The Distractions Inside (Building Lives #5)

Before we jump into the sermon, I want us to pray as a church for the church-planting family we support in north Minneapolis.

If you are new here, we have been supporting them financially and prayerfully for about four or five years. They live in a neighborhood that is racially diverse and, recently, has turned very violent — especially in the wake of what happened just a few blocks from where they live.

About ten days ago, he was leading a Bible study for kids in their backyard when gunshots went off right there in the neighborhood. Gunshots have been going off constantly, but having it happen while they were outside with children really rattled everyone. Then three or four days ago a couple sitting in a car was gunned down. He sent a photo of the car riddled with bullets. It is horrifying. And it shook them badly, because that is where they gas up their car, where they shop, near a park they had assumed was far enough away to be safe.

And yet in the middle of it, God is at work. This morning their church is baptizing three people. Their congregation continues to grow, slowly. Just this past week he had a phenomenal conversation with an eighteen-year-old who is genuinely curious and spiritually interested.

So God is at work, and there is terror and violence happening all around them.

Since we are partnering with them, I do not want us to be the kind of church that just sends money and forgets about them. I want us in this with them.

Father, we join in prayer for our brothers and sisters in Christ in north Minneapolis. Help them lead in a way that represents the peace that surpasses understanding — that represents the Prince of Peace in their church family, in their neighborhood, and in every interaction. I know he feels genuinely rattled inside. He is on the edge of fear, not wanting to let his wife and daughter go out or do things, afraid that what just happened nearby might happen to his family. Help them not to live in fear, but to trust you, their sovereign God.

I pray the same for their whole church — that this would be a congregation that still goes into the neighborhood despite the risk and the violence. Because Jesus, you came into a sin-stained world. So help those believers go, represent Christ, and show your love.

And with that, we pray for their safety. Protect them physically, emotionally, and spiritually. May that protection be sensed in your Spirit, felt when they are together, and known as they spend time in your Word, in prayer, and in conversation. May they have regular reminders that you are with them, that you are for them, and that you will do exactly what needs to be done so your will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

We look forward to hearing how you are working. Thank you for these three lives going public in their faith. Thank you for the conversations being had. Thank you for the people serving that church and loving that community. As they bring your gospel to the people there, bring your peace that surpasses understanding. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Where We Are in Nehemiah

We find ourselves in the fifth week of a six-week series in Nehemiah, running alongside a capital campaign to raise the down payment to purchase this building.

Last week we were in Nehemiah 4, looking at the outside distractions that came in trying to halt the rebuilding of the walls — and at the outside distractions that come into our own lives.

In the book, two governors named Sanballat and Tobiah were trying to interrupt the work. If the walls got built around Jerusalem, they would lose power and influence. They could no longer raid the city and take whatever they wanted. So they were completely opposed.

First they tried mockery, assuming insults would stop the work. When that failed, they resorted to violence, threatening to bring an army and kill people. That did not work either.

This week we are going to see something else attempt to stop the work — something that, in my opinion, is even more insidious than violent threats.

What could possibly be worse than someone threatening your life?

The distractions inside.

Why Outside Pressure Often Backfires

Outside distractions are a genuine pain, but sometimes they actually end up motivating you. Sometimes they create unity.

Think about a sports team whose opponent is trash-talking. The team cuts the clippings out and tapes them up in the locker room as motivation. It pulls everyone together and they go out and play their best.

Or, if you are old enough, think about what America was like right after 9/11. The terrorists tried to disrupt America, and what they produced was a unified America. Even people who could not stand the president at the time still found themselves stirred when he stood on the rubble with a bullhorn, encouraging the workers to keep going.

That is exactly what we saw in Nehemiah 4. Sanballat and Tobiah tried trash talk. It did not work. They tried threatening violence. It unified the people, and they put their hearts and minds into the task more than before.

But today we are going to see that sometimes the problem is not the outside. It is what happens within — and that is more insidious, because it fractures a thing from the inside until the entire foundation crumbles and it all falls apart.

The Text: Nehemiah 5:1–6

“Now there arose a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish brothers. For there were those who said, ‘With our sons and our daughters, we are many. So let us get grain, that we may eat and keep alive.’ There were also those who said, ‘We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses to get grain because of the famine.’ And there were those who said, ‘We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our fields and our vineyards. Now our flesh is as the flesh of our brothers, our children are as their children. Yet we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards.’ I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words.”

A quick word on translation

Most Sundays I preach from the English Standard Version, because I respect that the translators attempted what is known as a word-for-word approach.

Now, you cannot do a truly word-for-word translation of the Bible — if you tried to render the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament that way, the result would be nearly unreadable. But there are two broad approaches: word-for-word and thought-for-thought. We have both on our resource table. A thought-for-thought translation asks what ideas are being conveyed and how to express them in English. A word-for-word translation asks what the actual words are and tries to get as close to them as possible.

There are pros and cons to both. As someone who does not know the original languages, I appreciate the word-for-word approach because it keeps me closer to what is there, and I use the thought-for-thought versions almost like a commentary.

One downside of word-for-word is that it can be harder to read. The reading level is higher. Which means occasionally I hit something and think, what is this saying?

That happened to me this week with verses 1 through 5. I knew the story well enough, and I still found myself pausing. So if the wording felt stilted to you, let me lay it out plainly.

What is actually happening

The people are hungry. They need grain to make bread. And there does not appear to be enough.

Some people have no grain because they came with Nehemiah and have not had time to plant a field, wait out the growing cycle, and harvest. They have only been there a few weeks. Others, I suspect, do not have grain because they moved into Jerusalem to help with this project and left their fields behind.

And notice verse 3 mentions a famine. So this is a terrible season for farming. The land simply is not producing enough.

What happens next is that the people who do have grain are selling it at exorbitant prices — so high that families are having to mortgage their land, their vineyards, and their houses. They are giving up critical assets just to get food. And when they cannot repay, these wealthy nobles are taking their children as slaves.

Can you imagine?

Well — we live in America, so of course we can imagine. We live in a place where the rich often get richer on the backs of the poor. Think about payday lending. The only people who need that are people living paycheck to paycheck who will not make it to the next one. So they take a loan against that next paycheck, and the interest rates are sky high. People get rich off the backs of the poor.

That is exactly what is happening in Nehemiah 5. And it makes Nehemiah furious.

Why he is so angry

Charging those interest rates broke the law.

Not our law — though we do have some limits on interest. For the Jews, they operated under the Mosaic law that God gave through Moses. And one of the rules was that you could not charge interest to a fellow Jew. You could give them a loan, but when they repaid it, if you loaned a hundred, they gave back a hundred. You could not charge extra.

And here these men are charging so much that they are taking children as slaves.

They are doing the very same things that caused the Babylonian exile in the first place. The Israelites had wandered from God in their hearts. God kept warning them through prophets. Babylon finally came in, defeated them, and carried them into exile for seventy years. Now they are slowly being allowed back, since Persia defeated Babylon and is permitting their return — and they are behaving exactly like their ancestors did a century earlier.

So Nehemiah is livid, because he knows that if this continues, they will not lose their city to Sanballat and Tobiah. They will lose it to the fracture within their own nation.

We Fear the Outside; We Should Watch the Inside

Sometimes we are so concerned about outside threats that we miss what is happening internally.

A friend of mine took over a church plant in northern Minnesota back around 2006, when it had maybe twenty or thirty people. They had affiliated with the same association we belong to, and the association sent him as their pastor.

They needed a place to meet and ended up in a converted gas station that could fit fifty, maybe seventy-five people. Before long they were running two services with no room to spare. So they started looking for something else.

When they could not find anything to rent or lease, they started thinking about buying. And every single time they tried to buy a building, the city council voted it down — because the council did not want to give up the potential tax revenue that would be lost if a church owned that property.

They kept getting told no. I do not want to exaggerate, but I believe he told me they were turned down five times.

Honestly, after the second or third rejection I would have started to feel persecuted. It would not have been true persecution, but that is how I would have felt. They are against us. This could kill us as a church. Everything is stacked against us.

And yet, despite that outside pressure, the church kept growing. At one point they were running five services out of that gas station, seventy-five people at a time, packed. Eventually they bought a house next door for offices. Then a bakery nobody else wanted, which became a wing of the church. Eventually they tore all of it down, met in a theater for months, and built a building right on that spot — because it was the only spot the city would let them have, since nobody else wanted it.

Today they run around four hundred people.

Everyone assumed the outside pressure would kill that church. Instead, under pressure, it grew.

What would have been far worse is drama on the inside. Bitterness. Backstabbing. Gossip. That would have been far more dangerous than anything the city council could do.

Think About It Here

Would you want to be part of the worship team if our worship director were simply using it to build his own name and brand? He is not — he gives other people chances to lead. But if he were using people for his own sake, would you want in?

Would you want to serve in our children’s ministry if the leader micromanaged every little thing you did or said?

Would you want to be part of this church if I took advantage of your kindness and generosity to build my own little empire?

Would you want to be here if it were nothing but gossip? If one of the elders publicly insulted and shamed you and then made you feel it was your fault?

How would you feel if you found out fifty percent of the capital campaign money was going toward an all-expenses-paid trip for the elders and their spouses?

You would not want any of that in your workplace or your school — and especially not in your church. I would not want to be part of a church like that. I would be out. Because that is not how the family of God is supposed to be.

Nehemiah knows this. He knows the behavior of these wealthy nobles will not merely stop work on the walls. It will kill the nation from the inside.

He Confronts Them

“I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and the officials. I said to them, ‘You are exacting interest, each from his brother.’ And I held a great assembly against them and said to them, ‘We, as far as we are able, have bought back our Jewish brothers who have been sold to the nations, but you even sell your brothers that they may be sold to us!’ They were silent and could not find a word to say.”

By the way, “I took counsel with myself” does not mean he went into a conference room and talked out loud. It means he thought it through carefully.

And note what he is accusing them of. In that era, slavery was tragically common — and sadly it is still common today, just outlawed in most places. Back then it was not outlawed, so if you could not pay your debts, you often ended up enslaved.

Nehemiah is saying that surrounding nations had bought up Jews who fell into debt to them — and he has been using his own money, along with resources from the king, to purchase them back and buy their freedom, so they can help rebuild the wall and be reunited with their people.

Meanwhile these nobles are taking fellow Jews as slaves and selling them back to Nehemiah to keep getting richer. He is calling out the hypocrisy.

“So I said, ‘The thing that you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of our God to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies? Moreover, I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us abandon this exacting of interest. Return to them this very day their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the percentage of money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them.’ Then they said, ‘We will restore these and require nothing from them. We will do as you say.’”

They Actually Repent

Too often when we get caught doing something wrong, our first move is to justify it. Or shift the blame. Or downplay it. Well, in this case it wasn’t really wrong. Usually it was. But we come up with all kinds of excuses. If you are a parent, you get to watch this daily.

Thankfully, these nobles did not do that. When Nehemiah confronts them, it lands. It pierces their hearts and sears their consciences, and they realize they have been wrong.

I think three things convicted them.

First, they realized they had been breaking the Mosaic covenant. They were not supposed to be exacting interest from fellow Jews, and that is precisely what they had been doing.

Second, they realized they were hurting their own people. They have been a fractured nation. They have been in exile. There has been a remnant coming back. Zerubbabel came to rebuild. Ezra came to rebuild the faith. They are trying to reestablish themselves — and these very behaviors were about to wreck all of it.

Third, and I think most powerfully, they looked at Nehemiah’s own life and realized he was doing the opposite of them.

They were acquiring slaves; he was spending his own resources to free them. Keep reading from verse 14 and you see that Nehemiah had a right to the king’s food allowance and did not take it — he shared it instead. As governor he was entitled to levy certain taxes; previous governors took a daily ration of forty shekels of silver. There were genuine costs in governing — dignitaries would visit and need to be housed and fed. And Nehemiah still refused to collect that tax, because he did not want to put any extra burden on the people.

He would not collect extra food. He would not take extra money. He would not acquire land. He let them keep all of it, so they would be as free as possible to rebuild the wall and reestablish the nation.

I think the nobles saw that and were convicted.

I do not know about you, but I want to live the kind of life that makes other people look at it and think, that is probably how I should be living.

What Repentance Cost Them

Look again at verse 12: “We will restore these and require nothing from them. We will do as you say.”

Understand what that means. They had been selling grain. When people could not pay, they took a vineyard, a house, a child. By returning the house, the vineyard, and the children, it is essentially as though they had given the grain away for free and received nothing.

This cost them enormously. And they did it, because it was right — and because if they did not, they would kill their own nation.

And in doing it, they brought unity to the entire people.

Unity Is Everywhere in Scripture

This theme is not confined to Nehemiah 5. It runs through the whole Bible, and we hear it over and over in the New Testament.

Paul writes to the church in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 1 to lay aside their divisions — people were saying I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Peter. And he says no: we follow Jesus. Set the divisions aside.

In Philippians 4 he takes the time to address two specific women by name and urge them to agree in the Lord and find unity.

In Ephesians, writing to the whole church, he says to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called — with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

And this does not originate with Paul. It comes from Jesus. In his priestly prayer in John 17 he prays that his followers would be one, just as he and the Father are one.

Christ wanted us unified so much that in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:23–24, he taught this: “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

If you think about it, that sounds backward. You would expect to come to God first, offer your worship, and then go be reconciled.

But to Jesus, your worship of God is affected by your relationship with your brothers and sisters.

That is why, when asked for the greatest commandment, Jesus says to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength — and then does not stop. He adds a second like it: love your neighbor as yourself. He knows your vertical connection is affected by your horizontal health.

So set your gift aside. Set aside your desires. Set aside your reputation. Set aside what you want, and go make it right. Because if you do not deal with this, it will break from the inside.

We worry so much about outside pressure — what we are being told to do or not do, all the arguments swirling around us. What will kill us faster is failing to love one another.

An Unusual Instruction This Week

We are heading into communion, and I want to say two things first.

Based on what Jesus says in Matthew 5, here is the thing. We are not ancient Jews; we do not come to an altar. The altar was the place of sacrifice, where you brought an animal for your sins or a burnt offering of your firstfruits. We do not have that, because Jesus went to the cross and paid it all.

But for us, the equivalent is the communion table. It is here that we remember the willing sacrifice of Jesus.

So this week only, my encouragement is this: if you have an unresolved issue with a follower of Jesus, do not come to this table today.

Instead, pull out your phone and send a text or an email. If that person happens to be in this room, go to them. You may not be able to resolve it here and now, but you could at least say, can we meet this week?

But that would be so awkward. That would be so hard.

Yes. It was awkward and hard for those nobles in Nehemiah 5 to be confronted like that. It cost them a great deal to give everything back. They did it because it was right. It cost Jesus his throne in heaven to come to earth, and then cost him his human life to die in our place. It cost him everything.

So yes, it may be awkward. It may be hard. It will cost you something. You still need to do it.

But you don’t understand — I didn’t do anything wrong. They did. They should come to me.

You may well be right. But if you are going to live like Jesus lived: he did nothing wrong to us. It was all on us, toward him. And he still came for us. He took the first step.

So if you are going to follow Jesus, you are going to have to take the first step. Do not sit back waiting for them to come to you. You go to them.

A Phone Call Years Later

When I was in college, my parents’ church went through a very difficult stretch. Over several months a lot of people left.

Before the mass exodus, my dad was on the elder board, and the pastor announced he was going to resign. Some people in the church loved the pastor and asked why. He said he could not work with this elder board.

So the elder board offered to step down. My dad offered his resignation, as did the others. And then the pastor brought two of the other elders back and said, this team I can work with.

My dad was hurt and confused, wondering what he had done to make the pastor feel he was against him. It set off gossip throughout the church and a whole drama unfolded. Eventually my parents decided it was no longer healthy, and they left.

Years later, my parents were involved in a different church. My dad was at work one day when the receptionist called and said he had a phone call on line two.

He picked it up. It was that former pastor.

You have to understand this was before the internet and before cell phones. This pastor no longer had my parents’ phone number. All he could remember was where my dad worked. So he had to call directory information, get the number for the business, call it, and ask whether my dad still worked there. Yes, he does. May I speak with him?

My dad has told me this story, but I do not remember him ever describing how he felt in that moment. I only know how I would have felt. I hate confrontation. I hate these conversations. If I had picked up that phone and heard the voice of someone who had previously been against me, I would have gotten nervous. Lump in the throat. Stomach churning. Hands shaking. I would have wanted out of the call — though I am too polite to hang up.

My dad stayed on the phone.

And this pastor said something like: I was reading the Bible this morning — I think it was this very passage from Matthew 5 — and as I was praying, I sensed God telling me I needed to call you. And I tried to justify it. I don’t need to do that. I don’t even live in Iowa anymore. I’m not in ministry any longer. That’s long in the past. And God’s Spirit would not let it go.

So he did the awkward thing. He figured out how to reach my dad’s workplace, got him on the line, and said: I just wanted to call and say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the things I said. I’m sorry for the things I did. I’m sorry for the accusations I lobbed your way. Would you forgive me?

My dad said that in that moment a weight lifted off him and joy filled him. In tears he said, Yes, of course I will.

And there was reconciliation.

I want you to experience that. I cannot guarantee it will be your story. You might reach out and be rejected. You might reach out and get no apology. But you cannot have that opportunity at all unless you take the first step.

So this morning — probably for the first time and maybe the last in the life of this church — I am telling you: do not come to the communion table. Instead, pull out your phone, send a text, send an email, and get this cleared.

For some of you it is not someone here; this has been a good place for you. For some of you it is someone at a previous church, and you need to connect with a person you have not seen in weeks or months or years. For some of you it is someone you live with — a spouse, a parent, a kid — and you have been holding something inside and keeping quiet. Before you let it crumble and ruin that relationship, go talk.

Let us do what we need to do to have a solid foundation. Let us not rot from the inside. Let us be healthy and strong and vibrant — knowing that strong relationships here help us vertically.

What This Has to Do With a Capital Campaign

One last thing. We are in the middle of a capital campaign. What does Nehemiah 5 and a conversation about unity have to do with raising money?

More than you think.

If you have a sense that you are not loved, that you do not matter, or if there is bitterness in your heart toward someone here — you are not going to want to contribute to this.

But if you experience what my dad experienced with his former pastor — if reconciliation happens and the repair is made — it fills you with such joy that you want to be part of it. It makes you excited about what God is doing. And you will give willingly, cheerfully, and sacrificially.

Because I believe our best days are ahead, I want you to get to experience that. So for your sake as well as for the sake of this church: will you work to make your relationships strong and healthy?

Do the hard thing. Go talk to someone. Send the text. Make the call this week. Do what you need to do to keep the enemy from getting an inroad and ruining this from the inside.

Let Us Pray

Heavenly Father, we bow before you asking for courage — that we would actually reach out to the person who hurt us, or to the person we know we hurt, and seek to make amends, seek reconciliation, seek repair, so that we might have this beautiful worship of you.

For the sake of your name, for the sake of this church, and for the sake of the global church, give us courage to have these hard conversations. And be in the middle of those conversations. Let your Spirit be present. Let there be forgiveness, reconciliation, and joy.

Use these next moments as you need to. If you need to draw someone to these elements, let them come remembering what Christ has done for us. If someone needs to pull out a phone, let them do it, and give them the words to say.

Help us not to keep ignoring and avoiding. Help us be brave enough to be like Christ — to take that step, and then watch you do what only you can do. Holy Spirit, do what you need to do right now, for your glory and for our joy. Amen.

Now — I realize some of you are doing well and cannot think of anyone. You will be able to come to this table, and when you do, thank God for taking the first step, for coming for you, and for repairing the relationship through the cross.

But if you do not come to this table today, that is completely fine. It is absolutely okay to pull out that phone and send that text or email. And if you cannot do it right now, put it on your to-do list — and do not let today get away without making that connection.