Our sermon today is going to be taken from Nehemiah 5. I'm sure it's no surprise to you that we're continuing on in the book of Nehemiah. And up till now we've been looking primarily, as we've been going through Nehemiah, on problems that were afflicting the Jews from the outside. But we're going to now be focusing on problems that afflicted the Jewish community in Jerusalem from the inside. All was not well within the covenant community. It wasn't just that they were facing affliction from Sanbalat and the enemy forces that were arrayed against them, but the devil was doing his work within the community as well. And he was doing so through economic deprivation, through poverty, through slavery, and we'll see how Nehemiah as a godly civil magistrate takes things in hand and how he sets an example for us as Christians. We're going to learn from Nehemiah what it really looks like to walk the Christian walk in a fallen world, God willing. But before we turn our attention to the Word of God, let's go to the God who's given us this inspired Word and let's ask for His blessing upon it. Please join me. Heavenly Father, Lord, now as I open up your word, I feel, Lord, inadequate to do so. I know, Lord, that if I don't understand the meaning and the power of this word, I'll never be able to apply it. So I pray, Lord, that you would give me that insight I need, that you would illuminate me inwardly, and that you would give me your Holy Spirit to guide me. Let me not say anything that deviates from that path that leads us sure home to heaven. I do pray for your people as well. Just as much as I need help in preaching your word, they need help in listening to it. Our ears need to be open. Our minds need to be awakened. And we know that the devil loves to come to us in this moment, to be at our elbow, to be distracting us constantly, telling us our thoughts should be going to and through throughout the earth. But we know, Lord, that to concentrate on your word, to hear it, And to be seeking to apply it is what is most needful. So we pray, Lord, that you would direct our attention to this word. Change us by it. Don't let it simply bounce off of us and do no good or go in one ear and out the other, as the old saying goes. But rather, let it lie in our hearts. Let it germinate. And let it produce that great harvest that you desire within us. And we pray this in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Nehemiah, chapter 5. I'm going to be reading the entire chapter. This is the word of the Lord, living and powerful. And there was a great outcry of the people and their wives against their Jewish brethren. For there were those who said, we, our sons and our daughters and many, therefore, let us get grain that we may eat and live. There were also some who said, we have mortgaged our lands and vineyards and houses that we might buy grain because of the famine. There were also those who said, We have borrowed money for the king's tax on our lands and vineyards, yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children. And indeed, we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have been brought into slavery. It is not in our power to redeem them, for other men have our lands and vineyards. And I became very angry. And when I heard their outcry in these words, after serious thought, I rebuked the nobles and rulers and said to them, each of you is exacting usury from his brother. So I called a great assembly against them. And I said to them, according to our ability, we have redeemed our Jewish brethren who were sold to the nations. Now indeed, will you even sell your brethren? Or should they be sold to us? Then they were silenced and found nothing to say. Then I said, what you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the nations, our enemies? I also, with my brethren and my servants, am lending them money and grain. Please, let us stop this usury. Restore now to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their houses, also a hundredth of the money and the grain, the new wine and the oil that you have charged them." So they said, we will restore it, and we will require nothing from them. We will do as you say. Then I called the priests and required an oath from them that they would do according to this promise. Then I shook out the fold of my garment and said, So may God shake out each man from his house and from his property who does not perform this promise. Even thus may he be shaken out and emptied. And all the assembly said, Amen, and praised the Lord. Then the people did according to this promise. Moreover, from the time that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the 20th year until the 32nd year of King Artaxerxes, 12 years, neither I nor my brothers ate the governor's provisions. But the former governors who were with me laid burdens on the people and took from them bread and wine, besides 40 shekels of silver. Yes, even their servants bore rule over the people. But I did not do so because of the fear of the Lord. Indeed, I also continued the work on this wall, and we did not buy any land. All my servants were gathered there for the work, and at my table were 150 Jews and rulers besides those who came to us from the nations around us. Now that which was prepared daily was one ox and six choice sheep, also fowl were prepared for me, and once every 10 days an abundance of all kinds of wine. Yet in spite of this, I did not demand the governor's provisions, because the bondage was heavy on this people. Remember me, my God, for good according to all that I have done for this people. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. I'm sure most of you know this already, but this year I started teaching during the mornings at Renaissance Classical Christian School. And we've spent most of this year reading classics of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. So we read books like Beowulf, and Dante's Inferno, and the Canterbury Tales. And in a couple of cases, it was the first time that I had read the book. In many cases, they were books that I hadn't read in quite some time. But one of the things that was wonderful for me in reading these books is that most of the books, when I had read them before, I had not been a Christian. The last time I read Dante's Inferno, for instance, was in the early 1990s, and I wasn't a Christian at the time. So it was wonderful to be able to read these books now with a Christian worldview and to read them with an eye towards the worldview that was being expressed at that point in time. And one of the things that I've been emphasizing as I've been teaching these works is how the medieval worldview had developed and how the beliefs of medieval people had impacted their daily life. And one of the things as we've gone through these works that has been apparent is how in the period leading up to the Reformation, the period leading up to that point where Luther, you remember, nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg, how within the church, especially, there was a lot of talking, the Christian talk, but not much walking of the Christian walk. And it wasn't just during the Middle Ages that theology took a turn for the worse. Christian practice also suffered as well. And usually those things will go hand in hand. Bad doctrine breeds bad practice. And almost everywhere in medieval Europe, you saw this process whereby virtually everyone identified as a Christian. You were either Christian, or you were Jewish, or you were a Muslim. And there weren't many Jews and Muslims in medieval Europe, unless the Muslims happened to be invading that year. But regardless, almost everybody identified as a Christian. But one of the problems was, that not everybody lived as a Christian. Authors like Dante and Chaucer were very quick in their works to show via satire how Christians in general in Europe and rulers and clergy in particular did not live out their Christianity. One of the things that's scandalous about Dante's work is how many of the popes he put in hell. because of the way that they lived for their own personal avarice, for their own pleasures, how they were constantly using their office to amass wealth and then to appoint cronies or relatives via nepotism to important positions. But it wasn't just the popes, the clergy generally, bishops and cardinals, and sometimes even priests, and then also the rulers in various areas. They too were not acting like Christians. Greed and immorality were rampant during this period. Men bought and sold offices in church and state specifically so that they could levy taxes like those governors that Nehemiah mentioned who preceded him. They bought their offices specifically so that they might surround themselves with opulence and have sheep not to take care of, which is of course what shepherds are supposed to do. They're supposed to shepherd the sheep, being willing to sacrifice everything. But these guys, instead, what were they doing? They were treating the sheep like wolves do. They saw them simply as a food source, and they were willing to do anything to gather in money to themselves. And instead of being concerned with the needs of the people that they were supposed to be shepherds over, what did they do? They used them, and it was so wrong. But one of the things that I've noticed in teaching is that very often when it comes to history in particular, students have great difficulty connecting the events of the past with their own time. The events of history, so to speak, are kind of things that we treat like they happened under glass. They're subjects for our examination, but they don't have any connection whatsoever to us. And what I've been trying to do is show how there are direct connections between what was going on in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and our own time. That's one of the reasons that I gave them a special assignment. I asked them to do a worldview assignment. And what I asked them to do was to go out and ask worldview questions. and then to analyze the answers that they got back, to compare them with medieval answers and so on, but also to compare the answers that people gave with their stated worldview. So for instance, and the kids incidentally were terrified by this, you want me to go to adults and ask them what they believe? I'm like, yeah, I want you to do that. They're like, they'll kill us. I had one student who actually said to me, If I ask them, they'll kill me, shoot me, and then they'll kill me again. That was literally her words. I was like, what, they're going to revive you in between? I don't understand why you think they're going to do these things. But I gave them worldview questions that I wanted them to ask. And the first two were, do you consider yourself a Christian? And they went out and they asked that question. And the answer, overwhelmingly, we're in North Carolina after all, was Yes. Okay. The answer was overwhelmingly yes. But the second question that I asked them to ask was, how often do you attend church? And one of the things that they noticed was there was often a big disconnect between answer one and answer two. The people would answer, I attend church. I don't really attend church, but I am a Christian. There were a lot of people who answered that way. And the students were surprised to find that many of the adults they asked said that they attended church rarely or never. There were other questions about what things they thought were important. And there again, the students were surprised because many of the answers that they gave didn't match up with their profession of faith. the things that they thought were important didn't flow out of a Christian worldview. And my hope is that many of those students saw the connection between the way things were at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance and the way things are today, especially when it comes to worldview. I hope they see the crying need that exists for reformation in our own time, within our own culture, and I also hope that it caused them to think about how their own profession of faith and their beliefs and practices match up. That's something we desperately need to do, brothers and sisters, something you and I need to do. We need to be constant in examining. These are the things I say I believe, and these are the things I do. Do they match up? Are my priorities really the priorities of a Christian? Do I need personal reformation in my own life? Because when it comes to the people of God, reformation is a process in which our own beliefs and practices are brought into harmony with the beliefs that God says should be practiced by the people of God. The practices that he tells us we should be daily living out in his word. Now, if someone is going to press for reformation in church and state, and as I said, I desperately think we do need a reformation today within our own culture. We need reformation and we need revival. But if we're going to press for that reformation, We need to be people who have gone through a personal process of reformation. People who have been reformed and who are being reformed by God's working in their hearts and by the application of God's word to our daily lives. We need to be reformed ourselves. And I don't mean just in the theological sense, yeah, I believe in the doctrines of grace, therefore I'm reformed. No, I mean in the sense that we have been reformed in word and deed and practice and belief, all of them fitting together because of the Lord's working within us. And as I hope we'll see as we go through Nehemiah, Nehemiah as a governor was that kind of reformer, a man who could call on the people he governed to reform because he was living according to those Reformation principles himself. Why, he says, did he do the things that he did in terms of Reformation? He did them because of the fear of the Lord. He did them because of the fear of God. The beginning of wisdom, brothers and sisters, is the fear of the Lord, and Nehemiah had it. So therefore, he was a wise ruler, a man who'd experienced Reformation himself and desired to see Reformation spreading within the community that he ruled over. Now, the reform that was needed in Jerusalem wasn't just a reform in their defenses. I mean, that was obvious. They needed to rebuild the walls, and Nehemiah indeed had come to Jerusalem to help to rebuild the walls. But they also needed a reform within the walls. They needed a reform in the way that they treated, for instance, the poor and the weak. And they needed to remember also their own history as they went about that reform. Because Those who were mistreating, oppressing the poor, the widows, and the weak, were people who were descended from slaves themselves. You remember, in Egypt, they had been enslaved. They had gone into Egypt when Joseph was second in the land and had enjoyed a very good relationship with the pharaoh at that time, and they had grown. They had gone from being one family to a giant nation in the midst of Egypt, and the pharaohs had become scared of them, and they had set them to hard labor, and they had abused them, killing their sons, for instance. And so, in the midst of their bondage, they had cried out to God, and He had heard them. We read this in Exodus 2.23-25. Now, it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died. Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out. And their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them. In the middle of their slavery, they cry out to God, help us. And he hears, because he's a covenant-keeping God, because he's a faithful God. And he sends them, remember, the deliverer, Moses. And through a series of plagues, the Lord brings them out of Egypt. He crushes their oppressors and leads them out. And then he brings them into the promised land. And because they themselves had once been poor and defenseless and enslaved, and he had redeemed them, he told them specifically, you need to exercise mercy as well. As people who have received mercy, as people whose cup has been filled up with the wine of the mercy that I am giving to you, you too must allow that wine to be poured out to others. you have to be merciful. So, he set before them rules that they needed to apply in their own lives when it came to the poor, the indigent, to protect those people. So, if you would turn with me in your Bibles to Deuteronomy 14, this is terribly important in understanding how wrong what's going on in Nehemiah's time was. In Deuteronomy 14, 7, we read this. If there is among you a poor man of your brethren within any of the gates of your land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart nor shut your hand from your poor brother, but you shall open your hand wide to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his needs. whatever he needs. And note that, the way that's worded. But you shall open your hand wide to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his need, whatever he needs. Beware lest there be a wicked thought in your heart saying, the seventh year, the year of release, that was the Jubilee year in which those in indentured servitude were let go. And your eye be evil against your poor brother, and you give him nothing. And he cry out to the Lord against you, and it becomes sin among you. You shall surely give to him and your heart should not be grieved when you give to him. Because for this thing, the Lord your God will bless you in all your works and in all to which you put your hand. For the poor will never cease from the land." And you remember Jesus essentially repeated that verse. The poor will always be among you. You will always have the poor. The poor will never cease from the land. Therefore I command you saying, you shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy in your land. The poor will always be in your land. Therefore, charity always needs to be coming from your hand, if we could put it that way. If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you send him away free from you, you shall not let him go away empty-handed. You shall supply him liberally from your flock, from your threshing floor, from your winepress, from what the Lord has blessed you with. You shall give to him. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you. Therefore, I command you this thing today. So not obeying this law that the Lord had given them in Deuteronomy, taking advantage of the poor and keeping their brothers and sisters in a state of perpetual slavery instead of releasing them every seven years was one of the reasons that God had decreed that the Jews would be taken away into exile in Babylon. It was one of the things that brought this terrible vengeance down upon their heads that caused Jerusalem to be crushed in the first place. The very fact that Nehemiah was rebuilding these walls was due in part to the slavery, the oppression, the awful usury that was exacted by the Jews upon their brethren in that very city prior to the Babylonian exile. And after 70 years in exile, you remember, the Persian king Darius had issued a decree telling the Jews that they could return to their homeland. He said specifically, go back to your homeland, rebuild the temple of your God, and there offer sacrifices for me. so that our empire might be strengthened, so that I might rule well, and so on. So he had allowed them to go back and rebuild the temple. They were released from the burden of being in exile, but not all of them were released. That's something that we don't really consider. Many of the Jews who had been taken off into exile had been enslaved. They'd been enslaved by private citizens within the Persian Empire, and therefore they were property. So the decree of Darius to go back and rebuild the temple did not suddenly free them. They remained in slavery, in bondage, in servitude to the Gentiles of the Persian Empire. And as a result, many of the richer Jews, the free Jews who had the ability to buy those slaves, took pity on their poor brethren and had, as Nehemiah says, according to their ability, bought their Jewish brothers and sisters out of slavery so that they could return to the homeland. so that they could go back and settle once again in the promised land that God had given them. And in that, I was reminded of the story of Baroness Cox. I don't know if many of you know about her. She is a wealthy British evangelical Christian who has done trip after trip to Sudan in order to ransom captive Christians, Muslim jihadis, especially prior to the establishing of South Sudan, a separate country. raided extensively in the south and they would destroy the villages, destroy the fields, but they would take the women and the children and they would take them with them back up north and they would sell them into slavery. There are still countless Christian slaves within Sudan, so Baroness Cox and her organization would go over with money that had been donated, and in some cases her own funds, and they would buy these Christian slaves out of slavery. They would be redeemed. Now, Nehemiah indicates by his saying, we, when he's talking about this process of redeeming, that he was one of those people who had already used his wealth to redeem his brethren. And many of those who had been redeemed that way had probably come with him to Jerusalem. They had come in hopes of a new beginning. They had come in hopes that they would be able to establish themselves, to have a homestead, to have hope, to experience prosperity in the land. But it's important to remember that somebody who had been just redeemed out of slavery at that point in time and had gone into this land would be at a considerable disadvantage. In some cases, they would be able to take back their ancestral plots of land. that weren't being occupied, but in some cases they would have to buy them. And where are they going to get the revenue to do that kind of thing in the first place? Then they had to buy seed. You know, corn doesn't just grow out of the ground by itself. We have to plant it. And to plant it, you need the seed in the first place. And in order to plow the ground, you need livestock and equipment. In order to store the stuff that you grow, you need to be able to build buildings. You need a place to live in yourself. All of these things require what? Money. Farming is an investment process. You put out a lot of money initially to buy many different things, and often you do so on credit. And what are you, I guess, hoping for? You're hoping for a good harvest, and then you will be able to pay off the people that you borrowed the money from. But if you don't have a good harvest, what happens? They come looking for their money, knocking on your door. saying, hey, where's the money in the interest that we agreed on? You signed a contract. You said at such and such a date you would pay me back this money. Where is it? I don't have it. All right, then you're going to need to mortgage your field to me. You're going to need to essentially let me have this land if you can't pay it back. You're going to have to, if you can't do that, give me your property. You're going to have to give me, if you can't pay me back that way, your children to serve. as slaves. That was the way it went. If you fell into deep enough debt, you would often end up selling your children into indentured servitude, or more often at this point, unfortunately, slavery, in order to pay that debt. And in terms of the contracts that they entered into, you've got to remember that a man who is starving, with his family who are starving as well, will sign almost anything if he can just get some relief in the short term. He'll agree to insane rates of interest. He'll agree to put up things that he should never agree to put up in collateral and so on. Now, what had happened, unfortunately, is that the land had gone through several years of drought. As we read prophets like Haggai and Malachi, they point out that the lack of faith of the people in rebuilding the temple of God and in doing what he had said had brought a time of famine and drought upon the land. And several bad harvests had produced multiple bankruptcies. And as a result, many Jews had ended up enslaved once again by the wealthier landowners, by the wealthier people within the community, the nobles, for instance, the rulers. And in many cases, the sad thing was, and Nehemiah points this out, the very people who had been redeemed from being slaves to the Gentiles were now enslaved again. And who had sold them into slavery? Their own brethren. It was bad enough when the Persians enslaved them, but now it was even worse that it was their own brothers and sisters in the covenant community who had enslaved them. And in some cases, he laments the fact that these children who had been sold into slavery had then been sold to Gentiles, right back in the same position that men like Nehemiah had tried to redeem them out of. This was a sad and starry state of affairs. Now, one thing we need to know is that the majority, no doubt, of the transactions that resulted in people being sold into slavery and bondage were absolutely legal. The contracts didn't violate any legal provisions, but they were harsh nevertheless. One of the things we need to learn, brothers and sisters, even in business, is this. Just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should do something. There's a difference between legal and right many a time. So what they had done had been legal, but most of the time it wasn't right. Had the Jews lending money to their fellow Jews been living according to the word, they would never have sold them into perpetual bondage. And in fact, they might have asked themselves this important question, should we be giving loans or should we be giving gifts? Should we be giving away money to those who have no other means of prospering? Should we be charitable? And the question there, should always be answered, generally speaking, with a yes. But they hadn't done that. And now the condition of the poor was deteriorating. They'd lost everything. They'd lost their land, so they had no hope of making back any money or recovering anything. And when this was brought to Nehemiah's attention and the true extent of the poverty and the enslavement and the bondage that was occurring, when he saw that, he's shocked. And he's ashamed and he himself says that he had been lending and lending at interest. Now he uses, well the word actually that we see in the NKJV here is usury. Usury is when I lend you money and I expect a lot more than I gave you back. I want to make money on my loan to you. And usury is usually when the interest rate is too high. In other words, I loan you some money, and I don't expect just, like, 2.3% back. I expect, you know, the kind of rate of return that a Capital One card will charge you. 23%, 29%, 50% perhaps. So, that is what unfortunately had been happening. Now, I'm sure that Nehemiah hadn't charged anything close to that level of interest of his brethren. But the Lord, in His Word, condemns interest. They should not have been doing it in the first place. And he says, the practice has to end. He commands, restore now to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their houses, also a hundredth of the money and the grain, the new wine and the oil that you have charged them. He says, first, the things that they put up for collateral, their houses, their fields, and so on, the things that will allow them to live in the land and to prosper, give them back. Those are things that were given to them, their families, by God. You need to give them back. Now, he doesn't say, I want you to give back all of the money that you took from them. He says, I want you to give back, though, a hundredth of the money in the grain, the things that you took from them, a percentage of it, so that they might have enough to live on and to get started again, to be restored. At this point, the Ayn Randian is going to be incensed. The objectivist, the materialist saying, hey, wait a minute. Those people entered into contracts and they defaulted. Those businessmen gained all of that property legally. They shouldn't have to give it back. That's not right. It's not strictly legal. But brothers and sisters, What we're talking about here, as I said, is the difference between legal and right. We're talking about charity, and we're talking about within the community of believers. Should we not first exercise charity towards those who are members of the household of faith? Had they not benefited from the charity and the mercy of God? Isn't it wonderful that God doesn't operate on a strictly legal basis with us? It's one of the questions that I would have asked at that point in time. Isn't it wonderful that God operates on a standard of mercy when it comes to His people, not exacting a strict requirement of repayment according to His giving? How many of us think we could repay the Lord for His mercy? How many of us think we would be saved if our salvation were up to our work, strictly speaking? Brothers and sisters, we should all be lost if the Lord operated on that basis towards us. So we should be a people who remembering, and I'll make this point at greater length later, we're a people who should be remembering where we were when God found us, how enslaved we were. And Nehemiah remembers that. They know, he says, that what they've been doing is not in keeping with the Word of God or the example of God. And Nehemiah goes further. He knows how men often make promises and then go back on them, so he makes this repayment that he's asking for, this giving back into a religious oath. This is reformation in practice. And that reformation in practice causes rejoicing amongst the assembly of people. And all the assembly said, Amen, and praised the Lord. Then the people did according to this promise. But how convincing would Nehemiah have been if reformation wasn't being practiced in his own life? If he had said, I want you to reform, I'm not going to. Okay, I'm going to continue to do the things that I've always been doing. If he had been, for instance, acting as a harsh taskmaster over the people, exacting huge taxes, and then saying, well, you know, you guys, you guys need to be charitable. One of the things that drives me crazy is when a civil magistrate refuses to cinch his own belt, but then tells us we all have to. When he refuses to rein in his own spending, but then tells us that we have to pay higher taxes. But that's not what Nehemiah does. He says, I'm not going to act. He deliberately, before even this came up, he wasn't acting like the former governors did because he loved the people and he was operating as a true shepherd. He did not lay additional burdens on the people. He did not take from them bread and wine and money. He lived off his own income. And yes, even his servants who could have abused the people, he did not allow them to do so. He was wise in this. I heard an interesting little story that was being told by a guy who ran an air conditioner company. And I didn't realize this. Heating and AC companies apparently are well known for the way that they corruptly overcharge customers and how they will often charge them for things that they did not need. In fact, and I was appalled to hear this, he said that it's now become common practice among some heating and AC companies to actually tell their men when they go out and they check out a unit to cross some wires to destroy components in the heating and air conditioning so that they will have to come back and have repairs made. Well, he said, that's not the way I want to operate. That's not my worldview. So he said during the interview process, he asks a bunch of questions and then he said, here's my trick question. It's my sixth question. He says, when I've got a candidate, I'll lean in and I'll ask him this question. How do you feel about charging people for things they don't need? And he said he was interviewing one candidate and the guy leaned back and he said, I don't have a problem with it. And he said he got to his feet, and he said, the interview is over, we won't be hiring you. And he sent him on his way. He says he interviewed another fellow, and he asked the same question. And the guy got silent, and he said he looked at him, he looked at his feet, he looked at him, he looked at his feet, and he said, well, I've done it in the past, but I don't like it. He said, the reason I'm unemployed today is because I went through this process where I said to myself, I need to do this so I can put money in my pocket and I can put food on the table. I need to do this for my kids. It's what's being asked of me. It's the way everybody does business. I need to do it. And he said, I did that for a little while and then it suddenly occurred to me, what kind of example am I setting for my own kids? And he said, I went to my employer and I said, I won't do that anymore. And he fired me. That's why I'm here. And the guy hired him. Because that's the kind of person he was looking for. That's the kind of person we should be looking for. Nehemiah not only was exercising reformation in his own life, but he wanted that reformation principle to be operative amongst all of his employees as well. so that they too weren't lording it over the people, weren't acting as taskmasters, weren't being wolves amongst the sheep, but rather were exercising that oversight, that compassion, and that charity that is so needful. He didn't do what the former governors had done because he remembered who he was, where he had been when the Lord found him, and where they as a people had been. Specifically, although he was a high official, he had been raised as a captive in a strange land, as an exile. And now, according to his prayers, according to his supplications of the Lord, he had been allowed to return. And how would it have been had he mercifully been allowed to leave bondage, to leave exile, and then to go back and then to abuse the Lord's people? That would have been corrupt and awful, and no man who knows the Lord and who fears the Lord wants to go before Him after having done that. One of the things that's often said to pastors when they talk about the corruptions of the Word of Faith preachers, men like Benny Hinn, and how they bill people out of thousands of dollars, and yet they have these giant stadium-sized assemblies, and they reach millions of people by TV, and you point out the corruption. the money-making enterprise that it is, and people come back and they say, oh, you're just jealous. One of the answers that I'll often give is, I tell you this, I do not want to be Benny Hinn on the day of judgment. When the Lord asks, what did you do with my people? How did you treat them? What did you minister for? Was it for money? If it was, Oh man, you don't want to be the one who has mistreated the apple of the Lord's eye. Nehemiah feared God, so he obeyed his word and he ruled wisely. Now, one of the things that often happens is that the people of God don't have that perspective of where we were when God found us. We don't remember that we ourselves were slaves who needed to be redeemed. We sometimes develop the older brother and the prodigal son parable complaint. Haven't we always been faithful? Haven't we always been good? And so when we look at these awful wretches who come crawling back, having misspent their lives with no money in their pockets, asking for mercy, we look at them and we're just disgusted. You've done this to yourself. Why should we, who have always been faithful unto the Lord, help you or show pity, forgetting where we were? forgetting that we were once slaves. Now, often the response at that point is, we've never been slaves. We've never been bad. Oh, brothers and sisters, every single one of you who is redeemed was once a slave. Did you know that? Every single one of you. What were you slaves to? Well, you weren't slaves to the Persians, but you were slaves to sin. Jesus struggled vitally to bring that fact home to his own people. He said in John 8 31, turn with me to that section of scripture, then Jesus said to these Jews who believed him, if you abide in my word, you are my disciples indeed and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. They answered him, we are Abraham's descendants and have never been in bondage to anyone. Now that's a ridiculous statement anyway. If they're saying they're tracing the lineage back to Abraham, had they been in bondage in between those times? Obviously, they'd been in bondage in Egypt, they'd been in literal bondage in Babylon, and so on. They'd often been in bondage, subject to people who would oppress them and so on. But they answer, we've never been in bondage to anyone. How can you say you will be made free? Jesus answered, the most assuredly I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore, if the son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. Just as much as Moses came to set a people free from the bondage they were living in, Jesus came to set a people free from the bondage they were living in. The problem was the Jews in Egypt saw the physical bondage all around them and the reminders of it. But when he came to his own people in his own day, they did not see the slavery that was afflicting them because it was a slavery of the heart to sin. But what did Jesus do anyway? He redeemed his people. He redeemed his elect, the ones the Father had given him. He laid down his life for the sheep. And so what do the apostles constantly tell us in their word? Because we were bought at a price, because we were redeemed. How much should we be people who are living in light of that? Showing mercy, acting in accordance with our redemption. 1 Corinthians 6.19 and 20, Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. Live Christian lives. Be constantly looking to the Word and seeing how you need to reform your own behavior. 1 Peter 1.18 and 19, knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver and gold from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, you were redeemed. How did he pay for us? Well, Nehemiah obviously had paid literal money to release the people of God from their slavery and their bondage. Baroness Cox going over to Sudan went over with suitcases literally of American dollars. to pay the slave traders, for the people that she was buying out of captivity. But how do you buy somebody out of captivity to sin? How do you buy somebody out of bondage to the broken law? And the answer is by laying down your life as an atoning sacrifice. Jesus paid for our sins with his blood. That was the price of our redemption. That was what was needed to be due to make us free. And if that is how we have been freed, and I hope everybody who's hearing me has an assurance that they have been set free from bondage to sin, that the shackles have been broken, and that they are now free indeed because of what the Son of God has done. Adopted sons and daughters, princes and princesses, if I can put it that way, royal in the household, now because of what He's done. If that's the case, are we living like that? Or are our thoughts, like the Jews in Jerusalem before Nehemiah brought about this reformation, so tied up in money? So tied up in making sure that everything is legal, that we get as much as we're owed and so on, and willing to do anything to amass money rather than exercising charity, coming alongside somebody. One of the most impressive things that I've seen within the community here at Providence is the willingness to give freely without asking anything in return. That to me is a sure sign that Reformation is going on. If we become hard-hearted though, if we become graceless, if we become people who refuse to give freely as we have been given, that would be a sign that we're becoming hardened. and that our behavior is diverging radically from that within the Word. I think one of the most winsome things that you can see in the world today is the way that Christians love one another, love their brothers and sisters, and provide for them. Something the media doesn't want to cover, but did you know that evangelicals are the most charitable people on earth? American evangelicals, by percentage. And, you know, when there's a tsunami in Indonesia, we don't say, well, they're all Muslims, they deserve to drown. We send over teams to help them. We do that freely. Why? Because we were redeemed at a price. We were bought. We, too, were once slaves. We, too, were once in bondage. We, too, were once poor and had no hope whatsoever. And so we help out of charity, not because we're required to by the state, but because we want to, because our Lord and Savior came and helped us when we had no hope. I hope that's the motivating principle in your life. And I hope you'll ask yourself today, are you living in light of the redemption from bondage that you say is the central fact of your life? Are you sharing also not only goods, but the most precious thing that was given to you? What did Peter and John say when they went up to the temple, they went to the gate beautiful, and there's this man who is begging for alms, all he wants, all he expects, all he's hoping for is what? He has his hands out and he's hoping for money. But they say to him, gold and silver have I none. And then they give him something far more precious. Obviously, they heal him, but they give him the gospel. And his life is changed. That's what we need to be giving away. The mercy that's been extended to us is something we should be giving away daily to others, giving them the gospel, and not just alms. Feed a man, and you'll fill his belly. Clothe him, and you'll keep him warm. But what good will that do him if he spends eternity in hell? that He arrived there with a warm back and a full belly will not be a reason why He'll praise you in eternity, if you knew the gospel and didn't share it with Him. Let's be merciful and gracious with everything that we have, and let's be practicing personal reformation according to the Word in our lives as Nehemiah practiced it. Let's go before the Lord now and ask for His help. God our Father, in and of ourselves we can do nothing, but we know, Lord, that with You we can do all things. So we pray, Lord, that you would help us to reform in our own lives and to pray for reformation within our nation, within our communities, within our church. We ask for revival. We ask for help to be compassionate, to be merciful. When we see those who are still in bondage to sin, still completely deceived as we once were, may we not feel a feeling of hate towards them, but rather pity and to want to do everything that we can to bring the good news of the gospel to them. When our brothers and sisters have need, let us do all that we can to truly help them. When we see those who don't know you, let us be eager and willing to give them the good news of the gospel, that they too might experience that true freedom that only Jesus can give. We pray all these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen.