God's Not Dead

Man, it’s great to see everybody today. Thank you so much for being with us. And yeah, if this is your first time with us or first time in a long time, I just want to say welcome or welcome back. I really do invite you to fill out that Connect card on the back of your bulletin and drop it into one of the offering plates that are in the corners of our worship service area. I’d love to connect with you later this week. Do it over a phone call or a cup of coffee or something like that, whatever floats your boat.

So you may have noticed that in the front of the sanctuary, we’ve got two different piles of donations this morning. If you didn’t see on the Sauldam Facebook page, which by the way, we have a Facebook page that functions as a virtual bulletin board for all the announcements and stuff going on. You need to just search for that on Facebook. Sauldam Baptist Church will get you added onto that. That’s where a lot of details get communicated for random things like this.

So we are partnering with Charleston Baptist Association, which you see off of 526 over at 526 and Highway 17. We’re partnering with them to send goods up to a church in Western North Carolina they already had a relationship with. So we are taking collections through Wednesday night. And then on Thursday morning, all those items are getting taken up there. So if you have anything, bottles of water, cleaning supplies, shelf-stable foods like jars and cans, then please bring it up to the church between now, I guess, and Wednesday evening. And then Thursday, those things will get sent up to there. Yeah, I really want to do a good job partnering with them. And I know this is an incredibly generous church that’s going to want to take that opportunity.

Now, I also want to celebrate something that y’all have done over the past month. The month of September is Janie Chapman State Missions Offering. If none of that makes sense, that’s okay. Don’t worry about that. But as Southern Baptists, we have multiple giving initiatives throughout the year. One of them is this giving initiative for the sake of starting and revitalizing churches in the state of South Carolina. We’ve named it after a woman who used to live up in the upstate named Janie Chapman. Our church goal for that offering was $250. But I would like to share with you guys how far you surpassed that. I just need a little drum roll on the back of your pew, wherever you’re at. We raised $795 for that. So give yourselves a round of applause. Yeah. Incredibly grateful for y’all’s generosity expressed toward that. Always generous whenever we have something to really support and get behind. I would ask that you channel that same generosity toward these things as well.

So that’s what we’re gonna pray for. Like last week, we prayed for the folks that were affected by Hurricane Helene. We’re gonna pray again this morning for the very same thing. So if you’ll just grab the neighbor you’re sitting with and just pray for folks that have been either displaced or, man, really damaged or demoralized by Hurricane Helene. Y’all take it away and I’ll gather us back here in a moment. Okay? Thank you.

Father, I wanna say thank you. God, thank you for today. Lord, thank you that we woke up to sun shining. God, in an area that did see some crazy weather. Lord, but largely, Lord, we’re good. God, I pray again for the folks that were just so heavily impacted by Hurricane Helene. God, I’m just begging that you would please comfort them. Lord, you say in your word that you are the God of all comfort. I don’t have to ask you to live up to your name, but Lord, I’m asking that you would help those folks see you that way. Lord, not as disinterested or distant, removed from their suffering, but with them in the midst of it and able to comfort them, Lord. God, David said in Psalm 23 that you are with us. God, you’re with us in the shadow of the valley of death, the valley of the shadow of death, Lord. You’re with us in the deepest and the darkest moments where we are afraid and scared, even when our lives are at risk. God, you’re there with us. I pray that you would help the people of Western North Carolina and Tennessee and even the upstate of our state, South Carolina. God, I pray that you would help them to see that you’re with them, that you are comforting them, that you’re good and you’re gracious, please. Lord, thank you for the generosity of our church, not just to raise donations for them, but also, Father, to raise funds for church planting and church renewal and missions in our state. Lord, I pray that our offering of $795 would, Lord, be multiplied in Your hands. You don’t need our money. God, You created everything. You created the gold that once backed our money. God, You create all the stuff that our money is printed on and printed with. Lord, for Your own purposes, You’ve created us as a nation for however long we’re gonna be here as a nation. And God, all of these things, God, are ultimately just tools in Your hands. God, You don’t need our money. But Lord, what You want for us is generosity. And when You take our generosity, God, You can make something happen with it that we couldn’t do on our own. So Lord, I pray that You would take our generosity and that You would do something with it that we couldn’t do on our own.

Lord, I pray for myself this morning that You would get a hold of me. Father, that I would just simply preach what Your Word says. God, that You give all of us a spirit of expectation and eagerness to hear from You. Holy Spirit, help me to be sensitive to Your voice right now. Help all of us to be sensitive to Your voice, Lord. May we walk out of here treasuring You a little bit more, living a little more aligned with You, please. God, we love You. And it’s in Your great name we pray. Amen.

Well, the theme of the women’s retreat this past weekend was for the good. It’s a phrase taken out of a verse in the book of Romans that God works all things for the good of those who love Him, which means we can go through hurricanes or health struggles or financial crises, recognize those things aren’t good, but God works them for our good to produce something in us we couldn’t have otherwise. That is a lesson I am having to learn on for myself on a much smaller scale recently. If anybody isn’t tuned in to the life and times of Pastor Jeremy Simmons or his 2012 Honda Accord, then this will be this will be a little something for you.

A couple of weeks ago, I’m going to visit a couple of folks in the hospital who had had knee replacements. And it’s about noon. I’m about a little hour, 15 minutes away from the house. I’ve got Annie and Luke with me. And I’m thinking, you know what? This is a good justification to take them to Chick-fil-A, which really is just all the reason I need to go to Chick-fil-A. And we get to the parking lot and I go to turn my car on and you’ve all heard it, right? The du-du-du-du-du. And you’ve also heard that deafening silence of a car not starting. And if you’re a parent in the room, you’ve also heard what happens when kids don’t understand why the car is not starting and it’s noon and they’re ready for lunch and everything’s already been different anyways. Long story short, I got some help from some other church members that were there at the hospital with me and called Triple-A and a nice guy named Adam came and took care of me. And I’m talking with Adam and I’m like five minutes into a relationship with this guy. And I said, “Hey Adam, I don’t know if you’re a spiritual guy, but I am and I believe that you are a gift of God to me today.” And he said, “Okay.” I’m trying to begin a spiritual conversation with this guy and share the gospel with Him. And I’m realizing, okay Lord, this is a divinely orchestrated message moment. However, I need to reframe this personally. And I come to learn that he had been raised by a dad that was a Baptist, a mom that was Catholic. And he said, “I’m just kind of left drifting by myself. I don’t really know what I believe.” And I look at him and I say, “Adam, do you ever wish any of it was true?” And he said, “Sometimes, Jeremy, sometimes.”

So that was about a month ago. And then a couple of weeks ago, this was this Monday, actually, this was a week ago tomorrow. I’m taking Luke home from something. We turn on County Line Road at noon, mind you, at noon. And we’re riding at about 55, however, plus or minus, you want to believe I drive on County Line Road. And the oddest of Things happen at noon. A buck runs out of the woods. And I thought, I think to myself, it’s noon. That’s weird. I pull my foot off the gas. I’m not that slam my brakes type of guy. I pull my foot off the gas and the buck kind of runs beside me a little bit. And I’m thinking, he’s not going to do and he does it. And he runs right in front of my car. And I [inaudible] him a few times. He rolls himself a few times. Then he keeps running over to whatever he smelled that smelled nice at noon on a Monday, which leads to another conversation with another nice guy. This time, his name is Greg. He works at an auto body shop in Summerville. And we’re talking about my busted headlight and my dented hood. And at this point, I’m really frustrated, guys, because what I didn’t tell you is that before all this, I also got a flat tire in our parking lot. And this is a whole ordeal. And I look at Greg and we’re talking about the damage of Hurricane Helene and equally catastrophic, my headlight had been destroyed. And I come to learn he’s also not really a person of faith in any particular sense. I asked him, man, Hurricane Helene, stuff like that. It makes you wonder, is God really there? He said, yeah. And I wonder, Jeremy, if God is there, is He any good at all? Man, a couple of very interesting conversations that I had that I wouldn’t have had if things hadn’t happened to my car, which at this point, I guess I’m grateful for. What I want to tell you, what I want to communicate to you, what I was trying to communicate to a nice guy with AAA and another nice guy at an auto body shop is this. And this is what I want you to be able to take away from today’s sermon. God lives and He wants to live with you. There is a God. He does care. There is something that can be true. God lives and He wants to live with you. That’s what we’ve really been learning across the book of Nehemiah. By the way, if you have your Bibles, go ahead and open up to Nehemiah chapter seven. I’ll meet you there in a moment. Nehemiah is this figure in the Old Testament who is leading the people of Judah, it’s southern portion of Israel, specifically in the city of Jerusalem. He’s been leading them through a process of revival and restoration as they have been rebuilding their city, rebuilding their walls. Nehemiah has been God’s instrument for the people of God to be worshipers of God once more. And we’ve seen God be so active in this book. In fact, two weeks ago, I was preaching and I said the word God, God’s name is brought up like 80 times in this book that has 13 chapters. If you went through it, you would see all the various things that God does. It’s so clear from the book of Nehemiah, God lives and He wants to live with us. There’s four expressions of how God lives with us in Nehemiah chapter seven. The first one is this, the living God finishes what He starts. Pick it up with me in Nehemiah chapter seven, verse one. When the wall had been rebuilt and I had the doors installed, the gatekeepers, singers, and Levites were all appointed. Then I put my brother Hanani in charge of Jerusalem along with Hananiah, commander of the fortress, because he was a faithful man who feared God more than most. I said to them, do not open the gates of Jerusalem until the sun is hot and let the doors be shut and securely fastened while the guards are on duty. Station the citizens of Jerusalem as guards, some at their posts and some at their homes. The living God finishes what He starts. You see, the whole book of Nehemiah begins because the walls and the gates have been destroyed. Here at the very beginning of chapter seven, out of 13 chapters, the project’s done. In fact, we’ll learn it only took them 52 days to rebuild a couple miles of walls and gates that would encircle the city of Jerusalem. God finishes what He starts. He finishes this wall and He even sets up defenses. Verses one and verse three. You see, guards had been assigned to the gates. They had been assigned along sections of the wall. They had even been assigned according to family homes. God was finishing what He started. But the best expression of that is the fact that in verse two, we see Leaders are being appointed. You see, not just anyone can lead in God’s kingdom, apparently, according to the book of Nehemiah. If you look back at verse two, you would see that Hananiah’s qualifications were character-based, not competency-based.

You see, I believe, and what I believe the Bible teaches about leaders for God’s kingdom is that God puts character higher than competency. God’s ultimate desire is that those who would lead His kingdom, and hopefully, fast forward a couple thousand years post-Jesus, once the church is established, those who lead churches would be folks of high character. You see, there’s tons of books you can read about competency. I can go to seminars and get more competent, or I could just do the job and get feedback from you guys, and I could grow in the skills of competence. But if there were no character in me, then all the competency in the world wouldn’t amount to very much.

I think so often in life, whenever we are looking for someone to lead something, we want to look at who has the best competence, who’s got the most accolades, who’s got the most business experience or whatever it is for you that you value. And what God was telling Nehemiah, verse 2, to Hananiah, not because he built the most or put up the most bricks in the wall, not because he understood the mechanisms of defense better than anybody else. No, it was because he was a faithful man who feared God more than most.

In fact, if you got a bulletin on your way in, here’s something I want you to do this week. Look at those digging deeper questions on that sermon handout. One of them talks about the qualifications in Acts 6 and then 1 Timothy 3. I want you this week to go through those qualifications and look at how many competencies are listed versus the character qualifications. And you’ll get a taste of what I’m trying to communicate right now. For God, to finish what He started, He was going to appoint leaders, and those leaders had to be folks of high character.

You see, in the same way, God will one day complete His ultimate work, not a building project of a wall around Jerusalem, but His ultimate work of saving and redeeming His people. One day we will be done raising money for church planting. We’ll be done gathering supplies for hurricane relief. We will be done fighting the sin that is at war within us. We will be done with sin and struggle because one day God will complete His plan.

You see, this is God’s plan for you. And we’ll put it on the screen because I think some of us are better with the visuals than with the verbals. You see, God’s plan for you is that He designed you well. In fact, the Bible says very well, very good. God’s design is that we would live an intimate relationship with Him. We will be made in such a way that we would have a perfect love connection with the God of the universe. But one day that design broke down. Adam and Eve, the very first people, they chose to sin instead of always obeying and honoring God. And through that sin, there was a separation. If God existed in one place, it’s sin is like, I’m going to remove myself and I’m going to walk to the other side of the room. I’m going to get away from God’s presence. And that’s what happened. Sin created a separation between us and God, which means we live in a state today of brokenness.

Every person in this room, the 12,000 people that are in an eight mile radius of us right now, the 8 billion people on this planet, we all live in a state of brokenness. Though God’s design for us was perfect, when sin came into the world, that perfection was broken. And we all try to fix that brokenness in various ways, right? For some of us, it’s things we consume, alcohol, drugs, stuff on the internet, stuff through the screen. And we try to consume that. And it’s like a bungee cord. We try to run away from our brokenness. We try to fix it. But that thing always pulls us back to brokenness.

Or for others of us, we try to fix it through religion, matter of fact. And we think, man, if only I do all the right things, I do all the good stuff, if I avoid the bad things, if I pray enough, if I read my Bible enough, if I go to enough women’s retreats, then maybe, maybe one day God will forgive me. But we can’t escape the brokenness. That’s why someone had to come and fix the brokenness for us. And you all know who that person is, right? Who’s that? Jesus. That’s not Jeremy. It’s not Pastor Al. Wasn’t John Moore. Wasn’t Preacher Newton. It won’t be whoever’s gonna be pastor in 40 years. The Savior of the world is Jesus Christ. The one who could cross the chasm and the gap of the separation between us and a holy God who would come and live with us.

You see, Jesus Christ is God. And He came down to this world. And after coming down to this world, Jesus was put up on a cross so that anybody who would trust in Him would be forgiven, not because of all the good things they did, but because on the cross, God put the full wrath and penalty of our sin on His shoulders. And after dying on a cross and being laid in a grave, Jesus ascended out of that. He came back up. He was resurrected. God died. 2,000 years ago, God died, but God came back to life, securing for us forgiveness.

This is all part of God’s plan. So how do we access that forgiveness? Oh, that’s easy. You just turn and believe. You just repent and trust. You would turn away from your sin and you would trust God instead. And if we turn away from our sin and if we trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation, that we can come back to God’s design. We can walk in a state of restoration and redemption right now that one day will be brought to completion.

That is God’s plan for you. God’s plan for you is that you will be saved through Jesus Christ and then be released back into this world to accomplish God’s work until one day when Jesus Christ comes back and makes all things right.

By the way, this is for free. If you’re a little curious about how to do what I just did, about how to share your faith with others, that I want to invite you this Wednesday night. Carter is going to take us through training and he’s going to show us how in the world can we share that message of hope with people that we meet at Publix or in the neighborhood, folks we work with or that distant family member that we kind of written off. Come on Wednesday night, have dinner at 515. It’ll be great. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s going to be great because it always is. And then at six o’clock, hang out with me and Carter and everybody else and we’ll walk through that.

So we come back to the story of Nehemiah. I want to encourage you because take heart. The story of Nehemiah tells us that the Lord comforts His people and always keeps His promises. God always keeps His promises. He always finishes what He starts. That is who God is. For now, in 2024, we cling to those promises and we wait for His second coming. And I believe in the here and now, you and me, we can enjoy a dynamic relationship with God. Not a busy one. Not a really active church life. We can have that too. We can enjoy a dynamic relationship with God is what I said.

That’s because we will see God speaks. That’s the second expression of life with God that we see in this passage. The living God speaks with us if you’re a note taker. Read it with me in verses four through seven. You see, the city was large and spacious. We’re back in Jerusalem now. The city is large and spacious, but there were a few people in it. No houses had been built yet. Then my God put it into my mind to assemble the nobles, the officials, and the people to be registered by genealogy. I found the genealogical record of those who came back first and I found the following written in it. These are the people of the province who went up among the captive exiles deported by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Each of them returned to Jerusalem and Judah to his own town.

They came with, I’m gonna go a little further. They came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Rahamiah. Anybody thankful you’re not reading these names publicly right now? Here’s the rule. Fast and confident, then you’re good, all right? Y’all don’t know any better. Mordecai, Bilshan, Mizpareth, Bigvi, Nehum, and Ba’anah. Ba’anah. If you’re looking for a baby name, Megan, Ba’anah, okay? The number of Israelite men included. And this isn’t on the screen, I just wanna read it. Parash’s descendants, 2,172. Shephetiah’s descendants, 372. Aras’ descendants, 652. Pehath, Moab’s descendants, Jeshua’s, and Joab’s descendants, 2,818. I won’t belabor the point. Nehemiah took excruciating detail. Check out that historical committee, Mary Lou. Excruciating detail, right? There was a log of everybody. You would go down, and you would see, if you jump down to verse 66, the whole combined assembly numbered 42,360.

You see, originally, God had promised to Abraham that He would make them a nation that couldn’t be numbered. God originally promised to Abraham that they would be more than the sand on the seashore. Yet, after all the destruction and the exile, the amount of people that returned back to the city of Jerusalem was 42,360.

You see, as God finished what He started with the wall, another problem has revealed itself. Verse four says, the city is large and it’s spacious, but there’s only a few people in it and no houses had been built. Here’s the deal. An empty city would be a vulnerable city. So, God speaks. He speaks to Nehemiah and He gives Him the solution. He gives Him this idea to settle the city, which He would do based off these genealogical records.

Do you remember the last time Nehemiah gathered all the nobles and the leaders? This would have been a few weeks ago. This is back in chapter five, verses one through 13. You know what he did whenever Nehemiah last gathered all the leaders and the nobles? Nehemiah called them onto the carpet because they had been exploiting the poor. The last time all the nobles and the leaders had been gathered, Nehemiah was taking them through the ringer because they had been buying off all the land of the poor just so that the poor families could eat. They were buying the children of the poor as their own slaves. They were even buying some of those children and selling them as slaves to foreigners.

God did a number on these folks. The last time these folks were gathered, the nobles and the leaders, it was for their judgment. God gathers them again, not for their judgment, but to put them into His city of Jerusalem. This is for free of wealth. Gathering these folks again in order to put them inside of His special city tells me that God can overcome the junk we do and the sin we commit. God can always overcome what we do. No one is too far gone for God’s grace and His mercy and His redemption. However, we have to be repentant and listen to His voice.

Do you believe God is not done with you? I mean this literally. Do you believe that God is not done with you? Or do you think that God’s done with you all that He can do? Do we think God’s done with our church? Do we think God’s done with our community? No. He’s not done with you or me or us or Ravenel or the Lowcountry or America. He’s not done with us.

However, for us to experience fresh waves of grace and mercy and life with God, that means we have to be open to hearing His voice and responding to His waves of mercy with our own waves of repentance. I said it a few weeks ago. I’ll say it again. Revival requires repentance. We have to be constantly repentant to enjoy God’s constant grace and mercy.

You see, the living God spoke to Nehemiah and I believe He wants to speak to us. God wants to speak to us. The holy God of the universe can and will speak. He can. There’s another question for you. Are you in a position to hear God’s voice? Reading, experiencing God right now in the Blackabees, they say that there takes four, or that God speaks to us in four ways. He speaks through prayer, He speaks through His word, He speaks through fellow Christians, and He speaks through the circumstances of life.

God got my attention loud and clear that third time something happened in my car last week. I’m still trying to figure out what He was saying but He was talking. God wants to speak with us and when God speaks He intervenes in a real space, real time. Look again at all those names of verses 6 through 69. These are real people, real families. God’s, His words have a real impact on the real lives of people around us. These are real people who would have remembered the stories of God’s faithfulness in the past. Real people who were wrestling with sin and doubt about God’s promises and hope for the future. Real people, when God speaks, real stuff happens. Really, it’s real. God wants to speak with us. I believe that God is big enough to Speak and we be able to hear. God is big enough for that. God speaks and works in the real day-to-day details of our lives. And one of the most beautiful and meaningful ways He does that is this third expression of life with God. If you’re a note taker, write this. The living God purifies us. Oh, what good news that is. The living God purifies us.

Look at verses 63 and following with me. You see, Nehemiah had just listed a bunch of families. He had listed a bunch of temple servants. He had listed a bunch of Solomon’s old servants. And now he gets to the priests. Verse 63. From the priests, the descendants of Hobaiah, the descendants of Hakkoz, and the descendants of Barzillai, who had taken a wife from the daughters of Barzillai, the Gileadite, and who bore their name. These searched for their entries in the genealogical records, but they could not be found. Uh-oh. So they were disqualified from the priesthood. The governor, that’s Nehemiah. He’s the governor. Nehemiah ordered them not to eat the most holy things until there was a priest who could consult the Urim and the Thummim. The whole combined assembly numbered 42,360.

Apparently, there was a discrepancy about the qualifications of some of those priests running for those temple positions, mainly about their family of origin. That would have represented some ceremonial purity for them. Now, see, to serve as a priest in the temple, you had to go through a number of ceremonial purity filters. I mean, for one thing, it’s only of the tribe of Levi that any of those folks could have served in the temple. And amongst that entire people group within the broader family of Israel, only a fraction of them got to serve in the temple. And for this situation in particular, they had to have bona fide, verified genealogical records.

Now, apparently, there were some folks that were trying to serve as priests, I would imagine, with good hearts. They’re trying to serve as priests, but their background, or at least their certifiable records, didn’t quite measure up. So God does something. He cuts them from the team. Does that seem a little harsh to you? It kind of does to me, I’ll be honest. I bet these are some nice guys. They’re just trying to help people worship God in the temple. They’re just trying to help restart some stuff in the city of Jerusalem, and God just kind of cuts them off. Anybody else feel that tension here?

But the thing is, for temple worship to work, there had to be utmost standards of purity and holiness. And God is such that because He is holy, we must then be holy. I want to take you back to that three circles gospel presentation I shared with you a minute ago, though. Here’s the deal. None of us can make ourselves holy. There’s not a single person in the world that can clean themselves up enough through religion or good deeds or good intentions so that they would be approachable before a holy God. There’s not a person in this world that can merit God’s grace and His mercy. There’s no Billy Graham good enough because before God, all of our righteousness is like filthy shop rags. None of us are holy before a pure and good God.

So God, in His grace and His mercy and His kindness, He purifies us. If He was so dedicated to the purity of the temple worship, how much more dedicated is He to our lives being pure before Him? Here’s the deal. We don’t worship at the temple anymore. That doesn’t mean the temple’s gone away. No, Peter says it in his letter to some churches that we believers are like living stones being built up together into the temple of God, which means we don’t just come to church on Sundays and Wednesdays. We are church. We don’t come to a temple to offer our donations or our gifts at the altar. Our lives, as Paul said in Romans chapter 12, are to be a living sacrifice, a living gift to God because God does not just dwell at 5945 County Line Road in Ravenel, South Carolina. No, God dwells wherever I am at the latitude and longitude of this earth, which means if God’s gonna take up residence with me, He is going to purify me.

We cannot have the living God living inside of us and hold on to anything He hates. God will not have half-hearted purity. He won’t have 98% purity either. God deserves and requires and creates 100% purity. Think about it this way. Imagine there was a married couple at our church. On the surface, Everything’s really nice. Devoted dad, really engaged husband, always cared for the family and made the breakfast and made the lunches, even helped out with dinner time to time. But one night out of the month, every month, he wasn’t home because he was with another woman. One out of 30, he was cheating on his wife. Would we say that was pure or impure? You know it, I just need you to say it.

Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said that anytime a man looks with lust at a woman, it’s as if he’s committed adultery in His heart. He says the same thing about murder, right? What if there was a man in our church who every five years said, you know what? I think I’ve earned one murder this year. This is preposterous, right? And he goes and he does it. And we all knew about it. And we said, well, that’s just crazy Bob, man. You’re just going out doing something. Jesus said, if you have anger in your heart towards somebody, if you call them names, it’s as if you’ve murdered.

You see, we look at ourselves and we say, man, 29 out of 30, I’m doing pretty good. We look at others and we say, 29 out of 30, man, that’s a guy for us. Guess what? Best, I’m 29 out of 30. Before God, I’m zero out of 30, which is why I need God to purify me. You need God to purify you. We, before God, are all impure.

Here’s the good news of the gospel is that God loves you as you are and He will accept you as you are and He does not leave you as you are. The holy God of the universe, when He takes up residence in your heart by you repenting and believing in Him, hear it, not praying a prayer, not earning His forgiveness, not coming up to the front during the last song, though all those things are good, those things can’t earn you God’s forgiveness. You are forgiven by God because He has chosen to give you His grace in Jesus Christ because you’ve repented of your sin and you turn to Him. When you do that and you invite God into your heart, He starts cleaning up.

And like C.S. Lewis said, we get comfortable when God starts getting the cobwebs out. We get a little uncomfortable when God starts moving some of the furniture around. We don’t realize God starts knocking down walls and building on additions because when the God of the universe takes up residence in your heart, He’s gonna turn your cottage into a castle so that He can rule your life from a position of authority.

That’s what God is after in you and in us and in our world. That’s why sin is such an affront to God because it’s us telling God, God, you’re not in charge. This is my domain, my kingdom. I have it how I want. That’s not God’s plan for you. God’s plan is to purify us. You see, there’s always a cost to being purified by God, but the gain is always greater than anything we could ever give up.

You see, if you place your faith in Jesus Christ, you have a position of being saved. Your life is like this microphone. This is you. This is Jesus. When you give your life to Jesus, you are in Christ. You are in Jesus. Nothing can ever take you out. Jesus said that no one ever plucks anybody out of the Father’s hand. And what Jesus did on the cross and in the grave and conquering both those things for you, that stands eternally for all time.

But you also have a functional relationship with Jesus. That’s more like a river. Sometimes we put rocks, and logs and sticks and leaves in the river and it stops up the flow and it gets a little stagnant. You’re still a river, you’re still in Jesus, but the quality of your relationship with God just isn’t there. What I’m talking about is the river. God wants to clean up the river. He did that in Nehemiah’s day, He’s doing that today.

You see, in this chapter, we’ve seen the living God finish what He started, we’ve seen Him speak, we’ve seen Him purify, and finally, as we begin to close, we will see that the living God is worth everything. Let’s finish it out together, starting in verse 70.

Some of the family heads contributed to the project. This is to restart the temple. The governor, Nehemiah, he gave 1,000 gold coins, 50 bulls, and 530 priestly garments to the treasury. Some of the family heads gave 20,000 gold coins, 2,200 silver minus to the treasury for the project. The rest of the people gave another 20,000 gold coins, 2,000 silver minus, and 67 priestly garments. The priests, Levites, gatekeepers, temple singers, some of the people, temple servants, and all Israel settled in their towns.

Now, I gotta confess, I am not a day trader. I do not follow international currency very well, but to the best of my ability, I have calculated some of the worth of what the people gave to restart the temple. Originally, the unit of measurement for the golds that is mentioned in verses 70 and 71 is called a drachma. Gold, it’s got high value, which means those coins are very small. The original way that you would measure it is 1,000 drachmas, which today would equal nine pounds of gold. According to Google and Fast Money or whatever I got this from, nine pounds of gold today in America equals $29,560. There was 5,000 of that given, which would equal $147,000 and some more.

Now, silver was measured in a minus. One silver minus equals 1.25 pounds. That’s $300 roughly. All the silver combined is $1.2 million. Take all the gold, take all the silver, and this is what you get on the screen for us. $1.4 million with a cool $7,800 and four cents on the side. That’s not to include the priestly garments, which would have been studded with precious stones. 537 of those were given and all the ceremonial bowls. I can’t exactly verify this, but I think the ceremonial bowls are probably what your grandma used at Christmas, all right? Think about all the worth and the value of that and multiply that by about 60, then you get an idea of what’s going on there. That’s an extremely high cost.

Now, we could calculate all that down to the person. We don’t need to do that. Well, we need to recognize that there was great personal cost for people to get the temple worship back up and running because they believed God lives and He was worth it. I had to ask myself this week, what is God worth for me? I ask you, what’s God worth for you? What’s He worth giving up for? I believe that any season of spiritual progress in your life or in the life of our church is going to require sacrifice. It’s going to require sacrifice. So what’s the living God calling you and us to give? What’s He calling us to give?

For me, a few years ago, I had to sacrifice my dream of what my future was going to be. I had to sacrifice my comfort. You see, Becca and I, God was calling us overseas. And from the moment that I started following Jesus as a teenager up until that time, about seven or eight years, all I ever wanted was this right here, be a pastor of a local church. It was so clear God was telling me to say no to that dream and to said go overseas. God was calling me to sacrifice something for me to know Him more deeply and to live in response to Him.

I’m just curious, what’s God calling us to sacrifice? In fact, I want to invite you to do something with me. We do this occasionally. I call this open hands prayer. If you’re curious about what God might be calling you or us to sacrifice, what I want you to do is to show me your palms and then just put the backs of your hands in your lap so that your palms are up. The interesting thing about this posture is that this is both how you give and receive. This is how you receive a gift at Christmas. It’s also how you would offer something to somebody. And what I believe God wants us to do is He wants us to give Him something for Him to give us something.

So do this, close your eyes and sit in a posture of prayer and pray with me, God, what do you want me to give? What are you calling us to give? For some of us, it might be financial comfort or literally a prized possession. God might want us to give those things up and give them to Him in some way for us to have a deeper life with God. For some of us, it might be an unhealthy relationship with somebody that we know is dragging us away from the Lord. For others of us, it might be a pet sin, honestly. It might be that we’re gossiping, that we live with gluttony, or that we approach our lives with greed. Probably for all of us, what God is also Wanting us to give is time and energy that we’re giving toward entertainment, social media, TV, that we would spend that with Him instead. Promise you, church, whatever it is, it is worth giving to God and having more of Him. You see, God is alive and He wants to live with you, and He’s calling you to give Him something so that you can know Him more deeply. I want you to sit in that posture of prayer and offering to the Lord as I invite Donnie up. The very best way for us to respond in moments like this is to sing truth, to sing that God is worth our lives, to sing about how incredible He is as a declaration of our desire for Him and our desire that He would act in us. I want to invite you, let’s sing about how worthy the living God is.