Foreign.

We're going to be, like I said earlier in Nehemiah chapter one today, kind of kicking off a thing. I got to put these on. I'm going to start right out reading it, the first five verses. And there's a whole lot more in each of these chapters than probably what we'll read each. Each day.

But my encouragement to you is that you'll pick up your scripture on home time and you'll read either on a Bible app or a paper Bible, whatever it is. If you want to use one of the Bibles that's in the. In the pew, it's page. I actually can't read that. 524.

I made that print too small. But anyway, page 524, if you want to use that, it's nice and easy. It follows the same translation as the one I'm using that way. And so all the words match up. But Nehemiah will get into a little background on him in a few minutes.

But here's, here's some of. Here's what it says in these first five verses. Says. These are the words of Nehemiah, the son of Hakaliah. It so happened that in the month of Kislev, that was what they called it.

We clearly don't have a month of Kislev. In fact, in my research, I forgot to even find out what month that is. So if you care to know, that's what like Google is for. I don't know it, but in the month of KISLEV in the 20th year, I was in Susa, the citadel. Hanani, who was one of my relatives, along with some of the men from Judah, came to me and I asked them about the Jews who had escaped and had survived the exile and, and about Jerusalem.

They said to me, the remnant that remains from the exile there in the province are experiencing considerable adversity and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem lies breached and its gates have been burned down. When I heard these things, I sat down abruptly, crying and mourning for several days, I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. Then I said, please, O Lord, God of heaven, great and awesome God, who keeps his loving covenant with those who love him and obey his commandments. May your ear be attentive and your eyes be open to hear the prayer of your servant that I am praying to you today throughout both day and night, on behalf of your servants, the Israelites.

I was going to stop somewhere there and I just kept reading. So I don't know, I think I meant to stop at verse four. And I just kept reading. It's good stuff, and I'm. I love it.

But I'll stop there. Let me pray for a moment, and we're going to dig into this. God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the example that Nehemiah shares with us, that he received bad news and instead of brooding on it, he brought it to you in prayer. Instead of thinking how he can fix it immediately, he just goes to you and he begins his prayer and his praise and his supplication.

So, Lord, we pray that as we jump into your word here today, that you would first of all, teach us, teach us how to properly focus on you and on the ways that you want to reach out to us in the midst of the things that we're going through. Lord, we pray that whoever's going through some type of trial, struggle, temptation, illness, whatever it might be, that today they would find healing and freedom, Lord, that they would know your forgiveness and the new life that we can have in Jesus Christ. Thank you, Lord, for your word. Lord, speak through me that they would hear your word. In Christ's name, we ask.

Amen. So, okay, we're going to jump into this and the Book of Nehemiah. I said kind of earlier that it's, It's. It's not just a. An old book, it's a timeless book.

The scripture is that way. When we find, when we read the scriptures, sometimes there's things that we don't know or understand, things that it talks about. Like I said, you know, they had different names for their months. In fact, they started on different times than what ours do. But there's people that were scholars that went back and figured this stuff out.

And we can look it up and figure it out through them if we care to. But as we look through some of these things, we see that there's stuff that we don't really understand, like, where was Susa? What's a citadel? You know, just all kinds of questions. In fact, as I read the scripture, one of the things that I do is I'll ask questions of it.

If I don't understand something, I'll make a note and I'll say, what is this? What is that? Sometimes I don't get very far before I have more questions than I have time to find the answers for. So I encourage you as you read scripture, I. I know you guys are doing that, right?

Like, you're not just waiting for me to give you a few verses every week. You're going home and saying, okay, I've got homework, you know, like, what's your homework? Open the Bible, say, lord, teach me from your word. Please show me where it affects my life. And then read and listen.

You probably won't. You might, but you probably won't hear an audible voice of God. We did just have a guy outside. I saw Tom talking with somebody, and I went out to see what's going on. And I believe this guy saw some things and heard some things that none of the rest of us heard or saw.

Like, all I can say was, this guy needs prayer. I tried to even get his name and couldn't get that from him. He couldn't put even a phrase or a sentence together. But I'm pretty sure he's staying at the Quality Inn if you want to go track him down. He's wearing a motorcycle jacket that's got, like, the plating inside of it for if you fall off and go sliding down the road.

So it was a cool jacket. And I just went out to say, hey, I like your jacket. And then I don't know. I don't know what happened after that. But anyway, he went that direction.

And so he saw some things and heard some things that Tom and I were not aware of. But it's a little bit different when you read the Word of God and God speaks to you. He'll tell you some things that other people might not hear. So I understand that at the same moment, that seems, like, weird and yet also comforting because that means I'm not alone. It means when I read the Scriptures, when I read the Word of God, it's not just the same as I read a fiction book or if some of you guys are old enough to remember, I know the newspapers.

You know where you'd open it up and find the news. I heard somebody say this week they used to work in college or something on a newspaper. And they said, we had two sections, we had news and we had opinions, and they were two different things. Now it all seems to be the same thing. But anyway, boy, is it a mess out there today.

But when you read the Word of God, when you're doing this on your own time, God is going to speak to you and he's going to reveal to you from His Word what He has for your life. And so that's what we're looking at today. But it turns out, I guess as I study Nehemiah, it looks like some of the things that he says there, I'm going to have no choice but to talk about them. I'm going to talk about it. And I'm going to try my best to keep it just on the level of this is what was going on in the Scripture.

Here's how we can learn from it today. And I'm not going to try to read political bias or facts into it at all. But for instance, one of the things that we see here is there was a city of Jerusalem and the walls were torn down. Now, I know in this country we've had discussions, like, about a wall, you know, on a border for safety and security. I'm not going to go preaching a message about that.

But I will say, like, I've got to acknowledge that's kind of ironic that, that they're talking about things like that in the Bible and in today. And let's try to figure out where does the Scripture lead us in a godly way through these things without trying to get involved in the morass of political discussions that seem to be plaguing our country. See, the word of God brings healing to us, and so that's what we're going to do. So I'll try to be frank when the Scripture talks on frank items. But also I understand that some of these things might not be popular with half the country.

And so where the Scripture isn't popular in my heart, I have to look and say, is my opinion wrong? Or. Or is my understanding of it wrong? And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at it and say, God, you speak to me. Not cnn, not msnbc, not fox, not whatever podcast I listen to.

But, Lord, I want you to speak to me. Can we. Can we do that? I'll tell you, this is like I've taught through the book of Revelation before. That's probably the scariest thing a preacher ever could do, because nobody has the same two opinions on the Book of Revelation.

Nehemiah can be quite the same way. And so I step into this with a lot of. Not trepidation, but maybe it's a little bit like that. So we're going to continue from here. One of the things you need to understand about what's going on in Nehemiah is something that we don't understand in our country today, and it's the concept of exile.

See, what had happened with the people of Israel was just a little bit of brief background. God had given them a covenant that they were supposed to abide by, to live by. Part of that covenant was giving them his law. He gave them the law through Moses, and he says, here's these laws. You can read in like Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, There's a whole bunch of it in there.

In fact, there were 631 laws that were part of this covenant. I have a hard time keeping, like the Ten Commandments sometimes. I don't know which ones. Don't start to figure out which ones I have problems with. I'm just saying I probably have a rough time with those.

630 is a lot just to remember. They had whole lawyers just for that, just like we have lawyers today. They had lawyers about the word of God. And they tried to tell them, here's how you abide by these laws. And of course they're going to get it wrong.

But the biggest thing that the people got wrong wasn't breaking individual laws. God has much grace, mercy and forgiveness for those things. The things that they got wrong was when they started saying, well, Yahweh, the God of Israel, he's good for these things. But we need to start looking at our neighboring nations and see the things that they value. And we're going to find their gods and their idols, and we're going to copy those and we're going to worship those gods and we're going to start following them.

The leaders in Israel, the kings, they would go off and they would say, well, I. I could marry one of these women that's here, but why don't I find. Not that God had a problem with foreign women, but he had a problem with the gods and the culture that they brought in. And he says, the king says, I'm gonna go and marry this foreign woman who's maybe the daughter of another king, and I'm gonna bring her in to my harem of wives. And so that way I can have this peace treaty with this other nation.

But then what she starts doing is she starts bringing in the culture, the idols that she worshiped from her growing up nation that she came from. And so the kings began leading the Israelites astray. They began leading the prophets astray and the priests astray. You had false prophets that would proclaim messages that enriched their pockets. Does this sound familiar today?

Do we have some preachers on tv? They write a lot of books. Sometimes they might be good and helpful, but it seems so many times like some of them. I'm not naming names here. I don't even have names in mind.

I'm just kind of calling out the symptoms of it. It's people that seem to be shepherding for personal gain rather than for taking care of the flock. Amen. You understand? Are we good?

All right. If, like, I'm not trying to poke holes in your favorite TV preacher or whoever you listen to. I'm just saying if you can't tell why they're doing it, it might be for selfish purposes. So anyway, the people of God had broken covenant. They had worshiped idols.

They had gone astray. And so what God had spoken, spoken of through his prophets over the years. In fact, it was in the law that Moses had given them, that God said, here's what will happen. If you break covenant with me. If you break this contract, this covenant that you and I have together, then here's the things that will happen.

And one of those things is, I will give you over into the hands of a foreign nation. In other words, their army will come in, they will destroy your cities and towns. They'll take your young men and women and old men and women, too, and they'll take them all away. And they'll take the best and brightest out of the land. They'll leave the peasants and the farmers there to work the land, and they'll take the best and brightest away to their foreign nation's capital.

And that's where we find this guy Nehemiah. In fact, Nehemiah is with several other Jewish people who. They were Israelites who some of them had actually been born into captivity in these foreign nations. Now, it started with the. The Ammonites, then the Babylonians was the empire.

Then it was the Medes and Persians. Like, these empires kept rising and falling quickly. And finally, by the time of Nehemiah, you're with the. The Medes and the Persian Empire. The Persian empire is who the king was with Nehemiah.

And so what was going on, this is a lot of background. We're kind of getting into it. If you're taking notes, by the way, if you want to see where God had said this stuff would happen, it's Jeremiah 25, verses 1 through 14. But he had also said that he would redeem his people. Jeremiah 25:1 14 is where he says, if you keep down this path, these are the things that will happen.

I'll carry you off into exile. So God also said that he would redeem his people. And eventually he said that he would send the Messiah, that He would send the Messiah to come to his people, and that Messiah would show up in the temple in Jerusalem. So to the Israelite people, the temple was very important. And the temple had been destroyed 70 years before this, or so they'd been in exile for 70 years.

And so God starts Working with his people that are in captivity. Some of them are key people. You've heard of Daniel, Daniel in the lion's den. You know, his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that were in the fiery furnace. These were men who served the foreign kings faithfully, and yet they refused to bow down to them or to worship their gods.

And they were punished for it. And yet Yahweh, their God, the God of heaven, the God that we worship, is the one that saved them from these evil kings. And so they took their religious stand, even though they had never done anything to harm the king. They drew the line at when the king told them to turn on their God. For us, that's the line, too.

We follow the laws of our country. We work with the voting things and the politicians that are there, whether you voted for them or not. These are our people. And so we can write to them when we don't like it. Even, like, if you want to be like Elaine and write to you might have voted for somebody, but you say, hey, I don't like this thing you did, or said.

Like, how many letters are you at now? Nine. Okay, I said, elaine, eventually you're probably going to get invited to the White House. They're like, you've got a lot to say. Why don't you tell us what to do?

You know, it's going to be great. And so it's like, you know, you, you might say, like, ah, I'm going to vote for this person. But, you know, I really don't like this or that. Like, I'm going to tell them what I think. And that's our job as Americans in a representative democracy that we have.

But these men served the foreign kings very well and faithfully until the laws commanded them not to worship their God. And that's when they said, no, that doesn't work for us. So what ends up going on is Nehemiah, he has a visitor, one of his brothers named Hanani. And the interesting thing about Hanani is what his name means. And it kind of means that God brings good news and yet he's the guy that's bringing bad news.

It's kind of ironic when the guy that's supposed to be the bearer of good news, all he has is bad news to bring. And so he brings this bad news to Nehemiah. Now, Nehemiah in the past has been back home to Jerusalem. Even though we believe he was born in captivity, he had made a pilgrimage, if you will, to Jerusalem. And he had been there with another guy named Mordecai.

For those of you who are paying attention and know the book of Esther, that was Mordecai. Mordecai was her uncle. Nehemiah and Mordecai and a few other people had gone for a visit to Jerusalem. You read that in the book of Ezra, which originally, Ezra and Nehemiah was one book, but they split it into two. And so they had been back to Jerusalem, and now they're.

Now at least Mordecai and Nehemiah are back in the citadel of Susa, serving the king. And Nehemiah, it says in the last verse of chapter one, he says that he was the cupbearer to the king. In fact, his prayer to God said, lord, grant me success today and show compassion to me in the presence of this man. I was cupbearer to the king. So he had an important job serving the king.

In fact, his job was to basically be the one that makes sure nobody had poisoned the king's drink, his wine. Probably the king asked for wine when he would be celebrating or, I don't know, trying to forget stuff. All the reasons people drink whenever the king wanted to drink. Nehemiah's job was to select the right wine for the occasion and then to try it first and make sure there wasn't poison in it so that nobody would kill the king. Which also means if somebody's trying to kill the king, you're the guy that gets it, you know, like, it's not the best job.

He was also a slave and probably a eunuch. So, you know, job satisfaction, you would think wouldn't be too high with Nehemiah. And yet he goes out and he's like, hey, you know what? I'm going to come every day. I'm going to be happy.

I'm going to serve in my role, and I'm going to be happy about it. So here's what ends up happening in this art of this story. You've got Nehemiah's friend Hanani, that comes over from Jerusalem, and he says, things aren't good, man. Like our people, our homeland, the place where the temple is supposed to be, the place where the Messiah will one day come. The temple is still, like, there was a rebuilding effort that had started, but it was.

They were running up against opposition, and the walls around the city were left open so that any invad army could come in that wish to do Israel harm. By the way, there's still people that wish to do Israel harm today. I know we see that in the news. But, I mean, it's more than that. Like, it's.

It's. It's a history that's never stopped where people just want to harm the Jewish people of God because they're God's chosen people, and that. That's all they want to do is harm them. And so they were worried that the gates to the city. If you don't have gates in an ancient city, then anybody can come in, and they can look innocent, but they can come in as spies or as people wishing to do them harm, stay overnight.

Once the city walls were closed, if there were gates. Once the gates were closed, you can wreak all kinds of havoc within there. If you're an invading army coming in and there's no city walls, you just walk in and take that city. And so this was a city that was constantly under attack. And so there's no way that they can have security without their walls being built and the gates being rehung.

And so then, not only that, but the people were in distress. They were in distress because they were a target for all the neighboring nations around them. And they were constantly getting bombarded, maybe not with military weapons, but with people that would come not only to attack them with weapons, perhaps, but with their words. Have you ever noticed the thing where do we say, you know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me? And we know that that's a lie, because words can actually, like, just kind of cut you down and take the wind out of your sails.

Can kind of say, I don't even know why I bother trying anymore. You know, you can. You. I could have 10 of you say, oh, Pastor, that was a great sermon. Thank you for that.

And then one person could say, man, that was dumb. You know, you said the guy's name wrong or something like that. And I'd be like, I failed. You know, like, it just. It can take just one small thing.

Words do hurt. And they were using their words against the people of God, trying to stop them from the good work that they were doing in rebuilding God's temple. So there was three people. The. The Book of Ezra, Nehemiah is two books in one, and there was three main characters in there.

For those of you that are note takers, there's a guy named zerubbabel that led 42,000 exiles out of captivity and into Jerusalem with the king's permission and with his. He actually said, anybody that wishes to go back to their home country can go, and their neighbors should be compelled to give them Articles of gold and silver and things like that. So he blesses them on their way out. This is a king that any Jew would have considered evil, godless, like they weren't looking to him for help. And yet God used that man to bring them blessing and to send them back home to their home country.

Now, Zerubbabel led that starting in 538 B.C. several of the people. That's where we see, you know, people like Nehemiah and what did I say his name was? Mordecai, had probably gone around that time and checked it out and then came back. So these guys went there and they started rebuilding the temple, which took about 20 years.

The temple wasn't as big as it originally had been. And some of them that had seen it, the older men had seen it when it was little, when they were little. I mean, they'd seen the original temple and they were weeping and crying because it wasn't. It didn't have the glory that it used to have. The young guys that had never seen the temple before were celebrating because now we have a temple again.

We have a place to worship God. It's where our identity is. It's where the Messiah will come, when the Messiah comes. So 20 years after that or so you've got this guy named Ezra. Now, Ezra, he was a scribe, they called it, which is a guy that was one of the lawyers, the teachers of the law, and he came to teach the people how to worship God the way God had told them to.

He came in 515 B.C. and it was his contention that lack of obedience to the Torah, the law of God, was why they had been exiled anyway. So if we want to stay here and have prosperity, we need to worship God according to His Word, folks. I believe we have some instruction in that today. There's things in the Word of God in the Old Testament and New.

It's one giant overarching story that's pointing us to Jesus Christ. And as we study it and as we're studying His Word, we understand that God has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ. He has offered us new life in him, that new birth, that salvation. And he says, as you walk in that salvation, I will give you my Holy Spirit. And my Holy Spirit will show you how to live and how to be obedient.

Jesus says, if you love me, you will obey My commandments. That means we should probably read what Jesus said and did, find out his commandments and live by them. Amen. That's something that I can't do on even if I Preached every Single Sunday. That's 52 weeks a year.

I can't knock it all out in 52 weeks. You have to pick up some of that work yourself. Okay? You can go to the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament, you can read it for yourself. If you've never done it, take a notepad and say, did Jesus say to do something?

I mean, he said to do a lot of things. Some of the things he said to do won't directly apply to you. You know, like when his friend Lazarus had died and he calls him back to life and he's been in the tomb four days and they've got him wrapped in grave clothes, you know, and he says, take the grave clothes off of him. Okay? I don't think that there's any direct application to your life.

I don't think you're around people constantly coming back to life, right? Anybody. So you're probably not going to be able to live that one out directly. So what does it mean then? Well, have you noticed that there's people that when they don't know Jesus and then they.

They come to follow Jesus and they give their life to him and they're serving him, but they still carry the baggage of the past. Those are the clothes from when they were a dead man walking. Now take those clothes off of them. Allow them to shed that old stuff and to say, I'm going to live by the power of Christ. He gives us a new robe.

In Revelation, it talks about the saints of God being given a white robe and given a new name. Take those grave clothes off. Let them live as the person Christ has called them to be. Amen. Ezra is teaching the law.

This law is leading them. By following it leads them to obedience in Christ, which leads them into the favor of God. And then 13 years after Ezra shows up in Jerusalem, Nehemiah shows up. Nehemiah had received his bad news around the year 502 BC. And if you notice in those verses that I read, just in those first four verses, in fact, what we see is that Nehemiah, the first thing he does is when he gets this bad news in verse four, he says, I sat down abruptly.

I was crying and mourning for several days. And then I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. That's convicting to me. I think I even put that on Facebook and some of the mess that I made on there this week, if you didn't see it, that's fine. I just posted some stuff.

And then some people tried to make it all political and went crazy with it. And I was like, I took the bait and I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have answered him on anything. Anyway, whatever it happened. But here's the point of it.

I read this Scripture and I look at it, and when I see I've received bad news about things before, whether it's about somebody's physical condition that is close to me or within this congregation, or whether it's something to do with the condition of our nation, the spiritual condition, the breaches in the wall, the fabric of our society. I mean, that's what this series is called, right into the breach. A breach is a brokenness, a broken place. And we see so many broken places in our world and we're called as the servants of God, to go into those broken places and to proclaim the healing power of Christ in those areas, the redemption that Christ offers. But my first response isn't like Nehemiah's.

I'll be honest. I'm convicted on this. I'm convicted that I don't respond the way Nehemiah did. Nehemiah sat down and wept and cried and mourned over the condition of the city that he'd only visited before. He wept over it because he knew that that city represented something for his people.

So he mourned over that. Then he continued in prayer and in fasting. Can I be honest? The concept of fasting scares me. Like, I hate it.

It's not that I'm just some, like, oh, I hate missing a meal. I mean, I feel so weak and powerless and shaky. I don't know. Maybe that's, like, early on. Is there such a thing as early onset?

You know, diabetes? You know, I don't know. Maybe that's what that is. But whatever it is, it's like, I just hate it. I remember one time I tried fasting just lunch for, like a month, actually.

It was for Lent. It was 40 days. And that was exactly the wrong year to do that because I had started. I was working at a job, but I started a new position in that company. And what that job was was we were doing fertilizing on lawns and stuff.

But the machine that we rode on, the powered machine, was broken. So we had one of those push spreaders. And of course, you don't want to keep refilling it a bunch of times. So we would just dump 80 pounds of fertilizer in there and go, I'll tell you, you burn some calories doing that. And I started that about the same time that Lent happened that I started this 40 day, like lunch only fast.

And I'm telling you that that was. That was the hardest thing I've done. I mean, physically, like, the mental determination I had to say, no, I'm going to do this. A couple times the guy I worked with, because I didn't share with him what I was doing and I could have, I just chose not to. He says, man, you need to eat lunch.

I feel bad, you know, because he would pack his lunch and eat it every day. And one day he didn't have it. And we went to McDonald's and I said, I'll just sit in the truck, it's fine. And he bought me a burger. And I'm like.

Because he felt bad for me. So I just went ahead and ate it. I said, okay. It's better to, you know, not offend him than to just be so, like, legalistic about this thing. Boy, was that cheeseburger good.

And I also, by the way, I'll confess so many times at like 3:30 or 4:00 on the way home, I would stop and get a snack at a gas station. I'm like, it's not lunch anymore. Like, I'm like, Jesus wasn't legalistic about all this stuff. He got mad at the people that were. So he would be okay with this, right?

Nehemiah, I don't know how many days he was fasting and praying. One guy that I listened to said that it was for weeks or months. I don't know about that. But what I do know is he spent all this time doing this and he spent time in prayer. What he did by spending time in prayer was he was focusing on a few things.

One of the things that he focused on was he started with praise. He started by praising God. If you notice what he does here, he says, you know, when he opens up his mouth and he prays to God is to praise him. Because you see, God's not the one with the problem. Like.

Like, God's not the one that. That's deficient here. God's the one that's strong enough to do something about it. And so Nehemiah acknowledges that in our prayer. If we can acknowledge God, I'm powerless here.

My strength isn't strong enough. That's part of what fasting did for me. Just that lunch fast was like saying, okay, I am literally weak right now. I mean, I was in my 20s and I had never experienced like a blood sugar drop or anything like that. But I was just like, what is this?

Why Am I doing this? It's just one meal. And I recognized my frailty, my weakness in that moment. And through. Through fasting, through that voluntary fasting.

In those times, it caused me to pray a whole lot more because I focused on the one who did have strength. I said, lord, get me through just this day. You know, Jesus taught us. When his disciples said, can you teach us how to pray? He says, sure.

It's real simple. Our Father who's in heaven, your name is holy, hallowed be thy name. May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And today, I'm just asking for today. I got.

I need food. Can you just take care of my food today? And by the way, I don't think he meant just food and water. I think our daily bread kind of wraps around those basic human needs. Like, you know, I mean, everybody kind of prefers to live indoors, I think.

Amen. You know, like, have a roof even. At least. You're like, yeah, absolutely. Although we did spend.

I put a tent up in the backyard the other night because my daughter and I were laying down, looking at ours on a blanket. And then she's like, hey, you have a tent in the closet, right? I'm like, yeah, fine. So now we're putting a tent up in the backyard. And, like, I'm like, great.

This is going to be rough because she moves a lot, you know, in her sleep, and, like, oh, great. You know, and. But we slept great in the tent. And it's been up for, like, two weeks now because it's just still there. And so we spent the night.

The other night in it and actually talked Amy into staying the night in the tent. And so at 12:30, she went in the house, like, there, it's tomorrow now. I did it, you know, and that's the most time Amy spent in a tent, and that was on an air mattress. Like, it wasn't even real tent camping, you know, like, it was easy camping. But anyway, we we've got that tent there, you know, and.

But, you know, that's fun when it's just, like, camping for the fun of it. But to be honest, everybody likes to sleep indoors, like, more than just a tent. Like an actual structure, a roof, maybe some electricity, air conditioning would be great, that kind of stuff. And, you know, we kind of like to wear maybe not the same garment of clothing every single day. Like, new, clean ones are nice.

It doesn't have to be flashy. Like, I bought used shoes for seven bucks at the thrift shop. They were Hardly used, and they looked great. And I'm like, seven bucks is fantastic. Thank you, Lord, for providing those.

I'm so happy about that. But, you know, like, we have those basic daily needs. And I think when Jesus said to pray for those things, he's saying, you know, pray for your daily food, your daily needs, that you have clothing, shelter, that kind of stuff. But really, through all of this stuff, through all of it, what we're doing is we're starting with praise. We start by praising God because he's the one that can provide those things, and we are the one with the need.

Then on top of that, Nehemiah continued, and he said, it says he made supplication. Supplication is one of those weird old Bible words. And simply what it's doing is just asking God. It's the language you would use when you would go before a king and ask the king to grant you a specific favorite. And the thing that he asks of God is simply, would you hear me?

Would you listen to me? You know, it breaks my heart that there's people that think God doesn't have time for them, that. That. That your need is too small for God. Can I tell you that whether.

Whether you need help paying a water bill or you have cancer or your house is about to be foreclosed on, all those things seem like a different range of things to us. But to God, I bet they're probably all pretty tiny. And yet he cares about them so much because he loves each and every one of you. And so we can go before God with those things and we can say, lord, I have these needs. But, Lord, I'm asking right now that you would just hear them from me.

You see, when you go before a king, you can stand in front of that king and be like, I hope this king will listen. I hope this king will hear me. I sent nine letters. I hope that they caught at least one of them. You know, we see that in the story of Esther, where she goes to the king, she's married to the king, and yet she's not even able to just approach him unless he has summoned her.

And so she has to approach him in order to save the Israelites because somebody that was an evil man had gotten the king to allow him to just murder anybody that he wanted to because they turned out to be Jewish, and they didn't like Jewish people, and he didn't know that the queen was a Jew, and the king didn't even know that. You'd think that would have been part of the, like, application or whatever. But no, it wasn't. And so he just liked her and so he married her. That's what a king can do, I guess.

And so she went to the king and she had to have the king extend this royal scepter, and then you would come up and you would touch it. And that meant that the king had granted you a hearing that you. Otherwise, if he didn't, that's it. Like they could have you killed, you know? And that's just.

That's how kingdoms worked. Anyway, she went before the king and he was able to hear her. He or she was able to be heard by him. And you know what she said right there? Will you come to a party tonight?

A banquet, in other words, she didn't even make her request yet. She just wanted to be around the king for a little while. She also liquored him up a little bit so that he would be a little more pliable, you know. And then she also said, he's like, what's your request? And she's like, ah, not yet with the request.

I'm not ready yet. Can we just spend some more time together? He says, sure. So she had a banquet the following night. And he says, what's your request?

Now she's ready to make her request. She's made her supplication. That's when she comes up to the king and says, will you hear me? Will you spend time with me? He says, sure.

Second day. Will you spend time with me? Yes, finally, what do you want? And so she presented her request. She's like, all I'm asking for is my life and the life of the people that I'm related to.

He's like, yeah, that's. That's fine. I don't want you to die. You know who would do that? She's like, well, that guy right there.

You know, the other guy that she invited to the banquet, named Haman. It's a great story. If you've never read Esther, I'm telling you, you'll love it. But anyway, you start with praise, you continue with supplication. Then finally, you know what he did next?

He didn't present his request. He confessed his sin. We don't like that part either, do we? I mean, it's rough. I had to do that this week.

Like I had. I had to look at myself. I had to look at some things in my life and some attitudes I had, and I had to look at it. And I said, I got some people I have to apologize to. Some of them I Don't even know their names.

So I just sent an email and said, could you tell those other people? You know? And it was just. It's one of those things where it's like, you know, I had to look at what was going on in my heart, realize where I had allowed my heart to carry me beyond any intentions I ever had. Like, I never wanted to do that or say that or be that rude to some people.

And it wasn't, like, horrible in the scheme of things, but at the same time, it's not who I am and who I want to be. And so I had to do that and I had to acknowledge where the sin had crept into my heart and was beginning to take over. And I said, lord, that sin needs to get out of my life and be replaced with the love and grace and peace and patience of Jesus Christ. And so I had to do that. Nehemiah confesses his sin and his family's sin.

And he acknowledged that God is the one. That's just, the justness of God. And then he reminds God of his own words. He says, God, you said if we did these things that this is what you would do. But then you said that if we return to you that you would help us.

So, Lord, I'm asking you to listen to our prayer for your help. Nehemiah acknowledged the breach that their sin had caused. He acknowledged the brokenness in his people and in their physical walls of their city. And he says, I'm willing to charge into that breach. I'm willing to go before the king.

I'm his cupbearer. It's not necessarily like I have standing before him where I can just ask him for stuff, but nevertheless, I will ask the king for some help. Now, he didn't have a full plan on this. We're going to get to see that next week. It's going to be fun.

I really love chapter two and all the chapters of Nehemiah pretty much. But we look at the holes in our land, the fabric that's ripped up in our country, and there's much of it, and I'm not going to try to list it all out, but we look at what's going on in our land and we look at what's going on there, and we need to assess that. I don't mean assess it from your left or right political lens or wherever you might land in that spectrum of things. I mean, we need to look at it and say, how did God intend for people to live? And how is that messed up?

Where are people living in ways that God has called us not to live or not to act that way. And where do we start? From there we need to pray and confess our own sins, ask that God would hear us, and we know that he will. And then we present our request to him. So we look at where are our breaches?

As I wrap up on that one, I'm going to just say today after our welcome lunch, our board is meeting and we're going to discuss a few things. Some breaches that we might have just within this church. Three big ones that we'll look at is facilities we have. There's supposed to be a guy looking at the air conditioning on this building this week. If it's a little warm, that's why.

And then also the roof on the gym still left over from hurricane damage and trying to raise funds for that. And so we're going to be looking at those physical breaches that we have here in the ministry of this church. We're going to be looking at future ministry possibilities and a potential kind of a smallish grant that we might be able to apply for and receive and how we would be able to put that to ministry to minister to those in and outside of this local church. And then the third breach that we're going to be looking into is trying to work with the daycare center that we have that's here. And we need to work more to see those kids educated with Christian curriculum and some things that we have to discuss about that and to reach more of those families.

And so we're going to be looking at those breaches as well. But this all starts with prayer. It starts with a heart that's broken over the breaches that we see around us. Some of those might be in your home, some of them might be in your neighborhood. Some of them might be your extended family or a relationship that's fallen apart that you're trying to work on to bring back together.

It might be a physical thing. There's any number of breaches that we see. And there's certainly just like if you have a TV that has. Nobody has a channel, like anybody still have a knob, but you have the remote, you turn on the tv, you know, you hit the remote and like there's somebody talking about news on there somewhere. But most of it's just opinion.

There's a lot of breaches out there going on in our country. Forget the world. There's so much going on there. I got enough to focus on just in our local city. And that's where we're working here with this church.

And so what we're looking at is we're looking at those breaches and we're identifying them in our own life and in our community's life around us and saying, how is it that we can work to make a difference here? Starts with prayer and fasting and supplication. Will you join me in that? I don't have a specific. Like, here's how we're doing it.

I believe that God will lead you for how to approach him. I've given you a few things that Nehemiah did. I'm just asking that you'll read the scripture, that you'll read the story of Nehemiah or Ezra and Nehemiah, if you would like. And then you'll see where is it that our story is similar yet different for the modern time that we live in. And say, God, I'm willing to come to you and to say.

To submit myself to you, saying, lord, will you work in and through me? Amen. I'm gonna have a closing prayer over us. And then for those of you who wish to join for the welcome lunch, it's free, it's food, and it's available, so what more can you ask? Let's pray.

God, we just thank you this morning for your presence among us. Holy Spirit, we thank you for being here. Christ, we thank you for dying for us, that you have brought salvation that's available to all who will receive you. Lord, we pray that there is anybody today that doesn't know you as their Lord and Savior, that today would be the day of salvation, that they would look to you to be saved. Lord, we pray as we reach out to bless our neighbors, to bless every home around us, God, that your presence would accompany us as we go to those around us, and that you would empower us to open up our arms with love towards our neighbors, to be able to meet them in their place of need, wherever the breaches are in their world.

And, Lord, that you would help us to share the love of Christ with all we come into contact with. In Jesus name we ask. Amen. Now, if you'll stand and receive a benediction. You know you don't leave here today on your own.

So here you go. May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.