|
Series: Four People and One Person
Part 4 – The Hope for the Broken
by Jack W. Hayford
Text: Read Nehemiah 1:2-; Nehemiah
2:1-10
Nehemiah had hope for a city when no one else did.
The people of Jerusalem had given up hope and were in despair. They
never thought there could be the realization of that city’s
intended blessing because of a brutal, oppressive presence of surrounding
forces. Sound familiar? What was political in that day
is spiritual in ours.
Spiritual oppression surrounds many of our cities where there comes
a concentration of the works of darkness by reason of human ignorance,
blindness and rebellion, giving place to sin. Nehemiah presents
us with an attitude of heart, a readiness that will take
its place to serve God’s grace. The problems our
world faces today remind us all the more of how painful, problematic
and helpless we are apart from the intervention of God’s grace.
What are you and I to be, as people of our city at this time?
Nehemiah is a case in point of the principle of God’s commitment
to human beings. Our real worth as human beings never finds its
full discovery until we open to God’s ways,
but our worth to God is nonetheless somewhere to be found in us,
otherwise He would have never spent the life of His Son
to retrieve it. That doesn’t mean there’s any
human worth that can redeem itself, but that God delights to make
something more out of people who open to His way. It is
not to inflate our own sense of importance, but to expand
His purpose to those who we touch. It is also to bring
immense fulfillment to us who say, "Lord, have Your way in
me."
Nehemiah was such a person. Hearing of the distress of the city
of Jerusalem – ruined except for the rebuilding of the temple
– he volunteers to go launch a rebuilding project. His name,
Nehemiah, means "comforter/consoler." He came
in that capacity alongside the people of ancient Jerusalem and,
in the face of their futility and helplessness, helped them to rebuild
the brokenness of their city. Their worship of God had been restored
in the rebuilding of the temple, but the city was in shambles –
a source of embarrassment and shame to them. Nehemiah depicts a
man who says, "I’ll be a person set on saving
a city."
There is a call to us as believers to not only be nurtured in our
life with Christ, to grow in our relationship with Him, but also
to perceive ourselves as ones who the Lord is scattering throughout
our respective cities to be instruments of hope
in the midst of hopelessness, as Nehemiah was.
Please see Nehemiah as a picture of yourself – a person who
is not content to live in the comfort zone of what
you know (as Nehemiah could have in the palace of the king), but
to take your place a person who has been commissioned,
with a heart of compassion, to sense the need of others
who are in brokenness around you.
The Bible calls us to the compassion that characterizes
Nehemiah, the gentleness of heart that caused him to leave the security
of the turf where he had everything going his way. Nehemiah was
effective at rebuilding the city because first, he made
an approach to the king. This is analogous to our coming
to the King, Father God, and asking Him to endow us with resources
that we may minister to the brokenness in our world. The Lord wants
to equip us with a sense of confidence of access to His throne to
serve our task. Nehemiah asks the king for:
- Time – It takes time for God’s
redemptive purpose through us to occur.
- Authority – Just as letters of authority
were given to Nehemiah, so is authority given to us in Jesus’
name that we are to exercise in prayer. There is no demon
work of darkness that can successfully resist the advance of one
of the Lord’s own when we come in His name.
- Adequacy – His adequacy is given to us.
- Troops – The army of heaven is at our
disposal. "He will give His angels charge over you…"
(Psalm 91:11)
Nehemiah was a person who reached out to a broken city
because he loved people. In your city, may you be a person
who, like Nehemiah, reaches with the love of God, in the authority
of Jesus’ name and the adequacy of His life in you, surrounded
by the host of heaven, to restore hope and bring help to recover
the broken.
Suggested resource: Rebuilding
The Real You
Next: Part 5 – The
Power of Spiritual Dynamics
Copyright © 2003 Jack
W. Hayford, Jack Hayford Ministries, Van Nuys, CA 91405 |
Jack
Hayford Ministries
14800 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, CA 91405-2233