Would you take your Bibles this evening for a short time to the book of Nehemiah? The book of Nehemiah. If you get to Psalms, turn back a couple books to the left and you'll find the book of Nehemiah. No one ever cared for me like Jesus. Tonight I would like us to consider for a few minutes the heart of our Lord towards us as humankind. And we can see it exemplified in the life of an Old Testament believer by the name of Nehemiah. God used Nehemiah to do a great work. I love the story of Nehemiah. Just chapter after chapter of action and excitement and Nehemiah jumping in and doing something great for the Lord. God used him in a great way to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem there way back in the day. We come in kind of late into the story of Israel. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, 400 years later, Moses, the 40 years of the wilderness wanderings, then Joshua steps on the scene. God uses him to lead the nation of Israel into the promised land, and they start conquering cities. The walls of Jericho fall down. They start conquering the land, and God blesses as long as they follow Him. And then the judges come up because they stopped following God, and God uses the judges to deliver the people time and time and time again. Finally, the last stands up, Samuel, and God uses him. I love the stories of Samuel, don't you? And then King Saul comes on the scene, and he starts well, he doesn't finish well. And then God has a man after his own heart, David, and he establishes an everlasting kingdom with David. Now we're kind of in a pause right now, but one day Christ is going to come back and sit on the throne of David. So David comes and God promises him there's something special with King David. David has a son Solomon. Solomon is in the glory days of Israel. Things are great in Israel. Solomon doesn't end up so well because he stops following God's law. He starts taking many wives and starts enriching himself. And he has a son named Rehoboam who does some foolish things, and the kingdom splits into two, the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom. The Northern Kingdom quickly goes off into idolatry, king after king after king, and queen after queen. They lead them into Baal worship, and God brings judgment on the Northern Kingdom. The Southern Kingdom, they hang on a little longer. They're kind of like us, that will follow God for a while, and follow other things. Follow God, and then get distracted, and they start following idols again. Finally, after times of revival and times of following Baal, finally God brings destruction on Jerusalem and brings Nebuchadnezzar in and takes Daniel captive off to Babylon, Daniel and his friends, and destroys the walls of Jerusalem, destroys the temple, carries off all the gold vessels in the temple, and puts him as loot in his palace there in Babylon. Seventy years go by, a man named Cyrus stands up, Cyrus the Great, and he proclaims that he wants to help the Jews rebuild the Temple, rebuild Jerusalem. And, oh, by the way, pray for me when you get it done. And so a first group goes back with Zerubbabel, and they start rebuilding the Temple. Twenty years later, the Temple's rebuilt and dedicated, and they start offering worship to God again there on Mount Zion, the place where God had chosen to set His name. The city on the hill that God wanted to be a light to the whole world, that all people could see that the God of Israel is the God of heaven. Well, some 90 years go by, and we come to the story of Nehemiah. To put it in perspective, if today was Nehemiah's day, 444 BC, Jerusalem would have been captured by Nebuchadnezzar in 1862. Zerubbabel and that first group that went back would have started that work in 1932. Generations have grown up there in Persia, there in Babylon, not ever having set foot or ever seen the Promised Land. Like Ezekiel, they would sit down by the river and wish that they could be back home, but they're not. Nehemiah, God does a great thing in Nehemiah. He rebuilds the wall, sure, but then there's revival that comes because people start following the Word of God. There's all kinds of problems that are faced by Nehemiah and God gives victory and God uses him in a great way, even down to the establishment of our Bible. A group of scholars with Ezra and Nehemiah start compiling a lot of the things that have been there all along and available all along, but they start bringing it together and God uses them to kind of start collating the Old Testament to where they were part of that process of bringing us the Bible that we have in our laps today. God did a lot of great things with Nehemiah. Nehemiah's heart, we can see it in chapter 1. It reflects the heart of Christ as we see it in the New Testament. And I would like just briefly to jump through and look how God used Nehemiah in his day in a world that was hurting. Let's go to the Lord in prayer and then we'll jump into the scripture this evening. Lord, thank you for the opportunity to open your word tonight. Thank you how you've already stirred our hearts about the thought of so many that don't even have a Bible, don't even know the name of Jesus in far-flung places, Lord. And I pray that you would continue to work in our hearts. Lord, may our heart be like your heart. You cared for us. Help us to care for others. Lord, thank You for this opportunity. Help us to learn from You. I pray the Holy Spirit would have His way in our hearts tonight, that we would surrender whatever it is that's in our lives that's keeping us back from service to You, Lord, and that we would do as You want us to tonight. I pray that You bless our time now together. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. The news is our world is a hurting, a broken place. Every place we can look, every time you turn on the news, don't you see it? People are looking for something to give life meaning. They're wondering about the great beyond. I think of even this location that we're sitting in, an old nursing home. A lot of times when people get close to death, they start wondering, hmm, what is after this? It's not that God has forsaken man, but it's that we have forsaken God. We've kept Him out of the schoolhouse, out of the courthouse, out of the theater, out of the concert halls, out of the clothing stores, out of homes, and even out of churches in our land. Where would we be if God treated us the way that we treat God, but that's not the Lord's heart. It's a good thing that I'm not God. It's a good thing that you're not God. It's a good thing God is God, and He is merciful. Let's look at His heart tonight a little bit, shown here in the life of Nehemiah. Beginning in verse 1, the words of Nehemiah, the son of Hakaliah. And it came to pass in the month Chislew in the twentieth year, as I was in Shushan the palace, so he's back in Persia. that Hanani, one of my brethren, came, he and certain men of Judah, and I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire. came to pass when I heard these words that I sat down and wept and mourned certain days and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven." The first thing I'd like to see tonight is that Nehemiah saw the affliction and the reproach. Not physically, no. He's hundreds of miles away in Shushan the palace in Persia. His brethren came and brought him a report of the Jews that had stayed behind, oh, back from 1862 all the way till now, that had stayed behind and they're not doing well. This is not the Jerusalem that God intended Jerusalem to be. God's glory is not going out to the whole earth. Things are not well. and it affects Nehemiah. But before it affected Nehemiah, before Nehemiah did anything, Nehemiah saw what was going on. He saw with his mind's eye. He pictures their condition, in verse 3 it said, it's great affliction and reproach. As we look at our world around us, do we really see what's going on? Oh, we get angry, don't we? Oh, we read things on the news, the border crisis and the drugs in the streets and all kinds of immorality, all kinds of things going on in our country, let alone our world. And we get mad about things. Do we really see? Nehemiah saw not just with physical eyes, but he saw with spiritual eyes. He saw what the root problem was. He realized that their social problems they were facing, the enemy's taunts and affliction, all the problems they were facing, fixing those would just be a patch, a Band-Aid. The true root of it was sin. We find that because Nehemiah says down in verse 7, he's confessing to the Lord, "...we have dealt very corruptly against thee, and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandest thy servant Moses. Remember, I beseech thee, the word thou commandest thy servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations." Nehemiah put his finger on what the real issue was. And truly, every social issue in our world today, it's all traced back to sin. Every problem I have in my family, it's all traced back to sin. Every problem that we have in a church setting, it's traced back to sin. Welfare checks are not going to solve that problem. Nehemiah said, you know what, let's deal with the sin. Let's not just try another program. Let's not just try something else. Let's deal with that sin. I believe all of us know how to deal with sin. Confess to the Lord. Make it right with others. Let's stick to that. That's simple. It's not always easy to do, but let's do that. Let the Lord start to unravel the social problems. Nehemiah saw the affliction of his countrymen. He saw that God was not being glorified as he should have been. And that affected Nehemiah. He felt something. He saw something, but he felt something. We see in verse 4, we know he felt something because he sat down. You ever have news to tell somebody and you say, you better be sitting down for this one. Because it affects us, right? Sometimes some of those phone calls will affect us. Nehemiah didn't just rush on to the next thing. Now he was a very busy man. He was the king's cup bearer. So I imagine at least three times a day he's tasting food and tasting the drink that is going to be served to the king to see if he's going to keel over dead, you know, to protect the king. Nehemiah is there to serve the king. He's a very busy man. He has the king's ear. I'm sure there are a lot of people who were in Nehemiah's life and Nehemiah sat down when he heard this news. A lot of times we just keep on going with our life. We see something and we just keep scrolling. I do it. I just keep on going. What's the next thing? What's the next headline I'm going to read? I see it, but it doesn't affect me. I don't let it affect me because I just plunge onto the next thing. But Nehemiah sat down. Not only that, he wept. Now, I don't cry a lot. Now, don't test that later with a hammer to my... I don't cry a lot. I wish I cried some more. I wish I wept. more easily. Sometimes I feel like it, it just doesn't come. But Nehemiah wept when he heard the report of these people. It bothered him. He put himself in their shoes. If that was my child, if that was me, oh what if I was the one that was on a delta somewhere in a village and I had no hope, no future to look forward to, what would I turn to? What if that was me? He felt something. He wept. He mourned certain days. He was in sorrow of heart. He fasted. Now, I don't know about here in Delaware, but at least down south, it takes a lot to separate us Baptists from our food. But Nehemiah, Baptist as he may have been, he fasted. He said, this is serious. I want God to intervene and do something about this. Nehemiah felt something. Do we feel for the people that we see and the situations we see going on in our land? Do we just see people as drivers of slow cars or annoying voices in the grocery store? Or do we see them as souls? The heart of Christ. Nehemiah saw. Nehemiah felt something. Nehemiah believed something. In verse 5, we can see what he believes because in verse 5 we see how he prays. O LORD. Is that all capitals in your Bible? All caps? LORD? That's the personal name of God, Jehovah. I AM. The self-existent one. Now, I need food. I need water. I need friendship. I need time. God doesn't need any of that. He is self-sufficient. He's beyond all of that. And because of that, Nehemiah said, Lord, I am finite, but you are infinite. I depend on a lot of things, but you depend on nothing, but you're self-sufficient. You can do something about this problem. Not only that, He calls Him the God of heaven. This is a really neat term that shows up in Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel. The God of heaven. Not just the God of the Israelites, not just the God of the mountains, but also the God of the valleys, and the God over Persia, and the God over the whole world. Nehemiah could sit in Persia and pray to the God of heaven, and God would do something in Israel. Isn't that neat? Oh, we can pray for people in Burkina Faso, for people in Greenland. We can pray for missionaries that are in Papua New Guinea, in Ireland, and the God of heaven hears those prayers and he does something on the other side of the world as a result of your prayers here in Wilmington. That's amazing. And Nehemiah believed that God could do something because he's self-existent, and he believed God could do something because he could hear a prayer on one side of the earth and do something on the other side of the earth. Not only that, but he calls God, he calls Him the great and the terrible God. Now, a lot of times we use those adjectives contrary one to the other, right? How was your meal today? Oh, it was great. Oh, it was terrible. The first part of that word terrible, terror, I believe Nehemiah saw, as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6, he saw God high and lifted up, and he realized God is holy, and we need to fear Him. The people of Israel didn't fear Him as they should have. And that's why Nebuchadnezzar came in and wiped them out hundreds of years before. We need to fear God. We can't trifle with God. Say, oh yeah, I can sin back here, but I'll still go to church on Sunday and I'll still be a good Christian on the outside, but I'll just do my own thing in my own private life. Well, God sees all of that. He wants to see, oh, perfection? Be perfect even as your Father in heaven is a perfect. But God has grace for when we do fail. We might as well just show it to Him and say, Lord, I failed. Would you forgive my sin as I confess it? The great and terrible God. The great God. Now, just to let you know, great means considerably above average. Alright? You have a great day? That means it's considerably above average. God is considerably above average. I mean, there is no God like unto our God. Jeremiah 10.6, there is none like unto the old Lord, thou art great. Nebuchadnezzar? King Sennacherib or General Sennacherib? Who's that? The Antichrist? He does some pretty fearful things in the book of Revelation. But who's that compared to the great God? Nehemiah believed that God is self-existent, He's the God of heaven, He is great, and He is to be feared, and that He keeps His promises, and He stores up mercy. Isn't that wonderful that God keeps His promises? I can cast my soul at His feet and say, Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." And he'll do it. He's going to keep that promise. Nehemiah brings up a couple promises in verse 8. He asks God to remember the promise, which is ironic because God's the one who made the promise and God's not going to forget. But Nehemiah prays this prayer back to God and said, God, you said if we sin, you're going to cast us all across this world. But he asked God to remember another promise in verse 9. If ye turn unto me and keep my commandments and do them, though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of heaven, yet will I gather them from vents and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there. Nehemiah believed something about God. And he said, Lord, you made a promise. If we'll repent, you'll bring us back. And he's here repenting. and he believes that God's going to bring them back. Nehemiah believed God. Nehemiah's burden as he saw and felt for his people, combined with his belief in God, fueled a prayer. Verse 5 through verse 11, it's Nehemiah's prayer. And so many elements in the prayer, we don't have time to look at it, but you have time later this week to check it out. Well, tomorrow's Saturday. Maybe I'll have to do that next week. So many things in his prayer. Did you know we can pray? When you think about that border crisis, all these people coming across the border, and what's going on, and why aren't our leaders doing anything? We could pray about it, and God could do something about it. What about all these people who've never heard the gospel? We could pray about it. We don't have to leave it, you know, like our specialty tile saw way back in the back of our tool shed that we pull out when we do the bathroom remodel. You know, we don't have to leave it. We could use it. We could use prayer like a hammer or a screwdriver. It's in the kitchen drawer. And anytime you need it, it's right there. You use it on everything. I use screwdriver, you know, you can do a lot with a flathead screwdriver. And Brother Nathaniel, you're going to, I'm sure you're going to do some pretty amazing things in Alaska. with just what you have. But we should use prayer. It's ready to go. It works on everything. And Nehemiah prayed. He prayed. He continued in prayer. This was not a one-off. Four months later, when you get to chapter 2, the king says, Nehemiah, why are you looking sad? Is there a plot on to assassinate me or something? And Nehemiah says, I'm still burdened about my people that I heard about four months ago. It's been on his heart. He's been carrying it with him. He's been praying about it. He's been concerned about it. Nehemiah prays. But it doesn't stop there. So there's a burden. You see something. You feel something. You pray about it. But Nehemiah volunteered to do something. In verse 5 of chapter 2, halfway through the verse, he asks the king, he says, if I found favor in thy sight, that thou wouldst send me unto Judah. Send me. Right, Nehemiah could have said, hey, I know some guys that they're just kind of bumming around the city of Persia, like, let's send them. You know, they're not good for anything here in the city. Let's send them over to Jerusalem and do that work. But Nehemiah says, send me. That meant leaving his life in Shushan the palace. I imagine he ate the best steak the world had to offer. I mean, that's what was being served to King Artaxerxes. He was drinking the best drink. He was eating the best food. He was living a very comfy life, I believe. And he said, send me. I'll go. I want to do something about this. Do you see the heart of Nehemiah there? He says, my comfort, it doesn't matter, I'll go. I'm bothered about, my life is comfy and cushy, but I'm really bothered about these other folks that don't have what I have. And it's not about comfort and cushiness, it's about glorifying God and making things right with God. Let's turn over to Matthew chapter nine and closing. We saw the heart of Nehemiah there. an Old Testament believer, but I believe he reflected many of the same elements of the heart of Christ, at least as is seen in Matthew chapter 9. In verse 35, Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. I would like to be there that day. You know, I would have liked to have cancer that day. Just that day. You know, I have cancer. Ah, and be healed. Wouldn't that be awesome? Awesome testimony? Jesus did a lot when he was here on earth. But then in verse 36, when he saw the multitudes. See, Jesus's, the Father's plan was not that Jesus take the gospel to every person in the whole world. Himself personally, bodily. That wasn't Jesus's. Jesus didn't come to North America, okay? He saw multitudes and He said, this is bigger than any one individual. We see His heart here because in verse 36, He saw the multitude. He was moved with compassion on them. Do you see that corollary there? He saw and He felt. He was moved with compassion on them because they fainted and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd. No one ever cared for them like Jesus. We look at other people and we think, oh, if they'd only get out of the way, I could get to the grocery store on time. But Jesus saw them, they're just wandering around in life. And they're coloring their hair funny colors because they don't know God. They don't have peace in their life. They're on their third marriage because they haven't figured out that The Lord can patch up relationships and that there's forgiveness to be found because they're sheep. They don't have guidance. They're fainting. They're struggling through life. It's fatalism. Oh, let's eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. And Jesus felt for them. He was moved. Moved to do something. He didn't just feel something and then go drown it out in a carton of ice cream and go to bed. He was moved with compassion on them. Jesus saw, He felt. He tells us to pray in verse 37, then say at the end of His disciples, the harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Just like Luke 10 verse 2. That's always been the problem, few laborers. Not enough willing to say, send me, I'll go. I don't know, maybe we're all stuck back in the palace in Shushan, not willing to go and do something about what we're praying about. Verse 38, "'Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest.'" Ah, there's a burden, but the answer is prayer. But it doesn't stop there. The very next verse, the people who he told to pray are the people who he sends out. It's like, hey, pray about this. Okay, now go do something about this. It's the people who are praying that the Lord says, ah, there's a heart that I can use. There's somebody I can work through. And then He sends them out and does a great thing. I think it's Luke chapter 10 when He sends out His disciples. He sends them into all the places where He Himself would come. He wanted to go, in chapter 10, verse 1 of Luke, He sent them before His face into every city and place, whither He Himself would come. Jesus wanted to go there. Today, Jesus wants to go to the YK Delta of Alaska. And He's not going to go there bodily, but He's going to go there spiritually, in the heart of believers. And He wants to go to India. He wants to go to Brazil. He wants to go all over this world and see people saved. Now, the question is, are we willing to be that person that can carry Christ around? Now, I understand every believer, the moment you're saved, you're indwelt by the Holy Spirit for life. You have Him. That doesn't mean He has you, but you have Him. The question is, do we have that heart? Do we see others? Are we moved? And then do we pray? And after we pray and God says, ah, here's a way that you could help meet that need you're praying about, are we willing to say, I'll do it, I'll go. I'll leave behind, I'll sacrifice whatever, I'll do it. That's the heart of Christ. I mean, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, he did it first. You see, all the sacrifices all the missionaries are making, it ain't much. It is not much compared to what Jesus did to come to earth for me and for you. And so, let's have the heart like Christ had. And just seen there even in Nehemiah and in Christ, let's strive after that, having that heart. And when we have that heart, boy, everything else will fall into place when the heart's right.