, you will notice that once Peter has said, Humble yourself and cast your anxiety, his very next phrase is, Be self-controlled and alert. This is something that he keeps saying. In verse 13 of chapter 1, he says, Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled. In verse 7 of chapter 4, he says the same thing.

Therefore, the end of all things is near. Be clear minded and self-controlled. Why would Peter have so much to say about this? Because this was where Peter fouled it up. Jesus says to him, Watch and pray.

That's not too difficult, right? You got two things to do, Peter. Watch and pray. Got it.

Okay. I'm going to come back in a bit. I'm going to ask you, are you watching or are you praying? Comes back and there's Peter. So Peter says, Jesus said, Watch and pray.

I didn't watch and I didn't pray and I fouled up. So I want to tell you, so you won't do what I did. Don't be mindless. Don't think that because I put verse 7 before verse 8, namely, Cast all your anxiety upon the LORD, or in Nehemiah's case, Lord, strengthen my hands, that all you have to do is say, Lord, strengthen my hands. And then you'll take anything that comes your way, and you don't really need to adjudicate on it or think it through.

No, that would be silliness. In Nehemiah's case, his saying no to mindlessness reveals itself in the fact that he didn't take everything at face value. He had a measure of skepticism about him. Now, if you've determined that skepticism and Christianity do not co-mingle, I suggest you read your Bible again. We're not talking about unhealthy cynicism. We're talking about healthy skepticism, a skepticism which is based upon what we know about humanity and what we know about our Bible and what the Bible says about ourselves. We're naturally skeptical about ourselves, if we're honest, because we're skeptical that our immediate reaction to things is not necessarily the purest and the best.

If we don't have that healthy sense of skepticism, then we probably fall foul of the point we've just dealt with in relationship to pride. So, for example, here he gets this letter. The messengers come and say, you know, we would like to have a meeting with you.

Well, this is a change. These people have been sending all these horrible threats, and now they want a meeting? I keep picturing him talking to his wife, which says more about the way I respond to things than it does about him, because he was probably a eunuch and didn't have a wife. So x that out of your mind, okay? But when he spoke to his wife, he would have said to her, you know, I got a nice letter from these people.

They want me to go to a conference. Isn't that nice? He didn't say that. He said to himself, you dirty wretz.

No, I made that up. But I mean, he said to himself, he said, this is not straight up. Mindlessness would have said, hey, we're off to a conference. He said no to mindlessness because he says in verse two, the end of verse two, they were scheming to harm me. In verse nine, he says they were trying to frighten us. In verse 13, he says he had been hired to intimidate me. In other words, Nehemiah did not allow his unwavering dependence upon the hand of God to lull him into a sense of dreamy cluelessness. Trusting in God does not absolve us from the duty of personal vigilance.

Right? Trusting in God does not remove us from the realm of vigilance. So you've got teenage kids. And your son or your daughter phones up at 1130 some evening and tells you that they're at the dairy mart in who knows where.

And you just put the phone down and say, well, I'm trusting Jesus. I'm not. At least not alone. I'm in my car, man.

I'm looking for every dairy mart within a hundred square miles of the place. Well, my wife stays a long time at the office, a lot longer than usual. I don't understand that. I don't understand why her boss has suddenly got such an interest in the overtime. But I'm trusting Jesus. And if you're sensible, you're not. You're going to meet her at five o'clock every afternoon when the office bell rings, and it's time for out of there.

You're going to tell her boss to go take a running jump, because she's your wife first before ever she went working in there. Not unless you're stupid. Not unless you're clueless.

Do you know how much Christian cluelessness there is? How many silly things go on under the disguise of trust? You see, Nehemiah's conviction that God's hand would secure the eventuality did not prevent him from diligence and skepticism in this regard in relationship to what people were saying to him. Was it Chamberlain in the Second World War who met with Hitler? Chamberlain? Before the war, before it broke, right? So he goes and he meets with Chamberlain. I wasn't there, but some of you were.

You remember this. And I've seen the newsreel photographs of him coming back at the airport somewhere in the south of England, waving the sheet of paper and pronouncing to the House of Commons, peace in our time. What happened in that little encounter was that Mr. Chamberlain embraced mindlessness. He refused to say no to cluelessness. His doctrine of man was off, because he was a universalist and a Unitarian, and he believed that man was getting better and better all the time. And therefore, this funny little man with a mustache, because he would be getting better and better all the time, presumably had fallen asleep, woken up, was feeling much better, much more disposed to the rest of Europe, and was happy to say, and sign to peace in our time. And while he was signing to peace in our time, the armies of Germany and the mobilization of all of that stuff was being garnered for this immense and dreadful onslaught.

Ten million soldiers lost their lives on French soil alone in the First World War. And Chamberlain, embracing mindlessness, opened the door to it all over again. Well, apply that as you might. Parents, beware of mindlessness. Why do I say it to parents? Because I write it in my own notes to myself. And when I become a grandfather, I'll be saying, Parents, beware of mindlessness, whatever it is. Because if you don't preach the sermon first to yourself, why would anybody ever listen to the sermon you're trying to preach to them? I'm not telling you on Sundays things out of the richness of my experience that I know all about, that I've mastered, that this.

The day that I give that impression, I should just go down through this jolly trap door here with this pope. When I talk about saying no to privilege, it's a challenge to me. When I talk about saying no to pride, it's a challenge to me. When I talk about saying no to mindlessness, it's a challenge to me. And fourthly, when I talk about saying no to distractions, saying no to distractions is a challenge to me. Verse 3 is the key to this. I sent messengers to them with this reply, I'm carrying on a great project and I can't go down. Or as the New English Bible translates it, I have important work on my hands at the moment and I cannot come down.

Nehemiah related everything to his primary calling. The question that he poses in verse 3 is honest and it's vital. Here's the question. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you?

That's the question that a mother asks about 40 times a day. She's just got her hands into something. She says, could you please take me to the such and such? I said, I am doing a great work and I cannot come just now.

And then you get up the top of the ladders, could you…? You understand. Now, what's the story here?

Nehemiah understands that his primary focus is clear. Now, listen. Think about every life you've ever known that's made a mark, whether in history, in family, in friendship, or in business, and you're thinking about a life that is absolutely focused. You're talking about you have got in your mind right now somebody who knew what they were doing, why they were doing it, when they were doing it, and they were so consumed with doing it that they weren't going to do anything else and they weren't going to let anybody else divert them from that text.

Okay? How about Jesus? You go and read it for yourself in Mark's gospel. Mark chapter 1, he does the healings. He does the healings, he goes to pray. He's out praying by himself, the disciples come and find him, and they say, hey, the whole place is looking for you.

Now, there's an exclamation mark in the English translation which isn't there in the Greek, but it catches the sense of it, the disciples are pumped. You see, because they're Jesus' guys. They're with Jesus, they're the Jesus people, and his thing is taken off. He's got a ministry that's going gangbusters. He did a few healings, and the whole place is going crazy. They're up in the middle of the night looking for Jesus.

They're all over the place looking for Jesus, and so they come and find him and say, everyone's looking for you, Jesus, and you'll find in Mark's chapter 1 verse 38, Jesus says, let us go somewhere else. What? Jesus, I don't think you understand what we just said to you. We're telling you that your healing thing, it's big.

I mean, there's going to be tapes, books, videos, TV. I heard exactly what you're saying. Let's go somewhere else.

Explanation. That I may preach there also, that is why I've come. See he knew what his wall was, and he wasn't coming off it. Paul, 1 Corinthians 9. I am prepared, he says, to reach out to all manner of people in all manner of ways in order that by all means possible I might win some. Paul to Timothy as a young man, he says, I give you this charge. Preach the word, be diligent in season and out of season.

Keep your head, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry. Timothy, don't come off your wall. If I may just apply this in a different way for a moment. I want to say to those of you this morning, let me speak to mums for a moment. And there you are in the high calling of motherhood, whatever stage it is, whether it's the nappy stage or the teenage stage or multiple stages. And every so often on a Tuesday at about eleven thirty in the morning, as you look around on all of this and you think about what you're doing and why you exist and where you're going, there come all kinds of invitations to get off your wall. I want to tell you, don't get off your wall. You're at the very apex of opportunity.

Your children will arise and call you, bless it. Just stay on the wall. Some of you are thinking about running away and leaving your job and moving because the circumstances aren't just the way you wanted it, and if this happened and that happened, the next thing happened. Listen, it all falls apart in the next place as well.

Geography's irrelevant, ultimately. Stay on the wall. Keep your focus.

Say no to distractions. And the final point—and my time is gone—is that Nehemiah knew how to say no to fear and to intimidation. You see, the whole point was that from outside and inside, they were all trying to give him a real working over. But he knew it. He said, they're just trying to frighten us. And the real test of his leadership is the real test of all leadership. And that is, it is the ultimate test of human opinion. Would Nehemiah be brought down by their accusation?

Would he be seduced by their adulation? Because that's true always in leadership. The 19th-century hymn writer puts it like this, Some will hate thee, some will love thee, Some will flatter, some will slight, Cease from man and look above thee, Trust in God and do the right. When I was a wee boy at school in Scotland, we had this chorus that went, Learn to say no, learn to say no, To everything evil wherever you go.

And then it went on from there. What I'm suggesting this morning out of this study is simply that learning to say no is not always saying no to evil. It is saying no to the inferior for the sake of the best.

So let us be about the business of mending fences and building walls. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life, teaching us about the power of negative thinking. As we're learning from Nehemiah's experience, being in leadership is seldom easy. If you're in church leadership, we want to encourage you with a collection of messages from Alistair called The Basics of Pastoral Ministry. This is a series of 30 messages that will help you navigate challenges from within the congregation, as well as pressures from the surrounding culture. Alistair draws on his many years of experience in sharing key insights for establishing a Bible-based ministry. He talks about things like why the cross has to remain central, why our preaching needs to be grounded in God's Word, and what we should look for when we're looking for church leaders. There are four modules in this study that you can work through at your own schedule.

Each module has a corresponding study guide that can be downloaded for free. You'll find both the audio messages and the study guides online when you search The Basics of Pastoral Ministry at truthforlife.org. At Truth for Life, we are passionate about providing free, unlimited access to all of Alistair's teaching online and making high-quality books and studies available to you at our cost. And that's a passion we share with a dedicated group of listeners called Truth Partners. Their generous and faithful giving is what makes all of this possible. If you're one of our Truth Partners, thank you.

And if you've not yet signed up, you can join this vital team today. Go to truthforlife.org slash truth partner or call us at 888-588-7884. One of the ways we say thank you to our Truth Partners is by inviting you to request monthly book recommendations. Today, we want to encourage you to add an exceptional book to your library. It's called The Beauty of Divine Grace. It explores the core beliefs of the Christian faith related to salvation, namely the sufficiency of the Scriptures, the once-for-all sacrifice of the Lord Jesus for our sin, and God's gift of saving grace.

Ask for your copy of The Beauty of Divine Grace today when you sign up to become a Truth Partner or when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening this week. We hope you have a great weekend. Hope you're able to worship with your local church this weekend. On Monday, we'll see that while rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem was clearly important to Nehemiah, it was not his ultimate goal. Monday, we'll find out what was. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.