OCT 16 2022 | Rebuild: The Story of Nehemiah S1E4 | Know Your Enemy

Sea Change Church · OCT 16 2022 | Rebuild Ep 4 | Know Your Enemy
Nehemiah 2:17-20
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

and we hand them out downtown and then once a month we serve at the ladle at First Presbyterian Church downtown where they have doctors and we give them clothing, food, coffee, etc. So if you want to learn more about it I would love to talk to you or Mike Munson would love to tell you more about it and I also lead the prayer ministry. So today's scripture reading is from Nehemiah chapter 2 verses 17 through 20.

Then I said to them You see the trouble we're in? Jerusalem lies in ruins and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem and we will no longer be in disgrace. I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me. They replied Let us start rebuilding. So they began this good work.

But when Sanballat the Horonite Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem the Arab heard about it they mocked and ridiculed us. What is this you're doing? They asked Are you rebelling against the king? I answered them by saying The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding. But as for you you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.

The word of the Lord. The rubble or our sins Oh, where do we begin The rubble or our sins Oh, where do we begin The rubble or our sins Oh, where do we begin In the city that we love Welcome to church. Good to have you. If you have your Bibles open them up to Nehemiah chapter 2 or you can just look in your notes and before we start let's just get something out of the way right here.

Right there. Let's go, right? Let's go. Somebody in the staff meeting said you're a bandwagon fan. I said yeah for 53 years I'm a bandwagon fan. Yeah. This guy took a 10 year hiatus because they were horrible and just committed to mediocrity. It's not my fault. So we're ready to go. I got a ticket for Tuesday and Wednesday. I was like banging on the website on the Padres website.

I'm all by myself in the second to the last row on Tuesday night. All by myself. I'm going to have a hot dog slapping high fives to people I don't know. So I'll be there. Let's go. He's got to have that trigger finger. Yeah. All right. Lord Jesus, I want to thank you God for this goodness and the grace that even you can bring things back from the dead as we found out from the Padres.

Lord, so bring this bring back. Bless this message and this sermon in Jesus' name. Amen. God has a promise for your life. God has a promise for your life. He's got a promise for your life. The question is are you going to agree with it? Are you going to agree with the promises that God has for your life and you agree with it by living into those promises?

You can cancel out many of the promises. Now God still has grace. We talked about that saving grace, right? It's that saving grace. And some of us just live on that saving grace, right? You never get to the favor grace like, hey, you're doing stuff I like. You're doing stuff in your marriage. You're doing stuff in your business. You're doing stuff in your personal life and your spiritual life.

I like that. So I'm going to take my favor grace. I'm going to drop that favor grace on you too. No, we're just living in the saving grace. Oh God, I made a mistake again. Save me. And God's willing to do that. But if you want the favor grace, you can have it. Nehemiah's walking in the favor grace. He's shown that he's taking courage and he's shown that he's taken the initiative to rebuild the walls of his life.

We're doing a 52-day experiment to rebuild the walls of our lives. We started about three weeks ago on Rosh Hashanah. And you can jump on late. You can jump on now. It just takes one decision to change your life. One decision. Right now, you want to make a decision? You can make that decision. There's a big word in the Bible. It's one of the smallest words.

It's not I. It's if. If, my people. The word if is so important. If you want a new life, if you want to walk into the life that God has promised you, you can do that. And so we see that here with this idea of a promise for Jerusalem that Nehemiah steps into this process of God of rebuilding a wall. We're rebuilding walls. And we're rebuilding gates. And we saw that gates give identity.

They also give security. And so our wall, oftentimes, our gates are burned down. The gates are our finances. Oh, I want that thing? Boom. You know what I mean? We just swipe that. Swipe that. When I bought my Padre tickets yesterday, it had to come out of my personal savings account because my wife ain't gonna let me buy some Padre tickets. Just on a whim.

I see you. She's up in Big Bear right now having a retreat. I know she's watching. I see you. That came out of my personal, so don't you worry about it. A little personal stash of money. The enemy, look at your notes. The enemy of your soul desires to keep the land of your promise in ruins. The enemy of your soul desires to keep the land of your promise in ruins.

That's his whole deal. That God has a promise for you, and we need to be in agreement. Now, God can still open doors. He gives you that saving grace. He gives us what we don't deserve. We know that, right? We don't deserve heaven, and we're gonna get that. So God is beyond that. You can, you know, don't go into, oh, I'm a horrible person. I'll never get what I want.

No, no, God still, he drops blessings on people. Look at Samson. He's dropping blessings on Samson that Samson doesn't deserve, right? But there's a whole lane. There's a fast lane of favor. There's a bullet train of favor, and if you want to get on the bullet train of favor, get your gates in order. Look at your gates. Look at your finance. Look at your lust.

Look at your relationships. Look at your tongue. Look at your heart. Look at all these different gates and take the time to make it important. I find out one of the biggest things in regard to walking in the favor, the grace-given favor of God is self-control, right? If we can just control ourselves, control our tongues, control our hearts, control our actions.

Proverbs 25, 28. One of my favorite Proverbs, we preach Proverbs every single January to start the year because we want to frame the year in wisdom. It says, Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control. Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control. What does that mean? When your cities are broken in.

I was reading about the Viking hordes coming throughout the early Middle Ages into England, and they would just come into the cities, and they would pillage and plunder, and they would just take what they wanted. There wasn't enough security. So we want to get that security, and that's what Nehemiah shows. Say, in the book of Nehemiah, there's three types of people, and I believe that these three types of people exist today, right?

Especially in regard to living in your promise or living in the land of the wilderness. Can't survive in the middle ground. Can't live in the Jordan, right? They had to cross the Jordan. A lot of us just want to tread water. You can only tread water for so long. Like Magnum P.I., remember that episode? He's got the shark, remember that episode? You can only tread water so long.

You're like, I don't ever watch Magnum P.I. Nonetheless, three o'clock Thursdays. Okay, nonetheless. Three types of people. You got captives, consorts, conquerors. What's a captive? You know what a captive is. Nehemiah was a captive, but God released him from his captivity because he had the courage to ask the king. He had the courage to ask a question, to stand up for what he believes, at the suffrage of his own life, to ask the king who could have killed him to go back and rebuild the city that was once hostile to that king, Artaxerxes.

You got captives. He wasn't willing to be a captive. If you're a captive right now, you know it. You know what you're in captivity to, and a lot of times you have to decide if you want to release yourself from that captivity. There's very few people who are actually held in bondage where you can do nothing about it. 90% or higher percentage of the time, it's your decision if you want to be in captivity or not.

So there's captive, there's consorts. What do I mean by consort? Do I mean Prince Philip? You know, no, I don't mean Prince Philip or Camilla, you know. I'm not talking about the royal consort. I'm talking, consort means that somebody is in agreement with. Consort means to be in agreement with. There's two types of meaning for consort. One is the spouse of a king or a queen.

But in this, it's you're in agreement with. And we see that there's some pushback here. If you go into your scripture, verse 19, but when Sanballat, the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Geshem the Arab, that's three characters here, heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. So you got these three people that are captives. They are part of the Jewish nation.

The nation, Sanballat was from Samaria. These are people who should have been for Nehemiah. They should have been for what was happening, but obviously there had been a split in the kingdoms, right? Under Solomon, the kingdoms have been split, and now you have a divided nation. And so the northern nations and the people that lived up there did not like Judah and the southern nations, and they were upset.

So you have these people that are of your race, that are of your being, that are of the same line of you, that are part of the tribes often, or part of that grouping of people, that are now against you, because they've become consorts. There's captives and there's consorts. Are you in agreement? What are you in agreement with? Whatever you're in agreement with is one of your values.

Whatever you're in agreement with is one of your values. And so there's captives, consorts, and then there's conquerors. Now the cool thing about Jesus is Jesus says that you're not just a conqueror, that we are more than conquerors. If you look at 2 Corinthians, how do you be more than a conqueror, right? Conquerors in antiquity, when they would actually conquer, they would take the city and they would destroy the city.

Sometimes they would bury the city to where it no longer existed. You're not just conquering, you're more than a conqueror. There's a super conquering where you actually remove the memory of what existed before. Remember, much of my past is hard for me to remember. I don't dwell on it. I think for the first 10 years, I kind of traded on all the things that I'd gotten sober, and that was kind of my testimony.

And then at about 15 years, I'd have stopped talking about it, because it had been such a conquering in that area of my life that it just disappeared. You can have that. There's captives. There's consorts. There's conquerors. You decide what you want. There's that if. All right, there's two points today we're going to look at in this scripture. One, know your enemy.

Know your enemy. And number two, start rebuilding. Know your enemy. Start rebuilding. Verse 19. Let's start with the first one, know your enemy. But when Sambalat, the Hauronite, Tobiah, the Ammonite, officials in Geshem and the Arab heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us, and they said, what is it that this you are doing, they asked, are you rebelling against the king?

Now, it is believed that these Hauronites, Ammonites, and Arabs were possibly a mixed race. They were possibly half Jewish. But there was some belief that they should have been on the side of Nehemiah. But nonetheless, they are coming against Nehemiah. And if you are going to get your life straight, if you are going to get your life in the direction you want to go, don't be surprised when there's pushback.

Don't be surprised when there is pushback to that. I remember a story. I was doing some counseling. A woman came to me, and she said, my husband is an alcoholic. He's falling down drunk. I'm going to leave him. And I said, okay, well, let's see if we can get in some counseling. Let's talk through it. Might be the right thing for you to do, but let's talk through it.

So he came in, had a great discussion. He ended up going to celebrate recovery, got sober. A year later, they redid their vows. Things are going really good about a year later. And then about a year and a half later, I get a phone call. We need to come back and see you. Oh, what happened? Oh, he's falling off the wagon. I said, all right, well, come back in.

You know, let's get back on. Let's get back on the horse. Let's go for it. And he comes back in. I said, what happened? She said, well, it was actually our anniversary, and we were having our dinner, and I bought him a bottle of wine because I just thought it would be a good idea. I was like, what? You bought him a bottle of wine? And you know what's so interesting is sometimes we like some of the benefits we get from some of the bad decisions that are happening in my life.

Perhaps, I told her in this, perhaps you just like being the parent of the relationship. Now that he's got responsibility, now that he has stepped up to the plate, he says no sometimes. Sometimes he's stepped up, and all of a sudden there's boundaries in your life, there's relationship in your life. No longer can you just lord it over him. You have complete control.

She goes, I don't know why I did this. I said, well, you did it for a reason. You need to figure out why you did it. There's gonna be pushback, and sometimes, not that his wife was his enemy, and I don't wanna make that, I'm not making that in this analogy here, but you have to know what is coming up against you. If you're a captive, you need to understand why you have this issue.

Why can you not stop whatever? Why can you not stop your mouth from saying whatever? Why, why, why? You need to know your enemy. And the one thing that we see here is that Nehemiah understood his enemy. It says in the notes, Anba, Samballat, Tobiah, and Geshem were three enemies of the Jews who made several attempts, several attempts, not just one, several, to stop Nehemiah from rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.

You're gonna see that these attacks, as you continue to get strengthened in yourself and in the land of your promise, as you say, I'm gonna cross that Jordan, right? Can't live in the Jordan. Don't wanna live in the wilderness, okay? As you cross over into that promise, the enemy of your soul does not want you to live there, and he's going to begin to attack your promise.

Now, it usually starts, as we'll see here, with mockery, trickery, emotions, lying, deception, and we're gonna see how Nehemiah deals with that, but then eventually they have physical threats. It eventually goes to where he has to stand up, and we'll see how he deals with that. Today, we're just talking about how Nehemiah dealt with the internal struggle, right?

Because one of the main things that keeps us from doing the things we want is just that internal struggle. Remember, I used to think when I was using drugs, how could I ever live without that? I couldn't picture a life living without my substance. Could not picture a life living without my substance. And it made me sad, and it made me depressed to think that I would have to live like that.

One of the things I needed to do was to begin to picture my life in God's fullness on the other side of the Jordan where I could see myself living in that promise. I wanna challenge you, one of the things to do is to think about the goodness that God has for you, living in the promise, and we see that. And so we see, let's go to verse 18. Verse 19.

Verse 19 says, But when Sambal, the Hornanite, Tobiah, you got three enemies here, right? And the Ammonite and Geshem, the Arab, heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. What are you doing, they asked. Are you rebuilding against the king? Well, that's a lie. The king said they could go, right? So that's a lie. So let's just start out. The enemy of your soul, Satan, loves to lie to you.

He loves to put doubt. If you look in Genesis, it's taking the things of God, the promises of God, and getting you to accept and believe in a lie. Speak negatively. One of the things that we do in our family regularly is if we hear you speak negatively about yourself, we will refute that. We will say, do not speak that over yourself. Sometimes if somebody says something about somebody else in the family, we'll say, please, do not speak that over me.

That is not true to who I am. We've almost canceled out all negative speaking in the family by knowing our identity and who we are and what is true about us and what is not true. You see that the enemy is gonna start with mockery. Who are you? Come on, really, you? You're just this little David, you're gonna fight Goliath? Come on. And you begin to doubt.

Just get that seed of doubt going, right? Because I can grow that seed of doubt into a massive, massive, you know, forest if I can. Satan wants to take a seed of doubt and make a forest that you cannot get through. One of those enchanted dark forests. I will not go up against that. What is the seed of doubt that you've believed in? Have you begun to believe things that are not true?

We'll see in the next point, after know your enemy, that Nehemiah knew who he was. And he knew who they were. Perhaps you've heard of Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu, about 500 years or so before Christ was born, was a Chinese general who wrote an incredible little book. If you've never read it, it's called The Art of War. I'm sure you've heard of it. Kobe Bryant read this book.

Many have read it. And it is just a strategy book. And you can use it for life. Now, he's using it for military. Napoleon, all these others have read this book and they studied this because he was just incredible. One of the greatest warriors of all time. And this is what Sun Tzu said in regard to knowing the things that are going to come against you that are your enemies.

And today we're talking about those thoughts. We're talking about those emotions that we focus on. We're talking about ruminating on those things over and over again. He says this, If you know the enemy, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles. If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory is gained, you will also suffer a defeat.

And if you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. This is so true. You have to know who you are and you have to know what's up against you and you have to understand why that is. This week I was speaking to somebody and they had this thought and they said this and I said, Why do you think that? I don't know why I think it.

I said, Well, then why are you thinking it? You need to know why you think things. Why do you think you're worthless? Why do you think that you could never? Why do you think your kid will never succeed? Whatever thoughts you have. What are these thoughts that come in that ridicule you, that mock you, and cause you to ruminate? I spent some time this week thinking and asking myself, Why do I tend to ruminate towards the darkness?

Right? It's like there's 20% of my life that's darkness. Right? Not like I'm in sin, but I mean like it's difficult is what I mean. It's hard to deal with. They're the things you gotta do. They're the have-tos in life. They're the what-ifs. They're the worries. They're the doubts. They're the fears. It's just 20%. And sometimes I'll spend 60% of my time just living on the 20%.

When there's 80%, that's fantastic. I'm going to work. I love Sunday church. It's beautiful outside. You know, I harvested some apples this week. I'm gonna do some jarring and canning. I didn't know if you knew that I did that. I'm getting ready for Thanksgiving. I do my own jarring and canning. Try not to get botulism. It's all good. There's all this goodness surrounded in our lives.

But we focus on the mockery, the ridicule, the self-doubt. We focus on this over and over. Why do we do that? I had to ask myself, why do I do that? And so I did a little thing. I got a yellow pad. And I got, every time I had a negative thought, I wrote it down. And then I scheduled a time on Saturday, yesterday, to sit down for 30 minutes and think about those thoughts.

I just gave him a meeting. So, and I said, I don't have to think about you at four in the morning. Because I got a meeting at one and we're gonna meet at one o'clock on Saturday and we're gonna talk about this. But all of a sudden, begin to change that voice. Begin to change. Begin to use scripture to listen who God says that you are. We'll see here that Nehemiah knows who he is.

When we get to the second point, Nehemiah knows who he is. But he also knows the enemy. Why do you think what you think? I spoke this week to a friend of mine that did multiple tours in Iraq. He said, one of the biggest problems we had were the IEDs. The IEDs are those, those, basically they're landmines where they can blow up a tank and they were super dangerous.

And he said, one of the things we would do is we would go out in the field and we would, we're supposed to get the IEDs. And I was like, well, you didn't destroy them? He goes, no, we would actually keep them. And I, I'm just like, why would you keep them? What's the, he goes, because we'll never know our enemy if we destroy them. He says, what we would do is we would take them and we would dismantle, we would disarm and then we would dismantle them.

We would take fingerprints off of them. He said, we would, we would find out where the, where the, the parts are coming from because there's only so many parts. He said, it's not like in China or in America where if you're going to build a weapon, you build it on an assembly line. He says, in Afghanistan or in Iraq, there's like one guy in a house somewhere who's making these things.

And he says, if we can understand who that person is, he says, then we can get to, to the, to the source of who's making them. He goes, if we know the parts and we can figure out who's actually supplying the parts to the maker and if we can get to who's making the parts, we can figure out who's paying for it. And he says, that is how we understand. Now, when it comes to your doubts, your fears, and all the things that are coming against you in your life, you need to have that type of tenacity to understand why.

To just continue to suffer under negative thought after negative thought after depressive thought after depressive thought without diving into who that enemy is and why that is happening, you will never have a victory in that realm. The enemy will be in the shadows. That's how he is. He's in the shadows. He's in the shadows, ducks in, says something to you, and he goes, oh, this person doesn't even fight back.

They don't even know the enemy. So you know what? I'm just going to come in on a Tuesday. I'll give you one thought and I can go about my business. I'm going to go about my business because I know they're going to ruminate on that a week. They're not going to push back against it. They're not going to take a scripture and say, that's not true about me. They're not even going to fight it.

You know what they're going to do? They're going to spend a week ruminating on why I'm a miserable slob and God hates me because I just got to give you one thought. Or are you the type of person that's like, no, he's got to come back over and over and over again and I'm going to rebuke that and rebuke that and rebuke that and speak life and speak truth and to the point where it's like, man, we just, okay, we got to move on to something new.

That ain't working. Have you ever had something in your life that you've had so much victory on you don't even feel tempted by it anymore? It's like, well, I lost that battle. That's how you win battles. You have to have courage. You have to have tenacity and you stand up with a plan to know your enemy. What's the IED that wants to destroy your life? And are you just like, oh, I need some distraction.

I can destroy that for a moment because I'll go into distraction. That's what I did when I was an addict, right? Have a bad thought. At one time, I had 19 warrants for my arrest. 19, all traffic, right? I know, everybody's like, whoa, 19, that's a lot of warrants, right? Got a lot of MPB. So I had 19 warrants and I remember I was supposed to go to jail. They finally came to the house to try to get me and then I thought I better go in because they didn't get me.

So I went in and ended up paying 5,000 bucks and settled or whatever. But I remember one day I was supposed to go to court and I had this thing. I was supposed to face it. I don't want to face it. I'm just going to get high. And so I went down to the beach. I just got high and laid on the beach high, you know? Just get away from my problem. Just distract, you know?

And then all of a sudden, one day that turned around. So that doesn't work for me no more. It might have worked when I was a 19-year-old pot smoker. But that worked for me no more. I want to move on. Let's move across your Jordan. Let's move to the next part. All right. So the next thing we see is this. It's start rebuilding. Verse 20. I answered them. Oh, I love he has an answer.

I answered them. I know. I do this all the time and I practice not doing this. Starting to read a verse and then stopping reading it and starting to preach in the middle of the verse. It's a habit. But I got to say, like look, I answered them. Answering. Answer. Now sometimes, you don't need to speak to the devil. I don't need to talk to you. I already know in my heart.

But sometimes I'm going to answer you. I'm going to answer with scripture. He answered them by saying, the God of heaven, we will give us success. We, his servants, will start rebuilding. But as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it. Let's start with this. We will start, we are his servants. He knew who he was. He's a servant.

And we will start rebuilding. In your notes, I wrote this. It might be the best point of the day. At least for me. Satan never needs to oppose what you never begin to rebuild. Satan never needs to oppose what you ain't rebuilding. He never needs to stand in the way of where you ain't going. So he can just go on a holiday. He never needs to rebuild anything that you have not begun to rebuild.

As we look through this, you see a couple things that are super important in verse 20. First of all, he answered them. We want to answer, but he wants to answer by truth. Who's going to save us? The God of heaven. He knows who is going to save him. The God of heaven will give us what? Success. He believed in that success. He believed, he believed in his future, and he started with God.

I gotta say, I was listening to a lot of black gospel this week. So we have a Spotify channel. If you haven't checked it out, go to LJCF. Two songs on there right now. We're going to be continuing to upload, and they've given us our own radio channel. I told you this. So if you have two songs on Spotify, they'll make a little algorithmic radio channel. And Chris has done some black gospel.

And so it's funny that if you go to our radio channel, it's not like Waymaker, it's not like all these new songs that I kind of struggle. I don't know. Lately, I've really struggled connecting with modern worship. I've just completely struggled with it. But I went to our channel, and I started listening, and I'm like, oh, this channel hits. Let's go. I'm like, all of a sudden, I wanted to worship.

And all of a sudden, I realized that the algorithm, because she did two black gospel, it's mostly like black gospel that they're singing. And like things in New York. Can somebody in the ushers go help the kids not scream outside? That would really help me. Thank you. I got some, ah, unless there's a lion attacking them. Help me out. Thanks so much. So I'm listening to this, and this is, I was like, why do I like the black gospel more than I like the modern worship?

Why can I not connect with the modern worship? Here's what I realized. If you listen, go listen to the black gospel. They start with the solution, not with the problem. I'm saying, they start with God. Like, if you listen to it, it's like, God, you are so great. You are so amazing. You will save us. If you go to a lot of contemporary, I mean, a lot of contemporary worship, it starts with like, I'm drowning in the river.

I'm horrible, and life is crushing me, and I'm miserable, and I'm going to get destroyed. God, God save me. You're so good. You're so good. I go to the black gospel, they're like, we give you the God of hope. Let's go. Hope you're goodness and gracious, and you're great, and they just start going off. They start with the solution, not with the problem. I'm like, dang, let's go.

I want some of that, so I go to our LJC, and see if I'm not right. Go to Spotify. Not right now. Go to our LJCF. Find us on LJCF Worship, then it'll give you an option to go to the worship channel, and you start listening to it. It hits, and I realize, I want to start with the solution. That's what he does here. He doesn't start with the problem. So tired of starting with the problem.

Start with the solution. He says, what he says, the God of heaven will give us success. What if you answered your problems with that? What if when you have this emotion that comes up, this fear? I get it all the time. Whatever. You know what? Fear, I'm going to speak to you aloud. The God of heaven will give us success, and I'm just his servant. I was praying this week, spending some time trying to rebuild my prayer life, right?

Because a little week. I'm going to rebuild my prayer life. You can write a book about prayer and still not pray. That's crazy, right? So I did that. So I'm trying to rebuild my prayer life, and I'm like, God, you know what? I'm trying to go through some of the ancient stuff. I'm like, God, I'm just a worm. I'm just nothing. Like, I'm just dust. But then, like, New Testament, it's like, no, but you're my son.

I'm like, okay, because of Jesus, I'm this now. Now I'm more than a conqueror. Now I'm more than this. And crossing that bridge to the God that starts with a solution. Start with your solutions. Because quit dwelling on the problem. Start with a solution. Flip that around, man. Flip that around. So we see that in this, we have this, Satan never needs to oppose what you have never begun to rebuild.

No ground was ever taken without. No ground was ever taken without understanding your authority in Christ. And that's the one thing I understood about some of this black gospel I'm listening to. They get their authority, man. I don't know if it's because you started with the slave culture and you, and it was all this oppression and that changes the mindset.

You would think that people that had the most, like, victimhood in the culture, at least in our culture, okay? Some other races, Jews that obviously have had issues. But in our culture, you would think that they would start with the problem. problem, right? Not the solution because they experienced the problem more than a lot of us. I don't know why they don't.

I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to start asking. I don't know why they don't, but I want to be that kind of person. I want to start with the solution and then we talk about the problem because the solution is greater than the problem. Next thing, we're going to finish right here. It says, we his servants, he knew who he was, will start rebuilding. But as for you, as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem.

You can say that to your thoughts. You have, whatever that negative thought is, you have no share in my inheritance. You know, self-doubt, lack of self-control, you have no share in my inheritance. I'm going to the land of the promise. Or any claim or historic right to it. You have no claim. You see, Satan's making claims about your life all the time. I want your marriage, I want your kids, I want, you know, one of these things you hear from Christian parents all the time.

Kids have to rebel. They have, no they don't. Why do we believe that? Your kids don't have to rebel. They don't have to rebel. They need to separate. You can do a healthy separation with your children without them having to rebel. We need to not buy it. I've heard so many Christians use that statement at parenting conferences. Oh, it's just natural for kids to rebel.

No, it's not. It's not natural for kids to rebel. In a healthy environment with healthy parents who love and give them autonomy and care for them, it's not normal. It is abnormal for kids to rebel. Let's start with that. In a healthy environment, it is right for kids to want to hang out with their parents, to want to be loved by their parents, to want to be affirmed by their parents, and to be with them.

We need to switch that all around. He knows who he is, and the final thing he says is this, you have no historic claim or right to it. He knew who his enemy was. Self-doubt, fear, depression, whatever it is, you have no say, you have no right, you have no historic claim to my life, and I'm going to go take it. I'm going to take the bull by the horns. I started by saying this, the enemy of your soul desires to keep your land of your promise in ruins.

I added to it last night, it's not in your notes. The enemy of your soul desires to keep your land of your promise in ruins or uninhabited. If you don't go, who cares? It'll just be a wasteland. Are you going to take your promise? It's up to you. You can choose today. Amen? Let's go. Let's stand up. I'm going to bless you. Preaching to myself. Feels good. I love this.

I love this. I love Nehemiah. This is good, right? You can't get that at Starbucks today. I'll tell you that. I want to extend your hands. I want to bless you. I love blessing people. I love this. That's my favorite thing to do. God says to Abraham, whoever you bless, I will bless you. You can do the same thing. Whoever you decide to bless, you will bless.

So God, I bless these people. If you're in your own heart right now, if you want to change, you want to make that change today, no longer want to live in the wilderness, try to tread water in the Jordan, just in your own heart right now, say I want to make a change. I'm going to ask you to raise your hand. Somebody raise your hand if you want that for your life today.

There you go. There you go. A lot of us. Yeah, let's go. God, I bless those who want that change, God. Let them understand where they are. Let them know that enemy and begin to speak your truth. We pray God's truth over you. We pray just a carnivorous desire for the Word of God that you would just have tenacity to approach the Word of God. I pray that the Word of God would come alive to you.

For anybody who would want to read it, that it would just come alive this week. The Gospels, the Psalms, the Proverbs will come alive. Your life will come alive. God would put safety and protection. He wants to put boundaries. He doesn't want you in a small little studio apartment. He wants you out in a thousand acres in Montana. He wants you living in an eternity of his space.

We bless you with space, with kindness. Take away your problems. Your problems are small compared to God. Small. We're going to start with a solution. God, let us learn from the culture of this country and those that have sung how great thou art. God, we lift you up and we give you praise. We send these people out now wanting to follow Jesus. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen. If you need prayer, yeah, let's go. If you need prayer, come forward. If you want to know Jesus deeper, come forward. We're going to pray for you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.