The Gracious Hand of God | +Quigg Lawrence

Morning, friends. Morning. If you're timing, you can start. It's so funny. I wear a watch with a timer on it, and I almost never remember to push the button, and that's why you have long sermons. So tackle me at twenty five minutes or whatever you need to do, okay?

Can I share a story with you? Have something really dumb I did this week and then we'll get into it. So, my wife, Annette, is away and her dad is in his last week maybe. Who knows? Only the Lord knows. He's almost 93 and honestly, he's praying that the Lord would take him and we're praying that, but it's just hard. It's hard to watch. It's hard to watch your dad. He was strong and powerful and the superintendent of schools and all that be reduced almost to like a child. But I am so glad that Annette could be with her dad.

I will just tell you, if you have parents that are living, the days are numbered, and you will never regret this—I promise you. You will never regret any kindness, any forgiveness, or any time that you spend with your parents. When they're gone, they're gone.

But anyway, Annette's with her dad, and for the first forty eight hours, I loved it. It's almost like I was a single guy again. It was great. And then I realized that I'm eating salmon for breakfast, salmon for lunch, salmon for dinner. It's what I know how to cook: salmon, salmon, salmon.

Also, I noticed that all the dishes that normally get cleaned and put up, they weren't cleaned and put up. They just kept stacking up. There's no little elf that hides in the closet to fix and clean. That elf is my wife Annette.

So I said, well, let me clean up some dishes because I don't want to look like a hoarder house. And so in the morning, I decided to clean a glass. Truth be told, it was a wine glass. Okay, judge me. It wasn't at night. I hadn't been over served. It was in the morning after coffee.

But I'm sitting there cleaning it, and you know, if you leave a little residue of red wine, sometimes it's hard to get out of the cup. And so I was doing what I do, and I set my mind to something—I'm all in, I go for it. And I was cleaning it with a soapy sponge, and all of a sudden as I came around, pow. All of a sudden the most excruciating pain, like somebody had stabbed me with a knife. I looked at my hand and it was filleted wide open.

You guys, it hurt and blood was going everywhere. And I was like, I do not want to go to the emergency room and have them do all that and spend seven hours. I looked at it having been a former paramedic and said, "It's kind of the edge. I think we're probably okay."

Then, y'all, this is so stupid. I washed it. I got a white clean cloth, a semi tourniquet, and then I said, "What do you need to do? You need to raise it, you need to ice it, you need to compress it. Did I miss one?" So what I did is I got a cold pack out of the freezer, and I stuck it on my head, and then I put the finger there for forty minutes compressing it above my heart to try to stop it.

Let me tell you friends, it still ain't stopped. It's still rolling. But the point was there was so much pain. Have you cut yourself in this way? Do you know knives hurt? When your mom said don't play with knives, she wasn't kidding.

Then immediately my mind went to all the shows Annette and I watch. The one with Kiefer Sutherland or Liam Neeson, and they're going to save somebody and they're shooting and being shot at and they're stabbed, multiple bullet wounds and they're still fighting. Friends, I had one slice of a wine glass and I was out. That was it. It hurts so bad.

Well, there's physical pain, but there's other types of pain. Last week, Mike Massey was with us and he was telling us about Nehemiah. As he started, it was like, Heavens to Betsy. Nehemiah lived in a place called Susa, which is today Iran. I said, Lord, you better help Mike with this because it's hard for people in 2021 in Roanoke, Virginia to even care about some dude who was a cup bearer to a king whose name I can't pronounce. What does that have to do with us?

I think what we'll see is that Nehemiah shows a lot of traits for leaders. If you're in a position of leadership, even if it's in a lower position of leadership, you can learn a lot from Nehemiah.

Nehemiah's Story

Here's what we learned last week. Nehemiah is a cup bearer. That means that he would taste the king's wine. Why did he do that? You all are smart people. I would love that job. Could you imagine? It's like being a sommelier. Why did he get to taste the king's wine? To make sure it wasn't poisoned. Because apparently, kings got iced all the time by people putting poison in their wine. Every time this guy served the king, he risked his life.

He was a Jew. Israel had been destroyed, and he was far, far from home—a three month walk from home, if you will. There he is, and a report came back about his homeland.

So the Jews were there for seventy years as captives in Babylon, but while they're there, the Persians came in and defeated the Babylonians. And so now the Jews are under the Persians. Basically, you could call them slaves, you could call them indentured servants, you could call them people with limited freedom, use whatever word you want, but they weren't home. And the pain that they felt being away from their home and their temple and their language and their customs was grievous.

And so as Nehemiah chapter one gets the report about how the city is in ruins, it says it's just terrible. It looked like it had been ravaged, destroyed by fire. Can you imagine if you went away from Roanoke and you came back in sixty years and you saw no churches standing, all the people were living without the Lord and doing terrible things, and everybody was on meth and on heroin, and it was just a tale of two cities? But this is the city that is destroyed, that has no blessing of God. Could you imagine if that was your city? Do you ever wonder if your grandmother were to come back to life right now and see what's going on in our country, what would your grandmother say?

And so Nehemiah had this pain in his heart. Even though he had a great job and he's well competent—he has great wine, he serves the king—when he heard that his homeland had been destroyed, he was in great grief. Because it's not just his nation. It was his faith. It was his people. It was his culture.

Nehemiah's Response: Prayer and Repentance

And so he gets his report and Nehemiah, the first thing he does is not try to fix it. There's a problem. There's a big problem. It's a hard problem, and it's a real problem. What does Nehemiah do? He prays. It says before he went to prayer, he wept. And it wasn't like little crocodile tears. This guy was in grief as you would be. Imagine if you died and came back to life and saw your grandkids, your great grandkids, pagan worshipers being destroyed, living this terrible life, how it would grieve you.

So Nehemiah went before the Lord, and the first thing he did is not rub the Lord like in Aladdin's lamp, but he actually said, "Lord, we have sinned against you. You warned Israel. You told us not to get another king. You said, Israel, I'm your king. But no, no, no. The people of Israel said, we want to be like the nations. We want to have a king we can see. We like the finery. We want a king."

And the Lord says, "Well, I'll give you a king, but you're going to rue the day because he's going to tax you. He's going to conscript your children into slavery, and things will not go well. But if you want a king, I'll give you one."

And so God gave them a king, and the thing they thought was going to solve other problems actually made it worse. Almost every king was wicked and evil. And so Nehemiah acknowledged that God's people, Israel, had been disobedient. They'd done pagan worship and intermarried and all the things He said not to. They faced the judgment of God. They faced the wrath of God. A loving father promised them, if you do this, then I'm going to do this because I love you. Please don't do that, and they did it.

And so now Nehemiah is on his face before the Lord saying, "Lord, forgive us for our sin. Father, remember the promise you made to Moses that you knew your people would turn aside. You knew your people would not be faithful. But you also said, if we come back to you, if we return to you, if we remember the word of the Lord, you will bring us back and you will heal us."

That was Nehemiah's prayer. So we pick up in chapter two. It's a little subtle thing, but because I had all week to read commentaries and learn about Nehemiah and Ezra and Susa and all these things, I will indulge you. So when Nehemiah is doing his cup bearing and the bad report comes, it says in Nehemiah 1:1, it was the month of Kislev.

Does anybody have a clue what month that is? I'll tell you, it is the month of hunting season. It's November. Kislev—it's hunting season. It's the fall. It's the time when the leaves change.

And so Nehemiah got the problem in November. And then while he's seeking God and his heart's deeply troubled, you think Nehemiah would say, "Time's a wasting." But we see that he doesn't take action until the month of Nissan. I used to laugh at that as a kid—Nissan automobiles. Strange sense of humor, quick. But there's something very key here. It starts in the month of Kislev, goes to the month of Nissan. Nissan is March and April, so think basically Easter time.

So from hunting season in the fall until Easter time, or for Christians, March or April—how many months? December, January, February, March. How many months? Four months. He waited four months. Friends, if you get nothing else from Nehemiah today, understand this: Sometimes, even when God has put something in your heart to do something for him and you're passionate about it, he doesn't want you to run around like a chicken with your head cut off and just be reactive. He wants you to spend time asking him for counsel and for wisdom and for practical advice. So we see Nehemiah, the high and lifted up cup bearer of the king, not only gets on his face, not only cries, but he waits.

How about you? Do you feel like you got to move right now? Like somehow if you don't move right now, God's going to be unable to fix the situation? I tell you no. God's timing is perfect. He may be slow. The wheels may grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine and God's timing is perfect.

And so we see Nehemiah four months later, he decides to speak to the king, the Persian king, who he served as a cup bearer. He had waited four months. And when do you notice that he chose to speak to the king about his city and his ancestors being in ruin? After four months, he waited till there was a big celebration and there was much wine. I mean, isn't that a great time to approach somebody with an ask? Right? The king, when he's having great wine, a Chateau Lafitte Rothschild or whatever it was. He's having wine. It's festive. This was the beginning of the Jewish calendar year, so kind of like us in September or in January, you feel like all things are new—etch a sketch. So it's a time of new beginnings. It's a festive time. It's a time where the king has good wine in front of him. And at that critical moment, Nehemiah says, now. Now is the time to ask.

In the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when the wine was before him, I, Nehemiah, took up the wine and I gave it to the king, and now I had not been sad in the king's presence. The king said to me, Nehemiah, why is your face so sad seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart. — Nehemiah 2

I don't know if you realize this, but I read about cup bearers, and basically when you serve the king, they don't care about what's going on with your family, they don't care what's going on with your feelings. You just put a smile on your face and you serve the king. In fact, they don't want the servants to be bumming the king out with whatever's going on in their life. Just smile. Just smile.

And so he approaches the king, and to tell you how serious it is, when the cup bearer would approach the king, he would have to cover his mouth. In fact, when anybody approached the king, they had to cover their mouth. Guess why? They didn't have any toothbrushes, toothpaste, or dental floss, and they probably smelled, and they didn't want the king to have to smell the bad breath of the underlings. There was this thing of like, you don't rush into the presence of the king, and if you do, you cover up your mouth. You come in humility, ducking your head.

So Nehemiah finally decides it's time to speak to Artaxerxes. Now, for those of you who know that Ezra and Nehemiah were actually one book, you would know in Ezra chapter four, this same king had been approached by three dudes who said, "Hey, these Jews are starting to rebuild, and if they rebuild, you're going to lose money, king." And so the king in Ezra four—actually the same book, right? Ezra and Nehemiah, in the same book—he had made a decree: stop the building. Stop it. Because he was threatened. He didn't want anybody to take money from him.

And so now you have Nehemiah four months later coming up to ask that same king, right? The one he couldn't even approach without covering his breath, to ask him to reverse his decision, which would make him look weak. So do you see what a scary thing this is? I mean, he could have said, "Nehemiah, off with your head."

I was much afraid and I said to the king, Let the king live forever. — Nehemiah 2

He's sucking up to him. Oh, king, live forever. Why should not my face be sad? In other words, king, the reason I'm sad is the city, the place of my father's graves lies in ruin, and its gates have been destroyed by fire. So the king asked him why he's sad, and he tells him.

But you notice how smart, how strategic Nehemiah was. If he had said, "Yeah, that city Jerusalem, the one that just a few moments ago that you had put a decree on, right, that you're worried that they're gonna rise up and stop paying taxes"—so he didn't use the name Jerusalem. He just played to common sympathy. He says, "Look, the graves of my dad and my granddad and my great granddad, they're in ruin. Who would put up with such a thing? And the city where I was raised, it also has been destroyed."

And so he got sympathy from the king, avoiding the name of the city. He got sympathy because any loving, thoughtful person, if you heard somebody's grandparents or father's graves were in ruins and their city was burned until crisp, your only reaction would be, "Oh, how can I help?" That's what sane people, that's what non-narcissists would say. "How can I help?" That's exactly what the king did.

So God had a purpose. God had a time. And now he asked the king—the king who had already made a decree that the city should not be rebuilt—he asked that same king to let him go and rebuild the city. And he says, "If it pleased the king and your servant has found favor in your sight, send me to Judah, send me back to the city of my father's graves that I may rebuild it."

Then it says, it pleased the king. First he said, "How long are you going to be gone?" Fortunately, Nehemiah was a thinker. He was strategic. He wasn't a shoot-from-the-hip guy, and he had thought all through it. "It's going to take about this many months, it's going to take this many materials, and there's safety concerns," and he had a plan. And so when the king asked him, "Hey, how long—since you work for me, how long are you going to be gone?" And he told him, and he said, "It pleased the king to send me once I had given him a set time."

And then verse seven says, "And I said to the king, if it pleases the king, let letters be given to me for the governors of the provinces, so I can pass through these provinces until I come to my hometown of Judah or my home region of Judah. Also, while you're writing letters, king, could you also write one to Asaph?" Because not only are we going to need safe passage to go back home, but if we're going to rebuild the city, if we're going to rebuild the walls—remembering that we had been slaves and we've been annihilated and pushed out—we don't have any resources.

Nehemiah, I just love his boldness. He reminds me of a Gen Z. Have you guys known this about Gen Z? This is what I love about them. They are unafraid, unashamed to ask for anything. They don't necessarily get their feelings hurt if you say no, but they will boldly ask for the king's ransom. That's exactly what Nehemiah did. Nehemiah said, "I need a letter for safety, but I also need some materials."

Much to my surprise, what did King Artaxerxes do? He could've cut his head off. What did he do? He gave the whole kit and caboodle. He gave it all to him. We see in verse nine, it says, "The king granted what Nehemiah asked." And this is important. He said, "For the good hand of my God was upon me."

The good hand of God was upon me. If you're going to do something for God, first of all, make sure God's sending you. There's no stupider thing than to go out for God when God has not sent you. You need to make sure that you know that you know that you know that God has sent you. If God has sent you, he also is with you.

"I will never leave you nor forsake you. I will not leave you as an orphan, but I will come to you." — John 14

God promises his strength. He promises his presence.

Opposition Arises

So as soon as they get there and they start to rebuild, all of a sudden, something happens. Anytime you're going to be leading something, expect opposition. Anybody here a principal of a school? Anybody here ever been a superintendent? Pray for Curtis Hicks in Salem. He just got picked to be the new superintendent. I know from watching my father-in-law—he was a principal, he was a superintendent. When you step into positions of authority where you're going to make hard decisions, you're going to have a lot of enemies. They're just people that are going to be threatened anytime you're doing something.

These guys that were threatened—Sanballat, Tobiah, and there was another one, Geshem, I think his name is—they were appointed also by the same king, Artaxerxes. They had their little places of influence. They had a job. They were working for the same king, and they were like, "No, no, no, no, no. We don't want the Jews to come back. We want them to be destroyed so we can rule, we can reign, and we can have more money, and we can have more power." They opposed them. They hissed on them. They spit on them. They were nasty. They tried to stop the work.

So in the midst of this, even with opposition, look in verse 11. Nehemiah says, "So I went to Jerusalem." Very important—it says, "I was there for three days." Friends, why is that important? That in the scriptures, God made clear to let us see Nehemiah stop what he's doing right now for three days? Why would he have him stop? I mean, this is important stuff. The city's in ruins. God's people are being ravaged. Why would he have Nehemiah wait? He's already waited for four months. They've already waited before that for seventy years. Why is he going to wait for three more days?

Well, it could be further listening, but it could be he just made a two-and-a-half month journey on foot, and he's tired.

Friends, sometimes the Bible is just practical. So what he's doing here is setting an example for us. There's a time to move and a time to not move. There's a time to rest and a time to go to action. He knew he was tired. He wasn't his best, so he said, okay, I'm going to spend three days. I'm going to refill in the Lord, just like most of you are here today to refill in the Lord.

Then he says after that, he wanted to take a survey, and he said, I didn't tell anyone, and in dark of night, I got on one little old horse with just two or three of my most trusted friends. I didn't put it on social media. I didn't blab it to the whole city. I was playing my hand close to my vest. Sometimes when God gives you something to do, it's sacred, and you don't blab it to the world. You go do what God's asked you to do, let him work, then let the people see.

He went and inspected the city. He wanted to just keep crying and weeping when he saw how bad it was. He said in verse 17:

You see the trouble, brothers, all you fellow Israelites that are here. You see the trouble we're in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins and its gates are burned.

Then Nehemiah said something very straight. If you're a leader, there's ways you can lead. One way is with an iron fist, with power, with intimidation. Right? You've read about that in the news, haven't you, recently? People that lead this way. But Nehemiah was smart. He was wise, and that's why we study him for leadership. Rather than use an iron fist in his power and position, what he did is he involved the people. He said, Come. First of all, brothers and sisters, I want you to see what's happened to our city, to our people, and I want you to weep with me. But also, I want you to join me. I want you to join me in prayer, and I want you to join me in action.

So Nehemiah says, come, let us build and rebuild. Nehemiah was smart enough to know he couldn't do everything. As a leader, do you know that? A lot of you guys are really smart, you're really gifted, and you can do a lot of things, but I promise you, as the project gets bigger, or the task gets harder, you're going to need people underneath you. Moses found that out, and Nehemiah knew that. So he says, come, let us build the Wall of Jerusalem that we may no longer suffer derision. Let us rise up and build. And it says, they strengthened their hands for good work.

Finally, in verse 20, it says this:

I replied to them, to the people, Sanballat, and Tobias, and Geshem, and all those who were opposing the work of God in God's city. I replied to them, the God of heaven will make us prosper, and we are his servants. And we, his servants, will arise, we will build, but you guys have no portion, right, or claim in Jerusalem.

So friends, what did you learn from Nehemiah? Nehemiah was a man who had a heart for God and for God's people. Nehemiah was a man of some influence, but more importantly, he was a man that when he heard the situation, he got on his face and he prayed to God and said, God, what do you want me to do?

Instead of rushing to action, which is my enneagram seven, Myers Briggs—we can blame him, I'm a seven—what he did is he stopped and he got on his face and he listened to the Lord. I would say my biggest failure as a Christian and our biggest failure as Christians is we never listen to the Lord. We do what we want to do, and we ask God to bless it. Nehemiah screams to us, and he teaches us many things in this chapter. But one is, before you step forward, before you lead, you spend time listening to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. You listen to him, you get his plan, and you wait for his time. And if you don't, good luck to you.

So friends, I want to encourage you to be people that take your situations to the Lord. You ask him, Lord, what is it you want me to do? You're God, I'm not. And what is your timing? What's your plan? And watch God work. Maybe you, like Nehemiah, could say, God, your good hand was upon me. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.