Faithful Families

For Jesus Christ, You have sent Your Spirit to be a helper, to be a guide, to be a comforter, to be the very, the very life of God inside of us as individuals and inside of us as a local church, inside of us as a global body of believers. Holy Spirit, thank You, thank You for moving this church to sacrificially invest in missions. God, it’d be so easy, it’s so tempting to take that giving that we receive from our folks and not channel it outside of us. But God, You’ve given us a conviction that we are going to sacrificially give because You have been so radically generous toward us. You don’t need our money, but God, what You want from us is our generosity because You know and we know that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. So God, we continue to put our treasure toward the lost coming into saving knowledge of Yourself, and that’s where our heart is.

So God, I pray for the folks that were just mentioned in prayer in this room, Father. The people that we know that don’t know You, the friends, the family members, the co-workers, the neighbors, the community members that we have a relationship with and they don’t yet have one with You. God, I pray that You would save them, that You would draw them into Your kingdom even right now, God, at this very moment, that they would know that You are wooing them to Yourself, that You have sent Your Son that they may have life and life eternal. God, please. And I pray for me right now, like Donna prayed for me, God, that You would help words flow, that You would give me a freedom in You to preach what You have given me to say. But Lord, let it not just pass through me without dealing with me first. God, I pray You give all of us sensitive hearts and spirits to what You have to say to us. Holy Spirit, would You show us Yourself this morning? God, we love You, and it’s in Your incredible name that we pray. Amen, amen, amen.

Well, hey, for the very last time, turn to the book of Nehemiah. Man, the book of Nehemiah. We have been in this series. Anybody take a guess at how many sermons, how many weeks we’ve walked through this? What was that? You counted that? Did you count that? Well, there. Oh, 17. That’s right, Caroline, 17 weeks. Man, this has been, this has been so much fun. It’s at least been fun for me. That’s why I told somebody it’s been good for me. So there we go. Am I still, am I still on? Okay, all right, there we go.

Nehemiah has been a, I would call it a saga of God’s love. It has been a saga of God’s love to revive and to restore His people, and it is His love that’s fueling all the growth and all the changes that we see happening in and through Nehemiah in the city of Jerusalem and in the region of Judah, the people of Israel. And I don’t say that’s the same for us. Same for us. We don’t have any growth, we don’t have any changes outside of God and His love, and He’s, He’s just pouring love on us. Like whenever you’re going to be mixing all the ingredients for your Thanksgiving meals, that’s just what He’s doing. He’s continuing to put love into us, and that’s what’s changing things, His love.

In the book of Nehemiah, His love produces a purity that Nehemiah is fighting for. Chapter 13, what we’ve been looking at the past couple Sundays, is Nehemiah just fighting for the purity of his people. He’s just returning them back to their standards. He’s just returning them back to God’s Word. He’s just fighting for them to love God with everything they’ve got. I mean, that’s the standard, right? Jesus, when He was asked one day, when Jesus was around, someone asked Him, “Hey, what’s the most important commandment?” And He could have said a whole host of things. He could have said giving to missions is the most important commandment. Jesus could have said, “Hey, reading your Bible, having a quiet time every day, that’s the most important commandment.” That’s not what He said. What Jesus said, the first, most important, the greatest commandment is loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. Thousands of years before Jesus, the Son of God, walked the earth, Nehemiah knew that truth because God had shown him that the most important thing for his people was for them to love.

him with all that they had. That’s all chapter 13 has been. So this morning we are going to finish chapter 13. We’re going to finish the book of Nehemiah. We don’t do this all the time, but I would say you’ve already been up a few times. Hope your knees are warmed up. Let’s stand and let’s honor God’s word for this final reading out of the book of Nehemiah, Nehemiah 13:23-31. I’ll read it aloud, you follow along.

In those days I also saw Jews who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. Half their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, but they could not speak Hebrew. So I rebuked them, cursed them, beat some of their men, and pulled out their hair. Goodness. I forced them to take an oath before God, and I said, “You must not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or take their daughters as wives for your sons or yourselves. Didn’t King Solomon of Israel sin in matters like this? There wasn’t a king like him among many nations. He was loved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel. Yet foreign women drew him into sin. Why then should we hear about you doing all this terrible evil and acting unfaithfully against our God by marrying foreign women?” Even one of the sons of Joiada, son of the high priest Eliashib, had become a son-in-law to Sanballat the Horonite, so I drove him away from me. Remember them, my God, for defiling the priesthood as well as the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites. So I purified them from everything foreign and assigned them specific duties to each of the priests and Levites. I also arranged for the donation of wood at the appointed times and for the first fruits. Remember me, my God, with favor.

Y’all may be seated. Man, this incredible final passage of what I would describe as an incredible book of God purifying His people. Unfortunately, though, our passage this morning begins with profaned love in two ways specifically. There are impure marriages, but there’s also a lost spiritual heritage. Since Nehemiah was in Jerusalem the last time, he keeps going. He’s commuting, all right? He’s commuting from Persia. Since he’s been there last time, the people have had enough time to meet and to marry non-Jews, to bear children, and raise those children to speak coherently enough for Nehemiah to return, have conversations, and understand, “I’m not using the same language they’re using. They’re not speaking the language of their ancestors.”

Now that’s an issue for a couple of reasons. The first one is that God expressly forbids this in Deuteronomy 23:3. God said, “My people, the Jews, a tribe called by my name, may not marry outside of the Jews.” So it’s bad enough. It’s bad enough that God explicitly said don’t do something, and they’re doing it, and that ought to be bad enough for us. But it gets worse than that because it’s not that God hates interracial marriage. If that was the case, then why would Ruth be in the lineage of Jesus, marrying Boaz, a Jew, and would one day be the great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Jesus? It’s not that God hates interracial marriage. It’s that at that time the worship of God was limited to Jewish culture and language. Them marrying outside of the tribe meant that their societal holiness had been damaged, their worship of God was being hindered, and ultimately God’s glory is being tarnished, like the silver that some of you may be cleaning off for Thanksgiving. Israel is meant to be a light to the nations, drawing the people of the world into a relationship of worship with God. But instead of drawing them into God’s family, the Jews, they were being drawn into the families of the nations. It’s supposed to go this way, and it’s going the other. Because of that, their children are being raised without the influence of their faith in Yahweh, the covenant name for God. What grandparent in the room doesn’t want their grandson or granddaughter being raised under the influence of Christianity? What parent in the room doesn’t want to see their child come up to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? That’s what’s going on. God’s love changes what it touches, but these folks were resisting God’s kind and His loving embrace. They were choosing the embrace of idols and the arms of faithless lovers instead of choosing God. That’s the situation that Nehemiah is stumbling into now. Hey, I want to come out of the passage for A moment. This passage is not an expose on how to do marriage well, okay? And my sermon this morning also is not an equipping seminar on how to do marriage. However, marriage is the context that many of us are either in or we aspire to, so I figure nine and a half years in, 31 years old, why not? I give you three of my best marriage tips, okay? And this is a good touch, everybody. I really mean it. I’ve got a word for singles, specifically young adults and students, middle and high school students and young adults. Marriage for Christians is meant to only be with a particular people. God has designed marriage between Christians to work, and when Christians marry non-Christians, there’s some schism going on. Think about it this way: marriage is the most intimate, meaningful relationship you can enter into in this life, so why would you hook your life with somebody that doesn’t believe the same thing you believe about everything? It never goes well. So my word to folks that are not yet married: be picky and wait. All of us would rather have waited to make a right decision than rushed into a wrong one. Amen? Amen. That’s my first tip.

My second tip, this is for the married folks in the room: marriage is meant to reveal a particular glory. In Ephesians chapter 5, the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, and he says that marriage is the living metaphor to help us understand the relationship between Christ and the church. This, this is the metaphor for the truer reality. It’s not that the relationship between Jesus and the church is a metaphor for me to understand this; it’s the reverse. So he says, husbands, love and lead your wives, love them to the degree that I, or Jesus Christ, has loved them, sacrifice yourself for them. Wives, and in a response of love, submit to and follow your husbands. So for the married folks in the room, it’s not enough to only be married to another Christian. The vibrancy of your marriage relationship hinges on whether the husband is and can lead through love and sacrifice, and the wife can follow and submit. This sounds weird. This sounds so weird. None of y’all came prepared for this, did you? But here’s the deal for the married couples in the room: give it a week. Give it a week of husbands, you stepping up to the plate and saying, “Okay, I’m going to make sure we pray before meals. Okay, I’m going to make sure that we pray over every decision we make. Okay, kids, I’m going to handle bath time,” whatever that looks like for your family, and wives saying, “Okay, I’m going to willingly follow my husband’s lead.” Give it a week. If it doesn’t work, come back to me, okay? If it does work, go to Al and say, “You know what, Jeremy did have a good idea after all.”

And then this is for everybody, my final tip, and I’ll get off this, but this is for everyone, whether you’re married or you’re not: romance and intimacy in marriage is reserved for a particular context, marriage. So for us, we must all protect holiness and preserve intimacy for the right context. We talked about the definition of purity a couple weeks now. Purity is the right enjoyment of God’s gifts in the right context. There’s a lot of great things you can do in life that, when you do them at the wrong time or in the wrong context, make a great thing a bad thing. So my pleading for all of us is that we would set up some boundaries in our lives to make sure we reserve for the right context what is only meant for the right context. I’ll let you read between the lines there.

So let’s come back to the book of Nehemiah. The people of Judah have gone outside of God’s design for marriage. That’s what’s happening. God has said, “Hey, for right now, Jews only marry Jews because I want you totally devoted to myself, I want you totally devoted to me.” But the people have gone outside of that. So after exposing how their love has become profaned, Nehemiah fights for their love to become purified. Here’s the deal: we all fight for what we love, right? Right, right. You risk your well-being to protect your family members or your kids. You push through arguments and disagreements with friends because you want to maintain that friendship. We all fight for what we love. That’s because we’re made in God’s image, and God is the one who fights the hardest for what He loves.

P.S. That’s you. God fights so hard for you. He does. He fought an unconquerable enemy that you can never defeat. He fought a journey and a path that you can never walk down without Him. He fought everything to get you, and you, and you, and all of us, and a world filled with people that need to know the hope of Jesus Christ. He fights for us, and because we’re made in His image, we fight for what we love. So Nehemiah fought for what he loved. He fought for the purified love of the people, the people of Judah, and he does that in four ways that I read them earlier. We all kind of smirked about it. First thing he does, verse 25, is he rebukes the people. Literally, that Hebrew word, he files a lawsuit against them. He is testifying in God’s court of law how the people have gone against God’s design. After saying true things about what they’ve done, he then curses them, verse 25. Now he’s not using sailor language. He’s not using bad words. What he’s doing is he’s reminding the people of what God said would happen if they broke His law. He is calling the curses of God down on them, which, by the way, if you picked up a bulletin on your way in, you’ll see something in a section called “Digging Deeper” under the sermon notes thing. Sometime this week, read Deuteronomy chapter 28 and 29 to get a full idea of what Nehemiah was citing when he’s talking about the curse for disobedience.

So after rebuking and cursing them, my man Nehemiah, he just starts beating them up. He’s beating on them. He’s pulling out their hair. He’s just physically whipping them. Why in the world did he whip them? Why would he do this? He was shaming them. He was giving them a physical experience of what they were doing in their spiritual relationship with God. He was making them feel pain and shame. It’s kind of like in the Book of Jonah, which we’ll study next summer. In the Book of Jonah, Jonah preaches the good news of God’s salvation to the people of Nineveh, again, a group of people that don’t belong to the tribe of Israel, but God loves nonetheless. So God sends Jonah. Jonah preaches a good news. He preaches a gospel, and everybody in the city starts pulling their hair out and sitting in sackcloth and ashes. They were mourning. They were experiencing shame before a holy God. That’s what Nehemiah is doing here. He’s forcing them to feel shame. Then finally, he makes them take an oath, verse 25. He makes them take an oath, saying, “You must not give your daughters in marriage; you must not take their daughters in marriage either.” An oath is a promise of intended faithfulness, especially in public. Anybody been in court? You’ve seen somebody take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, that sort of a thing. An oath, it’s a public declaration of being truthful, of being faithful. The crazy thing is the people have already done this. Chapter 10, you scroll back a few pages, you go back a couple weeks in the preaching, and you’ll see that people have already taken an oath to having pure marriages. And it makes me sit here and realize it is so easy to break my promises that I make to God. Right? Man, who hasn’t made one of those promises that go kind of like this: “Lord, I’m in a rough spot. God, if You get me out of this, I promise I’ll be going to church.” I see a couple smirks. “I’ll give more money. I’ll pray more. I’ll tell people about You. I’ll start doing good things. I’ll stop doing bad things.” And we mean it until we don’t, and we find ourselves back in the same little hole that we dug for ourselves the first time. But who hasn’t done that? That’s what the people of Judah are like. That’s what the people that Nehemiah is dealing with are like. Despite your and my best intentions, despite our most serious resolve and dedication, we all fail. We do. We fail not just because we have weak willpower. No, we fail because there is an enemy also alive inside of us, and its name is sin. Sin is a living evil inside of you that will always be warring with your desire to live a good life for God. The Apostle Paul wrote about this in Romans chapter 7. “I don’t do the things I want to do, and I do do the things that I…”

don’t want to do. Who can rescue me? Oh wretched man, who can rescue me from this body of death? Who can help me? Who can help me keep my resolve? Who can help me keep my oaths and my dedication to God? Who can help me? And you know the answer, right? It’s Jesus. It’s the Holy Spirit inside of you. You don’t make yourself clean. You don’t make yourself pure. You don’t make yourself even lovely to God. God does all that for you.

The people, they’re wrestling with their sin, and here’s the deal: you and me, we are all sinners. We don’t like to talk about that word in today’s culture. We would rather just kind of go our own little way. You don’t mess with me; I don’t really mess with you. You can make your choices as long as they don’t hurt me and my choices, and I’ll do my things. You better not mess with me as I’m doing my things, and I promise I’m trying not to hurt you in doing your things.

We don’t like to talk about sin, but the most liberating thing you can do is to take a moment by yourself and say, “It’s true, I’m a sinner.” That’s why I can’t live the way I want to live. And the moment you realize and you recognize and you state there’s something wrong, that’s the moment where you can get on a path toward doing what’s right. We are all sinners, but here’s the good news: one day you’ll be done with sin, at least for those that call on the name of Jesus.

There’s a promise of the Bible. It says this: that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord—and not you, not finances, not a person—if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, that He really did die on a cross for you, He really did take all of God’s punishment for you, if you believe that He really did die, but three days later God raised Him back to life, then you know what happens? You’ll be saved. You will be saved. One believes with the heart resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth resulting in salvation.

One day you will be totally done with sin. If you confess Jesus as Lord, if you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will behold this written in the Book of Revelation, chapter 21: “I heard a loud voice from the throne: ‘Look, God’s dwelling is with people. He’ll live with them. They’ll be His people, and God will be with them. He’ll be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Grief, crying, pain, they’ll be no more, because the previous things have passed away.’ Then the one seated on the throne said, ‘Look,’ which is just, ‘Look, I am making everything new.’ He also said, ‘Write these words, because they are faithful and true.’ Then God said to me, ‘It is done. I’m the Alpha and the Omega. I’m the beginning and the end. [inaudible] I will freely give to the thirsty from the spring of the water of life.’”

One day we will be done with sin. One day we’ll be done making [inaudible]. One day we will be done with [inaudible] God, if you will just [inaudible] then I will [inaudible]. One day we’ll be done with all that. You can step into that now. Now you can step into that now, but it begins by recognizing your need for it.

Nehemiah brought all this to light because the people were on a road to disaster, and he knew it. Marvin Brenaman, in his commentary—which is just his notes on the book of Nehemiah—he wrote these words: “Nehemiah reminds us that the tolerance of evil leads to spiritual stagnation, which leads to indifference on doctrinal matters, and the final result is moral and spiritual degeneration.”

Here’s the deal: if you tolerate evil in your life or in this church, that will spiritually stagnate you and us. If that happens, then we naturally will become lax on what the Bible says, and this will no longer be our guiding authority. And if this is no longer our guiding authority, then our lives and behaviors are just going to go off the rails.

Nehemiah was serious about sin because he knew that holiness and God’s path was the right thing for us. It’s still the right thing for us, and it’s always been the right thing. Nehemiah knew this; that’s why he, in verse 26…

Talks about Solomon. You may not have been raised in the Church. You may not know a lot about Solomon. Solomon, his claim to fame is that he’s the wisest man in all of history, not because he gone to all the best schools and read all the best books, but because God was going to make Him King. And God said, “Hey Solomon, ask for anything you want. I’ll do it for you.” Solomon could have asked for wealth. He could have asked for a big name. He could have asked for power. He could have asked for a huge Kingdom. He didn’t ask for any of that. What he asked for, wisdom. He asked for wisdom. God gave him more wisdom than anybody else, and then He also said, “Hey, because you didn’t ask for all the other stuff, and because I’m so stinking generous, I’m going to give all that other stuff to you anyways.” But this is what happens to Solomon. Verse 26: “Didn’t King Solomon of Israel sin like this? There wasn’t a king like him among many nations. He was loved by God, and God made him King over all Israel. Yet, yet foreign women also drew him into sin.” God deeply loved and He lavishly blessed Solomon, yet that was not enough to stop Solomon from ruining everything for himself and for the people of Israel. Israel would never be the same after Solomon. What was intended to be a united tribe of God worshippers drawing the nations into the worship of God became a divided nation that kept splintering and being conquered and exiled, thus leading to the book of Nehemiah. There’s no book of Nehemiah if Solomon had just obeyed God’s Commandments and God’s word and God’s wisdom on marriage. We wouldn’t have this. We would have spent 17 weeks looking at something else. But Solomon broke those things, which has ultimately led to Nehemiah having to fight for the people to purify themselves again.

The issue, though, wasn’t just Solomon’s a long time ago. In this passage, the issue is pervasive. The people and the priests, it seems like at least half of the nation, at least half of this city, were being unfaithful to God through marrying people that weren’t of the same Faith. Verse 28 says that even the high priest Eliashib, even he had married somebody outside of the Jewish faith. What’s worse, he marries one of the daughters of a guy named Sanballat. Sanballat is one of the three men who are fighting Nehemiah at every turn in this book. You back, go back to chapters four and five when the wall is starting to come up. There’s three dudes that are mocking Nehemiah. There’s three dudes trying to intimidate all the workers. Three guys, one of them, Sanballat. The issue of intermarriage is so bad that even the high priest, who’s supposed to be like the big deal, he’s supposed to be like the pastor of all the pastors for the people of Israel, even him, he’s married to one of the daughters of this guy who’s been mocking the whole thing the whole time. Everybody needs to be purified, and it all comes down to one central truth. I’ve said a few things about a lot of things. Here’s the one thing I want you to really know: God’s love purifies us. God’s love purifies us. Look, verses 28 or 29 through 31 with me again. I’m going to read them again. “Remember them, my God, for defiling the priesthood as well as the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.” We’ll come back to that word covenant. “So I purified them from everything foreign and assigned specific duties to each of the priests and Levites. I also arranged for the donation of wood at the appointed times and for the first fruits. Remember me, my God, with favor.”

That word covenant, man, a covenant is the sign. It’s this ultimate sign of God’s initiating and unfailing love. Multiple times in the Bible, God strikes a covenant with someone. He does it with Adam in the very beginning. He does it with Noah, Abraham, Moses, the people of Israel, and He even does it with us. God’s covenants with His people always begin by His initiative. They are driven by His love, and they’re meant to produce a pure love in us for Him and the things He loves. Here’s the deal: God is continually initiating love relationships. God wants to have a love relationship with you. I don’t know what a church has said to you in the past. I don’t know what the society may say to you about you and your worth, but what the Bible says is that the holy and good God of the universe wants to have a love relationship with you and not just something that’s theoretical or conceptual. No, it is real and it is personal. God wants to make His home with you and He establishes that through covenants. Covenants are these legal declarations of faithful love. And when God strikes a covenant with us, He is legally attaching Himself to us in purity and love, and He is asking for that in return. He said, “I will do everything it takes to start and to continue and to finish this relationship. I just want you to follow Me in the journey.” Man, that’s God’s invitation for you. Embracing God’s covenant love for you, displayed in and ratified by the death and the resurrection of Jesus, is the only way for you to give your pure love back to Him. The Bible describes God’s gift of love this way: For God so loved you in this way, God gave, He gave, God gave His one and His only Son, so that everyone who would believe in Him would not perish but have eternal life. Imagine it. God, the incredible, holy, perfect God of the universe, who’s got one Son, He gives that Son so that He can have you. I’ve got a son now. I love y’all. I’m not gonna give him up for you. I’m just not. God loves you perfectly and so fully, so totally, so devotedly, so sacrificially, He would give, He’d give Jesus for you so that you can have God back in return.

Jesus did this for us on the cross. Jesus lived this perfect life that you and I are designed to live. We were made to walk with God. We’re made to talk with Him. We’re made to love Him and be loved by Him. We were made for that. Your heart aches for that. The Bible says that eternity has been hardwired into you. A desire for God is inside of you. Why else are you here? You were made to love God and be loved by Him. But something came into the picture to ruin that family portrait. That sin. Sin has taken up residence here. Sin has invited itself into your life, the home of your soul, and is that house guest that will never leave after Thanksgiving. Sin is the person that you’re trying to say, “It’s time for you to leave.” But we’re all Southern, so we don’t want to say it quite like that. We say, “Well, I guess I’ll let you go now,” and they take their sticking shoes off and they kick them back. Man, that’s sin. Sin, you’re trying to say, “Well, I’ll let you go now,” and sin says, “Nah, I’m pretty comfortable here. I might actually stay the night.” And sin has stayed the night ever since, and you can’t get rid of sin. You can’t do it. There’s no amount of spiritual scrubbing you can do. There’s no amount of money you can give in the plate. There’s no amount of Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes you can pack and fill and send. There’s no amount of mission trips you can go on. There’s no amount of devotionals you can read that will ever get rid of sin. That’s got to happen for you and to you, and that happened on the cross where Jesus took the weight and the pain and the punishment of your sin on His shoulders. And Jesus is the house owner that is able to look at the intruder of sin and He’s able to say, “Get out. This one is mine.” Now, when He declares that over you, He gives Himself to you, and He covers you, and He protects you, and He’s given us a meal by which we can remember that. Jesus says, “When you get together, remember Me by this meal.” So that’s why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.