One of the things that happens when you prepare a sermon during
the week is you struggle with coming up with a title.
And this morning's title is the danger of compromise.
As I was reading Nehemiah 13, I thought, OK, what word best
encapsulates the idea or the the the essence of what Nehemiah is
trying to communicate here. And I tried to find out what and
I want to be a positive. Now the word, the title, the
danger of compromise sounds negative.
It sounds like it's in the negative side.
But then I went through the passage, went through it
carefully. While it is a message of warning
of what happens when you compromise.
And so when I use the word compromise this morning, I'm not
talking about a conversation between a man and a wife,
husband and wife team and they're debating what color to
paint the house. She wants one color, he wants
another or maybe what kind of vehicle they should buy.
He wants something that can load up a bunch of stuff in the back.
She wants something to haul all the grandkids.
You have to compromise somehow. When I use the word compromise
this morning, I'm referring to the danger of compromise on the
truth of the gospel, the truth of God's Word, the truth of
foundational values that we carry in that if we compromise
them, our life changes, direction changes, and we're
either diminished or impoverished or even go wayward.
When compromise has compromise has to do with taking away one's
loyalty to to God in this sense in in our sermon this morning.
So when eternal life is compromised in favor of the
temporal, that's always a bad move.
We do make compromises all the time.
Some make a compromise when they hit the snooze button in the
morning. 10 more minutes is OK, 1010 minutes less of the day.
We make compromises all the time.
And maybe you're here this morning, you've compromised
maybe years ago, a decision that's still affecting you
today. Maybe it's a financial
compromise and you're making payments on something you signed
and today wish badly you never had, but you did.
Or maybe you are doing something.
There's a habit in your life that you would so much like to
stop doing. But back some years ago you
started doing this, whatever it is you're doing and you should
not have. But you did, and you
compromised. Now you're doing something you
very much would like to stop, but you can't.
You're stuck. It's a habit, an addiction, you
call it, because you compromised.
Or maybe you want to start doing something you haven't started
yet, but you'd like to. You need to, you want to.
You just can't. You've made compromise after
compromise where you gave, where you pushed it out and pushed it
out and procrastinated and postponed and and now you can't
start because it gets harder as time goes by.
It's not working. Maybe you stopped doing some
good thing at one time you became convicted of and you
started a good discipline and you said you'd never stop doing
it. Like quiet time with God in the
form of self-discipline. And you got grounded and focused
and stable and healthy, in good shape and all the rest of those
things. But what happened?
Compromises. Or maybe you did one time stop
something. You wanted to stop doing it.
For years you did stop doing it and you kept that boundary
intact. And somehow, more recently, you
stopped keeping the boundaries, and this time it on one little
compromise after another, and one little inch after inch, you
just slowly compromise and you're back in it again.
When compromise happens, there's no telling where it will take
us. So the answers don't compromise.
To compromise on one's character, on one's values, on
one's goals in life is a trade that doesn't work.
It always costs us in the end. Why is life like that?
You see, we're born in a sinful world with a sinful nature,
sinful characteristics, and that's who we are.
We have desires that we shouldn't have, cravings we
shouldn't have, but we have them.
We're by human, by nature. We're sinful.
The Bible tells us in Jeremiah 17, verse 9, this prophet writes
the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
Who can know it? We're stuck with this in a
sense. It's not just wicked, he says,
it's desperately wicked. It's beyond our own selves to
even understand it. And many passages of Scripture
were instructed to put our trust in God.
That takes discipline. When we start trusting in
ourselves, we're headed for trouble.
Good intentions don't change the heart.
It takes surrender, it takes discipline.
Another verse in the Bible, Proverbs 117, says surely in
vain, the net is spread in the sight of any bird.
I think it's a very telling verse, but it does not seem that
way with people, does it? Why does it not say something
like this in vain? The advertising industry tries
to get people to part with their money.
Why doesn't it say that? Or the immoral temptations are
all in vain as people refuse to fall for them.
Why doesn't it say that? Just think of the multibillion
dollar adult entertainment industry.
See if birds flock. If birds would flock into Nets
as people fall for temptation, what would happen of the bird
world? Think about that for a moment.
True, birds don't fly into Nets. That spread in plain sight,
obviously, but they don't have the brain capacity of people.
But it's frightening how easily people will compromise on almost
anything that comes their way. We're so easily lured and
scammed into doing all kinds of foolish things, getting
ourselves into traps that destroy us.
See, the writer of Proverbs 117 does not say, now this is for
the birds. OK, they're birds.
You have it. Don't fly into Nets spread out
for you. He's writing to people to learn,
teach a lesson. We cannot expect animals to know
about traps. But we human beings were blessed
with this thing called a brain and a mind to think.
And yet so often we're worse than the animals.
Considering what we do have developed brains for.
It's amazing how easily we're duped and scammed when it comes
to animal trapping per SE. One kind of trapping really
fascinates me. It's called live trapping.
In North America, there's this thing called a wild hog
infestation, especially in in the states to have this thing.
And I like watching videos how they trap those hogs.
They have this big circular trap.
It's a steel structure like walls and heavy wire mesh and
they have it on steel post. They raise it and it's
electronically rigged so that they can trigger it with a phone
or something. And so they raise it up and
spread corn around. And then the guy who does this,
he leaves the place and has this thing raised up high.
And then with a remote camera and device of some kind, he
watches from a distance. And then eventually a whatever
you call a herds of pigs come by and they smell the corn and they
come by and they're wary. They don't like it.
They're they're, they're curious, but not, it's not safe.
It's not sure. And so little by little, they
get closer and closer underneath.
And then they start feeding on the corn and they're skittish
and the slightest thing that sets them off and they run away
and they come back again. And then they slowly get all
getting finally, finally, they're all contentedly feeding
happily on the corn. And then the guy with the
trigger and down it goes. And the pigs now, and the
frenzy. They scream in terror and fright
and run in every direction over each other and smashing to the
fence. No avail.
The closures trapped them. They're stuck.
They're doomed. The guy comes with the truck
going to pick up a trailer and then kills the pigs and hauls
them away. They were deceived into
believing they were OK with feeding under that strange
closure. They got caught.
It was too good to be true. Yeah, sure, they were skittish
at the start, but the lure and they and the sensors were dull
and became complacent. They compromised.
Let me change the story a bit. Do you see what would it be like
if this guy would mark the pigs, paint them up so he knew which
ones they were and they let them go and then kudos, catch them
again. He would say, aren't they
learning? Don't.
Didn't they learn? And then maybe 3 or 4 times.
But guess what? That's exactly what we as humans
do. We have the ability to remember,
to record, to reflect. And how is it possible that we
repeat the same things over and over again?
Why don't we learn from the mistakes of our ancestors?
Why do we have to repeat them over and over again?
Just look at politics in our time, economy in our time.
Let's leave that aside. Look at the moral climate in our
time. Well, today we're wrapping up
the sermon series in Nehemiah this morning, and we're in
chapter 13, and we see how Nehemiah had to again bring the
people back to their earlier commitments to serve God.
They had done phenomenally well. Nehemiah had come from Babylon,
done this great reform work. Ezra had started it earlier.
Nehemiah finished it, so to speak, built the wall, dedicated
the wall. A lot of good things happened
under Nehemiah. No sooner was he gone, people
went right back to the old ways as if nothing had ever changed.
We see how easily it is for people to experience God's
grace, God's mercies, God's blessings, and this protection.
And just as quickly, off they go again to what's convenient,
what's attractive, what's what's comfortable.
It's compromise. The people had experienced
reform. They'd repented.
They dedicated themselves. They'd written down the
covenant, signed it. They were done with the old
ways. It's going to be different now.
Nehemiah left for Jude, left Judea, went back to Babylon for
a little while. We don't know for sure how long.
Some years didn't stay that long came back there.
We find him in chapter 13. Then we're going to pick up the
story. It hadn't gone well.
The reforms were pretty much done.
And there's there's one little piece that we find today in
chapter 13, verse one to to two, actually verse three.
I want to read that this morning.
It says here in chapter 1 verse 13, verse one.
On that day they read from the book of Moses and the hearing of
all the people. And it was found written that no
Ammonite or Moabite should ever come into the Assembly of God
because they had not met the children of Israel with bread
and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them.
However, our God turned the curse into a blessing.
So it was when they had heard the law, they separated all the
mixed multitude from Israel. I'm understanding this was
before he went to Babylon. So there's a little bit of a
little bit of material yet that we didn't cover last time.
So in this case, the Jews hear the word of God.
By the way, these Moabites and Ammonites are not Israelites.
We cannot be together with them. We can't have anything in common
with them. They had experienced all the
blessings that finished the wall that dedicated the wall.
One final little piece was left to do.
Separate the yourself from the Ammonites and the Moabites that
cannot be part of the congregation of Israel.
Well, the reforms didn't last. Nehemiah goes off to Babylon and
he comes back and he writes what happened and the and the
compromises are insane. Absolutely mind boggling.
But then we have to think they're not that different than
today. Let's read how it went starting
verse 4. It says Now before this Elijah
and the priest, having authority over the storerooms of the House
of our God, was allied with Tobiah, and he had prepared from
a large room which previously they had stored the grain
offerings, the frankincense, the articles, the ties of grain, the
new wine and oil which were commanded to be given to the
Levites, and singers and gatekeepers in the offerings of
the priests. But during all this I was not in
Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Arctic Circus, king of
Babylon, I had returned to the king, so he wasn't there.
Then after certain days I obtained leave from the king,
and I came to Jerusalem and discovered the evil that Elias
ship had done for Tobiah in preparing a room for him in the
courts of the House of God. And it grieved me bitterly.
Therefore I threw all the household goods of Tobiah out of
the room. Then I commanded them to cleanse
the rooms and I brought back into them the articles of the
House of God with a grain offering and frankincense.
Stop there. Verse 9.
What was the first major compromise that happened?
And it's interesting Nehemiah mentions this one the first, and
it's because it's the the important one.
They're all important, the compromise of the priesthood.
What is so interesting is that when Nehemiah was gone, the
spiritual rot started right back up.
And where did it begin? Right at the very core, at the
very top. Rot in any place is bad, but
especially bad when it's at the center.
That's what Satan does. He goes to the core.
If he can destroy the leadership, then he's got the
whole, the whole place. After Nehemiah had left, it was
as if nothing had ever changed. Nehemiah was gone and the
priest, the high priest, no doubt we'll find that later.
He himself allied himself with someone who had no business
being in part of the Israelites, the Jews.
Tobiah was not supposed to be in the temple.
He was not supposed to be in the congregation at all.
He was not even among the Jews. What does this tell us about
this high priest? He was not right with God.
He was. He was in a position of
compromise. He was not doing what he's doing
for the right reasons. He was selfish.
He was focused on other things than upholding God's honor and
glory and reputation. He was focused on the here and
now, appeasing and compromising and aligning himself with the
wrong people. His life was an example.
He was leading the wrong direction.
He had formed a connection with Tobiah an Ammonite officially
find that in chapter 2, verse 10 and remember then they were
Ammonites were not allowed to be in the congregation.
He had clearly violated God's standard.
Tobiah was an enemy of the Jews. Elijah embraced him, formed an
alliance with him and then he gave him a room in the temple.
We're not even not even Nehemiah wanted to go in.
In chapter 6, remember one of Nehemiah's enemies tried to lure
him into the temple under false pretense.
Ivan, you need to protect you. Somebody's going to come to kill
you tonight. They'll come to kill you.
Nehemiah said I won't go in. He didn't fall for the trick.
He refused to enter the temple because he was not a priest.
Here's this outsider to buy. He's not just an unbelievable
he's he's against the Jews in the lash of the high priest of
all people allies himself with him.
So he had repurposed the temple for this ungodly purpose.
The temple use had been shifted from storing things needed for
the Levites to serve to this man who now occupied a place in
there. And it happened in a very short
time. We don't know exactly how long
Nehemiah had left, but long enough that a lot of things that
happened there's some some years.
Anyway, it says in verse 8 again and grieved me bitterly.
I threw all the household goods of Tobiah out of the room.
I commanded them to cleanse the rooms, and I brought back to
them, into them the articles of the House of God with the grain
offering and the frankincense. When Nehemiah came back, he took
action. He dealt with it.
He was grieved, he was sad, he was also angry.
We'll find out more about that later.
I wonder what kind of conversations Nehemiah might
have had with Elias of the high priest.
Doesn't tell us, but we can assume they were not good ones.
Where Elias ship had compromised, Nehemiah kept the
boundary. Nehemiah did what needed to be
done to bring back to the temple of the things that belong there.
So the first compromise recorded was when Elias ship, the priest
made an unholy alliance with Tobiah.
Well, there's another compromise.
Let's continue reading verse 10. I also realized that the
portions for the Levites had not been given them for each Levite,
for each of the Levites, and the singers who did the work had
gone back to his field. So I contended with the rulers
and said, Why is the House of God forsaken?
And I gathered them together and set them in their place.
Then all Judah brought the tithe of the grain and the new wine
and the oil to the storehouse, and I appointed as treasurers
over the storehouse Shalamaya the priest, and Zadok the
scribe, and the Levites pedaya. And next to them was Hanan and
the son of Zakhur, the son of Matanaya, For they were
considered faithful, and their task was to distribute to their
brethren. Remember Me, Oh my God,
concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds that I have
done for the House of my God and for its services.
It was not just the priesthood that was corrupted.
The temple ministries have been compromised as well.
It was the duty of the other tribes to make sure the Levites
would serve in the temple, take care of the ministries, and they
all those things. The Levites job was to to look
after the spiritual ministry of the of the of the congregation.
But now the temple was deserted, almost empty.
No one or seemingly very few were still doing the work.
This compromise was providing for the Levites.
Compromise was providing for the Levites.
It was their job to take care of all the ministries.
They were in charge. The temple on that day was not
just in the Sabbath morning for an hour or so.
It was a week, seven days a week that stuff was going on there
and people were coming and going all the time.
A lot of work was involved. But now it was deserted.
Pretty much the Levites who were supposed to be there, well, they
had gotten themselves their jobs back and they were again
working. They had not been given the
money that was supposed to be theirs, the resources that they
needed. And so it says he contended with
the rulers and said, why is the House of God forsaken?
The singers, the worship leaders had been been neglected.
The portions had not been given them.
And it says in verse 11 he contended with them.
He did not put up with it. He brought the brought the
Levites back, brought the house back in order.
We can learn from this. He there's always a trickle down
effect when things start to go wrong at the top, when
selfishness, greed and control start to take over.
It's only a matter of time and everything else starts to
struggle and to suffer as well. And it would be safe to say that
earlier in the book, in the previous chapters, when they
repented, when they made a covenant at that time, they
would have not believed us all. We'll never do that all we'll
never compromising all we're, we're, we're not out of that.
That's history. We'll never do that again.
They would have said that, but how strong they were was very
quickly revealed by how quickly they fell or how weak they were.
They were not beyond rebelling. It's sinful human nature that
always tends to be drawn magnetically towards sin.
And once we start compromising, we never know where it will take
us. So they had compromised the
priesthood. They had compromised the temple
ministry. Well, what else were they
compromising? Let's continue reading verse 15.
In those days, Nehemiah writes, I saw people in Judah treading
wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves of grain
that it was, and loading donkeys with wine grapes and figs and
all kinds of burdens which they brought into Jerusalem the
Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day
on which they were selling provisions.
Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish in all kinds
of goods and sold them in the Sabbath to the children of
Judah. And in Jerusalem.
Then I contended, There it is again with the nobles of Judah,
and said to them, What evil things is that you do?
What evil is this that you do, by which you profane the Sabbath
day? Did not your father's do thus?
And did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on the
city, yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the
Sabbath. And so it was at the gates of
Jerusalem, as I began, as it began to be dark before the
Sabbath, that I commanded the gates to be shut, and charged
that they must not be open till after the Sabbath.
Then I posted. Then I posted some of my
servants at the gate so that no burdens should be brought in on
the Sabbath. Now the merchants and sellers of
all kinds of wares lodged outside the city, outside
Jerusalem once or twice. Then I warned them and said to
them, Why do you spend the night around the wall?
If you do so again, I will lay hands on you.
From that time on. They came no more on the
Sabbath, and I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse
themselves. They should go and guard the
gates to sanctify the Sabbath day.
And again, Remember Me, Oh my God, concerning this also, and
spare me according to the greatness of your mercy.
This third thing we see is the compromise of the day of rest.
Note, we have the compromises ripple outward from the priest
to the Levites. Now it's the Sabbath day.
There's no stopping here. The compromise of keeping the
Sabbath day holy. That's what they did.
What was it that led them to do this, to desecrate the Sabbath
day and work on it? When commentator mentioned that
the Jews had come back from captivity, they had become
immersed in other cultures, and perhaps these Jews had been used
to working where they were in captivity before, or the nations
that had occupied their homeland.
Maybe they were working the Sabbath too.
They had been acclimatized, so to speak, in some way.
And so now keeping the Sabbath day was a bit of a stretch.
Maybe it was something new for many of them that would have
been normal to work on the Sabbath day.
But now they had covenanted. They were going to follow the
laws of Moses. They were going to go back to
the old ways, but now here in Jerusalem, Judea, it made sense.
You know, it's, it's money, it's income, but keeping the Sabbath
day holy, well, it maybe was conditional, maybe it's not,
maybe it's optional. We must put ourselves in these
shoes of these people and just try to imagine this.
You see, it makes sense in the Sabbath.
You know, it makes sense economically.
So right? After all, you got to make
money, right? That's often the thinking.
God strictly commands people to keep the Sabbath day holy.
Yet here were the people, the Jews, doing all kinds of manual
labor on the Sabbath, the day of rest.
Nehemiah saw this. He took action.
He wouldn't tolerate it. He didn't respond kindly.
At the end, it says he contended with the leaders.
He went to the source. He didn't go to the individuals
who were trading out the grape, the grapes, and hauling that
stuff. He said, why are you allowing
this to you leaders? Why are you allowing this?
He went to the source where the trouble came from, where he
needed to go to the leaders. Again, we're seventeen.
I contended with the nobles and said to them, what evil is this
that you do, that you do? The leaders, the people were
doing it, but your fault. It was the leaders who were
responsible for how the community functioned.
The leaders were the ones where the blame lay that compromised
and the people followed along. And I believe it's safe to say
here at this point in time that the leaders were not thinking,
OK, let's do evil or let's do something we know is wrong.
No, I don't believe that's what happened.
More like, you know, what can it hurt?
What's wrong with it? Why shouldn't we always question
marks behind God's commands? It was the leaders who initiated
it, and the people just followed it.
That's hard to root out. And it says, you know, the gates
had to be shut. And Nehemiah just ends it.
He stops it. Nobody's allowed to do this.
And the merchants and the sellers, they lodge outside the
city of Jerusalem once or twice and he warns them and says, I'm
going to lay hands on you. He's not talking blessing them.
He's talking about I'm going to get physical.
Now. This is, I have to say, it was a
minute. I struggle with this a little
bit. I mean, you're going to now
handle these guys or something. Are you going to what do you
handcuff them and haul them off to jail or something?
He says, I'll lay hands on you. And for that, those people
worked. They stopped.
He's going to use force. The point was, he said we got to
keep the Sabbath, the holy guys, and you can't, you can't mess it
up. He had to take strong measures.
Now under the new covenant of Jesus, we don't use physical
force in, in, in these spiritual matters.
But the point wasn't that time. They were not under the new
covenant like we are. And so Nehemiah had to deal with
this. But there's more.
You see, the compromise, the priesthood, the compromise, the
temple ministry, the compromise, the Sabbath day.
There's another one. In those days I also saw Jews
who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, and half of
their children spoke the language of Ashdod and could not
speak the language of Judah, but spoke according to the language
of one of the other people. So I contended with them and
cursed them. I struck some of them, pulled
out their hair. Now he's losing it and made them
swear by God, saying, Shall you? You shall not give your
daughters as wives to their sons, nor take their daughters
for your sons or yourselves. He's frustrated, he actually hit
them again. He's not under the new covenant
like we are, but this is what he did.
Verse 26 Did not Solomon, king of Israel, sin by these things?
Yet among many nations there was no king like him who was beloved
of his God, and God made him king of royal Israel.
Nevertheless, Pagan women caused him even to even him to sin.
Should we then hear of, should we then hear of your doing all
this great evil, transgressing against our God by marrying
Pagan women? And one of those sons of
Jehoiada Joiada, the son of Elijah, of the high priest,
there he is, was the son of son-in-law of San Balat.
The horror night intermarriage had already happened.
Therefore I drove him from me. See the compromise of marriage,
more compromise again. This was one of the sins that
had been dealt with earlier previously.
But now Nehemiah has been gone. He's come back and it's back in
again for some years already. Children are old enough to speak
languages. The Jewish men had married
foreign women, women of foreign nations that worshipped idols,
and from these marriages they now had children and these
children on mixed homes was not God's plan.
Little side note here. I've at times wondered when I
read the Old Testament why it was that God was so strict.
And we have to say, and we have to tell us.
It seems harsh, right? But what is it that makes it
such a difficult issue? I cannot help go but go back to
the beginning of Genesis chapter 1-2 and three, when God created
marriage between one man and one woman.
God called it his image. He intended it to reflect him in
anything that violates that is abhorrent to him.
And I think of how harshly God dealt with some of these types
of sins in the in in the Pagan nation, even for his own people.
For example, in the wilderness when the Israelites at one point
in time allied themselves with the Moabites, while they're
mixed with the Moabites, God was angry.
His wrath destroyed many. If you find the story Numbers
chapter 25 verse 1 to 9 if you want to read that sometime,
Numbers 25, one to 924 thousand people in Israel died for that.
When God created marriage, He intended it to be holy, and he's
serious about this. A man and woman, both followers
of God, dedicated to him in their marriage and relationship,
but not this mixed marriage stuff here.
Now the men had married foreign women, had brought disgrace to
God's name by marrying foreign women in Nehemiah's absence.
Nehemiah's response to this instance was more than just
severe. He gets physical, it says in
verse 20. Read that again.
He says I contended with them, cursed them and struck.
Some of them pulled out their hair.
They couldn't pull out my hair, but you get the idea.
They had long hair. In those days, even men wore
their hair long. He says you shouldn't do this.
And again, Nehemiah was not as severe as God was in Numbers 25
here. No one got killed.
They contended with them. Not a gentle conversation.
He was confronted. He was confronted.
He's decisive. We don't know exactly how those
meetings might have been. Well, they were not very good or
very easy. There was tension.
There was friction. I would say this, under the new
covenant, under Jesus Christ, we're not calling.
We're not called to go out and physically beat up people.
We're supposed to leave wrath and vengeance to God.
But there are times when compromise has gone to such a
point where physical just removal is important.
He says in verse 24 again. And one of the sons of Joiada,
the son of Eliashib the high priest, was a son-in-law of San
Balat the Horn. And I drove him from me.
You have no place here. You got no room gone.
Compromise had reached a level. It had gone past the point of
even discussion. He had to go.
He had to leave. Didn't matter.
He was a high priest son. I wonder how Eliash felt about
that. Maybe it was because he was that
close to the to the top authority that he had to go, But
Nehemiah put distance between himself and this man.
May sound harsh to us, but that's what compromise led to.
Again, today we're not under the old covenant called to hurt
people, but at the same time, we have to say the command isn't
all that serious. And Nehemiah even made them
swear we're not going to do this.
We're going to, we're going to stay the straight and narrow.
Now he drove. He drove this man, one man away.
And I wonder how Nehemiah must have felt coming back from
Babylon. And there's no good news.
All about compromise and waywardness and all the rest
can't have been good. You see, they compromise the
priesthood, they compromise the temple ministry.
They compromise the Sabbath day, they compromise marriage, and
they still believe they're God's people.
What's the message for us today? Where do we stand?
Nehemiah struggled tremendously with this.
Let's read further. In verse 29 he says, remember
them, Oh my God, because they've defiled the priesthood in the
covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.
Thus I cleanse them from everything Pagan.
I also assigned duties to the priests and the Levites each to
the service and to bring the wood of offering in the first of
the appointed times. Remember Me, Oh my God for good.
I wonder how tired he was. I wonder what it did to me
emotionally. We know he got angry, but here
we find his heart. He wants God to remember him.
He does this. He does this in a zeal for the
Lord. What I do know is that when I
was a young believer in a worker and got into pastoral ministry,
I had some of this weird idea that we're going to teach
everybody, going to train everybody, we're all going to be
1 happy, holy Christian family, everybody doing the right thing.
Boy, was I wrong. We'll never get there on this
side, folks. We're all in process.
We will. We will be perfect when we cross
the finish line from here to there.
We keep on repenting, confessing and correcting course.
If you hear this morning and are listening, I just want to
encourage you don't give up hope, no matter how bleak it may
look, how much you've compromised and and want to get
back on track. You can't.
You want to stay on track and you're falling off all the time.
It's not permanent. We as a church have experienced
in recent weeks some some serious turbulence.
Don't shift focus, don't derail. It can be a stepping stone or a
stumbling block, depending on how you step.
What gives me hopes? That Jesus Christ is the same
today, forever, and He always will be.
He has not changed. He died and he rose and He is
today at the right hand of the Father.
Father interceding for us. The Spirit is with us.
He modeled it for us, living a human perfect life.
Nobody else ever did. He's promised us to go with us.
He's inviting us, it gives us hope.
There's life, life beyond the circumstances He's promised us
an eternal presence with God. For now, the journey continues.
We should embrace it with joy, anticipation, what the Lord has
for us, not miserably looking what went wrong and why and so
on. Sure, we we have to remember it,
but we don't stop. Let's imagine ourselves where
Nehemiah was. He simply wanted the people to
serve, to live for God and follow God's commandments.
In the book of Exodus, in chapter 20, we have the 10
commandments that are recorded for us.
The 10 rules of life that God gave to Moses to write down
teaches people. He said if you live by them,
you'll experience blessings and if you don't, you won't.
And of course they didn't. They compromised.
They experienced punishment and discipline again and again and
again, and God never gave up on them.
God has not changed. He's still the same he was when
he wrote There's Adam and Eve in the Garden when he wrote the 10
commandments. He's still the same as it was
when Nehemiah lived, and he's still the same to us today.
Let's begin with, do we love Jesus?
When we love Jesus, we have a starting point.
Then we can start focusing and maybe the compromises will
become fewer and less and smaller and we'll win over
temptation. We'll stop stumbling so often.
I don't know where you're at today.
Maybe if you've compromised so much it's gone.
It's hopeless. No, it's not.
If there's breath, there's hope. If we surrender our lives to
Jesus, he'll redeem us. Not by reversing all the bad
financial choices we made. Or we got to.
We got to plod through those. Maybe not bringing back our
health that we ruined through substance abuse and neglect of
our body and so on. We got to live with that, maybe
not restoring a bad reputation that we ruined by being a very
bad person, but there's salvation, there's surrender.
When we surrender, there's salvation, There's hope, and
there's new life. I will encourage us today.
Let's surrender our hearts to Jesus.
Let Him fill us with His Spirit, His joy, and let us allow Him to
guide our paths and we can win. We don't have to be like the
people in Nehemiah's time in chapter 13 of Nehemiah that
constantly compromised and getting themselves into trouble
all the time. We can stand strong, we can win,
we can be victorious. Let us pray, Lord, we're
reminded that you are God. We're reminded we're human and
we're prone to sin and to compromise.
We're reminded that we need You all the time, not part time.
We pray that You will continue to draw us close and remind us
of Your holiness, of Your glory and Your calling on our lives
and our need to constantly repent and turn to You.
Thank you Lord, for Your mercy and for your grace.
Help us Lord, to see where we compromise and help us to
repent. Help us to walk with You.
We ask that Your Spirit will give us your peace in Jesus
name.