Our Father in heaven, you have instructed us that we cannot live by bread alone, but only by every word that proceeds out of your mouth. We pray that you would satisfy us with honey from the rock. Bless us, open our ears to hear your word. In Jesus' name, amen. Turn in your Bibles, please, to Ezra chapter one. as we are beginning a new old series today. This would be a new series on Ezra and Nehemiah. On the one hand, we've never been in this part of the Bible before. On the other hand, it's just a continuation of the Survey of the Old Testament. So it's Sermon No. 1 on Ezra, but it's Sermon No. 160 on the Survey of the Old Testament. If you've been here for the whole series, it started in Genesis 1-1, and we have worked consecutively through to this portion right here in Ezra chapter 1. The relevance of Ezra and Nehemiah are fairly obvious in that this is a time of restoration. And so it raises the question for us, how is the church to be restored? How do we revive the church? It's the kind of question that we are eager to answer today. We want to know how to revive the church. We want to know how to restore the people of God to health and to the kind of prominence that the church is meant to have. Why is it that the influence of the church is waning? Why is it that the numbers in the church are waning, at least in the West? Apparently the church is experiencing tremendous growth in the third world right now, though the form of some of that growth is concerning. But in the West, Europe and in the United States and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the numbers are shrinking. And influence is shrinking, and our impact upon the moral life of our civilizations, that is shrinking as well. And so given this waning influence, there is a question about the health of the church and the vitality of its message and the integrity of its ministry. And how do we go about reviving the church and restoring the church to the image that God has ordained for the people of God? And there's a number of diverse answers on that question. There's a lot of people rethinking the church and the shape of the ministry of the church, and how we go about bringing the gospel to a lost world. And that's really the question of Ezra and Nehemiah. How do we reestablish the people of God to health and vitality? What kind of commitments are necessary? What kind of ordinances need to be established? What kind of institutions need to be built that will sustain the collective life and witness of the people of God? There's a number of books that are leadership studies based upon either Ezra or Nehemiah. I think it goes beyond that. This is not just a study of leadership. This is a study of revival and restoration and church building. And as the people of God come back from exile and they begin a new, a fresh start, It is a time where that kind of reflection that is possible. How do we avoid the catastrophe, the travesty of destruction into which the people of God fell at the time of the destruction of first the northern kingdom, then the southern kingdom, and captivity into Babylon? What we'll find as we go through Ezra and Nehemiah is that Ezra is a man of the word of God. For example, chapter 7, verse 10, we read there of the verse that is characteristic of Ezra. For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel. That's the key to Ezra. Ezra is a man of the word of God. He's also a man of prayer. and we will see Ezra at prayer repeatedly throughout this book, yet the focus in Ezra is upon the word. Nehemiah, chapter one of Nehemiah, verses one through, rather verses five through 11, we find that Nehemiah is a man of prayer who also sets the word in the center of his ministry. Nehemiah 1.5, we find him praying and fasting and beseeching you, thee, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who preserves covenant and loving kindness for those who love him and keep his commandments. It goes on through verse 11. interceding on behalf of those who have already gone back to the promised land and are restoring the life and institutions of the people of God. So if we want to set them in contrast, Ezra is a man of the word who prays. Nehemiah is a man of prayer who, as we see in Nehemiah 8.1 through 9.3, who sets the word of God in the center of his work. If we look at the two of them together, then we have the biblical balance that we'll see again and again. There's the Word and there's prayer. Ezra represents the Word. Nehemiah represents the prayer. The Word and prayer together. If we're going to restore the people of God, it will always be through the means of the Word of God and prayer. That's how we restore life, health, and vitality. to the people of God, to the church of God, to the ministry of the people of God. It has always throughout history been by means of the reestablishing of the place of the word of God and prayer in the life of the people of God. That is how God goes about restoring his people. Another contrast might be is that Ezra is a man of the cloth. He is clergy. He is a priest. He is a scribe, and he is a student of God's Word, as well as a man of prayer. Nehemiah is an administrator. He's a practical man. He's not a priest at all. He is the one who's going to build the walls. He's actually going to get involved in the construction. So you might say, here's the difference between a teaching elder and a ruling elder, or a clergy and laity. Ezra is clergy, giving himself to God's Word. Nehemiah is going to concern himself with practical matters. of gathering the funds and carrying out the work, the construction work, building the walls of Jerusalem in order to protect the people of God from those who would destroy them and disrupt their work. And you need both of those. You need those who have devoted their lives to the ministry of the Word, and you need those who have been given by God practical gifts that are not clergy gifts. They're not ministers, or in Ezra's case, they're not priests, but people with practical ability, organizational and administrative and fundraising skills. There is that practical side of the ministry of the church that cannot be neglected, and it cannot be spiritualized and explained away. So that, yes, it's going to be by the word ministry of Ezra, the prayer ministry of Nehemiah, but we can't just spiritualize that. There's also the nuts and bolts, the practical matters of the life of the people of God. There's bricks and mortar that have to be attended to. And so we can also look at Ezra and Nehemiah as Ezra is that man of the word, the man who is going to be responsible for the religious life of the people of God and of the maintaining of orthodoxy and piety. And then there's Nehemiah, who's going to get about the business of collecting the bricks and getting the mortar and all that is needed in order to build up the life of the people of God. I mean, you might contrast it with, say, what we're doing right now. We've got construction going on back here. There are practical matters that, frankly, your ministers don't know anything about. And whenever I get a question, I say, here, you call so-and-so or talk to so-and-so. I just don't understand it. You need both. You need those who are going to concern themselves with the spiritual life, the religious life, the ministry of the church, the piety of the people, the quality of our spiritual life together. And then we need as well those who understand what it takes to actually put up a building. to build the, somebody had to draw up the plans to build this great structure. There's the practical side. We are not disembodied spirits. We are physical beings. And so we're concerned about matters, the nuts and bolts matter of going about building the buildings, constructing the walls that are necessary to perpetuate the life of the people of God, so that they have a place in which to meet, so that they have the necessary walls built around them to protect them from their enemies. As for Ezra himself, Alec Wattier, my revered and beloved Old Testament instructor from Trinity College in Bristol, England, he characterizes Ezra not as an innovator, but as an enforcer. not as an innovator, but as an enforcer. He's bringing the people of God back to the word of God. 587 disaster fell upon Israel, all right? The last of the people are deported and taken away. Seventy years later, approximately, now they're beginning to go back. What do they need above all else? They need to be reminded of the Word of God, which they betrayed and abandoned, and which betrayal led to the catastrophe of 587. So, Ezra's not going to innovate. He's not going to become creative. He's not going to write a new message. He's not seeking for a new theme. He's going to drive the people of God back to the Word of God because that is the means by which they will be restored. I've been an ordained minister for 25 years now. Actually, this is the 26th year. And I was mentioning this summer that in those years, probably once every week, something comes across my desk promising that if we will just implement this new program, if we'll just take this new approach, if we'll just give the life of the church this new emphasis, this new dynamic that they're promising, And there's been a variety of them. The creativity of these folks is extraordinary. And all of these brochures that come across my desk are filled with exclamation points. This is exciting. This is vital. This is crucial. This is powerful. This is dynamic. You know, all of the exaggerated terminology. that's used, all the superlative adjectives are thrown in in order to describe how wonderful this new, never-before-thought-of idea is going to be for building the church. All of those things I immediately just pitch into the waste can. I think that they're misguided at best, they are pernicious at worst, because they're a distraction. Because the ministry of the church is fairly easy. And Ezra knows exactly what it is. He is going to restore the Word of God to the people of God. That's the key. It's always the key. I've mentioned, I think, before that when I first got here, there was a member of the church staff that asked me, very confrontationally, what was I going to do in order to build this church? And she was of a denominational tradition where that meant a three-ring circus. That meant some exciting new program, some attention-grabbing, new, exciting method was going to be used in order to wake up the whole community and draw attention to ourselves and get everybody talking about us and all the exciting and wonderful things that were happening. downtown in Savannah. My answer to her was what we're going to preach and pray. That's what we're going to do. After we experienced some pretty significant growth those early years, I had a representative of the Presbyterian Church in America, denominational representative. He had heard that we had about doubled all our numbers. And Sunday night, we quadrupled and more our Sunday night attendance. And Sunday school had doubled and tripled. And Sunday morning had doubled. And lots of exciting growth was happening. And so I got a visit, taken out to lunch. I got a free lunch out of the deal. wanting to know what we were doing. He had pen in hand. He was ready to take down all the ingredients of the new program that we had brought to Savannah and how that had stimulated all this excitement downtown at Independent Presbyterian Church. And so I told him, we actually are not doing anything different. We have the same services we always had. All we're doing is ministering the word of God and praying. That's it. And he continued to question me. He found that almost unbelievable that that would be the case. But in five minutes into the conversation, our meeting was over because I didn't have anything new and exciting that I could tell him about that he could write about and which could become the next new key to the growth of the church and that which would lead to exciting and boundless growth for the congregations of the Presbyterian Church in America. That's really what's behind the worship revolution, by the way. What's behind it is that these are the keys to growth. If you have a praise band up front, if you adopt a certain format that's kind of informal, and you have a gregarious leader up front, that's going to build the church. That's going to grow the church. And these things come through the church in waves. It's very distressing to me. Whole denominations just get swept over by the latest thing that the latest person is doing to build their church. So if there's a Southern Baptist church somewhere in Alabama that suddenly is tripled in size and they've got this new thing that they're doing, the next thing you know, the entire Southern Baptist Convention has been overtaken by it. Have you seen this kind of thing happen? It's no different in the PCA. Same thing. New thing, new exciting method, new program that has quadrupled the size of the church. Come and everybody jumps on that bandwagon and they race to do the new thing. And what happens is basically nothing. It worked because of the dynamics of a certain place and a certain person and certain ingredients that were being overlooked. I would maintain that wherever you see a church truly growing, that when you strip off all the external trappings and get to the heart of it, somebody's praying a lot and the Word of God is being preached. And it's not all of the extravagant additions It's not the external trappings. It is, at its core, the Word of God and prayer that builds the life, restores the people of God. Now, the context of the restoration in Ezra is, first of all, the deportations of 587, which were the last of three deportations. The first was in 605 BC, the second in 597, the third in 587. For the most part, emptying Palestine of the descendants of Abraham. So in other words, this is a devastating time. This is a time of desperation. A couple of Sunday nights ago, we sang Psalm 74. And we pointed out ahead of time just the despair that is to be found in that and the shock. For example, Psalm 74, it says in verse four, thine adversaries have roared into the midst of thy meeting place, talking about the temple. They have set their own standards for signs. It seems as if one had lifted up his axe in a tree, a forest of trees, and now all of its carved works they smash with hatchet and hammers. They have burned thy sanctuary to the ground. They have defiled the dwelling place of thy name. They said in their heart, let us completely subdue them. They have burned all the meeting places of God in the land. So you see that kind of Despair, Psalm 137, of course, is famous for this, particularly in the King James Version. But by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. They're thinking back to Jerusalem, to the temple. And we wept when we considered, when we allowed ourselves to think of the devastation that has been brought. Upon the willows in the midst of it we hung our harps, for there our captors demanded of us our songs, our tormentors, and with and our tormentors mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her skill. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy." So you can see there the despair that was brought to the people of God as They pondered the devastation of Israel, the deportations, now by the rivers of Babylon, their captors mocking them and demanding the songs of Zion and the difficulty with which they could sing that songs, only weeping as they did for the loss that has been incurred by the people of God. In verse 1 of Ezra, It says, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, Jeremiah 25, 12, 29, 10, both had promised 70 years of captivity, and then they would begin to return. And apparently, it was less than 70 years. In other words, God shortened the days. As he said he would as well, as Jesus preached in Matthew 24, that the days of devastation visited upon Jerusalem would be shortened. So he shortened the days. There are fewer days, not fully 70 years, but God in his mercy shortened those days that the people of God might be encouraged. And Jeremiah promised, Jeremiah 29, that there would be a future. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. So the captivity was not to be forever. The loss was not to be permanent. God had other plans as well, plans beyond the destruction of Jerusalem and their captivity. There was a future for Israel. There was a basis for their hope. There was the promise of restoration. And so remarkably, here in Ezra chapter one, what we see is hated Jeremiah. Here's the weeping prophet, as he's been called. and rightly so, rejected by his people, scorned and ignored, and here the nations of the world are marching to the words of God's despised prophet. As Cyrus, the king of Persia, begins to act on behalf of Israel, why? You see, verse 1, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah. This despised prophet, this rejected and ignored prophet of God, the king of the greatest empire on earth, is beginning now to move in obedience to his word. God makes a mockery of the human categories. And the Lord stirs up the spirit, it says, of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he sent a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put it in writing, saying, and then in verses two and following, we have the proclamation. The context here is the deportations of 587 and the return from exile, which begins in 538, or as Ezra says, now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia. Now what then happens, again to set our context here, the first of the returnees began to return in 538 under a man named Zerubbabel, who was eventually joined by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. And the account of that first returning party is in Ezra chapters 1 through 6. From 538 to 516, the temple work begins. It then is halted for 16 years, and then it restarts in 520 and is completed. Cyrus is then followed by Cambyses, who is followed then by Darius I, who reigned from 522 from 486. Do you know from history Darius or Darius? He was the emperor who sent the expedition to the plains of Marathon in Greece. and whose armies were defeated by the forces of the Greeks on that day of battle, when Pheidippides came running all the way from the plains of Marathon back to Athens, announcing, rejoice, we conquer, and then fell over dead. That's who we're talking about here. This is the emperor who will initiate the first of the Persian wars against the Greeks. That will take place in 490. The second party that returns, returns with Ezra in 458, 80 years after the first party. And we'll read of that in Ezra 7 and in the following chapters. This was under the emperor Artaxerxes, who reigned from 464 to 423, who is the son of Xerxes. And what happened, again, between the first return and the second return back there in international relations was that Xerxes is the emperor under whom the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea were fought. Tens of thousands of Persians in that mountain pass, and then were betrayed. And then finally, just a couple of hundred Spartans then fought to the death under Leonidas, the Spartan king. That was in 490. And then, rather, in 480. And then quickly after that, the great sea battle of Salamis. in which the Greeks defeated a huge Persian navy off of Salamis, and then the Battle of Plataea, where the combined Greek armies of the various city-states defeated in a huge land battle the invading Persian army, which then was forced to withdraw from Greece and withdrew forever from Europe and retreated back into Asia. So this is Artaxerxes, the son of that emperor, Xerxes, who initiated the battles of Thermopylae, Silamus, and Plataea. Xerxes is the emperor in the book of Esther. He goes by the name of Ahasuerus then, but it's the same person, Xerxes. The third body returns with Nehemiah in 445. So again, the timeline is 538, the first group returns. or 458, rather, the second group with Ezra, 445, the third group with Nehemiah, who then joins with Ezra and begins to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Nehemiah then leaves in 433. He returns for a second term as governor. Now, during the period of Nehemiah, we're in the age of Pericles, that period in which Athens is in the ascendancy, It forms the Delian League, which then invades Asia Minor and pushes the Persians out of Asia Minor and liberates the Greek cities that had been colonized there. This is the age of the building of the Parthenon and the other grand public buildings in Athens. It's in the age of Pericles, then, that that Nehemiah comes and then returns for a second term as governor. He comes back in 433. 431, the Peloponnesian Wars begin as Athens and Sparta then begin a war that will last for 30 years. Victor Davis Hanson calling it the worst of all wars, terrible, terrible destruction being brought to those peoples. The main point here is, the main point of Ezra chapter one, for that matter, we could say this is the main point throughout the whole of Ezra and Nehemiah, is that restoration begins with God. Looking at verse one. In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he sent a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and put it in writing, saying, why Does Cyrus, the great emperor, why does he order the restoration of the people of God to the land of God? He does so because the Lord stirs him up. World history is merely a stage upon which God acts. Nations rise and fall at his command, and they do so thereby serving his purposes. Why are the people of God to be restored? They are to be restored because God begins to act. That absolutely is the key. The Lord prophesied through Jeremiah. The Lord then stirred up this people. And we will see it again as we continue. For example, in verse 5, those who participate in this first group that goes back, it says, everyone whose spirit God had stirred up to go and rebuild the house of the Lord, which is in Jerusalem. In other words, the actions of Cyrus commanding the restoration of the people of God in Jerusalem. Why does that happen? It happens as the Lord stirs up Cyrus. Those who go and participate in this restoration, why do they go? They go because God stirs them up. So there's an obvious lesson in Ezra and Ezra, Nehemiah and Ezra chapter one. And the lesson is that when the people of God are restored, it is by the hand of God. And if we are to see a restoration of biblical Christianity, a restoration of the gospel, even as it's being betrayed, as was mentioned this morning, it's being betrayed. It's being betrayed by the liberals on the one hand who are rewriting the Bible and rewriting the commands. And it's being betrayed even by the conservative evangelicals who just are not talking about things that are unpopular anymore. William Willimon, formerly the chaplain at at Duke University, the primary preacher at their beautiful cathedral-like church that's at the center of that campus. He said a few years ago, recognizing that he's pretty much a liberal, he's moved in a pretty conservative direction over the years, he's become more and more conservative as he's gotten older, but recognizing himself as a United Methodist liberal, he said he used to take some consolation in knowing that even though he didn't preach the way you really ought to preach, that there were preachers who did. that there were sort of fundamentalist, conservative, Bible-believing preachers, hellfire and brimstone preachers who did preach that way. And that kind of encouraged him, because even though he didn't have the nerve to do it, or was not inclined to do it, he thought somebody should be doing it, and that he was glad that there were people out there who still believed the old gospel and still preached in that way. But he said, look, I'm very disheartened today. because I'm finding that in the ranks of those who proclaim the truthfulness and authority of Scripture and affirm the Gospel as from God and the Scriptures as inerrant, they're not preaching that way anymore." He says, it's very disheartening. I didn't want to preach that way, but I thought surely they would. He said, now we're finding that not even they, even those who profess that they believe the Bible, who profess the truthfulness of the Gospel, they won't preach it. because it's negative, because it's unpopular, because people don't want to hear about sin, don't want to hear about judgment. And so they are failing to preach the gospel. In other words, I just think you have to back up and look at the trajectory. You don't want to be all doom and gloom, but the trajectories are not good right now. If you're thinking in terms of the status of the gospel and the health of the church, the trajectories are not very encouraging right now. And so what we're looking for, we need to be honest and face the reality, what we're looking for is a reversal of those trajectories that are of unbelief and silence and betrayal and loss of nerve. We want to see that reversed. How is that reversal going to take place? It's going to take place as God begins to open minds and hearts and stirs up a new generation. That's how. It won't happen otherwise. We water and plant, but God has to give the growth. He's the one that multiplies the word 30, 60, and 100 fold. That's why we need to be vigilant about prayer. Because as we call upon God, he may be inclined to hear us and grant our request to do that work that only God can do. We cannot stir up the hearts. of the leaders of this world or of the people of God. We cannot get to hearts. We have no access to human hearts. Only the Holy Spirit can get to human hearts. That's why when we water and plant, it is futile unless God causes the growth. So where does the restoration of the people of God begins? It begins when they recognize that restoration is a work of God, that only God can restore the people of God, restore it to health and vitality, restore the power of his gospel and the influence of the people of God, and turn things around so that once again, the church of God and the people of God are characterized by life and health and fruitfulness. May we ask God to visit his church and revive his people once more. Let us pray. Our Father in heaven, we pray that you would stir up your people and stir up even the unbelievers around us to show favor to your people, that your gospel might once again be your power unto salvation. and that many might be supernaturally born again by the power of your gospel, by your living and abiding word, and many might be transformed and grow by the pure milk of your word. And so we pray dependently, knowing that apart from you we can do nothing, knowing that our efforts are feeble, that we are foolish, and that we are weak. And so we pray, our Father, that you will raise yourself up and do that great work that you did in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, and visit your people once more. In Jesus' name, amen.