NOV 6 2022 | Rebuild: The Story of Nehemiah S1E7 | RESPONSE-ABILITY

Sea Change Church · NOV 6 2022 | Rebuild Ep 7 | RESPONSE-ABILITY
Nehemiah 6:1-9
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

I am carrying on a great project and cannot go down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you? Four times they sent me the same message, and each time I gave them the same answer. Then the fifth time, Sanballat sent his aid to me with the same message, and in his hand was an unsealed letter in which was written, It is reported among the nations, and Geshem says it is true, that you and the Jews are plotting to revolt, and therefore you are building the wall.

Moreover, according to these reports, you are about to become their king and have even appointed prophets to make this proclamation about you in Jerusalem. There is a king in Judah. Now this report will get back to the king. So come, let us meet together. I sent him this reply. Nothing like what you are saying is happening. You are just making it up out of your head.

They were all trying to frighten us, thinking their hands will get too weak for the work, and it will not be completed. But I prayed, now strengthen my hands. The word of the Lord. The word of the Lord. Where do we begin? The rubble or our sins? Oh, oh. Where do we begin? The rubble or our sins? Oh, let me begin. The rubble or our sins? Right on, great to have you here this morning as we dive back into the story of Nehemiah called Rebuild.

We're kind of at the end of our 52 days of rebuilding the walls in our life, the stronghold of our life, and trying to take dominion over territory outside of our life. Actually allow God to take dominion and let Him be the stronghold. But by looking at the walls of our life, the gates of our life, we've been doing that for six weeks. We're in week seven. Next week is the final week of Nehemiah.

And I've just loved being in this book. So if you have your Bibles, go to Nehemiah chapter 6. We're going to be in verses 1 through 7 today. And the thing that is, I think, the main key that we're going to talk about today that I think is very practical for all of us is the power of a response. I mean, we respond regularly. You respond all day. You respond to impulses.

You respond to questions. You respond to thoughts. You respond to emotions. You respond to Facebook posts. You respond to lights when you're driving. Your entire life oftentimes is a response. And hopefully we're responding and not reacting. What we're going to see in this passage is that Nehemiah had this incredible ability to respond. And you're going to see that even though he had to equip himself for war, possibly being attacked, they were working with one hand on a sword or one hand on their sword on their side and another hand on the trowel as they were building the wall.

Nehemiah never had to actually use his sword. Why? Because his responses were so wise. His responses were so powerful. They were so well measured that they did the job for him. And the point of that is this, is that if we can learn to have response ability. I thought about that word before. The ability to respond. That sometimes it will actually remove the battles that you might have to fight.

That your response sometimes will actually be the battle. And the response has the ability. We know that responses can start battles, right? You've seen somebody say something that they shouldn't say. Or you've seen a couple people get into it, you know. And I remember when I was living in PB, Garnett, on a Friday night. You can see a lot of response going on down there.

And boom, you know. This left side laughs more than this side. I wonder why. 25, 35. Good to see. Let's go. We're going to talk about power of response. And let me give you the context. As we set this up, and as you write response ability, if you would, just write it over the top, right there on the top of the notes. It actually says that on your notes, but you can circle it if you want.

Let's go through the context of what's happening here. We're getting to the end. It's almost finished. The gates had not been set in place. But in 52 days, like at day 48 here, the entire wall had been rebuilt. I love the fact that it was rebuilt out of stones that were broken, that was rubble. It wasn't new stones. They took the broken stones. The stones of our lives are often broken.

We get overwhelmed by that rubble, but they turned it back into a stronghold. You don't always need new stones to rebuild. That's true for our relationships again. You don't have to leave every relationship. Some can be healed, and we use the rubble of that, and we rebuild as a stronghold. It says, in the context, in this passage, we see Satan employing one of his most powerful tools, persistence.

So what you're going to see is Satan, and in the book of Nehemiah, there's multiple times where the same question, the same problem, the same temptation shows up over and over and over again in an attempt to wear down Nehemiah. And every single time, Nehemiah is up for the challenge with his responsibility. He has the ability to respond. One of Satan's main tools is to use persistence in your life.

He's got plenty of time. Well, actually, his time's running out, but nonetheless, he's got plenty of time in our lifetime to continue to come over and over again and back and forth. If we look earlier in the passage, we saw that, in this passage, that five times Nehemiah's enemies came to him in hopes of luring him into a trap. Five times. Five times.

Now, they came four times. He gave him a response. We'll talk about that response. And then they came a fifth time with the unsealed letter, and they started accusing him of doing all these things that weren't true, pointing accusations. And the fifth time, his response levels up. So he gives a little bit more. He didn't start with the big response.

He gave four responses that were similar. We'll look at those. And then the fifth time, it was like, okay, it's time to level up. I'm going to speak some truth here. And he spoke up. But he had this ability of a measured response. Once again, his responses actually kept him out of battle. Now, we don't want to go to battle, right? We're willing to go to battle, but we don't want to go to battle.

We want to live in peace. We want to live in contentment. If you see the five times that they came there, if we go back in the scripture to Nehemiah 4 from a few weeks ago, remember that we had the rubble, the rabble, and the relatives? So you had the Jewish relatives that had lived there that were not taken into Babylonia. And they had kind of had 70 years.

Granted, they were under the king, Aarixerxes. They maybe had a few more taxes. But they didn't have to lose their homes. They didn't have to lose their businesses. They weren't human trafficked to Babylon. Instead, they just lived there. And when Nehemiah came and said, hey, let's rebuild this wall in our nation, they saw the writing on the wall like, hey, man, status quo.

We got things. Will you stop? Stop with what you're doing. We're happy living in status quo. Nehemiah was not. They came to him ten times, it said. Ten times they came to him. Over and over and over. And when it comes to one of Satan's greatest weapons, it isn't just to bowl you over immediately. I mean, oftentimes, most people don't get bowled over with their sin immediately.

The things, you know, affairs and things like that often don't happen immediately. It isn't like you have a perfect marriage and everything's great and there's never any problems and you're not drifting in another direction. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this happens. No, there is a slow movement towards that. So one of his, Satan's greatest tools is not the immediate impact that he brings to people's lives to cause them to go one direction or another, although that does happen on occasion.

It's persistence. Over and over. Just a little bit. A little compromise here. A little compromise there. Over and over again. Or persistence. I wrote in the notes in the box that Satan does not care if he can trap you on his first eight attempts as long as he can ensnare you on the ninth or perhaps the thirteenth. Let me say it again. Satan does not care if he can't trap you on his first eight attempts as long as he can perhaps ensnare you on the ninth or perhaps the thirteenth.

When it comes to perseverance, that's a spiritual gift. Perseverance is a spiritual gift, it says. It's one of the key spiritual gifts. When the New Testament talks about having hope and it talks about having perseverance and character is developed when it gives that, you know, that hope leads to proven character and perseverance, all those are in a symbol, a lineage of the godly character and one of those is perseverance.

How's your perseverance? I remember when I was, back in the day, I was trying to, you know, my first few years of following Jesus and I had some issues I was trying to sort out in my life and get right and I remember I would say no to a temptation like, I don't know, 15 times. But by 16, it was time to reward myself, right? Because I had said no 15 times and I had kind of done well enough to say, well, I'd done well enough, we've had some improvement.

Perseverance means able to blow through the fifteenth attempt, the thirty-second attempt, the fifty-third attempt because you have made a decision, you have made a line in the sand that you will respond to whatever happens, no matter how many times it happens, in a certain way. Now, we do see that there is a gradiated response. So, he starts with four responses, but at the end, he's like, enough's enough.

And on the fifth response, he just says enough is enough. And sometimes, you need to finally step it up and to wherever that temptation's coming from. Maybe it's you, bringing it to your own door. Maybe it's somebody else who's, you know, keeps coming, you know, into your life over and over again with a temptation or whatever that would be, you know your life better than I do, where you eventually just have to put a line in his hand and say, hey, I need to speak straight to you, just, I want to say this in love, but boom, this is it.

We're not going that direction. End of story. What I have found personally is at a certain point, Satan gives up. At a certain point, he might come back in an opportune time, but that persistence, there comes an ability when you resist the devil, it says in Ephesians, and he will what? He will flee from you. Nehemiah, in this passage, is so good at resisting the devil.

Now, the devil has these enemies and these people that he's using as his emissaries to come into Nehemiah's life and destroy it. It doesn't look like the devil, but he has all these enemies, but Satan is still behind that plot. I put, Nehemiah overcomes the persistence of his enemies by wielding, you can circle wielding there, a wise response. By wielding, I use that word on purpose.

He was wielding a response like you would wield a sword. It's like a responsibility. Stephen Covey says this from the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The ability to choose our response to any circumstance or condition. The ability. You know, I had never looked at the word responsibility like that. I had seen responsibility as like, or somebody who's responsible, as just somebody you can trust, right?

They're responsible. Are you responsible? Do you have responsibility? I can trust that person. I kind of left it at trust. Well, I guess if you back it up and you backfill that and you ask yourself, trust them with what? Well, what you're trusting is their ability to respond wisely no matter what the situation. A response-able person. The response-ability.

Back into your court. In regard to your responsibility, how is your responsibility in the most heated moments? I am, as you know, we are in our second season of our basketball team. As you know, we won the championship. And we are well on our way to winning our second championship. FYI. I did find out that we have a guy on our team that was in the NFL for five years.

I didn't know he was in the NFL. So that helps. I don't know who he is. But I was talking about him because I was in the NFL for five years. I'm like, no wonder you can dunk like you do. Thank you very much. So we have some NFL players on our LJCF team. One of the things that sports will teach you is a person's character. I believe it was John Wooden off the top of my head that said that sports doesn't build character, although I believe it does.

It reveals character. How is your response when somebody says that thing that your dad used to say to you? How is your response when you get triggered, when there's a nerve that's hit? How is your response when you're, you know, in your bank, you know, account shows a little lower than you thought it was? How is your responsibility? You know, there's so many places and gates in our area where we need to respond to that gate, right?

There's a financial gate. There's a relational gate. There's a sexuality gate for your life. There's all these different gates that we live in that have, that, you know, we, the gates allow people, you know, to come in and to go out of those gates. Where do we have the ability to respond as a gatekeeper? Remember, Nehemiah went from a grunt, he was a, he was a servant of the king, to a gatekeeper to becoming a governor, right?

Governor has authority. The more responsibility you have, the more authority you will get oftentimes in this world, but definitely in the kingdom of God. You know, he who is faithful with little will be given more. So being faithful is the ability to respond. How is your responsibility? And are there weak areas? What I have found is, is, is, as long, you know, you're only as strong as your weakest link, right?

So you see this all the time in, in church work where you have these pastors and they're amazing and they've got like, you know, 15 gates. They've, you know, incredible ability on these 15 gates, but there's this one gate doesn't have any, that doesn't have any, you know, gates to it. And it's just in and out, you know, and before you know it, they fall.

Why? Because you're only as strong as your weakest link or as the weakest gate that you have there. Responsibility. Look at his ability to respond. I want to give a, a verse, because I used that word a moment ago, wielding. You wield responses. Responses are a weapon. The Bible was so clear about that. They have the ability, words and actions have the ability to bring life and death into a situation.

Most of what my job is, is responding. Like the majority, so much of my job is just responding to an email, responding to a staff plan, learning how to respond in a way that brings life. Proverbs 25, 15 says this, through patience, and patience, sometimes not responding is the response to have. Through patience, a ruler can be persuaded, and a gentle tongue can break a bone.

Now, I, I, I, I live on this verse. I love this verse. And whenever I want to send like that stinging reply on the text or whatever else, I, I have to remember what the Bible tells me. That a gentle word, not for the sake of, oh, I'm going to break some bones here with this gentle word. I'll show you a thing. That's just, that's just being manipulative and whatever.

But just, hey, what's the gentle response? How do I defuse this situation? How do I bring it down another level to do that? It says, though patient, through patience, a ruler can be persuaded, and a gentle tongue can break a bone. The thing I put in the notes, the thing that often destroys the work of God in our lives is not the threat, but our response to the threat.

Oftentimes, the thing that will destroy your life and, and God's work in our life is, is not the threat that you have. You're under a threat of, you have a financial threat. Perhaps you've actually literally been sued, or there's, there's something that's happened in your life where there's this threat. And we, then we, we're really good at screenwriting the, you know, the Armageddon play of our life.

We, we, we, we're, we're so easy to like, okay, I have this threat, and now this is going to happen, we're just so good at writing negative results for our life, right? It isn't that that destroys our life, but it's how we respond to that threat. Oh, I'm, I'm fearful now, so I'm going to speak out, and actually, you make it worse sometimes. You do something, and you cause your own demise because of your inability to have responsibility.

Nehemiah over and over again, ten times with his relatives, five times with, with, with his enemies, responded. He never had to pull the sword out. He never actually had to go to war. He never had to battle because a gentle word was able to break a bone, and he gave over and over again. You see, there was a scheme that was afoot to destroy Nehemiah, and each time Nehemiah responded, it was wise, and it was measured.

In the scripture, in the, in the, in the Proverbs, I believe it begins with saying, the way to get wisdom, if you want to get wisdom, get wisdom. I love that. If you want, it's like what Dick Cotton said to me, the best way to stay married, stay married. That's like the best way to stay married. The best way to get wisdom is to love wisdom. Do you love wisdom?

What I have found is wisdom has saved my neck so many times now. Not my wisdom. It's God's wisdom. Not mine. I want to get it, though. I want to, I just want to take as much as I can. That's why I read the Proverbs every single day to a point where if you read the Proverbs every day, I want to challenge you to do, read a Proverb. There's one for every day of the month, 31 of them.

And if you read one every day, eventually it will become, the responses will become second nature to you. I've been doing it eight to ten years now, maybe more. However, I find that the responses are second nature. I get a text or I get an email I want to write, but I'll show you with my amazing wizard skills, you know, on my computer or my texting, you know.

And then I'll just get this, hey, a gentle word, you know, a gentle word breaks a bone, you know. Or whatever it is, in the household, you know, my wife and I don't agree on everything all the time. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've been like, you better get some wisdom here, right? So let's go get some wisdom and feast on that. It says a, there was a scheme of a, let's go to verse two and look at these responses.

Verse two B, halfway through verse two to verse three, but they were scheming to harm me. So, circle so, that's a conjunction. We talked about those conjunctions, those segues in our life. I sent a messenger to them with this reply. I'm carrying on a great project, I can't go down. That's it. Look at that really quick. First one, he says, here again, we see the power of the conjunction, the so.

We've talked about that in our lives. Therefore. These are the big words in scripture. Because it's after the therefore, it's after the so, it's after the if, it's after whatever that conjunction is that the next action happens. It's where the response ability happens. It is the fork in the road. And being aware of, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm at a conjunction moment in my life right now.

How am I going to respond? Even having the response, the patience, as it says, the patience can win over a ruler, is amazing. Sometimes my wife and I, we will have this disagreement. I try never to have an argument or a disagreement. We don't really argue, but a disagreement would go more than like three minutes. Like, I just have this internal timer now.

I know after three minutes, I'm no good. Like, I got to tap out. I'm like, you know, one rounder, you know? And so after three minutes, I'll just basically tap out. And one of our tools, let me give you a tool for marriage, because we have a counselor that we go to. We say, hey, here I say, hey, you know what? Let's table this, and let's go meet with Corrine.

That's our counselor, one of our people here on staff. Let's go meet with her on Thursday and talk about it then. You know what we found out? We can still go on our date that night when we do that. I remember when we first got married, we were going to Disneyland, and we had Lily, and she was like two, and we're heading in. We're in the parking lot.

We had this argument. It's like, Disneyland's over. We're not going to Disneyland. Ruin the day. Get in the car. Go home. It's miserable. Like, I mean, you've had that. Like, we don't have Armageddon really anymore. You know what I mean? Like, we've just, you can learn that. It's just a learned skill. It's just a learned skill. Anybody can do it. You just have to not love battle.

You have to love peace. Not at the sake of truth. We still got that meeting on 2 o'clock on Thursday or whatever day it was. You know, the crazy thing is we so often get there and to the appointment. We're like, what were we arguing about? I mean, that happens all the time. It wasn't even that important. You see this responsibility that he has. But they were scheming to harm me.

Satan is always scheming. He's always scheming. So I sent messengers to them with this reply. I am carrying on a great project and cannot go down. Love that. He just gives this reply. Hey, I got something going on. I'm just, I'm busy. My schedule's full. I'm building a wall. I just got to move on. He basically just tells them the truth, but he puts it off because he understands that they're trying to kill him and lure him into a trap.

Here's another little thing that I use. I, if somebody sends a complaint, an upsetness, or anything via email, I try never to respond with more than three sentences. I get myself in trouble with more than three sentences. I don't need to do a diatribe where it says, the scripture says where the words are many, sin is not absent. So what I try to do is I keep it as brief as possible, and I never send anything controversial in an email or a text, ever.

Like I've just learned that. I never put anything that I can't take back. And even during COVID, I got to say, I was feasting on COVID. I mean, not COVID, excuse me, on Proverbs. I love that COVID. It's more like, during COVID, I was just leaning into the Proverbs, you know, how to make decisions. And the majority of the decisions we made as a staff were biblical decisions out of COVID.

I mean, out of the Proverbs. I'm going to get the word right here in a minute. There's a couple of things. In verse 8, he kind of steps it up a little bit, right? He says, I sent him this reply. Nothing like what you're saying is happening. You're making it up out of your head. Like, I like that one, right? Like, that feels a lot better than the first one he gave, you know?

Like, hey, that's not happening, okay? You're making it up out of your head. This is not happening. There's not a plot afoot to, King Artaxerxes actually is paying for this. I'm a bro to him. Like, he's made me governor. It's all good. They were just jealous. So he steps it up. And he eventually says, enough's enough. Sometimes you need to say that.

You need to have the ability to say, enough's enough. But he says, you're making it up out of your head. And so there are times where you do that. But be wise. When you say something, be wise on how you say it. Sleep on a text. Sleep on an email. Pastor Mark always said to me, my old pastor, if it feels really good when you press the button after you press sent, you probably sent the wrong email.

Yeah. I feel, oh, my, what did I just do? I want it back. Don't you wish they had a tool that you could, like, take the email back, like it would just suck out of their email box before they read it? That'd be great. Few people understand that victory is often found in the response. And if we're going to have victory in our responses, we must love a wise response more than the passionate or clever retort.

If we are going to have victory in our responses, we must love the wise response more than the passionate or the clever retort. Oh, I got the last word. I really showed them. Well, you might have showed them, but now you don't have a relationship anymore. You've actually lost your ability for relationship in that place. To be able to just, just, to fall in love with the wise thing to say.

I will say that I have personally experienced through just trying to follow what the scripture says of, like, love wisdom and how much it saved me, that you will get to the place where when you have this crossroads in your life on how to respond on an email. It's harder in the moment when you're having a conversation, but, like, on an email or a text or something like that, you will get to the place where you'll be like, I love the right response.

I'm thirsty for the right response. I want to know the right response. You will get to a place where that becomes your second nature. It will become the first thing that you go to as opposed, you won't even be thinking about how can I, I'm going to defend myself. You don't have to defend yourself if God's defending you all the time, especially in text in these things, saying the right thing at the right time.

And then I got another proverb here. You can just ask yourself, do I weigh my answers? Do I have an answer? Do I weigh it? That means taking time, putting it on the scale. And what are you weighing it against? When you weigh something, you have to have a counterbalance to actually know that there's a weight, what it's weighed against. You're weighing it against God's justice, God's truth, God's kindness, God's everything.

And if you don't know the answer, sometimes you don't even know how to respond. I would say probably 80% of the time, I don't, on a difficult situation, I don't know how to respond. I have to go to the Lord and say, God, how do you want me to respond? In James, it says to ask, and he is generous, and he will give you wisdom of how to respond.

Trust that God will give you wisdom if you're patient enough to weigh it, because that persuades a king, as we saw. And if you're willing to weigh it against the truth of God, not your truth. That's the problem with our society right now. Like, your truth is the truth that matters. No, the truth that matters is God is the truth, and I don't weigh it against my truth.

My truth is wrong most of the time. It's God's truth. And so there is no my truth. I look at God's truth and his power and use that. But here's the takeaway, practical takeaway. And Nehemiah, as I said earlier, never drew a sword the entire rebuilding of the wall. Rather, the entire victory was won through wise response and decision making. That is such, I mean, whew, that is such a powerful takeaway.

Do you want to win victory? Maybe you're just amazing at, like, just, you know, battling it out on the playing field or in an argument, or you get your way, you're so good at being manipulative. Whatever, you win. You just win. You know, and you're doing that. But Nehemiah never had to do that. Nehemiah never drew the sword, even though he was ready to fight if needed, during the entire rebuilding of the wall.

Rather, the entire victory was won through wise response and decision making. Responsibility. How's your responsibility? Amen? Let's stand, if we would. We're going to have our communion. Be some good conversations on the way home this day. If you have your communion, this is our time where we're going to focus on the blood and the body of Christ.

The reason we do that is because he suffered for us. And it allows us to see in our own humility of what he did on the cross. That he saved us through his blood and through his resurrection. If you have your communion, I'm going to ask that you would just open the bread. Let's just hold that in our hand for a moment. In a moment, we're going to break it together after I read.

But let's just hold that. Let's just hold the communion in our hand for a moment. If you've said something, if you've responded, if you've had mistakes in the past or you want to change that, just as we hold that communion wafer, just let God know. God, change our responses. Let us respond to you first. Let us love wisdom. Let us love the Father's wisdom.

It says, He gave thanks and He broke it. I want to encourage you to break it. And we'll take it together. Let's just thank Him right now for His brokenness. God, thank You that by Your wounds we are healed and we thank You, God, for Your brokenness. Meet us in our brokenness, God. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. In the same way, after the supper, He took the cup and He said, This is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you.

this is the blood of the covenant and he says take this as a remission for your sins and do this in remembrance of me let's take the cup now as is our custom we want to bless you today God said to Abraham who you bless I will bless so it's true for us too who you bless God will bless him so if you want to extend your hands I want to bless you with this passage and this responsibility Lord God we want to pray over your people God some of us aren't very good at responding and we want to be responsible and I pray God that you would infuse those here who want it the ones who want it God with wisdom that they would feast on wisdom Lord God they would love wisdom the wisdom of the Father and it would change their lives and begin to win battles that a three sentence email will win a battle that a kind word that gives life will win a battle without ever having to fight that you'll diffuse arguments Lord God that you will lessen arguments that you'll lessen disagreements Lord God and move our church into a church of wisdom a church of peace God for blessed are the peacemakers God we pray for peacemakers Lord God for you break the bone Lord God you battle for us and we are called to stand to put the full armor of God on and to stand and when we've done everything to stand to stand again with persistence and perseverance God we pray that we would come against the devil's persistence with your perseverance pray for perseverance over these people God perseverance over addictions perseverance over any temptation over any gate God as you set the gates in their lives in place we send them out now God as warriors God warriors of peace warriors of love warriors of truth warriors of justice in the name of the Father Son and the Holy Spirit Amen Be blessed if you need prayer today come forward we love you and we'll see you next week Bye bye I just have a look of a man a man a man a man a man a man a man a man a man Thank you.