Nehemiah 4:10 Meanwhile, the people in Judah said, “The strength of the laborers is giving out, and there is so much rubble that we cannot rebuild the wall.”
When Daniel Webster was a young boy, his father left him and his brother Zeke home alone with a specific work task. When Daniel's Father returned home, Daniel and his brother had not completed the job left by their father. He asked Zeke what he had been doing, and Zeke answered nothing. Finally, asking Daniel what he had been doing, Dan said, helping Zeke. Sometimes work is left undone, but in the case of Nehemiah, he wanted to work on rebuilding Jerusalem.
Nehemiah was the cupbearer
for King Artaxerxes. He asked the King for and received permission to return to
Jerusalem, his home, which their enemy destroyed some 70 years earlier.
Instead, Nehemiah and a company of workers found the city in ruins, and its
gates lay in ashes. Most of the people of Judah were still living in captivity
in Babylon. Because of the opposition to rebuilding the wall and city of
Jerusalem, Nehemiah had to post guards while the rebuilding went forward.
The men of Judah had
become discouraged and told Nehemiah, "The
strength of the laborers is giving out, and there is so much rubble that we
cannot rebuild the wall." (4:10)
Like Nehemiah and the
workers who returned to Jerusalem, we are builders. Because of sin in the
world, the community of humankind now lies in ruin. As children of God, we as
Christians have the cure for this lost, dark, and dying world in the Gospel of
Christ Jesus. Unfortunately, our work on this most important rebuilding project
becomes very unproductive because of all the rubble in our lives. The wreckage
of unconcern for the lost of this world begins with weak prayer lives and
little or no bible study among God's people.
Satan will offer us ways
to gain fame and fortune that will keep us busy seeking after our desires and
pleasures. In the short term, this might seem like something we could do while
following God's will. However, the rubbish generated from a self-seeking
self-absorbed life will build up to a point we are blinded to our commission to
spread the Gospel to this lost, dark, and dying world.
We must remove the
unnecessary rubbish from our everyday lives to be competent and capable workers
for the cause of Christ Jesus. To possess the power necessary to make a
difference for Christ in this world, we must humbly kneel before the Father,
confess our sins, ask for forgiveness, and turn from those sins. Then and only
then will we be able to begin building a clear and clean foundation to carry
the good news of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
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