We see the celebration of the people of Jerusalem as they thank God for His many blessings. As we approach Thanksgiving this week, this chapter gives us a good lesson on how to be properly thankful.
How do you handle the week after the holidays? Usually, we are exhausted and just want to crash? But the people of Nehemiah 9 go back to the temple, spend hours in worship, and make a promise to God. In this chapter, we learn a lot about worship and commitment.
If you had a task that took about two months to finish, and you did nothing night and day but work on that task, how would you celebrate its completion. Today we see what the people of Jerusalem did after the walls of the city were completed. In some ways, it is quite a surprise! And in many ways, it is very helpful to understand!
We come to a problem that is common when one person or group has success -- that is, jealousy from others. This is true, even within churches. We will look at this chapter from Nehemiah's perspective, and we will be reminded that when we are effective, others will often react in jealousy. We will look at healthy ways to respond while staying on track to fulfill our purpose.
We return to our study of Nehemiah, and we see how he overcomes a large and unforeseen obstacle. In three short acts, we get a glimpse of how a leader calls his people to obedience and the work of the Kingdom resumes in earnest!
We see that any task or dream will bring discouragement at times. In Nehemiah 4, we see a list of 5 reasons why the people were becoming discouraged, and we see Nehemiah's wisdom in dealing with each type of discouragement. Hopefully, this can give us wisdom to finish the work that we are called to do.
We move from the theme of, "what were you born to do?" to a new theme that we find in Nehemiah 3. This chapter focuses on teamwork. Sometimes, even though you have a particular vision or passion, you pitch in and help the group (church, community, family, etc) accomplish a larger purpose. In this chapter, we see everyone working together for the good of the community.
We see our part of the process, to PREPARE. We will see the exact steps to prepare ourselves for success, not in man's way, but in God's way. And we will see Nehemiah model each one of these. This is our third study in our Nehemiah series.
In this second sermon from Nehemiah, we learn some fascinating things about how to pray for God to be successful through us. We see that when we have a vision, and seek God's blessing, we can pray with great confidence. Nehemiah shows us how to pray specifically!
The church is about to begin another building program! As we do, it would be wise to look at one of the building programs in Scripture and see what we can learn. So, for the next ten weeks, we will study the Book of Nehemiah and see the lessons that the leaders and the people learned about building, as they built the walls of Jerusalem. Individually, it will be helpful to see how God can "shape" each one of us into the kind of "living stones" that He needs for His church.