The Sixth Sign of Renewal

The Sixth Sign of Renewal

Nehemiah 8:1-10

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Most of our attention is focused on local matters—our congregation, our neighborhood, our school, our family, our business. We think in the short-term, because local deadlines are more urgent and more dependent on us as individuals and families than big, long-range issues that we cannot do much about.

That's the way life is organized; these are the rows we are given to hoe, and they can get weedy very fast if we neglect them. On the other hand, things may improve just as quickly as they go bad; but that makes for another problem, as when your tomatoes ripen more quickly than you can pick or process them.

In small-scale operations we get used to quick outcomes, whether for good or for bad. A local church revival, for a more applicable example this morning, develops and dissipates more rapidly than a national one.

In Bible times, both disaster and recovery took longer than they do now, partly because communication, travel, and technology were much slower and more cumbersome, and partly because the Old Testament people thought of themselves as one people with a common destiny. They were first a tribe, then a nation; not first a congregation, then a denomination. The disasters were bigger and harder to undo. When things went bad, everything went bad, and on a large scale. When Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem, he did not close a synagogue, or slaughter a village. He conquered the whole nation, destroyed its capital city of Jerusalem, and leveled the Temple of God. That was over a hundred years before the events recorded in the book of Nehemiah. It took that long after the disaster wrought by Nebuchadnezzar to bring the people to the moment when they gathered at the Water Gate to hear the reading of the Law. They had not come very far in a hundred years.

· the Temple had been rebuilt, but it was a homely and cheap imitation of the one it replaced.

· They had just finished rebuilding the city, but there was no King on the throne and no real army to defend the land.

They would not have even got this far without the cooperation and consent of the Persian emperors. After Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, the second book of Kings says Jerusalem was like a cup that had been rinsed out and turned over to drain. Now, so much later, the cup is barely half full. In the meantime, Persia has conquered Babylon, so Jerusalem is now part of the Persian Empire. The world had changed big time in that century.

There were signs of renewal, however. While the glory of Solomon had not returned to Jerusalem, the city was at least functioning again as a Jewish community. Things weren't as great as they had been 400 years before, but neither were they nearly as bad as they had been a hundred years before. The people of Israel were still greatly humbled, but they were also newly hopeful. Here are signs of renewal in the book of Nehemiah.

1. The prayer of Nehemiah in chapter one: They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand. O, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name.

2. The commitment of Nehemiah in chapter 2, when he asks the Persian king for permission—and provisions— to rebuild Jerusalem.

3. The rebuilding of the wall by the men of the city, "for the people had a mind to work."

4. The return of thousands of people to Judah, to take up their lives in their homeland once more.

5. The gifts of the people toward the common work.

Renewal is the work of God, but the signs of it show in the response of the people. These five signs have their parallels in modern church renewal too:

· Earnest prayer;

· bold decision;

· a building (or other) project requiring high energy and sacrifice;

· the gathering of the people;

· their generous giving to the common cause.

These are so exciting and encouraging that people may easily believe that renewal has occurred if these five signs are present. They may believe it if only one or two are present. But a sixth sign must be evident if the renewal is to last: commitment to the Word of God. So, after building the wall, after moving into their homes and settling down, and after establishing some sense of permanence in the land, They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel.

They did not want just to look new; they wanted to be new. They had the law of the Lord written on a scroll, but they needed it written on their hearts. They needed God to rule their nation and their lives. That is why they stood there for hours while the law was read: and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. What does "all" mean? Both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. Who besides men and women? Apparently, every child old enough to understand. This was a universal sign, with everybody participating. Ezra and his colleagues did more than read the law. They taught it. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

The reading of the law is the sixth sign of renewal; it does not replace the other signs. If they had not built the wall and done the other things named, the importance of the law of God would not have commanded their minds. On the other hand, without the law of God there would have been no renewal at all, just a few achievements left to stand on their own merits. They would not stand for very long, because without the word of God people revert to their old habits and opinions. Without the word of God truly taught, anything can happen, and often does.

Even worse, nothing may happen—that is, nothing of substance or of lasting value. Apart from the word of God, what is it? Nothing but human achievement, human wisdom, human religion.

We still have the Law of the Lord today, but we have more; we have the Gospel. We have what St. Paul called the whole counsel of God. On that day by the water gate in Jerusalem they read the law because the law is what they had. Today we have the word of God from first to last, from the creation of the world, through the cross of Christ, to the final judgment at the end of the world. The lasting renewal of the church takes place in the light of this word and according to its truth.

Unless the sixth sign of renewal is evident, the other five other signs may get lost in directionless prayer, undisciplined emotion, sheer busyness, and in large numbers of people who are excited but uninformed.

As with so many passages of the Bible, this one furnishes us with a checklist if we want to mark it off. When we are dissatisfied with ourselves, or at how things are working in our family, job, church, and so on, we can always do this reality check:

· Have I given this to God in prayer in such a way that I am open to his answer?

· Have I put myself out in any way, or risked anything? Am I willing to? How much?

· Have I committed my labor to the cause?

· Have I committed my physical presence to it?

· And finally, am I committed to the word of God, that I will hear it, and believe it, and obey it, in this particular situation?

When a church is recovering from a slow time and a passive mood, these are signs of renewal. They are signs of life in a church that has been renewed.

` This has been a message about the sixth sign—people hearing, knowing, and obeying the word of God. Renewal is the work of God. The signs of renewal are the evidence that the work of God is doing some good! AMEN.