We are in the book.
We're going through the book of Nehemiah.
It's one of the historical books in the Old Testament.
We're in chapter 10, so we're a little past halfway.
What we've seen is that the nation of Israel has been in exile for some 70 years, and slowly they're beginning to return to the promised land, and specifically to the city of Jerusalem, the city of David.
They found themselves in exile because of their own unfaithfulness.
Through the covenant of Moses, God said, You are my people, I love you, I'm setting you apart.
And we're forming a covenant.
Part of that covenant were the curses and the blessing, blessings of the covenant.
Blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience.
Because of their disobedience, the Lord sent foreign nations to bring those curses and that chiding to the people.
It looked like the nation of Israel was all but destroyed.
The city of David itself, the temple, had been destroyed.
But now a remnant again was returning, first through the priest Ezra, secondly through Nehemiah, who was set as governor over the people of Israel under the rule of Persia.
Ezra was sent to rebuild the temple, and then Nehemiah came and he began the work of rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem and kind of the overall work of rebuilding the city and kind of re-establishing the people in the land that God had given them.
But far more than just a physical rebuilding project, this was a spiritual rebuilding project.
Again, the people knew that they were in this mess because of their own unfaithfulness.
And so, even as the temple was being rebuilt, the place where they met with their God, where they brought their tithes, their offerings, their sacrifices, where they confessed their need, and God met them in grace, love, and forgiveness.
And in the city where, which was to be a light to the Gentiles, where the people of God would dwell.
Even as that was being rebuilt, the people themselves needed to be rebuilt.
They needed to be reminded of who they were, who God had called them to be, and why he had called them to themselves.
And so the people gathered together for a solemn assembly, we're told in chapter 8.
In chapter 9, the Levites began to read the law, the Torah, to the people, and the people are cut to the heart.
They'd forgotten the scriptures, they'd forgotten God's law.
And when they were confronted with all the ways that they had broken God's law and been unfaithful, they wept.
And yet the leaders, specifically Ezra and Nehemiah, told the people, This is a day of joy, not of sorrow.
Why?
Because, yes, we disobeyed and we were unfaithful to our God, but he has never been unfaithful to us.
And so even in this solemn assembly, the Lord is reminding his people that they are his.
It has much to teach us if we will take a look at it.
So let's jump in.
First, point one, this teaches us that repentance is specific.
As we said, God's people realize that they were in exile because of their own unfaithfulness and the unfaithfulness of their forefathers and foremothers.
And as Sam recounted to us last week, if you go back and read chapter 9, they recount their whole history as a people, beginning with Abraham.
And it's this amazing recounting where God's faithfulness is elevated and glorified.
And yet their failures, their presumption and unfaithfulness is named in very specific and repeated ways.
And so this gives us a great framework of looking and understanding our own repentance, whether we're repenting to the Lord or we're repenting to one another as human beings.
Alright, so what does this teach us about repentance?
Repentance means being specific about the ways we have sinned and fallen short.
The tendency, if you're like me, or maybe I should just talk about myself, when I repent, I love to keep it general.
You know, man, I I totally screwed up.
I know that.
No big deal.
I'll do better next time.
But the reason we keep things vague is because we want to keep things in the dark.
We feel shame, we feel bad, we don't want to feel condemned.
And so, and we also want to kind of work on it ourselves, right?
We we have this false delusion that, man, yeah, I messed up, but I can get it right next time.
But what we see here in chapter 9 and 10 from Israel is that in order to confess truly, we need to bring our sins out into the light.
If we want to be forgiven and we want to be healed, we need to drag them out of darkness and bring them before the Lord.
Now, we who are in Christ, we are fully forgiven.
And yet we still we are still in that sanctification process.
We long to be healed of our sins, so that we might sin no more, that we might increase in righteousness and obedience.
And the only way to do that is to fully confess, to be specific about where we have sinned and fallen short.
Hidden sins are unhealed sins.
Secondly, this repentance, this teaches us that repentance means taking ownership of our sins.
We're not going to read through it, and you can thank me later.
But the first 27 verses of chapter 10 are people's names.
It's the names of the leaders, the Levites, and the priests.
Now, why?
Why is that included in this chapter and in this document?
Because they, the leaders of the people, were taking ownership of how they had fallen short.
They were saying, we are responsible for the community.
We are taking ownership of where we have sinned, and we will be held accountable moving forward.
Repentance doesn't give excuses, it doesn't blame others.
It says, we are responsible for our actions, and we will be held accountable moving forward.
Third, repentance means asking for forgiveness.
Again, this is something I can tend to forget.
It takes so much energy, so much humility to name our sins specifically.
Sometimes we think just putting it out there is enough.
But we, my wife and I, Stacey and I were taught early in our marriage that to name where you're reconcile an argument, you need at least three things.
You need to name where you're wrong, you need to say that you're sorry, and you need to ask for forgiveness.
And then you need to wait and allow the other person to forgive you.
Now, sometimes when we're dealing with other people, spouses or otherwise, uh, they're not always ready to forgive in the moment.
But when we have genuinely confessed, when we've been specific, when we have been contrite, we've asked for forgiveness, we are free to simply wait and entrust them to the Lord.
Now it's it's they are the one before the Lord who must process and offer forgiveness.
But with the Lord, we don't have to wait at all.
This is the good news of the gospel, beloved.
We know that our God is faithful and just, that if we confess our sins, we are already forgiven in Christ.
This is this is the madness of the flesh.
Uh when we hesitate, when we wait to confess to the Lord, sometimes we want to maybe try a little bit harder.
We want to we want to polish ourselves up a little bit before we go to the Lord.
It's always a waste of time.
Go immediately to the Lord in your sin.
He is ready and waiting to forgive.
There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
The Apostle Paul writes.
Amen.
Come on.
Amen.
That's right, guys.
Come on, we're all engaged here.
Uh fourth thing this teaches us repentance can be both individual and corporate.
We won't spend a lot of time on this, but this seems to have become a controversial point in certain quarters.
Clearly, God's people were able to confess both of their individual sins and their corporate sins.
And we as Westerners and Americans specifically we need to be reminded that this is okay, this is real, that we are more than simply individuals, but we are the community of faith.
We are the church.
Finally, repentance means changing our actions.
When the Pharisees and Sadducees came to John the Baptist when he was baptizing in the wilderness, he charged them to bear fruit in the keeping with repentance.
It's not enough to simply confess where we're wrong, but it is to endeavor to change our actions.
Repentance is metanoia, which means literally to change one's mind or to turn around and go the other way.
We fall into ruts, we fall into patterns of behavior, and so we confess our sins, but we commit them again and again.
To truly repent means to take action, to act differently.
That leads us to point two.
Repentance is a verb.
Let me read again these verses that Sam read to us earlier.
The rest of God's people, the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants, and all who have separated themselves from the peoples of the land to the law of God, their wives, their sons, their daughters, all who have knowledge and understanding, join with their brothers, their nobles, and enter into a curse and an oath to walk in God's law that was given by Moses, the servant of God, and to observe and do all that was commanded by the Lord our God and his rules and statutes.
In these words, in this oath, the people of Israel are echoing what we talked about before, the book of Deuteronomy, the second telling of the law, that talks about these blessings and curses.
Blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience.
So what does Israel now commit to do in this recommitment ceremony?
First, they say in verse 30, they will stop giving our daughters to the people of the land or taking their daughters for our sons.
They promise to stop intermarrying with the people around them.
Now, this may sound odd to us.
It might sound uh distasteful or maybe xenophobic.
Why are the people of Israel so afraid of the people around them?
But in truth, what God is calling the people is to fight for the purity of the faith.
You see, God warned his people that if they were to marry the pagan people around them, that their own faith, this true word that God had given them, would become corrupted.
And God had given Israel this charge, this mission to be a light to the Gentiles.
You see, God wasn't looking down on the people around them and saying, ooh, stay away from them, they're dirty.
Quite the opposite.
God was saying, I want the people around you to see the glorious, the gracious relationship you have with me, so that they will want to come in and to have the same relationship with me.
And so God calls them to purity, purity of faith, purity of walking before him.
Second, they committed to keep the Sabbath in its various forms.
They committed not to buy or sell on the weekly Sabbath.
They promised to give the land its seven-year Sabbath and let uh to let it lay fallow.
This is all part of the Old Testament law that they had been given long ago.
They also promised to observe the forgiving of debts every seven years.
Any debts that were outstanding among the people of God, they were simply to forgive after seven years.
These Sabbath laws were all meant to teach Israel that their lives were not their own and that God cares for them.
Right?
To not buy or sell on the Sabbath day is to trust that if I don't make money today, that I will be okay.
I can rest from my labor and God will provide.
It also taught them that they needed rest to be whole persons, that they didn't ultimately provide for themselves, but that God cares for them.
It also taught them that the creation itself needs rest and it belongs to the Lord and not to them.
Third, they committed to support and provide for God's work in the temple through the giving of tithes and offerings.
They were to give monetary amounts that provided for the day-to-day workings of the temple.
They were also to give grain and animal sacrifices.
In those sacrifices, the Levites and the priests were cared for.
The temple was both the place where God, God's people, met with their God, but it was also a place where the broader community was provided for as well, both the priests and the poor.
What's fascinating about all of these is kind of we can step back and say, well, we're Christians, we don't have to obey these laws anymore.
And that's absolutely true.
And yet, when we look at the New Testament, all of these same themes are, we are called to continue.
Jesus taught that we, the church, are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
We are to be a nation of priests who live our lives in such a way that those who are not Christians would see our relationship with our God and desire that same relationship with him.
Paul exhorts the Colossians to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.
And John said, Do not love the world or the things of the world.
Beloved, we don't obey the Old Testament law to have God love us or even to define us.
We are declared righteous in Christ by faith.
And yet Nehemiah 10 invites us to ask ourselves some reflective questions.
Where am I not walking in a manner worthy of the Lord?
In what ways am I not trusting the Lord with my life or seeking my well-being through my own work?
In what ways am I living my life, uh, living as if my life, my things, my resources are mine and not the Lord's?
Am I an active and supportive member of the body of Christ?
Or am I living as an individual separate from God's community?
These are good reflective questions for all of us to ask on a regular basis.
Just like the Israelites, our hearts are prone to wander.
And that's why we come back to worship week after week.
That's why we receive the sacrament of communion, to strengthen our faith, to remind us of the truth.
Last point repentance isn't enough.
In some ways, Nehemiah chapter 10 is the climax of this book.
Through Nehemiah's faithful and steadfast leadership, not just Jerusalem, the city, but the people are rebuilt.
It is beautiful.
But after chapter 10, Nehemiah returns to Persia to kind of check in with the king there and do some official business.
And when he returns to Jerusalem in chapter 13, he finds that already the people of Israel are breaking the Sabbath.
They're buying and selling again, and Nehemiah is furious.
And humanly speaking, it's absolutely depressing.
We want the fairy tale, right?
It'd be nice if chapter 10 ended and it said, and they lived happily ever after.
I have a whole sermon illustration.
I can't tell how much I think I have time.
Have we talked about how they tried to destroy our childhood in the Star Wars series?
If you're my age, right, you grew up with episodes four, five, and six.
Han, Leah, Luke, they defeat the Empire.
It's glorious.
And it just should have ended that way.
Then they went and did the prequels, and we won't talk about those.
But then they came out with seven, eight, and nine.
Man, seven was so good.
The Force Awakens.
Love these new characters, love Rey.
But when Luke comes back, what do they tell us?
That after the great victory of episode uh six, uh, he's just a failure.
He's gone, he's a recluse, he's, you know, he's given up on life, basically, and Ray has to go and kind of revive him and ask him to teach her.
It just, you know, if I let it, it destroys the story of my childhood.
This incredible, incredibly beautiful story.
Uh but the truth is, is that that's actually how life works.
Our lives are not fairy tales.
We do have moments of great victory and rejoicing, and then inevitably we fall down again.
What Nehemiah, the book of Nehemiah as a whole, teaches us is a deep and a profound truth.
No matter how sincerely we repent, no matter uh, no matter how many resolutions we make, no matter how specific we confess our sins, we will fall into sin again.
We cannot will ourselves to righteousness and obedience.
On our own, we are left hopeless.
And that's why Nehemiah is not the end of the story, and why Nehemiah points us to someone better.
Right?
Praise God for the one who is better than Nehemiah, better than any of our own repentants.
Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Jesus is our perfect repentance.
Jesus took the curse upon himself so that we might not be cut off.
Jesus is the seal of the new covenant.
Jesus is our perfect righteousness.
Beloved Paul wrote to the Corinthians, for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Amen?
All right, a little better.
Beloved, we are called to ask those repentant questions, those introspective questions.
We are to seek to live and to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
And yet that is not the source of our comfort or our hope.
We always fall short of the glory of God.
And yet Jesus is with us.
Jesus loves us.
That in Christ we are fully beloved, sons and daughters of the King.
We obey out of our security and joy not to find our security or joy.
Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
If you have any questions about this sermon or need prayer, there'll be a pastor down front who's ready to meet with you.
Let's pray.
Our Father and our God.
Lord, this is this is attention.
This is this is uh this is difficult for us at times.
Lord, we long to walk in your ways.
We long to be rid of sin.
We long for you to be pleased with us in our actions, and yet we continue to fall short.
And yet, the good news of the gospel is that you we are fully forgiven in Christ.
Uh, when you look upon us, you see Christ and His righteousness.
Lord, thank you for that.
But we ask, Holy Spirit, that you would fill us, that you'd give us both the desire and the ability to say yes to obedience and no to sin.
But in all things we rejoice, because in our weakness and in our strength, you are our God.
And we pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.