Brick by Brick // Conflict Resolution within the Church // Nehemiah 5 // Pastor Josh Evans

And how am I in the world going to continue to listen and that kind of thing?

We're going to do our very best. Hopefully you received a outline, word search, that kind of thing to kind of keep you plugged in. Adults, you got an outline as well. Hopefully, if you got one of those on your way in here today, you say, why did you do an outline for the adults? You normally don't do that. Well, I figured we have kids around and we need you to stay engaged as well. So you're not distracted. Some of the adults are looking for the word search like the kids had. I get it.

And so if you get bored, ask a kid around you if you could borrow theirs and that kind of thing. So but we're in Nehemiah Chapter number five here today. Nehemiah Chapter number number five. Now, I recognize that it is eleven, according to this clock in the back, it's eleven thirty eight. We got to be a little sensitive to time. We have a funeral here at one o'clock. OK, and so we'll be a little bit sensitive to time here today.

I know some of our regular attenders are like, yeah, right, he's long winded no matter what's coming up after that. And but we will be sensitive to that a little bit here today. But we have been in a series. We've been in a series called Brick by Brick. Can we say that together?

Brick by brick. And we've been in a series now for several weeks as we've been looking and and kind of preparing ourselves for, like you heard about, groundbreaking. If you're new to our church, you can find out a little bit more online about what God is leading us to. But we have a phase project so that we can eventually we're going to move our church out there and things like that down the road. But we are breaking ground on the first phase, which is our educational building to expand our our school, our schools maxed out. And so we are breaking ground next week on that. We're super excited about it, give us an opportunity to continue to reach more people with the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So we're super excited about it. And so we are looking through Nehemiah. There's so much in this book that really is applicable to where Union Grove is at here here today.

And so a little bit of recap, just especially for the younger ones, so you'll know exactly where we where we are. But years before this, there was a empire called Babylon. There was an empire called Babylon.

Let's all say Babylon together just because we can Babylon and Babylon came in. They captured Judah, which was where God's chosen people were living. All the Jews were there.

And and so they went in, they captured it. And the capital city of Judah was Jerusalem. And when they captured it, what they did was the walls around the city of Jerusalem. They burned those to the ground.

They tore down Solomon's temple and they completely dismantled all of all of Jerusalem. Well, during that time, Babylon, they took some of the smartest, brightest that the Jewish people had to offer back to Babylon. We would know some of those. Their names were Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.

You would know those names. So when Babylon captured it, they took some of them back to Babylon. And and then years after that, a new empire came about named Persia.

Can we say Persia together? Persia and Persia came in and now they invaded Babylon and completely overtook Babylon. And when they did, they had all these Babylonians. But then they had all these Jewish people when Persia captured it because Babylon had captured the Jews and all that. And so now they had all these Jews. They had all these Jews there and the Persian king said, hey, I don't got a whole lot for you guys.

So you're welcome to stay here with us or you are free to go back to your homeland, back to Jerusalem. So a man stayed back. His name was Nehemiah. He stayed there in Persia. But a lot of the Jewish people went back to Jerusalem. Well, the Book of Nehemiah picks up about 90 years after all of that happened, after some of the Jews had left and Nehemiah, he is working for the Persian king and he is the king's cupbearer.

Now, if you don't know what a cupbearer is, here's basically what it is. Is anything that goes to the king has to go through Nehemiah first. So he's pretty important.

So in other words, if you were to hate the king and you want to poison the king and so you kind of connive yourself, you put some poison in a drink and you hand it to the king. Let me tell you this, it's going to go before Nehemiah, before it gets to the king. So Nehemiah was super high up.

He worked for the king of Persia. And shortly after his brother, who had gone back to Jerusalem and some of his friends, they come back to Nehemiah and they're visiting him. And Nehemiah says, hey, what's the state of my people? How's the Jews doing? How's Jerusalem doing?

How's the homeland doing? And Nehemiah's brother begins to tell him that the people of Jerusalem, God's chosen people, are completely discouraged in pain. Chapter number one of Nehemiah says that they were in reproach and experiencing great affliction. Now you say why they had they had gotten dismissed.

Why on earth would they feel this way? And he goes on in chapter one to say that the reason they felt this way is that the city of Jerusalem, which was where God's presence would dwell there in the midst of all the Jewish people, that right there, the city was completely dismantled and nothing had been rebuilt back. So you remember Babylon came in, they burnt down the walls, they tore down Solomon's Temple. The gate was burnt down, all these different things. It'd be like them returning a hundred years later.

Right. And everything's still being laid around. There's still rubble. There's still pieces of the wall that's laying down. And so every single day when they woke up and they looked around them, they were reminded that they were defeated and they were reminded that God's presence was not not there.

Can you imagine the affliction that that would be, the pain that that would be? And so Nehemiah is hearing all of this and he's thinking, oh, my goodness. So his heart was broken because of the brokenness of the people of Jerusalem. So what he does is he decides, hey, I'm going to pray, I'm going to fast and I'm going to seek the Lord at how he can be a part of fixing the brokenness of his of his people. Well, about five months after he prayed and and fasted and sought the Lord, God finally leads him to go before the king. His name was Artaxerxes.

So let's say that together, see how many of you could do it. Artaxerxes. OK. And so he goes before the Persian king and he says, he says to him, he's like, hey, I need some time off. I need to go back to Jerusalem and help rebuild my people. Now, the Persian king, he didn't serve the one true God. He served pagan gods. OK, and so what's amazing to me is the Persian king said, sure. And he sends him on his way. In fact, he gives him letters so that he can go. And other empires wouldn't capture him or anything like that. And he gives them building supplies to get the wall rebuilt and things like that. Let me tell you this, that God can use anyone. He can use a pagan government to get his will done if he wants to.

That's how our God can work. So in this case, the Persian king, he sends Nehemiah on his way. Nehemiah goes back to Jerusalem. He becomes the governor of Jerusalem. So he's running things. He's helping him rebuild everything.

Everybody is on board. Everybody's following Nehemiah's leadership. And Nehemiah is being used by God to bring the people back into relationship with God and to restore the Jewish people. Well, listen, in chapter number four, we saw this last week in chapter four. Any time that the enemy, the devil, right, any time the enemy sees that God's work is going forward, the enemy is going to do anything he can to disrupt God's plan.

Right. He hates it when we say yes to something God wants to do. The enemy hates it.

You say, why does he hate it so bad? Because he doesn't want the mission of God. He doesn't want more people to get saved. He doesn't want more people to grow in their relationship with God.

He doesn't want those things to happen. So when we try to take steps and do what God wants us to do, the enemy is going to always try to attack us. Well, the first attack we see is in chapter number four with some guys by the name of Sambalot, Tobiah and Geshem. So these guys, they're from outside the camp. They're not Jewish people.

And these are guys that are outside and they're mocking and they're ridiculing. Funny story about this. Sambalot. Any of you named Sambalot in here, by the way?

None of you. OK. And but funny name, funny story is a couple of weeks ago, you remember Pastor David, our student pastor, he actually spoke and he spoke from Nehemiah chapter number two. How many of you were here that day?

You remember when David spoke on Nehemiah chapter two? And so David speaking and one thing that you know about our church services, we live stream the 11 o'clock. So there's people watching right now. We live stream the 11 o'clock.

You guys are here for the 11. So you might not have heard this. But David in the 830 service, which I can't watch because we don't live stream it and I was out of town in the 830 service when he was teaching about Sambalot and these guys, he told the church, he said, you know, what would be funny is if when Pastor Josh returns, if because these guys were what he called haters to the work of God, he said that any time Pastor Josh says the name Sambalot, people from the congregation should just shout out haters going to hate, is what he said. True story. So I didn't know that at all.

So I'm completely like clueless about that. And so last week I come back and I preach. And when I get to the verse in chapter number four, that says Sambalot, someone from the congregation dead serious. They shouted haters going to hate. And I'm sitting up here now. Remember, I had no context. I'm like, what on earth did they just say?

Like, I'm like, what in the world? And and so but they did. So you weren't here.

You weren't a part of it. But it was wild. And I was literally like, I struggled to move on as a preacher. You're like, do I say, hey, what was that? And hear it repeated or do I keep going?

So I decided to keep going. I had no idea what they were saying, but back to the story. And so Sambalot, Tobiah and Geshem, they're kind of creating all this opposition. They're making fun of what Nehemiah has come to do. When chapter number five, we see some more opposition that the enemy raises up to try to get Nehemiah to stop what God is telling him to do. But this time the opposition is not from outside, it's from within. And here's what we learn is that the enemy, if he can't stop the work of God from those outside, you know what he's going to try to do? He's going to try to stop the work of God with those on the inside, with conflict, with disunity, with problems, with disagreements and all these different things.

And so what you see here in chapter number five, it is just that. And I'll tell you this is that that's what the enemy. That's why I love what Pastor Fletcher said.

If you were in our prayer service on Wednesday night, Pastor Fletcher, he led us through a prayer as we're about to do groundbreaking. Here's what he told us. He said, we got to stay unified.

We got to stay together because the enemy is going to try. They hate what God is leading us towards. And so the enemy wants to do everything in their power to disrupt that by creating discord in the congregation that we that we have.

And I'll tell you this. Some of you have experienced that church conflict and church problems are a real thing. In fact, some of you might be in our church because of a problem that happened somewhere else.

Right. I've told you my story. I went through a church problem.

We would call it like a split and that kind of thing. I went through one of those situations years ago in my ministry. And here's what I've learned. I've grown up in church my whole life. I've pastored for three years. And so I have everything figured out, if you're wondering. And so, OK, that's a joke.

Some of you are like, really? No, I don't. I'm far from it. But here's what I've learned in my experience about church conflict and problems within the camp is this, the church at large struggles to handle conflict in the local church the right way. Here's what I've seen.

I've been in church my whole life and I've been in a Baptist church my whole life. And you would think if anybody gets it, it's got to be there. Right.

And so I'll tell you this. It's very rare that people handle problems in church the right way. Here's what normally happens. We gossip, don't we? We ignore the problem. Or perhaps if we have conflict, here's what we do. We just we're like, man, we're just going to ignore it. We're going to go somewhere else. Right. We're just going to take our problem.

We're not going to say anything. And so we're just going to go the other way. And when you see what happens with that, that's not the way that biblical conflict can be can be handled.

Right. And so there's all these different things. And because of that, here's what happens is we kind of ignore what the scripture says about internal conflict. We make excuses. We blame circumstances.

We blame people. And we refuse to handle things the biblical way. And here's the result of that. When we choose not to handle conflict within our congregation the right way.

Here's what usually happens as a result of it. Conflict in the church will stay with some forever. I had an issue in our church that I grew up in and it's been 15 years ago. And a few weeks ago, I got together with a lot of people from that. And here's what I'll tell you. 15 years later, some of them are still hanging on to everything that happened 15, 20 years prior.

They haven't moved on. And I'll tell you this, some of you might be there today. You might show up here every single Sunday, but deep down you have bitterness and animosity and problems about a certain church or about something that happened years ago. And so what we find is when things are disrupted in the local church, it stays with us for a long time. And ultimately, here's what happens is that conflict in the local church, it hurts the effectiveness of the church and its mission into the community.

Think about it. Who wins when there's conflict? Definitely not the community. Definitely not lost people, because here's what I'll tell you.

That is that word. If things don't go right in these walls, everybody in the community hears it. And the gospel and the mission is hindered. And the effectiveness of our church into the community will be affected if we don't fight and strive to keep things unified right here. Well, in Nehemiah chapter number five, we see some problems within the Jewish people.

Let's look at a verse one of Nehemiah five. It says this, and there was a great cry of the people and I love this and of their wives. Listen, when the wives get involved and are crying out, we got serious problems.

Any of you that are married, you get it right. And so there's this great cry. Now, when we think of the word cry in our English translation, we naturally go to tears streaming down our face, that kind of thing.

Here's what I'll tell you. The word cry here, if you look it up in the Hebrew, it's actually the same word that was used when the Israelites were in captivity and in bondage in Egypt and they cried out to God to deliver them. It's the same word that we have here. And so you get the idea that there's desperation involved and that they're crying out to Nehemiah about the problems that exist there within the Jewish people. It says that they cry out against their brethren. In other words, the Jews are there.

That's the one that's where the problem happens. It's not Sambalot. It's not Tobiah. It's not the people of Samaria. It's not Geshem.

It's not all these outside forces. The enemy is raising up problems within the Jewish camp. And that's where the problems lie. Verse two. For there were that said, we, our sons and our daughters, are many. Therefore, we take up corn for them that we may eat and live. In other words, the population is growing. So there the Jewish people, there's no more people than there are resources. It's not enough food to go around. There's not enough food to provide for our family. Verse three, some also there were that said we have mortgaged our lands, vineyards and houses that we might buy corn because of the dearth, which is famine. So there's this famine in the land. The population is growing.

There's already not a lot, not enough resources to feed everybody. And so now people are selling and mortgaging their homes in order to provide and survive as a family. Verse four, there were also that said we have borrowed money for the king's tribute and that upon our lands and vineyards, here's what was happening. They were raising taxes. So the head guys there in Jerusalem, they were saying this. They were like, hey, listen, we got to provide for our family and we're the leaders.

So let's raise everybody else's taxes so that we can benefit from it. You see that here in verse number four, verse five. Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children. And lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants. And some of our daughters are brought to bondage already.

Neither is it in our power to redeem them for other men have our lands and vineyards. So it became so they were so desperate that they started giving over their kids to slavery and to bondage so that they can get some money back so that they can they can provide. Now, we have some kids in here and I'll just tell you this. That's not a good idea, parents. Some of you are like, wow, that's not a bad way to pay for the groceries. You know, let's just give our kids over to whatever. And so the kids are like, is that why he has us in here?

We're going to kind of institute this new policy. And so but what's happening is they needed to provide for their families. So they were sacrificing, giving their kids over to to all of these different people.

Hey, go work for them so that we can provide. So the problem was this. The infrastructure was not big enough to support the growing population. We find that in verse two, the famine was heavy. We find that in verse three, the leaders forced them to pay heavy taxes and they continue to raise their taxes, heavy taxes, which was called causing all sorts of problems. We find that in verse number four in verse number seven.

We're not going to look at it, but the leaders were taking advantage of the citizens for personal gain. So you have a problem, OK? There's a problem within God's people, the Jews. These concerns or their cries were isolated to the Jews. And here's what I'll tell you, any time in this case, the city of Jerusalem, any time the work of God is going forward, the enemy is going to try to disrupt the people of God so that the mission of God will not go forward. That's exactly what's happening here is that the enemy is trying to use Sambal at Tobiah. And we learned in chapter number four, Nehemiah is like, hey, I'm staying on the wall, I'm staying, you know, busy.

And they're like, man, that didn't work. So the enemy now is saying, well, if it's not going to work with these guys, let's go within the church or within the group of people, the Jewish people. And let's start with the conflict there. So here's what I want to do.

I want to give you just a few things. This will be quick. But when the enemy attacks, because I'll tell you this, the enemy's going to attack, we shouldn't be surprised by it. The enemy's working.

And when we take the step of groundbreaking, he's going to be working double the amount of time as he was because he hates what God is leading us towards. So when the attacks happen, perhaps in this place, like we learned from Nehemiah, how in the world can we handle it? Nehemiah is so good and so wise with wisdom from above that you see some really good stuff here about how we handle conflict within the church. First thing is this. Be quick to listen.

Be quick to listen. Now, here's what I'll tell you. Like, how many of you, let's just be honest.

There's no judgment in this place. How many of you would say a lot of times you like to talk more than you like to listen? Be honest, OK?

My hands up. Some of you are like, no way. Some of you are nudging your spouse right now. That's you. He's talking to you, right?

Like, we love to talk more than we listen. But what we see here from Nehemiah, when the problem, when the Christ came to him, he was quick to listen. You see this verse number one.

There was a cry of the people. You don't see a response yet from Nehemiah. Verse two, it says, for there were that said.

In other words, people are still talking to him. Verse number two, he's still listening. Verse three, there's some others. There were that said is what the scripture says. Verse three, Nehemiah is still listening. Verse four, you see some others come to him and they're saying as well, Nehemiah is still listening. Verse number seven, we see that he consulted, which is wild.

He consulted with just himself. In other words, he listened to everything, all the cries of all of these people about all the problems that they have. And then he spent some time praying and seeking wisdom and figuring out the best plan to go forward.

Let me tell you this. Nehemiah listened before reacting. He listened before he reacted.

He listened before he planned a solution. Now, this is where we go wrong, isn't it? When we disagree, what do we do? We immediately we come up with a solution. Think about it if you're married in here.

My wife's not in here, so I can say anything I want for the next few moments. OK, that's a joke. We live stream this.

So do we need to cut the live stream off? I don't know. And but here's the thing is when you're in a, you know, we don't have disagreements ever in our marriage, but perhaps we did.

OK, that's a joke as well. But when we're kind of disagreeing on something, here's what I'll tell you. A lot of times when she's talking to me and explaining something to me is I'm kind of listening by the fact that I'm not saying anything. But you know what I'm doing up here? I'm already crafting my response, right? I'm already thinking in my head the minute she stops talking, I have I have a three point outline of how I'm going to fix our problems and everything's going to go away. If you would just listen and adapt your will to exactly what I want. Right. And you're the same way. We sometimes struggle to really listen and understand where the person's coming from.

And here's some practical application. There's always going to be disagreements in a church. I pastor a church of 400 different opinions.

I have a you wouldn't believe it. I have opinions of our music being this way. I have people on the other side, our music being this way, our dress should be this way, our dress should be that way. This should be this.

This should be this. I got opinions all over the world. I'm telling you, it's wild, OK? And we have tons of them, tons of them. And here's what I'll tell you, is that a lot of times we take our opinion and our preference and what we think and we think that ours is the one and only way, don't we? So what we do is when there's another one, we're like, no way. Ours is right.

Yours is is wrong. And that's what happens in a lot of churches. And that's where problems arise in churches is because we elevate our opinions and preferences above what the scripture has to say. And a lot of times church problems aren't about theological issues.

You know what happens? Churches are disrupted because of preferential issues most of the time. It's because we elevate those things. Here's all I'm telling you to do, is when you see something differently than somebody else in the church, listen. Stop talking, stop trying to fix it, stop trying to tell them and prove that you're right. Listen. In fact, the scripture elevates listening over speaking. James 1-19, Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be quick to speak. You know what he says? Be swift to hear, slow to speak and slow to wrath.

We see all the time throughout scripture that we are to listen, to try to understand, not to try to prove that we are right and that our way is best. So you see Nehemiah, you know what he did? He spent some time, he listened. He tried to understand what the cry was and what the problem really was.

But number two, you know what he did after he assessed the situation? Verses seven through nine, he addressed sin directly. Look at what he says, verse six. And I was very angry when I heard their cry in these words. Verse seven, I consulted with myself and I rebuked the nobles and the rulers and said unto them, Ye exact usury, every one of his brother. And I set a great assembly against them. So what you see here is when this happened, Nehemiah had a problem with it. And here's why.

Without going into a lot of detail. In Deuteronomy chapter 23, you could tax people, but here's what you couldn't do. You couldn't add interest and things like that on top of it. It was Jewish law. That's God's law that was given to Moses. And that's what the Jewish people were abiding by. And here in Chapter six, the problem was the cry of the people was that they are taxing us and adding interest, which would be a direct violation to God's written law that he gave Moses way back in the book of Exodus. And so Nehemiah, he understood that.

So we had a problem at hand. It was sin. And so Nehemiah, he addressed sin directly. He addressed it directly in verse number seven.

Nehemiah took some time to think in verse number seven. He rebuked the nobles, all the leaders. He called them out about that. He rebuked sin. And then in verse number nine, look at it. It says, also, I said to them, it is not good that you do.

Of course not. You're sinning. Ought ye not to walk in the fear of our God? So he rebuked sin. But then he urged them to live with the fear of God. He urged them to live with the fear of God. Let me tell you this, that that's probably the root of most all of our sin right there. Is that we don't really fear God, we don't view him the way that we should. If you view him as Lord, if you view him as master, if you view him as ruler, if you view him as your judge, your response to everything that God's word has to say, like gossip, slander and all of these different things, how to handle conflict the right way, all these different things.

Everything would be changed if we viewed God properly and had a healthy view of the fear of God. So Nehemiah, he listened and then he rebuked sin. But then what we see in verses 10 and 11, he fought for restoration. He fought to restore all things.

So in other words, like he didn't just leave it. Some of us are good at rebuking sin, aren't we? We can point out everybody else's sin. We struggle to see the sin of ourself a lot of times, but it's easy to kind of say. Some of you are like, I hope so and so is here today. Right. You know that feeling?

OK, maybe the pastor is only the person that has that. I don't know. And so but it didn't stop there. He rebuked sin. But you know what he did?

He restored everything. Look at verse 10. I likewise and my brethren and my servants might exact of them money and corn.

I pray you let us leave off this user. In other words, let us repent. Of our sin, listen, sin demands us repenting, sin demands it. And so when there's problems, when when you slander, you need to repent of it.

If you gossip, repent of it. And and we we have to in order to keep unity, we have to have a repentance and a sensitivity to our sin so that we can repent of it. But not only that, in verse number 11, he says, restore. I pray you to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive yards, their houses, the hundredth part of the money.

And of the corn, the wine, the oil and the exact of them. In other words, we repent, but we don't stop there. We forgive and we restore. We restore it. We give it back to them. We clear the debts, if you would. You see that in churches a lot. You make things right and then you come out of that.

Why never speaking to them again? Right. Is that rest? That doesn't look like biblical restoration. That doesn't sound like clearing the debts.

That doesn't sound like any of those things. Here's the point. The goal on the other side of any conflict in your life should be this.

Restoration. But sometimes we just want to prove we're right. That's all we're here to do.

We just want to prove everybody to see things from our perspective. And here's the thing. Nehemiah, he restored everything back to its original owner. He cleared the debts. He returned the money.

He returned it all. Listen, as we close here today, because we're out of time, here's here's the challenge, very simple chapter number five. Here's what I think if I was to summarize it this way, here's what I'll tell you. As a church, our application right here, you if this is the church that you call home, here's what I want you to do. I want you to fight for unity in our church. Strive to keep the unity, fight to stay together, because that is the difference, because I'll tell you this, the minute that we start sowing discord, and this is a warning, the minute the enemy gets a foothold into a church, it's going to hurt the effectiveness of what God is leading us towards.

That's why we must stay together as a church. Would you bow your heads with me? I'm going to invite you to stand.

And we're going to briefly respond here today. This is what we call an invitation, and I just want you to just do business with God. Perhaps if this is your church home, maybe today your response as the instrument plays, your response is just this, hey, we just need to pray for unity. Pray that the enemy can't get a foothold in this door. The enemy can't get in here because we don't need that. We need to shield him away through being on our knees and praying that he will not disrupt what God is wanting us to. So we got to be unified moving forward.

We have to stay together as we move forward. Perhaps if you're in here today and you saw us take communion, you saw all these things and you heard what Jesus has done for you and you say, Pastor, I've never trusted in Jesus as my savior. I don't know him today. I don't have a relationship with him today. If that's you today, if you would, you know, nobody's looking around. Nobody's going to judge you. But if you feel comfortable, slip up your hand high enough for me to see it. Long enough for me to recognize it. If you don't know Jesus as your savior.

You don't have a relationship with him. I would love to show you from the Bible how you can know him today and trust in his sacrifice, because it's the only hope that you and I have. What a beautiful thing to be a unified church moving together in the direction that God is leading us to, and by the way, I get it, because I've lived this. It takes a lot of humility to get there.

It does. It takes a lot of humility and understanding and fighting for something that is better for us. And I think that's the most important thing to do. And I think that's the most important thing to do. It takes a lot of humility and understanding and fighting for something that is bigger than the way that we see everything. That's what unity is. And the beauty of the gospel is that we're all different.

That's OK. But we've all come to faith in Jesus the exact same way through the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Let that be what unifies us together. Father, we love you. We thank you for today. We thank you for your word and what you shared about being unified. God, I pray, Lord, for our church that we would stay unified together, that relationships with one another would be the most important thing in our church. And as we seek to bring you glory and as we seek to bring you honor, God, that we would do so in the way that we handle disagreement and problems within our church, because we know the minute we step out and do this, that the enemy's coming, the enemy's going to attack and send opposition our way. So we we know that help us to be so close to you as we move through that and help us to be unified as we move together. God, you're so good to us. We love you for it's in your name. We pray and all God's people said today. Amen.