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Steve DeWitt The Joy of Opposition - Part B Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, Nehemiah 4:1-23 Scripture Reference: Nehemiah 4:1-23 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, Nehemiah 4:1-23 Sermon Series: Spiritual ExilesMessage: The Joy of OppositionAirdate: 9/18-9/21/26Programs: 2360 and 2361Morning, Bethel Church, and this is our challenging weekend with Daylight Savings. I said, or I just was thinking about our first service people today, that those are the really early risers to show up at the 815 on the spring ahead weekend of Daylight Savings. You're sort of more the hoi polloi, the sort of the normal folks, and we'll see who comes to the next service. I stand before you as a tired man. My daughter was up throughout most of the night, and I'm running on fumes today. So I say that to you in some way to mitigate my guilt for something stupid that I might say, because my eyes are like rolling in my head, I feel like today. So we'll get through the morning and go home and take a really good nap. And you parents who've been there, you know how I'm feeling today. I do want to greet our Cedar Lake campus this morning, and thank you so much for joining with us. Our Hobart Portage campus, which is not in this service with us, but are next week celebrating their... grand opening. I can say our grand opening. We're just one church. Really excited about that.So if you happen to just remember that in prayer, we've got a lot of work that's gone into kind of kicking that off, and I've seen the plans, and it's really going to be a great weekend next weekend over there. And how often do you, you know, grand open a new campus? You know, like, well, we've done it twice in the last six months, but we don't know how many more ever in the future, so we want to celebrate that, and we're going to next week. Today, we're going to stay in the stream of our teaching in 1 Peter without being exactly in 1 Peter. We've seen in 1 Peter this focus on trials. That trials are meant by God to reveal and to refine us. We look at them often as being bad things. God looks at them as being good things because of the effect that they have. And 1 Peter is written to people that are in exile, that are experiencing opposition.They're experiencing... ostracization, and Peter encourages them to see even those things as being part of God's refining fire, that work that he works in us, and to embrace them, not as being bad things, but in the end ultimately good things. So today I want to take a little break from 1 Peter and to look at one particular kind of trial that we so often run into as individuals and as a church. And that is just the trials of opposition, the trials of opposition. And my title is The Joy of Opposition, which sounds oxymoronic, right? Who looks at opposition and goes, yay, we don't naturally do that. There is from Scripture and from the teaching of Scripture every reason for us to even look at opposition as being something that we can rejoice in. James, of course, says, “count it all joy when you fall into various trials and temptations”, and that includes the trials of opposition. We all face opposition, don't we? Maybe as I say that, names come to mind. Perhaps that person is sitting next to you today. and try not to be poking them throughout the sermon, especially if you're married.But we all face opposition, and we have to know how to respond to it if we're ever going to make it through these trials that God brings our way and these people that God puts in our path. How should we respond to opposition? And Nehemiah is just a fantastic... book and a fantastic story about a man who suffered great opposition and who not only endured it, but who goes down in history as a great example of somebody going through it in a way that honors the Lord. And so... is that Nehemiah hears that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down and remained in that condition. He was serving King Artaxerxes in Susa, the capital of Persia, and he hears that Jerusalem is still in ruins, the wall is still in ruins, and he has a burden for that. He offers a prayer, and God blesses that prayer, and King Artaxerxes says, Nehemiah, you can go, and I'm going to... the thing. I'm going to provide what you need for this thing. I'm given a letter that ought to get you all the way there. And he was the most powerful man in the world at the time. And so that was like a huge endorsement.And so Nehemiah, he goes to Jerusalem and he inspects the walls and he gathers the Jews and he says, listen, my friends, let's rise and let us rebuild this wall. And Nehemiah is this amazing story of how a people that, you know, they weren't naturally masons and builders, but they come together and they accomplish this amazing feat of rebuilding the walls of the city of Jerusalem. And in the midst of all of this success, there is chapter 4 where there is trouble. There's trouble. Even in the midst of a great success, there's trouble. And it seems to me, my observation would be, and even my own experience, that whenever God is really doing something, whether that be in somebody's life, a new Christian, or maybe some victories that you've had spiritually in your life, or maybe it's your small group, or even a church or a mission work, wherever God is really moving, so often when there is a lot of momentum, something will happen or somebody will come or there'll be some sort of criticism that steps into that moment and can so easily derail the entire thing. And that's what Nehemiah faced.And I'd like to begin in our little study here of chapter four by looking at the strategies that the opponents of Nehemiah employed against him. So let me introduce you to the bad guys, okay? These are the bad guys. And their names are notorious, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. These were three kings of small kingdoms that surrounded Jerusalem. And they represent the opposition to the Jews rebuilding this. wall. We're introduced to them in chapter 2 verse 10 where they first hear that Nehemiah has come to rebuild the wall and the text tells us that they are displeased greatly. And they begin then to wage a kind of psychological war against Nehemiah. That continues throughout the story. Even after chapter 4, it's not the end of it, because as the story unfolds, they write an open letter, you know, a kind of assassination of Nehemiah's character. They post it on Facebook for everybody to see what this guy was really all about and what his motives were and questioning those. Later, they want to meet him in the fields of Ono. And when your enemies want to meet you in the fields of Ono, you say to them, Oh, no, I am not going to go there.They wanted to kill him. And so these guys were serious about this. And Sanballat is the ringleader. Tobiah is kind of... his sidekick, and Geshem was the schemer behind the scenes that was doing his scheming. This might help a little bit. Sanballat was the Sith Lord, Tobiah was Darth Vader, and Geshem was General Grievous, just to give some communication to some of you. Now, these guys surrounded Jerusalem. Their kingdoms surrounded Jerusalem. Maybe you're in a situation like that right now as I talk about opposition. You feel like you've got it on all sides. I got nowhere to go. There's no safe zone for me. There's no green zone for me. Everywhere I look, it seems like I've got opposition against me. That's what Nehemiah was facing. Everybody around them wanted them out of there. Now, these men couldn't attack Nehemiah directly because, remember, Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, the king of really the world at that time, had endorsed the project. So to come out overtly and to say, we're going to take you on, we're going to take you down, would have been in opposition to Artaxerxes. And even these guys didn't want to mess with Artaxerxes.So their strategy really is one more of cloak and dagger. All right, this is espionage. This is insinuation. It's the psychological guerrilla warfare that they employ against God's people in the rebuilding of this wall. So what are the strategies that they employ? Well, notice, first of all, that they begin where every schoolyard begins, and that is with taunting and with ridicule. Look at verse 1. “Now, when Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, He was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, what are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish and burn ones at that? Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, yes, what they're building, if a fox goes up on it, he will break down their stone wall.” Emphasis added for effect, okay? So here you have Sanballat now. He's the ringleader. He's the spokesperson. He's the Sith Lord. And he begins by ridiculing the effort that these Jews are doing in rebuilding the wall.And the text literally says this. It says that he became very angry. Literally, his nose became hot. This is a Hebrew idiom for when somebody is really mad. It's like the blood. They get red in the face all the way to the end of their nose. Like if you see a guy who's red all the way to the end of their nose, he's mad, right? And that's Sanballat. He's mad to the end of his nose, mad. And so he begins by taunting them. And visualize this with me. He gathers his cronies, he gathers the army of Samaria, and he begins to jeer the Jews in a way that he knows they're going to hear what he is saying, and he begins to mock them. And this sounds like, you know, the local elementary schoolyard, or maybe an IU-Purdue football game, because he begins by saying this. He says, these feeble Jews. Okay, what's that? Name-calling, right? They're wimpy. They've got nothing. He derides their ambition. Will they restore the wall? In other words, this project's a joke. Come on. Putting this whole thing together. He ridicules their optimism. He says, what are they going to do? Pray the wall up? They can't build this wall.All they have is their prayers. He mocks their enthusiasm. He says, well, they finish in a day. Word had gotten out that they were busy little beavers working so hard on the wall. All of their enthusiasm. Do they really think they can do this thing? I mean, come on. He undermines their confidence. Can they bring the stones back to life? In other words, they can't do it. They can't. Do it. And if you can visualize this, here's all these people, and they hate the Jews. They're not for this wall going back up. And every one of these that he says, all the guys, you know, they've been drinking. Think of a sort of a drunken sort of mob scene where they're all, wow, no Jews, and they can't do it. And so it kind of is building a Sanballat, kind of does this and does that. And I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where somebody tells a really good joke and somebody else thinks it's a great time to pile on. Or jump on the bandwagon. There's not a lot of humor in the Bible, but this is one of them, actually.Sanballat very effectively rolls out these ridicules, and there's Tobiah. He thinks it's a great time to jump in, and he goes, yeah, if a fox ran on the wall, it would fall down. I hear everyone going, oh, Tobiah, that's so stupid. Why would you say something like that? And we know from history and archaeology that it is stupid. They've done studies of the wall that Nehemiah built. It was nine feet thick. That would be a big fox. Knock that wall down. The point here is that he wasn't saying this for the armies, and he wasn't saying this for his cronies. He was saying this hoping the Jews would hear it, hoping they'd hear the mockery and the laughter. You know, the old adage in the schoolyard is, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. You've heard that before. You've probably said that. And the fact that you have to resort on the schoolyard to poetry ought to say that words are effective at discouraging us, aren't they? And even as adults, a little contrary word, a little criticism, a little taunt, a little mockery, and inside we can suddenly become so fleshly, we can be discouraged.And that is always the case. Words are effective. Now, why do you suppose Sanballat began with ridicule? Why not just march the armies out there and just take them all on? Because what is Satan? He's known as the father of what? Lies. Satan is the master of the subtlety. He's the master of the insinuation. We see that with Adam and Eve, or with Eve specifically in the garden, as he just twists the words and he plays with the mind. Those that Satan controls and follow his path, they do the same thing. Satan knows that he doesn't have to get a good Christian to deny the virgin birth or the fact that Jesus is coming back. All he has to do is discourage him a little bit. And with that discouragement, the good work that God's doing in them or the good work that God's doing through them, all of a sudden, it can come to a halt. Why? I'm so discouraged. And maybe you're there right now. You're rejoicing in what God's done in the past, but right now you're discouraged and somebody said something. Something's going on.This person's in my life. I got a Sanballat. I got a Tobiah. And you're just thinking, oh, that's the way the enemy operates. How should we respond? Notice how Nehemiah responds in verse 4 and verse 6. I won't read them, but in both cases, he prays. Now, I never saw anybody in the schoolyard do that. I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray over these words that you've said. It's not our natural response, is it? have an example here from Nehemiah, I'll come back to this later, in how to respond to criticism and opposition. Go to God in prayer. And notice what he adds after verse 6. He says that the response of the people was that they worked even harder. And the text says they worked because they had a heart to work. I love that little phrase there. And as I read that, you know what I think about? I honestly think about Bethel Church.One of the qualities of this church that I love so much is that this is a church that has a heart to work. And I've seen that over the years. I can think of just even recent examples of moments where it just comes pouring out. A year ago right now, we said, hey, we bought this building in Gary. We got a clean 30 or 40,000 square feet. Y'all come out now. And I know a terrible cold, I mean, I-65 was a sheet of ice. I know because I drove down it. You know, we had 400 people, volunteers that showed up and we scrubbed every inch of that building. And I saw the way that people were working and laboring and sweating and all of that. No pay for God, you know, that kind of a thing. And I just admire that so much. And like the, you know, a month ago we said, hey. somebody's given us two gym floors, come pull planks. Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, I think I'm going to pull planks today.But we had all these people that showed up and they pulled planks all day and they got blisters and sore backs, but they did it to the glory of God. Why? Because they had a heart to work. And I just think about our church and even the day-to-day kind of week-to-week ministries, I think it's a wonderful quality of our congregation. We're good at…
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