One of the things that we've been doing, or the thing we've been doing on our sermons the last few weeks is going through one chapter at a time in the book of Nehemiah and doing selected portions of each chapter. And it's been quite interesting to see what was happening. So in a briefest of nutshells, and I said that a couple weeks ago, and it was 17 minutes, I really mean it. I'm looking at the clock, I'm giving myself a time limit. In the briefest of nutshells, what was happening was a long time before Nehemiah shows up.

The the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. The temple was torn down, and the people were removed from there and brought into a foreign land called Babylon that was called exile. They were taken into exile as a result of them disobeying God over and over and over again for a long, long time. They knew what they were supposed to do. They didn't do it.

God sent them prophets that said, if you don't get in shape, I'm going to take you out of here because this land was promised to your ancestors, Abraham on down, but it was on a condition that you would obey my laws. And if you don't obey my laws, you can't stay here. And so the period of exile lasted 70 years, partially to give the land its Sabbath rest, as he had talked about, but also so that they would kind of learn a lesson and that when they returned after 70 years, that they would live according to God's law. So during that time, they sent a guy. His commission was to rebuild the temple.

They saw the temple get rebuilt, and then they kind of did nothing about it for the longest of times. And then a few decades later, another guy named Ezra shows up. He gets sent back there by the king who had it had been the Babylonian empire. Then they get overtaken by the Persian empire. And so the Persian king allows Ezra to go back there, and he leads a bit of a religious reform, but it doesn't fully take root yet until another guy a few years after that named Nehemiah shows up.

Nehemiah comes there. He had been the king's cup bearer, but then he heard about everything that was going on in Jerusalem, and he said, God, this is weighing on my heart. He spends four months praying and fasting. The king recognizes that there's something wrong with him. He says, your heart seems sad, your body looks well, but you have a sadness of the heart.

And so he says, well, oh, my king, may you live forever. The city of my ancestors the gates and the temple and the walls are still in ruins. The city hasn't been rebuilt. Of course, I got this going on. This is the place of my ancestors.

So the king says, what do you want to do? He says, well, I'd like to go back and rebuild it. The king says, what do you need? He's like. He gives him building permits, he gives him materials.

He gives him letters of protection and guards and all this stuff. And then he allows him to be the governor. And he says, how long are you going to be gone? Well, he ends up being gone 12 years. Nehemiah comes back to Jerusalem for 12 years.

He, along with Ezra, lead the people in a spiritual revival. And the people committed that they would follow the word of God and the laws of God. They signed their names to it. The heads of the family said, as for me and my household and my children and on down, this is what we're going to do. Some of you, many of you, have made a commitment to Christ.

He's your Savior. And you said, you know, I'm going to follow Christ with my life. And then at some point later, you maybe had, like, a deepening of that commitment. Maybe we might call it like something like being entirely sanctified or set apart, where you recognize that within you there's a sin problem that still persists in your heart. And you say, God, I want you to take this sin out of my life.

Take this desire to sin out of my life, and I'm going to live for you. No matter what you tell me to do, I'm going to live for you. If you call out a sin in my life and you say, I don't like that in you, by the way, God loves you. I said this last week, he loves you. Just.

He loves you for who you are and how you are, but he doesn't love everything that you're doing. See, there's things in your life that God says, I didn't create you to be this way. He loves you. He accepts you as a person. He created you.

But there's things that are in your life that he didn't create for you to live that way. And so he will call you away from those things. He'll call those things out of your life. At that point, we repent of our sins. And we say, lord, I follow you.

I'm going to do what you call me to do. Oddly enough, the times that the Holy Spirit does that, sometimes it might be something that somebody else saw in your life a long time ago and said, I really Wish they'd quit doing that. Especially if you're married to him. You know, you're like, you're so much better than the Holy Spirit sometimes at pinpointing those areas in your spouse's life. You know, maybe it's a kid and a parent doing that, but you're like, please stop.

You know, but it's amazing what happens when the Spirit of God says, okay, now we're going to work on this area of your life. And when the Spirit of God says that, it's your job to respond to that, to, to agree with God, to repent of sin, and to walk in holiness. If you don't do that, you get calluses on your heart. It thickens up. This area where, where you, you say, nope, I'm not listening to you on this one.

God, I'm going to keep doing it my way and I'm going to keep doing it my way so much that you end up not hearing the voice of God anymore in that area. It's a dangerous way to live. So the people of Israel had been doing that. And so when Nehemiah shows up and he's working with Ezra, the, the teacher of the law, they, they have a ceremony where they have like a six hour long sermon. You're welcome.

That I don't do that. Have this like super long sermon where they spend the day reading the Word of God. And Ezra is doing that and they're explaining what it means. It's essentially what we do here, what pastors do. We read the Word of God and explain to you what it's going on, what it's about and, and how it applies to our lives today.

And so they did that and the people signed this commitment that they would obey the word of God. Some very specific things they said that they would do. And then what we find out is after being there for 12 years, Nehemiah has gone back to King Artaxerxes in the citadel of Susa. And so as he's there, he's thinking, okay, I set it up really well. The laws are in place and the people said they would obey them.

When we, we rebuilt the walls, the gates, they started building homes in the city, we, we started bringing justice to the poor where they had taken economic advantage of them and charged them interest that was not allowed to be charged. By the way, do you know the interest rate that they were really mad about that they were charging the poor? Anybody want to guess what a, what a number would be that they'd be mad about? 2%? Yeah, I think it was actually like 1%, 1 or 2% interest.

You nailed it. Like, have you bought a car and gotten a loan from the bank? Is like probably at least 4, maybe 8%. If your credit number is lower, the interest rate is higher. That's how that works.

The lower your credit score, the higher the interest you're paying. Sometimes it's 9 to 12%. It's like, if it's that high, like, you probably should just save up cash and do that. You know, it's. You're.

You're spending so much money just to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. It's ridiculous what happens. Forget a credit card. Or if. If you're at a store and you're like, hey, do you want our card?

It's like, it's 30 interest most of the time. Just don't do it, you know, just. No, thank you. I. No, I'd prefer not to.

Well, they were mad that they were charging the poor, like, 1% interest. I think some of our corporations and government today could learn a little bit of just how evil interest rates are that we're charging people anyway. They get all that stuff set straight, and then they focus on the worship systems in the temple. They focus on getting the Levites in place. They were the ones that kind of ran the everyday ministry.

They weren't the priests, they weren't taking. They weren't doing the sacrifices, but they're making sure that the temple is operating as it should be. And then they actually had singers, singers that had been living in, like, artisan villages. I'd never noticed this until I did this deep study in Nehemiah. They had these, like, singer artisan type villages where all the creative people that were writing the.

Writing new songs, they were saying, you know what we could do when we go to the temple to worship God is we could present this new song. We could worship God in this new way through the experiences that we have with him. And so they were doing these things, and Nehemiah set it up where they had a place that was provided for them. When they would come on their rotation to Jerusalem, to the temple, they would have their turn to lead the people in worship. And they were provided for.

They were provided in food and in a place to stay and in all these things that was important to them. Worship is an important thing. It's not just in our music, but there's so many forms that worship takes, and they're all important. A believer who doesn't lead a life of worship truly hasn't understood who God is because to understand God is to worship him. And, folks, we're all going to worship something in our lives.

We're going to worship something with our time. We're going to. We're going to worship something with the things that we do and the talents that we have, and we're going to worship something with our finances, among other things. We're going to worship something with our words. The question is, are you worshiping the lifeless things of this world, or are you worshiping the God who has given life to you?

So Nehemiah sets all this up, and then he's as promised, he returns to the king. He goes back to the citadel of Susa to serve the king again. Now, I imagine on one hand, that's a lot easier. I mean, he doesn't have the burden of leading the people anymore. He's no longer the governor.

His job is just serving the king some wine, tasting it first to make sure nobody's poisoning it. Said, yeah, King, no foaming at the mouth. I think we're good. You know, here's your wine, sir. A little bit of a scary job, but pretty easy, right?

Fairly simple. And so he has this gig and he goes back to serve the king. And you would think, okay, just coast out my days there, I did good stuff for the name of God. For the people of God, I did good. In fact, like three times in Nehemiah 13, he says, Lord, remember me for what I have done.

We're going to see some fun stuff that he got to do. I want to read to you just a few verses, verses 4 through 11 in Nehemiah, chapter 13.

Prior to this time, Eliashib the priest, a relative of Tobiah. Now, for those of you, by the way, timeout. For those of you who, like, didn't catch the earliest parts of this book, Tobiah is not a good guy. He's not a friend. He's not a believer in God.

In fact, he was the opposition to everything that Nehemiah was doing. He's somebody that really, truly hates God. This guy Tobiah is a relative of Eliashib the priest, and listen to what happens. He had been appointed over the storerooms of the temple of our God. So while Nehemiah is gone back to serve King Artaxerxes, the priest puts the enemy of the people of God in charge over the storerooms of the temple.

He made for himself a large storeroom where previously they had been keeping the grain offerings, the incense, the holy vessels, along with the tithes of the grain and the New wine and the olive oil that was commanded to go to the Levites, the singers and the gatekeepers, and the offering for the priests. During all this time, I, Nehemiah, was not in Jerusalem. For in the 32nd year of King Artaxerxes of Babylon, I had gone back to the king after some time had passed. I had requested a leave of the king and I returned to Jerusalem. Then I discovered the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah by supplying him with a storeroom in the courts of the Temple of God.

I was very upset, and I threw all of Tobias household possessions out of the storeroom. That had to have been awfully fun, wasn't it? I mean, he was, by the way, the stage lighting. My daughter Emma, she's eight, she usually turns on all the lights, and sometimes she'll ask, what's the. You know, what's.

What's the sermon about today? I said, oh, it's a fighting day. So she said, I think red. So everything's lit up in red. That was her call.

And she was right. That's why it's red up here. Today is a fighting day. He threw out. He evicted this guy Tobiah, with malice.

I mean, he. This was not like a gentle. Like, you know, how Jesus turned over the temple, the tables of the money changers and the animals, and he whipped the animals out of there and all that. This is a little bit of a foreshadowing of that. Nehemiah isn't Jesus, but he has a zeal for the house of God, and he finds the unholy things that are in there and throws them out.

You have to think that the people in Jesus day, they know their scriptures a whole lot better than you and I do. By the way, when Jesus is turning over the temple, the money changers in the temple, I bet they thought of Nehemiah throwing Tobias out of there. They had to have had that image in their mind. And when the disciples remembered that zeal for God's house should consume us, they think of Nehemiah at that moment, Nehemiah was zealous for the house of God. Amen.

So he throws Tobiah out all of his household goods. Then I gave instructions that the storerooms should be purified. Oh, yeah. In other words, we really need to clean this place up. Who knows what this guy did in here, but he worships evil and he worships false gods.

He doesn't worship the one true God. So we need to cleanse and purify this place. And then I brought back the equipment of the Temple of God along with the grain offering and incense. I also discovered that the grain offering for the Levites had not been provided and that as a result, the Levites and the singers who performed this work had all gone off to their fields. So I registered a complaint with the leaders, asking, why has the Temple of God been neglected?

Then I gathered them and reassigned to them their positions. The interesting thing that's going on during this time that I never put together until just a couple weeks ago was the last book written in our Old Testament, or the last one that's shown there is the Book of Malachi. It's four chapters long, and he deals with a few different things in his writing. Malachi was a prophet, and he deals with several issues to do with the way the people were living and the corruption of the priests that were leading the people. What I had never put together was that this happened during his ministry or his.

His time as a prophet happened during the interim period of. Of Nehemiah's departure. At least that's what a lot of biblical scholars believe. And it makes the most sense to me. The time when Malachi was ministering happens in those first few verses of chapter 13.

During this interim period. And in the first few verses, the ones we didn't read, they had actually opened the book of the Law and found some things they were doing wrong. And so they. They started a little bit of a revival there, but it never fully took root until Nehemiah came back. So Malachi was.

Was ministering during the time that Nehemiah had gone back to King Artaxerxes, between when he had left and when he had come back the second trip. And so really what we're looking at, the verses we read and the rest of chapter 13 is actually chronologically the last things that happen in your Old Testament. There you go. Isn't that neat? If nothing else, you learn that maybe, like I'm not saying maybe you heard it, maybe that's true, it is a possibility that it's not.

But we believe that that's what's going on. And so Malachi is talking about the corruption, especially that the priests have. And as I mentioned in the verses we read Tobiah, this guy who's an Ammonite, they're the enemies of the people of God. And he not only was allowed a place in the city, he was actually brought into the temple, which means there's several layers of failure that have happened. There were gatekeepers.

We talked about them a couple weeks ago. And a Gatekeeper seems like a menial task, and yet it's very important because they're the ones that are making sure that the proper people are coming into the temple. They're the first to come and the last to go. And they're ensuring that the temple is properly held in high esteem. And yet they seem to have failed.

The Levites and singers had left. And another verse that we didn't read says they had gone back to their fields. Or maybe I did read it. I can't remember. They went back to their fields.

Why? Because there was no provision for them in the house of the Lord where they were supposed to serve. The people had stopped giving of their tithes and their offerings and their first fruits. The people had stopped giving because the priesthood was corrupted all the way from the top, and it trickled all the way down through. That's why the title of today's message is Trickle Down Church.

It does trickle down. As the leaders go, so goes the congregation. And that's quite sad in so many places because we see a lot of times where pastors have the. These moral failures, and you look around and you wonder, where did that come from? I don't know how that happens.

I look at that as a pastor and I think, well, that won't happen to me. I won't be one of those people. What does scripture say? Watch out. Just when you're most prideful, that comes before you're about to fall.

So I tried to maintain a humility. I tried to maintain not just an air of humility, but I tried to. To take. Take myself a little. I don't know, I heard somebody say recently, I don't take myself too seriously.

What does that even mean? I. I take myself quite seriously, but I tried to have a perspective on myself that I'm not quite as important as I'm tempted to believe I am. And yet. And yet the position that I hold, I do hold that very seriously because I know that I am to be judged in eternity for how I've led the Lord's church.

I'm not judged on results. I'm actually judged on, have I led with integrity and honesty? And so I take that quite seriously. I take that sometimes way too seriously. Like, it worries me.

Sometimes I pray like, lord, am I. Am I leading properly? Am I doing the things that you want me to do? Have I. Have I led people astray?

Have I. Have I not led faithfully in these areas? I take that seriously. And apparently the priests in Nehemiah's absence weren't taking it seriously. And we've seen pastors in our era that don't take that seriously.

They get a little famous online, they get quoted in different articles and writings, they get invited to speak at different conferences and all these things are going on and they think, ah, I've made it, look at me. And so they begin living out this almost rock star lifestyle. They begin living as if somehow they are the thing that's important. They were what it mattered, the part of it that mattered. When it turns out it was the house of God that mattered and the worship of God is what mattered.

And so when the priests had gotten corrupt, then everything trickled down from there. They began inviting the wrong people into leadership. Many times a pastor will do that. Many times a leader of a church will do that. When they begin to get corrupted in their heart, they begin to, to push out the faithful people and to invite in people who will just say yes to everything that they want to do that'll stroke their egos, maybe stroke the checks to pay for their lifestyle and all these things.

And so they'll do all of this. And so you begin to the, the, the leader of the church and then the leaders under them begin to reflect their ideology. And then after that you get the faithful people that say why, why should I be here? The Levites and the singers looked at the priesthood and, and when they moved Tobiah into, to the temple where they were supposed to store the things that were for the, the leaders of God's people, when Tobias in there living lavishly off of this, then the Levites and the singers said well, I guess I just have to go back to my field and work. Even though the scriptures had provided from the days of Moses on forward, had provided for their livelihood and their well being, they found there was nothing left for them.

So they were forced to go home. Now it's interesting. I've heard a few preachers over the years that say, well I don't take a salary. And they were really proud about it. Ah, even the Apostle Paul in the scripture says I made sure that I wasn't a burden to you.

I earned my own way. There's something noble about that. And yet at the same time the scriptures tell us, hey, the person who declares the gospel makes their living from the gospel and, and until, and Jesus, they say the worker is worth their wages and all these things. And it's like, okay, God had provided through his scriptures that the, the, the priests or the people leading the church would be provided for from that ministry. Why is that?

It's because we're lazy, right? Well, no. In fact, I remember a time when my old mentor, he was in the hallway and he's vacuuming the carpet in the church. And somebody said to him, pastor, give me that. I'm sorry, you shouldn't have ever had to do that.

He's like, I'm not above vacuuming. No, we're not paying you to clean this building. We're paying you so that you can study the Word, so that you can think through it, that you can pray through it, and so that you have time devoted to that, to bring us that message. And so I know the times where I've had the most, like, you know, I'm like semi bi, vocational. I work here, but I also pick up other work on the side to supplement the income.

And I know the times where I work the hardest during that week. I feel the driest on Sunday because I haven't devoted myself the same amount of time to the study of the Word of God that I should have. And I've got that last minute, like, oh, God, you got to speak through me today. I don't know what I've got. And the beautiful thing is he's faithful in those things.

Sometimes the best sermons that, like, the sermons that get the most, like, pastor that really spoke to me today, I'm like, good. I was so worried because I felt like I had nothing to give you. And so there's. There's something about being provided for. Not because it's like, oh, I don't want to work.

No, there's a lot of work. And I'm learning this from, from. From Nehemiah's study with these Levites and the singers. They didn't just show up to sing, they didn't just show up to serve. They were spending their time just.

Just basking in the presence of God. So then when it came time to lead the people, they had been worshiping God all week, and it just radiated off of them. And it's. It just. It starts inviting others into that.

So this had stopped. It had ceased. When that happens, it trickles down to the rest of the people. And what we see through the other verses In Nehemiah, chapter 13, was a few critical issues. One thing is that they had begun breaking the Sabbath again.

Not just foreigners that lived nearby them were coming in on the Sabbath to sell their goods and their products to them, but the people of God were doing all their work on the Sabbath day, to the contrary command of the word of the Lord. And they had signed that Commitment. Remember before? And now they're breaking it already, just within a few years. And so they're participating in seven day a week work.

Now, I'll tell you, God has told us, I didn't create you to live that way. I created you for a certain rhythm. Work, work, work, work, work, work, rest. Work, work, work, work, work, work, rest. And when we fail to do that, we wonder, why do we have sickness, why do we have anxiety, why do we seem to never get anything done?

And yet we're always constantly busy. It's because we put so much faith in our own efforts and we forgot that we were to stop and rely on God. And so they were breaking the Sabbath. And so Nehemiah sets up a thing where he's like, lock the gates. Now, their day started at sundown the night before.

So, like the Sabbath of Saturday. So Friday night, lock the gates when the sun goes down. Don't open them again until sundown Saturday evening. And when the Sabbath is over. And so people were camping outside the gates.

And he's like, hey, go away. And they're like, nah, we're waiting until the gates open. He's like, if you guys keep doing this, I'm gonna come out there and beat you. Like, he says, I use force against you. So he's like, you know, and I was reading this to Emma a couple weeks ago, and she's like, what does he mean by use force?

I'm like, I don't know, get the guards or the army or something. Maybe he's just gonna go out there with his own fists. I'm not sure what he's gonna do. But you don't want to find out. It's just kind of one of those things, like if you keep pushing, you'll find out.

So, so, so he. He deals with the Sabbath thing. He evicted Tobiah. He returns the Levites and the singers to their roles. And then the.

The other thing that's going on is that there were a lot of people who had. They'd. They'd signed on that they weren't going to do this practice. And yet they fell into it again. They started marrying non believers.

So people from the neighboring nations and lands around them that didn't believe in God. They started marrying into their families and bringing them to live with them and having kids with them. Now, the big problem there was they didn't teach their kids Hebrew. Their kids learned the language of their parent that came from a foreign land. And the interesting thing here is that the Hebrew scriptures were written in Hebrew.

I mean, the Jewish scriptures were written in Hebrew. And so if your kids can't speak that language, they can't know the word of God. And so it started from the priests. It's worked its way down through the Levites and the singers, through. Through the leadership, the gatekeepers, all this stuff.

And now the common folks are just saying, you know what? Nothing really matters. I mean, it's just almost back to a full state of anarchy at this point. And so Nehemiah starts saying, are you guys serious? Look at what Solomon did.

First of all, he had way too many wives. Like, one I'm still figuring out. Like, being married to one, you know, like, we're still learning stuff about each other. And, like, you know, if I do this stuff, life goes easier. If I do this stuff, life goes harder.

Like, oh, okay, he has that times a thousand. All right, well, times 700, 300. We're just. Ah. Anyway, yeah, so.

So he's got all these women. That seems like enough said, you know, we don't have to talk about it anymore. That's just insane. But. But then what, what, what the problem with Solomon was, was all these women, most of them were coming from foreign lands, and they show up and it's like.

Like this isn't a prohibition against, oh, can two different races marry? No, that's not what scripture is talking about is, can two different faiths marry? Can you bring the faith of a person who worships God and the faith of somebody who's opposed to God and bring them together? It doesn't work. I know people try to make it work.

I know they say, oh, well, this works great. Like, I know our vice president and his wife are two totally different religions. And what is. They have to decide things like which. Which religion are our kids going to be involved in?

How are we going to deal with these things? What about holidays? What about all these things? And supposedly they seem to have figured something out, but this is not what God has called us to do. And, and so, you know what, what, what God does here or what Nehemiah does here is he says, God told us not to do this.

It didn't work. Well, for Solomon, the kingdom actually splits after Solomon's death because of a few things. But part of it is that it's the idolatry that they had brought in. Years and years later, you've got an Israelite king named Ahab and his wife Jezebel, and she was an idolater. She was a.

She was into witchcraft and sorcery and all these things. And Jezebel had led the people to sin and to worship false gods. And the prophet Elijah has, like, a whole thing against her. You know, like, it's a. It's a cool story in your Bible.

I'll let you read that for yourself sometime, looking up that story. And so one of my favorite verses in the Bible, it has to do with what happens after he confronts these men about their. Their marriages that they had. Let's look at what it says, Bo. It was there.

Go back. It. It like takes a second to pop in there. There we go. He entered a complaint with them.

He cursed them, struck some of the men and pulled out their hair.

Now, remember, there's like three times in this chapter where Nehemiah says, remember me, God, for the good that I've done. He includes this in what he considers good.

Now, like, I don't know if this was some of Jesus inspiration when he did cleanse out the temple. You know, like, it doesn't ever say. And I've tried to look it up so many times. Like, I wanted it to say that Jesus also cracked a whip on some of the people that were doing these things. And it doesn't say that Jesus did that.

It says the whip was for the animals. But I'm just. I've always have maintained that on that kind of backstroke with the whip, he might have caught a few of the dudes that were there, you know, but, like, Nehemiah. Nehemiah is like, okay, guys, here's the deal. First of all, beep, beep, beep.

Like, curse words. You know, he cursed him. I don't know which curse words he used. You know, you can imagine that on your own, but he cursed some of them. And he starts punching guys.

Like, I don't know if it's in the face, if he's just sucker punching him. I don't know. But he's like. He's hitting people. Can you imagine if we went around church and started doing that?

Like, I know what you did, you know, and beep you because of this thing. And I'm going to start yanking out your hair. Like, he's scalping guys. You know, some of you guys are making that a little harder for him. I get it.

Like, I'm starting, you know. Anyway, the critical question here is, what happens to the people of God when the leaders of them and all of the servants of God start falling away, start being pushed out of leadership? What happens when leaders don't lead? What happens when the people of God don't pray? What happens when a Leader stops leading, does the congregation say, eh, I guess I can kind of relax a little bit.

If the leader is not pushing that hard, I don't have to push in my faith that hard. Well, if I don't see the leaders praying, then I guess I don't have to really pray. Why should I spend my time on that? Well, if. If, you know, if.

If I see. If I see them busy all the time, then I guess I can be busy all the time. I don't have to take a Sabbath rest. Well, if I don't see them giving, I don't have to give. Well, if.

If they didn't ask me to sing, I shouldn't sing. If nobody's really leading the singing, I guess. You know what? That's okay. We don't have to do that.

Oh, oh. If, if, if. If they're. If the preacher isn't preaching the word to the depth that I'd like, I guess I just won't grow any deeper on my own time.

If the church looks kind of like. I've known churches where they paid off their mortgage and people said, well, I don't have to give as much anymore, you fool. The church's need has nothing to do with the faithfulness to which God has called you to give. Let me dig into that a little deeper. You don't give because the church has a need.

Although there are times where we present a need and ask you to give towards that. But that should not be the basis or the base level for your giving. You give because of what God has called you to give. In fact, one of Malachi, the prophet I mentioned, one of Malachi's complaints against the people during this time was that they were robbing God. And they're like, how can I rob God?

He's like, well, you haven't returned the tithe to him. See, when we talk about tithing, it's not like giving to God, like, oh, I'm going to give you my money, Lord has nothing to do with that. See, you misplaced it because everything you own is actually God's. If you. If you placed it in his hands the right way, if you've understood it the right way.

Every blessing you have is a gift from God, and you're merely stewarding it or hanging on to it. And at the last day, we're supposed to be able to hold it up to him and say, lord, here's what I have done with what you entrusted to me. That's why Jesus told this parable of the people that had given the king had given them these, these minas, this amount of money. And he gave one mina to somebody and two to another and five to another. Some of them took it and doubled it.

One of them buried it in the ground to safekeep. And he's like, look, I kept it safe. He's like, are you kidding me? I expected you to have a return on this. I expected you to.

To. To. To bring more back than what I gave you. And so Jesus is telling us like, it's not really ours. You're just holding on to it, and you're supposed to utilize it for the purposes of the kingdom of God.

And God, what you. What he's put in your hands and say, lord, look what I did with what you entrusted to me. One of the things that he asked us to do is to return to him 10% of it. Just like I'm not supposed to work all seven days. I'm supposed to trust him on one of those days that he is going to provide for me and my household in the same way we return 10% to him and say, lord, even though it's all yours, I'm giving you back a tenth of this because I'm trusting that you can do more with 90% than I can do with 100%.

I didn't hear enough amens on that one. Okay, Anyway, and so the point is, what happens when we don't faithfully lead in that way? Oh, I never saw the pastor put a thing in the basket. Well, guess what? Mine comes out every month automatically, like through the text to give thing that we have.

And so that way I'm sure that I never skip a month on it. Like, we give additional offerings in. In that way too, from time to time. Because I. Even though you might not see me put it in the basket, I can promise you it's there.

And so what happens when we say, well, I don't see the leaders doing this, so I shouldn't be held to a higher standard. I don't know how much the pastor's praying, so I'm not going to say, hey, what are we doing? Do we have a prayer time? Is there a time where I can come to the altar and pray? Oh, hey, we don't see leaders doing this thing or that thing, folks.

We're each one responsible. I'm responsible to lead in a godly way. I'm going to bring you the word of God to the extent that I can understand and that the Spirit's given me the ability to speak it. But if all you're getting is what you hear on Sunday morning. You're going to be missing out.

God has so much more for you. He taught the Israelites that every day they should recite the same scripture morning and evening, and that the words of God would be on their tongue all day long and that they would teach them to their children. And their children needed to be able to recite the words of God. You see, that has to happen throughout the week in the home. And there needs to be place or there needs to be a time and a place in our lives where we're devoted to God to say, I'm going to grow closer to Christ every day.

It's on me to do that in my own life and it's on you to do that in your own lives. What happens when the people of God aren't living faithfully to everything God has called them to do? When that happens, it all begins crumbling and falling apart. So I wrap up today asking you, as I started this morning at the beginning of the service, we've got a signup sheet on that purple table and I'd ask you to fill out a time or two on there that you're going to spend time fasting and praying and saying, I'm going to be on my knees before. I'm not expecting you to spend six hours on your knees or six hour time slots, but I'm asking you to spend some time and say I'm going to be on my face before God, imploring him that he would move, that his spirit would fill us and that this congregation would have an impact on this city and this city on the state, that we would, that we would see a change happen and that Godliness would fill our land again.

Amen.