“Do You Remember What’s-His-Name?” (Part 2 of 2)

Our culture is obsessed with top ten list.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll discover the only list that really matters, and we'll find out how you can get on it. Alistair Begg is teaching from chapters 11 and 12 in the book of Nehemiah. If we moved amongst the crowd and said to them, what's your name and what were you doing?

We would get, essentially, six replies. And what were you doing in Jerusalem? Answer, I was living in Jerusalem. Secondly, in verse 12, and what were you doing? Oh, I was working there. I was working in the temple. And how about you? We say to another, what were you doing there? Verse 16. I was serving there.

I had a responsibility of the outside work of the house of God. Doesn't sound like a big deal, does it? But it is a big deal. It's a big deal out there when you're trying to come in here and park your car. It's a big deal out there when you drive in on a day and you bring a guest to see the place and you look around and you say, my, this looks really nice.

It's a big deal. See, we devalue the significant necessities of life by exalting to undue prominence things that are really not that significant. For example, I think, without any question, most of us would assume that that which is most public and most visible is inevitably most significant. After all, why would we make it public and visible when it's not significant?

But in fact, that is a warped way of thinking. And Paul makes that clear when he identifies the members of the body of Christ as being many but all one body and existing for one another and existing under the authority of the head. And when he points out, he says, it is our unpresentable parts of our body that are the most significant—that the renal function of our bodies is not on public display, mercifully, but it's all underneath, it's all unseen, and it's all vital.

Vital. Are you prepared to be totally unseen for the kingdom? Are you prepared to live your life in such a way that no one knows your name and no one even cares for the kingdom?

You see, well, that's an easy question for you to ask, because after all, you're not even facing that issue. Well, I don't want to be self-focused in any way, but I want to tell you that when I came to Cleveland, Ohio, I came to total obscurity. I faced the issue in coming here to this church. I didn't know a living soul in America, bar two or three or five people. I faced the question, do you want to stay in Scotland, which is a small place with only five million people, and be notorious? Or do you want to go to the land of the free and the home of the brave, to a place called the Great Lakes, with a continental landmass that is so vast, with 250 million people, and be lost in total obscurity?

Are you prepared to go and bury yourself in what is not clearly the Garden City of America? Yes, Lord! Now what God does with that after that is his business, but the issue confronts us all. I read a magazine edition this week which was rejecting wholesale the missionary hymn, So Send I You. You may know this hymn.

So Send I You, it has lines like, So send I you to suffer unrewarded, to toil unknown, unsought, unloved, etc. And the person writing the article said, This is ridiculous. This is totally non-Christian. This is not Christianity. Christ does not call us to live our lives in obscurity. Christ does not call us to serve unsought and unknown.

And the person is completely crackers in the way they're thinking. Because he does call us to that. And if he chooses to do something other than that, then we will live with the implications of that, but that is not our prerogative. We will not be a footnote in a footnote on a footnote in the whole of church history when the records are reckoned up. No one will remember us, except God.

So therefore, if all that I have to think about is how my service is responded to by other people, if all of my jollies come from the accolades and the immediate gratification of those around me, then what I'm saying is I have never learned to serve, and I see myself in the mirror of that all too clearly. You see, the heroes in looking back for me are people you will never know except I told you about them. Who knows T.S. Mooney in the whole world except a bunch of you folks, because I keep talking about him. Why would I talk about a wee man who was a bank manager all of his life, never ever married? Well, because he was such a fabulous wee guy, had a boys' Bible class for fifty single years of his life—fifty years, a boys' Bible class—so that the boys in his class would have a Savior in their hearts, a Bible in their hands, and a purpose in their lives. Nobody knows T.S.

Mooney beyond the immediate environments of Londonderry, Northern Ireland. But he's on God's list. See what this says? See what Jesus is saying?

He says, you can get on all the wrong lists, think in there the right lists, and not be on the one list that really matters. I was living there, I was serving there, I was working there. Verse 17, I was praying there.

So what were you doing? Madaniah son of Micah, the son of Zabdi, the son of Asaph, the director who led in thanksgiving and prayer. That's what he did. He encouraged the people to come before God in prayer.

That was his thing. If you mad at me, he said, why don't we pray about it? If you knew you had a burden and you needed some encouragement, you could go to this fellow and say, you know what, maybe you could pray about this with me. Isn't it a staggering thing to think about how our lives are sustained by those who pray? I mean, the people we don't even know about who pray for us. We wonder how it is we make it through our days. We wonder how it is we're even sustained.

It's because there are great armies of people who undergird us with prayer. We don't necessarily know who they are. We don't know their names.

That's not important. God knows. Do you have a prayer list? Do you pray for people regularly? Do you pray for the pastors and elders and leaders of this church? Weekly?

Daily? You say, well, that's not much. That may be the difference between usefulness and failure, your prayers. Fifthly—and who are you, and what were you doing? Well, I was watching there, verse 19 of chapter 11. I was on the gates, Akub and Talmon and their associates, who kept watch of the gates, one hundred and seventy-two men. They were alert, they were aware, they were keyed in to external threat. In verse 26 of chapter 12, you find the same emphasis, and they served in the days of these men, and in the days of Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the scribe. They were the gatekeepers, verse 25, who guarded the storerooms at the gates. I don't know how that applies in the sense that I'm not gonna try and come up with some elaborate way to spiritualize the text, you know, and say, Here's the gates, and here's the storerooms.

Just understand this. Here's another relatively unspectacular task, fulfilled with faithfulness. And sixthly, what were you doing there? We ask another, and in verse 22 they reply, I was singing there. I was one of Asaph's descendants, responsible for the service of the house of God. The singers were under the king's orders, which regulated their daily activity. If you study this carefully, you find that these are the great-grandchildren of David, the singing boy. He got singing going in his family, and it was ricocheting down through the generations. And all these generations later, there they are, still to the fore, still singing, still praising the Lord, because their great-grandpa sang, and their grandpa sang, and their dad sang, and they sang, and they gave glory and praise to God. And when you go to the eighth verse of chapter 12, and the Levites are listed, you realize that they were together there in charge of the songs of thanksgiving. And Bekbukiah and Unni, their associates, stood opposite them in the services.

Oh, yeah, that sounds really great. But it was. Because it was antiphonal singing. They tell me that means one side sings and the other side echoes. If you don't have anybody standing opposite on the other side, you ain't got no echo. So you just got a group going, praise the Lord, waiting for the echo, and there's no echo. There's no response.

There's no reverberation in the heart. And these people stood opposite the other people, and the people said, Isn't God good? They said, Isn't God good? When they said, We praise his name, they said, We praise his name. When they sang, they sang. And they are listed here for that and that alone.

And the psalmist says, Oh, that man would praise the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works towards the children of men. In other words, read the list, and what you realize is this. Nobody is described here in terms of their personality. And we live in a personality-driven world. People's personality is far more significant than their intelligence or their wisdom or their grace or their tact or their purity or their ability to govern the country. It wasn't their personality.

It wasn't their faces, because there's no pictures. Go through the list and imagine, Was he tall? Was he small? Was he fat?

Was he thin? Long hair? Short hair?

Blunt hair? Black hair? Blue eyes? Brown eyes? What in the world did he have?

Green eyes? Who knows? It doesn't matter. Why doesn't it matter? Because these things are superficial. They don't matter.

And yet these are the things that we spend all our time thinking about. Well, is my hair right? Is it not right? Are my eyes nice?

Are they not nice? Am I fat? Am I thin? Am I tall?

Am I tall? This is what is so significant in my life. It's ultimately irrelevant. Because the issue here was not their faces, it was their function. It was what they did. I had the strangest experience yesterday. I took a photograph from off my shelf of my mother and I when I was eight years old. And as I looked at a picture of us standing together, I couldn't remember what my mother looked like even though I was looking at the picture.

I wanted to see right inside the picture. I couldn't. It frustrated me. I couldn't bring her back to my mind anymore.

It was gone from me. But not what she did. Not what she said. Not how she cared. Not how she laughed. Not how she prayed. Not how the two of us got thrown out of church services for laughing when we should have been quiet. None of those things were gone from me.

They're thrown out by my father, that is. None of those things were gone from me, but I couldn't remember her face. And then I say, well, it doesn't matter if I remember her face, because all of that function is what has touched my life.

Do you remember your Sunday school—your very first Sunday school teacher's face? I can't. You may.

Do you remember her name—his name? I can't. You may. But I do remember what they told me. They told me Jesus loves me.

This I know, for the Bible tells me so. They told me that I needed to know Jesus as my own personal Savior. They told me that God had ultimately one significant list. He kept it in heaven—it was a book, and it was called the Book of Life—and they told me that if your name was entered in the Book of Life, you may go safely to heaven, and if your name was not entered in the Book of Life, then it didn't matter what in the wide world book your name was ever entered in.

Because of that function, God brought me to faith. You see, the issue in the list is not that the people were famous. It is that they were faithful. If you and I take care of being faithful, we let the Lord be concerned about whether he wants anybody to know us or not. Whether they recognize what we do or not.

Whether… whatever. The issue is faithfulness. The issue is being faithful, it's not being powerful. You can read this in Luke chapter 10. The disciples come back, and they say to Jesus around verse 18 or 19, you know, we went out, and even the demons do what we say. We just say your name, Jesus, and the demons even obey us.

They go places when we tell them. Jesus says, Don't rejoice that the demons are subject to you, but rejoice that your name is on the list. Rejoice that your names are written in heaven. But when some of us, as we make our journeys through our day, realize that any sense of earthly recognition we enjoy is minimal, we feel as though we've been laboring hard and long and in obscurity, and that somehow or another what we've done has been missed, there's no excuse for it being missed by those of us who should have recognized it.

Listen here. Hebrews chapter 6 and verse 10 will be a great encouragement to you. God is not unjust, he will not forget your work, and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people. This is great, isn't it? God is not unjust, and he will not forget your work. The work that is displayed in the fact that you have shown love for him—how did I show my love for him?

By helping people and by continuing to help them. God doesn't forget. We take names off the list all the time. Somebody dies, somebody moves, somebody goes here, goes there, we remove the name from the list. God doesn't take the names from the list.

And his list is the only one to be on. Most of you know the name of D. L. Moody, right? Famous evangelist, American evangelist, et cetera. D. L. Moody was responsible for leading Wilbur Chapman to faith in Jesus Christ. Those of you who know church history know that Wilbur Chapman became a great national evangelist in the generation that succeeded Moody's generation. Wilbur Chapman was involved in all kinds of evangelistic campaigns, and on one particular Sunday afternoon in Chicago, he and some others trailed a gospel wagon, as they called it, from the Pacific Garden Mission into the streets, and they came down State Street in Chicago. As they came down State Street in Chicago, there were various people standing around, and one young man who played baseball for the White Stockings and had a Sunday off was standing leaning against a bar—it was the White Stockings at that time, incidentally—was leaning against a bar on State Street. They issued an invitation to the people who were standing in the street to come down to the meeting at two-thirty that afternoon, and at two-thirty that afternoon, this young man came, heard the gospel, professed faith in Jesus Christ, and Billy Sunday, the baseball player for this particular Chicago team, became a committed Christian. Two more years playing baseball, and then he began to work for the YMCA in Chicago, which was a fine Christian organization, especially during that time. Wilbur Chapman came back through town, said to Billy Sunday, Would you like to join my evangelistic team?

What am I supposed to do? Will you go ahead of me and kind of soften up the troops, and then I'll come behind and preach?" Billy Sunday said, Fine, I'll do it. Makes a commitment to do it, and then Wilbur Chapman leaves, quits as an evangelist, and becomes the pastor of one of the largest churches in America, thus leaving Billy Sunday as the evangelist. So then we have Billy Sunday's evangelistic crusades, and he continues where his mentor had left off, travels all across America, and in one of his meetings, a young man by the name of Mordecai Ham became a Christian. Some of you won't know that name—you probably think I got it from chapter 11 of Nehemiah—but others of you will know the name Mordecai Ham, and Mordecai Ham accepted Christ.

He, in turn, became an evangelist, and especially south of the Mason-Dixon line, and was greatly used of God in evangelism. He's got an evangelistic crusade going, and as a result of that, people are inviting their friends, and one young guy says to his reluctant friend, Why don't you come to the crusade and hear Mordecai Ham? The guy says, Well, not really.

I don't want to. The fellow prevails upon him, and he comes. The two sit together, and the young man who came reluctantly committed his life to Christ as a result of the ministry of Mordecai Ham—he being Billy Graham. Billy Graham, in turn, obeys Christ, and many of our lives and the lives of our friends and family have been impacted by all of that. But that is not, as Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story.

Because the rest of the story is back at the beginning. Question. Who led Dwight L. Moody to Christ? What was his name? Well, it was his Sunday school teacher. And the Sunday school teacher determined that on a given day, he would go and visit all the boys in his class, and he would ask them one question, Where do you stand in relationship to Jesus Christ? And on a particular Saturday afternoon, he enters a shoe store in Chicago, and he is taken into the back of the shoe store amongst all the shelves and all the shoes, and he confronts this teenage boy, Dwight L. Moody, and he says to him, Hey, son, where are you in relationship to Jesus Christ?

And right there amongst all the shoes, he leads Dwight L. Moody to faith in Jesus Christ. Now, what was his name? Most of you don't know.

But it was Edward Kimball. Who knows? Who cares? God knows. God cares.

But that's not even all the story. What was the pastor's name? Who, encouraging the Sunday school teachers in his church, suggested to them that they may want to take some kind of radical action in the lives of those under their care and go and speak to them about their souls and about their relationship with Jesus Christ?

What was that faithful guy's name? Nobody knows. Nobody cares.

Well, actually, God knows. And God cares. But that man died in anonymity, not knowing that a simple word of encouragement set in process a chain that under God has meant thousands upon thousands of people coming to faith in Jesus Christ.

Do you remember what's his name? God dies. God dies. Powerful, compelling message about how God works through ordinary and often unknown people. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. As we heard Alistair say today, the only list that really matters is God's book of life. And today we want to recommend a book to you that is perfect to help encourage children to find their identity and joy in Jesus rather than in what the world values. The book is titled The Big Book of Questions and Answers About Jesus. The author of the book is our friend Bible teacher and theologian Sinclair Ferguson. And in the book, he teaches young school-aged children that true happiness is found in giving their lives to Jesus.

This is a large hardcover book. It presents 34 questions followed by the answers from the Bible. You can easily work through a question a day. Sinclair also provides families with several suggestions for how to gain a deeper understanding into each of the answers, including scripture verses, a short prayer, memory verses, and questions to spark further family discussion.

He even supplements the lessons with creative drawing and craft ideas. Ask for your copy of The Big Book of Questions and Answers About Jesus. When you donate today, you can give a one-time gift at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can arrange to set up an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org slash truth partner, or give us a call.

The number is 888-588-7884. And if you'd prefer to mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to Truth for Life at PO Box 398000 Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Hope you have a great weekend. Hope you're able to worship with your local church this weekend. On Monday, we'll see how, even though we often associate sacrifice with loss or suffering, we can find great joy even in sacrifice. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.