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[0:00] Good evening, everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday Night Bible Study. We're continuing our look at the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament. We're in chapter 9 of Nehemiah.

[0:11] Last week, we had the beginning of the festival of the booths, where they gathered for a fall festival to remember what God has given them, a lot like our Thanksgiving in some ways.

[0:21] And they had read the law every day, and the people were feeling some remorse about hearing the law and what they had done wrong. We had talked about how sometimes we do wrong, and we don't even realize it.

[0:35] We have a lot of that going on in our culture today. People who find themselves doing something that they shouldn't have done, but they weren't aware that they were doing something wrong.

[0:46] It could be all this issue around Black Lives Matter, or it could be all these issues around even the coronavirus, where we find ourselves doing things that are really not the right thing, but we weren't aware we were doing it.

[1:01] Let's get right into chapter 9 and start out. It says, On the 24th day of the same month, the Israelites gathered together, fasting and wearing sackcloth and putting dust on their heads.

[1:15] Now, that's not something we normally do. So fasting is when we refrain from a meal or something like that and respect for God and to prove the commitment and the depth of our faith.

[1:29] So we associate it with the season of Lent. We'll give something up for the season of Lent. Or maybe for some people, they will fast once a week or something like that and not eat meals from morning to night.

[1:43] In the Muslim faith, they just completed Ramadan, which is when they don't eat during the day and they only eat in the evening. And so the fast is during the day.

[1:57] Now, sometimes people actually don't eat from sundown to sun up. And so then after that, they eat a meal we call break fast, breakfast as you might refer to it, which is the breaking of the nighttime fast.

[2:17] That's what the word actually means, to break the evening fast. So we do that as a sign of our commitment to God. So they were fasting and they were wearing sackcloth.

[2:28] Sackcloth is like burlap bags. It's not very nice. It's not very comfortable. And it's designed to show humility. So it'd be like wandering around in life wearing black plastic garbage bags in our culture.

[2:43] They will cover us, but it's certainly not a fashion statement. It's not something people are going to look at and say, wow, aren't those people stylish? At least I hope they wouldn't. So the idea is to show that you have put away yourself and are lifting up God.

[2:59] You're not worried about what you look like or who you are or how you're held up, but only about God. And then they also talked about putting dust on their head. Another sign of commitment to God and humility from dust you came to dust you shall return.

[3:18] So we put dust on the head on Ash Wednesday when we put the sign of the cross and mark people's head and remind ourselves that we only are dust in the end.

[3:30] They say something like 98% of the body is water and the rest is a small amount of dust that could fit in a container about like that. So what we are really is just a small little pile of dust.

[3:42] And compared to God, we are nothing. We are nothing. So they put dust on the head. And by the way, dust on the head is not a comfortable thing. They would anoint people sometimes with oil.

[3:56] That was a soothing and healing thing. It's like putting conditioner in your hair, right? To make it softer and nicer. Imagine putting dust in your hair. You ever get to where you work really hard and you get so dirty that your hair is full of dirt or dust or something.

[4:11] And one of the most beautiful experiences in life is to go into a shower and wash that away. Just like God washing away our sins in baptism, right? So that's what the symbolism is of these three things.

[4:26] In verse 2 it says, Those of Israelite descent had separated themselves from all foreigners. So they are clearly marking off themselves as a people separate, a people of God.

[4:41] They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the sins of their ancestors. Now, before we get into their confession, let's talk about this separation, which is going to come up again and again in the chapters that we're going to read and the chapters we've already read.

[4:58] And that is this idea that somehow we need to separate ourselves. We do, in a way, separate ourselves. It's part of the reason why we gather for worship.

[5:10] It's one of the things we miss, is to be around people of like mind, like thought, like belief, where we can freely express who we are and what we are without any concerns that people will misunderstand what we're about.

[5:25] It's an important thing. And there's a cohesiveness to being a part of a group that's very much like us, has the same ideas, same thoughts, same feelings about things, as you'll see soon, who has the same history.

[5:43] And we're going to talk about the power of history for a people. So it creates a sense of drawing people together. But there's also, in the process, an exclusion of others.

[5:56] An exclusion of others. And so at some point, we have to ask ourselves, is the intention more to be a called apart, separate community, or more to bring others into the community of God.

[6:14] This is a struggle that people of faith have wrestled with since the beginning. When do we invite the peoples around us to become part of us, which the Israelites did when they came out of Egypt?

[6:30] And even the Bible talks about welcoming the foreigners and the strangers amongst us into our midst, which we do when we say that we want to bring people to Jesus Christ or help them to come to understand the saving and blessing faith experience we have.

[6:47] When do we reach out to the community, the world around us, to bring people in? And when we need to say, no, this is who we are. And we need to set boundaries to demonstrate that we aren't the same as everyone in the whole world.

[7:01] That our faith in God and our beliefs in God and the things we hold to are different. If we believe everything and we accept everything, then we actually believe really nothing.

[7:16] Because believing everything is believing nothing. So somewhere we need to draw boundaries. We need to put up limits. And this is a difficult thing. Because on the one hand, when we open up, we bring people to God.

[7:31] On the other hand, when we open up our lives to everybody and all around us, we can find out that the faith and the beliefs we have are diluted into almost nothing. So there are reasons why people like to gather with folks like them.

[7:46] It's nice to be around people that talk the same, act the same, feel the same, look the same, and have the same belief system. But it's also very hard if it becomes something that looks exclusionary or judgmental, where it can appear as if somehow the group that are homogenous are trying to suggest that people who don't look and act and talk and believe like them don't have a place with them.

[8:15] So Nehemiah wrestles with this a lot. It's a problem that goes all the way through the book and I think creates a lot of problems for the people around them. And it creates a problem as they try to discern how to be the people of God.

[8:31] Now they were in a unique situation where, for the most part, their faith was considered a minority faith. An unusual small little group of people had it.

[8:42] So there was a great temptation to become a part of the larger culture and therefore forsake the beliefs and take on the beliefs of the people and the customs and attitudes of the people around them.

[8:55] So one of the ways in which people who are of a small minority faith, whether it be Christian or Judaism or Islam or any other of a number of faiths, is that you collect yourself in a contained community where you can feel that sense of purity and connectedness and that closeness and that bond.

[9:19] But the Christian faith was not intended for a small little group of people. It was for the whole world. So this is the back and forth. And we have this going on in our churches and in our culture today.

[9:32] So it says, they separated themselves from all foreigners. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the sins of their ancestors.

[9:42] So not only did they acknowledge that they had sinned, but they acknowledged the sins of their ancestors.

[9:59] Not only do we need to be responsible for the things that we have personally done wrong, but also for the things that the people we call ours have put upon the world.

[10:14] It's a little confusing sometimes. But the truth is, is we have a responsibility to some degree to own our heritage.

[10:28] Now, we're in the midst of a lot of struggle over racial issues. And I've had people talk to me about it from different perspectives. And I understand this isn't an easy subject.

[10:38] But I think it's important, especially in light of the fact that Nehemiah is excluding people who aren't like him and that they're confessing the sins of their ancestors. Because at that point in time, they may be guilty of that sin of exclusion, of pushing people away from God.

[10:58] And at the same point in time, while they recognize that their ancestors sinned, do we always recognize our ancestors sin? Many years ago in the United States, we had an institution we called slavery.

[11:16] It was based on the idea that there was a belief among some people, not everyone, but some people in our culture, in our nation, in our world, that certain people, it was all right to enslave them because they were considered to be not quite human.

[11:36] I know that doesn't even make sense to many of you. But they somehow convince themselves that these people were not quite human. We do that all the time, by the way.

[11:47] We don't seem to think we do. But if we can take the people that we have a problem with and take away their humanity, then we can treat them disrespectfully.

[11:59] And this goes in both directions. So in other words, a police officer, if they're just a uniform, if they're just a caricature, we can treat a lot different than if they're our neighbor, than if they're somebody we go to church with.

[12:16] So it doesn't matter what we're talking about. It's when we take people and dehumanize them, when we take their value as a human being and reduce it.

[12:28] In some ways, that's what Nia Damiya was doing with the people who were of a foreign background. So what we have is we have this cultural idea that came about in this country that we could treat people who were not the same white-colored skin, or it's not really white, but Caucasian, as less than human.

[12:55] Nations do this in war. The Germans were no longer people. They were the Huns. The Japanese weren't a civilized nation.

[13:06] They were Japs. We had all kinds of other names that we could call people, but we were dehumanizing people. Now, why am I bringing that up? Because it's talking about the sins of the ancestors.

[13:18] Now, my ancestors, on my father's side, came from Germany, so I could say, well, these weren't my ancestors. My ancestors were guilty of creating a culture that ended up with Nazi Germany, so I guess we could blame that on my ancestors.

[13:35] And even my ancestors on my mother's side that were in this country during the time of slavery were in the North and were more likely to be a part of the abolitionist movement than slaveholders.

[13:46] But still, there is a collective responsibility to accept fault for the sins of our ancestors that have led to our privilege and possibilities today.

[14:03] Now, a lot of you don't want to hear that. I understand that. It's hard. But I know, I know that there are certain qualities about people that give them privilege.

[14:17] I happen to be of an age where I have just enough silver hair but not so old that they treat me as irrelevant yet. Very close, but I'm not there yet.

[14:28] I know I'm a man. I know that because, and I'm not tall, but I'm average height because I'm not short and because I happen to be of a Caucasian background, because I happen to be able to speak the right language, because I happen to get the proper education, because I happen to have an address in the right neighborhood, because I happen to be fortunate to have two parents who love me and raise me that way.

[14:54] because of a lot of things that I had no responsibility in making happen, I have privilege in this world.

[15:04] I know that. Now, you might say, well, yeah, but that's not my fault. No, it's not my fault. But it is the fault of the culture that created a situation where certain people, because of their gender, because of their looks, because of their age, because of their background, because of their race, because of any number of things, have been given in our culture easier entrance into making things happen.

[15:40] And so because of that, we have to be responsible to help the people who have had less advantage. In other words, to give an advantage to those who have not had the advantages I already had.

[15:58] That might not sound so obvious, but it's true. If because of my innate things that I didn't create, but my ancestors did, because of these advantages I have, let's just make up something and say there was a test, I would get a score of 90 where somebody else would get a score of 60.

[16:26] And the truth is, if you took away all of our intellectual or whatever ability, I would get a score of, the highest score I could get would be 100. The highest score they can get because of cultural problems is 70.

[16:40] so we give them 10 points. They still don't get up to 100, but they get a little edge because we've gotten edges all over the years. That's what they're talking about as far as I can understand.

[16:54] And I admit, I don't understand this from the same perspective as others because I am who I am. I can't change that. But because of that, we need to give advantage to people who are disadvantaged.

[17:10] Doesn't mean we have to give everything to someone in that situation, but there needs to be something that helps to bring the playing field a little more level just to make it fair.

[17:26] So it'd be like if we were playing basketball and we wanted to be fair and one team comes in and they all just because of the way they were born are no taller than 5'2", and the other team is 6'8".

[17:42] So maybe we would lower the basket by a foot and a half. I don't know. Just trying to get a relationship. How do we make things so people have that opportunity and how do we acknowledge that what our ancestors did, maybe not even recognizing that they were doing wrong, what they did create some of the problems we have today.

[18:05] The Bible says the sins of the father will be visited the second and third generation. The attitudes and the things that we were taught growing up will stay with us.

[18:18] Proverbs says, and even the monks used to say, give me the boy until they're six and I'll have the man the rest of their life. Show a boy in the way they should go and they will walk in it, as Proverbs would say.

[18:32] So they are confessing the sins, if you will, of their ancestors. And the interesting part is, I would say that even in their separation from the people around them, they are creating a problem that will become for their children the sins of their ancestors.

[18:50] So what are we doing so that the people in the generations coming after us don't have to confess as much of our sin and undo the brokenness that we are putting into the world?

[19:06] Maybe not even realize when we're doing it. Alright? Just a thought. Just a thought. In verse 3, it says, they stood where they were and read from the book of the law of the Lord, their God, for a quarter of the day.

[19:20] A quarter of the day. I don't know if that means a quarter of the daylight day, like four hours, or a quarter of the day, like six hours. We don't know, but four to six hours, that's a long time.

[19:32] For a quarter of the day and spend another quarter in confession and in worshiping the Lord, their God. Again, even if it was four hours, so four hours reading the scripture and then four hours worshiping God, confessing, God, I've sinned, God, I'm not perfect, looking for the faults in me to offer up to God, not only so he can forgive them, but so that I can recognize what I'm doing wrong that needs to change.

[20:02] And then worshiping God. Why? Well, worship is, is what we do to recognize that we are not God, that we are deficient, that we rely on and depend on God to make us whole and make us complete.

[20:20] So we praise God. It's not that God needs some ego stroke from us, although I think he likes to be with us. It's that we need to recognize who God is compared to us so that our lives can be healthy.

[20:38] You know, right from the beginning here, this is about practicing a word called humility towards God. Okay? And verse 4, it says, Standing on the stairs of the Levites were Jeshua, Benai, Kadamil, Shabana, Bunai, Sherabiah, Benai, and Kenai.

[20:58] They cried out with a loud voices to the Lord their God. And the Levites, Jeshua, Kadamil, Benai, Habashniah, Sherabiah, Hodiah, Shabaniah, and Bethaniah said, Stand up and praise the Lord your God who is from everlasting to everlasting.

[21:20] So, it's sort of a, we say this, you say that. We have that sometimes in worship like a responsive reading or when in the liturgies I say, the Lord be with you.

[21:32] And so you said and also with you. We naturally react that way. It makes the worship inclusive of both the people leading it and the people who are engaged in it.

[21:45] So he says, and this is verse 5 towards the end of it, it says, Blessed be your glorious name. May it be exalted above all blessing and praise.

[21:58] Now this is, this is a prayer in a way, but it's one of the longest prayers there is. So bear with me. We won't read the whole prayer all the way through I don't think because it's a long prayer and we'll have to come back to it either way.

[22:10] So, Blessed be your glorious name. May it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, the earth, and the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.

[22:28] You give life to everything and the multitudes of heaven worship you. Okay, so first of all, it begins much like the Lord's prayer. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.

[22:40] You are to be praised. God is to be praised. God is almighty. He created the heavens and even the highest heavens. There's three heavens according to the scriptures.

[22:52] Paul talks about the third heaven. The first heaven is the air, the atmosphere, the sky. The second heaven is the outer space, the stars and the moon and the galaxy and the universe.

[23:04] And the third heaven is the place where God lives, the highest heaven or the third heaven of God. And God has created all of this and he has created everything. He created the earth.

[23:15] He created the seas. He created life. He created even the multitudes of heaven. All right? And he created them all to worship him, to acknowledge that he is the one who is making life happen.

[23:35] So now he's going to go through a bit of a history lesson. All right? So in verse 7 it says, You are the Lord God who brought Abraham and who, excuse me, You are the Lord God who chose Abraham and brought him out of Ur of Chaldeans and named him Abraham.

[23:55] God is kind of in the business of changing names. So Simon became Peter. Saul became Paul. Jacob became Israel.

[24:09] And Abram became Abraham. And Sarah, his wife, Sarai, became Sarah. God changes names because he wants to convert our lives completely.

[24:21] So that even means to take a name that we were given for whatever reasons that may not have a thing to do with God and give them a holy connotation, a holy purpose.

[24:32] Now my given names are Thomas Michael. So my names are holy. They come right out of the Bible. Thomas, the best named apostle, and Michael, the archangel.

[24:46] That's who I'm named after, Thomas Michael. Now my parents didn't give me the names necessarily for that. They may have named me after a friend or a grandparent or something like that.

[24:57] But ultimately, my names, my given names come from the scripture. The apostle Thomas, best named apostle in the Bible, and Michael, the archangel.

[25:08] Great names. Great names. Craft is my surname. It is the name given to me by my family. They didn't have those in the Bible. What they did in the Bible is they would give credit to the parents.

[25:25] So Jesus would be Jesus bar Joseph. Jesus, son of Joseph. So their last name was their father's name.

[25:36] Or to give you a modern example of that, Johnson, David's son. David's son. John's son.

[25:47] Johnson. You see how that works? So we have people that are still named that way today. I mean, obviously, that name comes from an ancestor years ago. But that's the family name.

[26:00] He changes people's names. Now, he actually called Abram's father to go to Ur. Abram's father was born in a region near Iraq.

[26:15] And God called him to go to the Promised Land and he got as far as Ur, which is up at the top of the Fertile Crescent. And he stopped and he settled there. So then Abram, when he became of age and was married, was called by God to go the rest of the journey down to the Promised Land into what we call Palestine.

[26:32] So Abram became Abraham. And in verse 8, it says, You found his heart faithful to you and you made a covenant with him to give to his descendants the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Pesosites, Jesuitites, Gigahites, and Mosquito Bites.

[26:53] You have kept your promise because you are righteous. Now, what do you find about Abram? He found Abraham's heart faithful. Notice it didn't say his actions, righteous.

[27:07] None of us are that good. None of us are good enough to say that we have no faults. That's why they spent a quarter of the day confessing their sins and even the sins of their ancestors because we're not perfect.

[27:20] None of us are. We all mess up. No one is good enough to attain the glory of God. No one is good enough to live in the new creation of God because of their own righteousness.

[27:33] We live because of mercy because God, when we confess our sins, has said that he will forgive us and remove the guilt of our sin. Okay? But it wasn't Abraham's actions that were necessarily righteous.

[27:49] If you read about Abraham, there are some things he did that weren't always so good. Like a lot of people in the Bible. These aren't perfect people in this book. But his heart was always faithful.

[28:00] And that's something, by the way, about Nehemiah, the author and subject of this book. Nehemiah wasn't always perfect in his actions. He didn't always get it right.

[28:11] But his heart was always with God. And that's what God is looking for. God wants us to be holy and entirely in love with God.

[28:22] Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your mind, your soul, your strength. We would say that means with our heart, our relationships, with our mind, with what we learn about and what we put into our mind, with our soul, with how we worship God and pray to God and our strength that we live a life for the purpose of God.

[28:45] I heard a TV person the other day. I thought this was interesting. They weren't, they're just a TV announcer. And they were trying to make some analogies and they said, well, you know, most people in this country would accept that we were created by God and that God gave each of us a unique ability or gift to do something.

[29:04] And I thought, no, most people don't even know that they were given a gift. They don't even realize God chose them. Before you were born, it says in Jeremiah, God chose you and called you while you were still in the womb to his purpose.

[29:19] He's got something for you to do. He made you unique and specifically for that. Now, what other people say you should be but what God wants you to be.

[29:30] Find that and you will find contentment. But anyways, I'm getting a little off track. But it's important that God is the one who is called righteous.

[29:42] You have kept your promise because you are righteous. God is the one that is righteous. Abraham is the one who is faithful. the song Who Am I?

[29:52] Not because of what I've done but because of who you are. Right? Not because of I don't know if I get the lines right.

[30:04] Because of what I am but because of who he is. God is the one who is righteous. And his righteousness is wrapped up in his forgiveness and his mercy which God has for us.

[30:20] So faithfulness. That's what God wants. He wants us to be faithful to hold on to him even when we're broken. Verse 9.

[30:30] You saw the suffering of our ancestors in Egypt. You heard their cry at the Red Sea. Sometimes we don't think God is paying attention but he hears it. Now, by the way, it took years for God to respond.

[30:43] Because sometimes response, when it, we talk in another Bible study a lot about unintended consequences. So, sometimes we wonder why God takes so long but we need to recognize that when things happen too quickly sometimes or in the wrong way, even something that is intended for good can have unintended negative consequences.

[31:06] That's what we have happening a lot in this whole issue where we're struggling with these two major societal concerns. On the one concern, we have the intention of not giving people a disease that could, what is it, a virus that could kill them.

[31:24] And on the other hand, we have an intention of not destroying people's livelihood, people's life, people's emotional stability. Right? We don't want to do one or the other and sometimes when we're trying to do the right thing over here, we create a problem over here.

[31:40] And when we try to do the right thing over here, we make an unintended consequence over here. And the same thing in this whole protest situation where we have, where what we're trying to say is that people who have gone through these inappropriate struggles, these difficulties, that seem to have a correlation to their natural state, how they were born, where they were born, what they look like, what color they are.

[32:14] And as we are saying, we need to do something about the brokenness that has happened to this segment of the population. We have another group of people that we're saying we appreciate that there are folks that protect us, people that will make sure that people who want to do great harm won't do great harm, that we don't have to worry about walking down the street at night, that we can have property that won't get stolen all the time.

[32:43] And so we appreciate people we call the law enforcement of our country. All right? Both are good, but sometimes when we try to make this happen, we have unintended negative consequences this way, and sometimes when we try to show appreciation this way, we create unintended consequences that way.

[33:05] Very difficult. So sometimes God goes a little slower because he has a better understanding of the timing of things than we do. We want everything. We're the instant culture.

[33:16] We nuke things because we don't want to wait for him to cook. We're ever going with fast food or fast this or fast that.

[33:27] We don't want to go to the speed limit because if we go 10 miles faster, we can get there like that. We're always in a hurry and we need to slow down. Slow down, you're moving too fast.

[33:39] You got to make the morning last just. Kicking down the cobblestones. Looking for love and feeling groovy.

[33:51] That's for you 1960s people, you know, my generation. I'm looking forward to days where I can just slow down and not move that fast.

[34:04] Take it easy. You were not created to be human doings. You were created to be human beings. Be still and know that I am God.

[34:14] That's what the Lord says anyways. You saw your suffering of our ancestors in Egypt. You heard their cry at the Red Sea. The Red Sea was an instant crisis and God was there.

[34:27] You sent signs and wonders against Pharaoh, against all his officials and all the people of the land. For you knew how arrogantly the Egyptians treated them. You made a name for yourself, which remains to this day.

[34:41] So he's saving the Israelites from the end of the Egyptian. In verse 11, it says, You divided the sea before them so that they passed through it on dry ground.

[34:52] But you hurled their pursuers into the depths like a stone in the mighty waters. By day you led them with a pillar of cloud and by night with a pillar of fire to give them light on the way that they were to take.

[35:06] All right. This is the Exodus story. The children of Israel went down into Egypt because there was a famine in the land and they went down with Jacob and his son Joseph and the other boys and Tina who went down into Egypt because it was safer down there and they were welcomed.

[35:24] But after hundreds of years, they multiplied and the Egyptians felt they had overstayed their welcome. You know, like the guest who says they're going to come and visit for a day or two and you like, but then they stay for three, four weeks, five weeks and you say, Hey, time to go.

[35:38] Well, instead of saying time to go, they made them servants. They made them slaves. So the Israelites knew what slavery was because they had been in bondage and so they cried out to God and God rescued them and when the Egyptian army came to re-enslave them, God actually fought on the side of the Israelites and the Egyptian army was destroyed in the sea, in the Red Sea.

[36:03] Okay. And then they wandered in the wilderness. Often it feels like we're wandering in the wilderness of life, but God sent a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day to show them the way.

[36:19] Now, this is God, the second person of the Trinity. God, the word of God, God, who we think of as manifested most perfectly in Jesus, God incarnate, God in life, walking and dwelling amongst us.

[36:35] You see, it's not always Jesus. Sometimes it's a different way that God shows His physical, His real interaction with us. In this case, it was a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of smoke during the day.

[36:49] And God intends for us to have that experience of God in this world today as well. Not necessarily a pillar of fire and a pillar of smoke, but something that will cause us to know and to feel and to experience that God is leading us.

[37:03] For some people, it may be a voice of God. For some people, they understand words from God. That's where I'm at. I hear words from God, not entire sentences and paragraphs and such, but concepts or ideas.

[37:17] Or I know when things are the right time for something to happen because I'm listening. Remember what we said about Revelation? God is revealing it to everybody. Not everybody is listening to it.

[37:30] So what is God trying to reveal to us today? What's the message that God wants to get across to us at this point in our life, in our history, in our existence?

[37:42] You came down, he says in verse 13, you came down on Mount Sinai. You spoke to them from heaven. You gave them regulations and laws that are just and right and decrees and commands that are good.

[37:54] He gave them the Ten Commandments. Those were written by the finger of God. And there were other rules and regulations that were to be there to be helpful to them. And they're written in the book of Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy.

[38:08] Verse 14, it says, You made known to them your holy Sabbath and gave them commands, decrees, and laws through your servant Moses.

[38:19] So there's the Ten Commandments, there's the Sabbath Commandment, and then there's the many laws. Now, what's the Sabbath about? First of all, the Sabbath is Saturday. The first day of the week is Sunday.

[38:31] That's the day of new creation. And then you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and then Saturday is the last day. Six days of work. The seventh day is a day of rest, a day to keep holy to God.

[38:44] So Saturday is the Sabbath. Now, we do have a Sabbath worship service on Saturday night. Most of our people attend worship on Sunday because most Christians worship on Sunday, which is the day Jesus rose from the dead.

[38:57] So we call it the Lord's day. And so a lot of worship was changed over to Sunday. But Saturday is meant to be the Sabbath. Now, I don't think the day of the week matters. I think the concept matters.

[39:09] You have in your life one day that you stop working. For some people, it's almost impossible for them to stop working. Well, make up excuses.

[39:20] Well, I'm not doing my job, so it's not work. Well, I like what I'm doing, so it's not work. Well, I have to do it on this day because it's the only day I can. That's hard.

[39:33] It's hard because we become a culture of perpetual motion, human doings, moving, moving, moving, moving, moving. And God said, it's not healthy. You need to take at least one day a week and just stop.

[39:45] And then, he also said that we need to have one day a week when we worship God. Is there one day a week that you set aside to make sure that you don't forget about God?

[39:58] Is there one day that you put aside to remember God, to pray to God, to worship God, to gather with the people of faith, to spend with God?

[40:09] Because if you don't, if you don't do it as a regular pattern, you'll lose it. One of the things people will say to me is, I got out of the habit of going to church.

[40:19] We don't like to think of worship as a habit. We like to think of worship as something we desire to do, want to do, should do. Some people call it an obligation.

[40:30] But really, there is something about the idea of it being a habit. If we do it regularly, we won't forget it. And it will feed us. Just think, we will spend hours and hours and hours a week on our work, hours and hours and hours a week on the computer, hours and hours an hour a week watching videos or TV shows or something like that.

[40:52] Hours and hours and hours doing all sorts of things. And if we're healthy, we might spend one or two hours a week with God, like you're doing right now.

[41:06] How do you think the message of God is going to get into our soul if we can't even give that little bit of time? It wouldn't work if that's all you did for work or if that's all you did for your studies in school or that's all you gave to any particular subject.

[41:21] It wouldn't work. Thank God it works for us with even that limited commitment. So God is saying, don't forget me. Take one day for God.

[41:33] Take some time to remember God. All right. In verse 15, and then there were the other, and there are lots of other laws, some of which we don't keep today because we were for that culture then.

[41:45] And that's an important piece that we'll try to get to if we can to later. In their hunger, you gave them bread from heaven, and in their thirst, you brought them water from the rock.

[41:55] You told them to go in and take possession of the land you had sworn with uplifted hand to give them. So he fed him with manna that came down from heaven. And water, when they didn't have water, Moses struck a rock and water came out of it.

[42:11] God took care of them. God takes care of what we need. Not what we want, but he will normally provide our needs. In verse 16, it says, but they, our ancestors, became arrogant and stiff-necked and they did not obey your commands.

[42:29] They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked. Stiff-necked. That's like, you know, like have you ever tried to pull a dog that doesn't want to go and you got him on a leash and he, down up the neck, you can't make me go.

[42:46] No, I won't do what you want. That's what it means to be a stiff-necked people. We won't go where God wants to lead us. In their rebellion, they appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery.

[43:04] Do you hear that? But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore, you didn't desert them, even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, this is your God who brought you out of Egypt or when they committed awful blasphemies.

[43:22] Now, let's understand that they, when Moses was up on the mountain and they were kind of leaderless for a while, they got themselves into a situation where they started to wonder if they made a mistake coming out of Egypt.

[43:36] and so what they did was they tried to make up a God. So they made a God in the image of a calf. A calf is an image of prosperity and fertility.

[43:47] Okay, so they made this false God to represent what they were looking for, which was prosperity and health and future. and they even appointed a leader to help them rebel against what God was trying to do for them and return them to Egypt.

[44:09] Now, why would anybody want to go back to Egypt? Why would anybody want to go back to slavery? Well, to some reason, it's because in some ways it's easier.

[44:24] Yeah, you might get, you might not be able to do whatever you want and might not have much freedom and might occasionally feel the back of a whip or something, but you don't have to figure out how to pay the bills.

[44:35] You don't have to worry about where the food's going to come from. You don't even have to worry about what you're going to do for a living because you're going to be told what to do. You're going to live where you're going to live. It's a life where you don't have to do much thinking.

[44:47] In this world, if they're going to survive, they have to learn how to survive in a place they've never been before. Things are different. Things are different for us.

[45:00] We're going to have a new normal, a new way of doing things. It won't be the same. No matter what happens, it won't be the same because that's how life works. As a society, we grow by stepping on the results of our previous generation.

[45:19] In this case, they're going to grow if they move out into the desert, which they don't want to. God was not happy with them, but instead of destroying them all, he forgave them because God knew that they were just confused.

[45:39] God has more mercy than we would. God has more likelihood to say, I forgive you, even though this is, what amount of times you've hurt me?

[45:51] How many times have we hurt God? God has a tendency to show mercy more than people do. So, he didn't desert them. Even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, this is your God who brought you out of Egypt.

[46:07] Or when they committed awful blasphemies, when they said things that were just hurtful to God. In verse 19, it says, because of your great compassion, you didn't abandon them in the wilderness.

[46:19] By day, the pillar of cloud did not fail to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take.

[46:29] So, in the midst of all of their lives, no matter how broken things feel, even a brokenness between God, God is still providing them a light to show them where to go.

[46:40] And if we look, God will always show us where we need to go, what we need to do. Where will we find the answers?

[46:52] Because God wants to give us those answers. Interestingly, Sunday, we had a lot of protests in our country. They called them protests, but actually, what they turned out to be in many ways were just prayer services, places where people were praying, singing songs of worship, and praising God.

[47:10] And they were talking about how there was no violence in those protests because they were focused on God and trying to have God follow, lead them.

[47:22] In verse 19, because of your great compassion, you didn't abandon them to the wilderness. Not because of what they did, but because of God's compassion. By day, the pillar of cloud didn't fail to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night, to shine on the way that they were to take.

[47:38] You gave your good spirit to instruct them. The Holy Spirit guides us the way we should go. You didn't withhold your manna from their mouths, and you gave them water for their thirst. So God took care of them.

[47:50] For 40 years, you sustained them in the wilderness. They lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out, nor did their feet become swollen. God took care of them for 40 years.

[48:02] Now, why 40 years? Well, 40 is a special number. We have the 40 days of Lent. We have the 40 days Jesus was in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. We have the 40 days and 40 nights that Noah's on the ark, and we have 40 days that they were in the wilderness.

[48:17] It's a time of preparing for God to do something amazing. And God took 40 days. Now, the 40 days also happened to eliminate the entire generation that came out of Egypt.

[48:31] Only Caleb and Joshua were alive to go into the land of promise. So sometimes God will take so long that he will take a whole generation out if that's what it takes to change people to go in the direction God wants them to go.

[48:46] We need to be careful about that. If we would just change and follow God, turn to God, we don't have to worry about those kind of consequences. Verse 22, it says, you gave your kingdom and nations, allotting to them even the remotest frontiers.

[49:00] They took over the country of Sihan, king of Heshbon, and the country of Ag, king of Bashan. You made their children as numerous as the stars in the sky, and you brought them into the land that you told their parents to enter and possess.

[49:14] So God took them into the nation, and they became very prosperous and a lot of children. Their children went into the land and took possession of the land.

[49:25] They subdued it before them. The Canaanites who lived in the land, you gave the Canaanites into their hands. Canaanites who lived in the land, you gave the Canaanites into their hands, along with their kings and the peoples of the land, to deal with them as they pleased.

[49:44] So the Canaanites were not people that God particularly was fond of because they had become pretty evil, and God caused them to fall into the hands and the judgment, if you will, of the Israelites who conquered them.

[49:58] They captured, in verse 25, they captured fortified cities and fertile land. They took possession of the houses filled with all kinds of good things, wells already dug, vineyards, olive groves, and fruit teas in abundance.

[50:10] They ate to the full and were well nourished. They reveled in your great goodness. So when they conquered the land, they took the wealth of the land and they lived well and they gave honor to God and said it was because all their success was because of God's great goodness.

[50:32] Okay? Now they're telling the history of Israel's, what they're doing in this prayer. So let's get a little further along and see how far we're going to try and get this whole story in. In verse 26, they were disobedient, rebelled against you.

[50:45] They turned their backs on your law. They killed your prophets who had warned them in order to turn them back to you. They committed awful blasphemies. So the people, this happens, the greatest danger for the faith in God is prosperity.

[51:08] We don't think we need God anymore. We think God is irrelevant to our lives. So they turned their back on God and so God gave them over to their enemies.

[51:20] Why? Because sometimes God has to let us reach depravity or even total depravity, realizing how bad it is without God to realize we need God.

[51:32] So you delivered them into the hands of their enemies who oppressed them. But when they were oppressed, they cried out to you. From heaven you heard them and in your great compassion you gave them deliverers who rescued them from the hand of their enemies.

[51:46] So they cried out to God, finally came to their senses and cried out to God and God sent people to rescue them. But as soon as they were at rest, they again, it was evil in your sight.

[51:59] So they went right back to it as soon as they felt safe. Then you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies so that they ruled over them. And when they cried out to you again, you heard from heaven and in your compassion you delivered them time after time.

[52:15] So God keeps rescuing them like a parent that keeps helping a child that keeps messing up because that's what we're like. All right? Because God loves us and God is good even when we're not.

[52:30] You warned them in order to turn them back to your law, but they became arrogant and disobeyed your commands. They sinned against your ordinances of which you said the person who obeys them will live by them.

[52:44] Stubbornly, they turned their backs on you, became stiff-necked and refused to listen. Remember that stiff-necked? You can't make me do it. They're not going to listen to God.

[52:59] In verse 30, For many years you were patient with them. By your spirit you warned them through your prophets, yet they paid no attention. They paid no attention, just went on doing whatever.

[53:12] A lot of us do that because we're just not recognizing the limitations to this life and the blessings that God can give in this life and the life to come. So you gave them into the hands of the neighboring peoples.

[53:27] But in your great mercy you did not put an end to them or abandon them, for you are gracious and merciful. You are a gracious and merciful God, which is what defines God.

[53:39] Grace and mercy. His forgiveness because of His righteousness which is a response to our faithfulness. Now therefore, our God, the great God, mighty and awesome, notice the almighty God again, who keeps His covenant of love.

[53:56] He keeps His covenant even when we break ours. Do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes, the hardship that has come on us, on our kings and leaders, our priests, our prophets, on your ancestors and all your people from the days of King Assyria until today.

[54:13] God, look at our problems and help us with it. And all that has happened to us, you have remained righteous, you have acted faithfully while we acted wickedly.

[54:24] So the problem isn't with God. The problem isn't that God isn't doing what's right, it's that we aren't. And we keep bringing more and more brokenness to this world we live in.

[54:35] Our kings and our leaders, our priests, our ancestors, they didn't follow your law. They didn't pay attention to your commands or the statutes you warned them to keep. Verse 35, even while they were in their kingdom, enjoying your great goodness to them and the spacious and fertile land you gave them, they didn't serve you or turn from their evil ways.

[54:56] So even when God was blessing them, it wasn't enough to make them live the way God would want them to live. We turn to God in our brokenness. We turn to God when things are good.

[55:11] Do we wonder why we don't have as many blessings and we have more brokenness? Because God is trying to turn us back to Him. In verse 36, it says, But see, we are slaves today, slaves in the land you gave our ancestors, so they could eat its fruit and the other good things it produces.

[55:31] Because of our sins, its abundant harvest goes to the kings you have placed over us. They ruled over our bodies and all our cattle as they please. We are in great disgrace.

[55:42] Disgress. So, what they're recognizing, Ezra and Nehemiah in this prayer, is that they keep going back into a circle of brokenness.

[55:57] And when they turn to God, God blesses them. And so they're saying, we've fallen into a cycle of brokenness again. We need God to rescue us.

[56:09] History is an important thing. Most people don't like history. A lot of people won't study history. But history is really just stories. Actually, the word, His story, the story of God, the story of life.

[56:23] History can teach us who we are. History can teach us what we've done in the past that's wrong and what we need to change today. and where we have a tendency to fall into sin because each individual has certain sins that they're more tempted by.

[56:38] But a people, a group of people tend to fall back into sin again. There has to be a reason in our country why even though we ended slavery over a hundred years ago, we've never gotten to a place where our country treats people from an African-American background the same as people from a European background.

[57:04] I don't know why. There has to be a reason. There has to be something, a trap we're falling into again and again and again. We need to break that cycle.

[57:16] Now, how we do it, I'm not going to claim I'm an expert. A lot of people have all sorts of different theories, some that you would like to hear and some that you wouldn't like to hear. Some tell us that the problem is in a consciousness of the people who create oppression without even realizing.

[57:34] Others would say it's a problem with a community of people that have become accustomed to the life of slavery or of entitlement and want to go back to Egypt and have people take care of them and aren't willing to do what's needed to pull themselves out of that.

[57:48] Now, you see, it's easy to be on one side and see the problem as the other. Maybe it's both, maybe it's all. We saw both and all in here. We saw people keep turning back to the same problem.

[58:00] We saw people who said it was easier to be a slave. I don't know. I'm not claiming I have the answers necessary to all of this, but I do know that by studying history, we can at least see where we've been at fault in the past and hopefully not continue the sins of our fathers and mothers, but instead move forward with blessing and hope and healing and break the patterns of these things.

[58:28] But history is also important because going back to the beginning of our study, it can be the story that draws us together. I've told you, even in this Bible study, where my ancestors came over to this country.

[58:42] Yes, I have some that go way back. Most of them came over well after George Washington, but when I was a little child, I was raised to think that George Washington was my first president.

[58:53] I became a part of that story. The history of this country became my history, which meant that I also had to accept its blessings and its curses.

[59:06] I had to accept the guilt of the past and I had to accept the blessings that were given to me from the past by saying, these are my people and I'm going to identify with them.

[59:18] History does that. The Christian faith gives us stories that help us and draw us together and people know them wherever you go. Whatever Christian community you're in, they know these same stories.

[59:33] They draw us together. We have a commonality that makes us one. We talked about that. People like that aspect. Now the difference is, and I'll speak to it here even though it'll keep coming up from week to week, but the difference is we need to make sure that in our faith, in our experience of God, in our experience of life, that we don't think that somehow it's a certain group of people by virtue of their relatives or their bloodline or their length of time in this country or how long they've been a member of a church or whether their name is written in a book or something like that that causes people to somehow feel like they're part of us or not.

[60:12] because God blesses all of us to join together and adapt the story, adopt the story that God has given to us. And so the story of the Good Samaritan is my story even though it was originally told a couple thousand years ago to people that don't look like me.

[60:31] Do you follow? Because that story has now become my story. So when we can make our history, our story together healthy, it makes our whole people healthy as we become one.

[60:44] Casting off stories that divide and drawing in stories that unite. I'm going to finish this chapter. I only got through one really. In view of all this, we are making a binding agreement, putting it in writing, and our leaders, our Levites and our priests are fixing their seals to it.

[61:02] So they're going to make an agreement with God, a covenant. God has made an agreement with them. He hasn't broken it. Now they're going to make an agreement with God. Now we'll go through and we will talk about what the agreement is when we look at the next chapter next week.

[61:19] And we will see how well we can do at getting through and figuring out what Nehemiah has to tell us. These are stories from the exile. There are people that were trying to get back to what they want to be and what they feel they should be just as we want to as a church people.

[61:35] It's coming. Our leaders are meeting to try and discern what is it that we should be? How should we open things up? How do we get back to being a people?

[61:46] They had to figure out their pathway. We'll figure out ours. Maybe we can learn a little something in the process, though, about how we should approach our time together, who we are, and who are the people that are a part of us.

[62:00] Because I know that through this effort, one of the great blessings God has given us is drawing many of you into our community who weren't a part of that community before. We welcome you.

[62:11] We accept you as part of us. That we will have a common story around God and His righteousness from now and going forward. Let's pray together, shall we?

[62:21] Dear God in heaven, we pray that you will bless us and be in this place. That you will fill our lives with your Holy Spirit. That you will help us, Lord, to see where we're at fault.

[62:33] And you would teach us, Lord, the ways that we should go. Forgive our sins. Bless us with your great and wonderful grace. We praise you, Lord, for you are a mighty and powerful and wonderful God.

[62:47] And we know that you can even change the course of human history. So we pray for the brokenness and the hurt and the pain and that people will find a way to bring healing. We pray for unintended consequences, Lord, that when good people end up doing things that are wrong without meaning to, you will help them to start doing what's right.

[63:06] We know, Lord, that you love us and we know that you love the whole world. As we pray a blessing, Lord, on this world around us and this community, that in all we are and all that we do, you'll give us your grace and your hope and your wonder now and forever.

[63:20] As we pray, as Jesus taught us, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

[63:33] Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

[63:45] For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Wonderful to have you with us. Looking forward to seeing you again next week. God bless you and be with us.

[63:56]  Join us if you will this weekend for worship. God bless and go in peace. Amen.