The leaders of
the people were living in Jerusalem, the holy city. A tenth of the people from the other towns of
Judah and Benjamin were chosen by sacred lots to live there, too, while the
rest stayed where they were. And the people commended everyone who volunteered to
resettle in Jerusalem. Nehemiah
11:1 - 2 (NLT)
Chapters 11 and 12 of Nehemiah have another
imposing list of unpronounceable names.
I was tempted to skip these chapters, but I am rather stubbornly
committed to preach to you all the council of God. And, if God put these names in Holy
Scripture, and preserved them for more than two millennia, they are
important. So we will investigate them.
The backdrop for this
event is God’s people returning from 70 years’ captivity in Babylon. The walls of Jerusalem had now been
re-constructed, and the temple restored.
The rulers dwelt within the city, but the rest of the population – the
common everyday folks lived in other surrounding cities. Nehemiah knew that a city must have a population
to have an economic and emotional vitality.
So he instituted a voluntary draft to repopulate
Jerusalem.
What I mean by voluntary
draft is that you really didn’t have to move to the city if you decided against
it. All the citizens were considered,
and when the “flip of the coin” chose someone he had the right to decline.
As Nehemiah proceeded,
people were chosen – and then responded positively or negatively about going to
live inside the city walls as Jerusalemites.
Those who said “yes” became “voluntary draftees” – new citizens of the
old city.
The people came from all
walks of life, social strata and vocational backgrounds.
Now, this has much to say to a church like
ours, and about a home like yours. We
are a melting pot – northern, southern, young and old. We have professionals, medical, hard-working
skilled people, and management. There
are homemakers, hunters, pacifists, dog and cat lovers and haters. We are a varied bunch.
We are also alike – we are
voluntary draftees into the family of God, joined together by invitation and
sanctification.
This morning I would like
us to see a few defining statements about personal ministry, and the sacrifice
we all have in common when it comes to serving God on His terms.
#1. Sacrifice; What if God asks ME?
Ever since God told Adam to tend
the garden of Eden He has been calling people to do things. Sometimes He speaks loudly and clearly. In the case of Nehemiah’s repopulating Jerusalem,
the idea of flipping the coin was very specific. It very seldom landed on its edge and stayed
there. It either fell with your side up
or not. Flipping a coin however is not a
great way to determine God’s will for your personal ministry.
One thing is certain – with the
world in the state in which we now find it:
hunger, poverty, loneliness, disease and lost people everywhere, there
is plenty of ministry to go around. How
do you know if God is singling you out for a ministry?
Inclination
You may be drawn to a certain
type of ministry. If dealing with lost
people face-to-face is exciting to you (exciting, not scary), then
evangelism may be that to which God is calling you. On the other hand, you may be more suited to
helping put a roof over someone’s home.
What some would call a natural inclination may be more like the evidence
of a supernatural gift.
Affirmation
One of the reasons we lay hands
on ministers is the affirmation of the church body that this person has been
gifted to that particular ministry.
Not all people have the same
gifts; not all people have the gift they think they have.
Gifts are like the tools in the toolbox; as I
shared with the children, you should use the tools you’re given, not someone
else’s…but you should use it!
In some way we do that with our
Nominating Committee report when we elect folks to ministry positions; we
affirm their suitability for that ministry.
Situation
There are times when God just
drops a ministry into your pathway and you have no choice but to know this
is it!
God did that with Paul. Paul just knew his calling was to persecute
that crazy cult called Christians – those followers of Jesus. Then came the Damascus Road, a blinding light
and Jesus turned Paul’s world upside-down.
What he thought was his calling became the very opposite of his real
calling.
God doesn’t do that blinding
light thing with everyone – and many of us miss God if we’re not
paying attention. The key is to know
that God does single us out for ministry, and it is our business to listen very
carefully in prayer.
This is because…
2. God is not interested in pedigrees; He wants Hearts
In the list(Chapter 12) of brave men who
were selected to live in the city, two of the tribes mentioned were Judah and
Benjamin. These two tribes really have a
checkered past. At least one of Judah’s children
in the Patriarchal days was born of incest.
This child, named Perez, became known as one of the mightiest warriors
of the nation.
The tiny tribe of Benjamin also had a record of sexual
sins, including rampant homosexuality.
From Benjamin came two Sauls – one, the first king in Israel; the other
Saul later had his name changed to Paul.
After Paul got over being blinded on the Road to Damascus,
he started churches all over the known world and wrote more of the New
Testament than anyone else.
Two tribes – horrible pedigrees; God used them for His
purposes anyway!
We have some tribes here today that may have gotten a
rough start like Judah and Benjamin.
Starts are only that – the beginning; it is how you finish that
counts!
A North Carolina favorite son, basketball great Michael
Jordan, always looked kind of uncoordinated when he lunged to steal the ball
from an opponent – but when he drove down the court to the basket, there
was a man who could finish with style!
Friend, God is not interested in your pedigree – where
you got your start, who your Daddy might be, or what degrees and honors the
schools wrote on your sheepskin. God is
after your heart – that’s what will determine how you finish!
These three statements are connected, layered one on
top of the other:
ü God DOES ASK…He wants you to serve.
ü He doesn’t care about your history…He wants to know your heart’s
desire is to serve Him…
ü and…
#3. He Asks, But It’s Up to YOU to Respond
Responding to God means you come to the point where He
can have anything you’ve got; it comes to the point where you release
everything to God – past, present, future – all of it.
It requires sacrifice to serve God. Anita Burnett, a friend in Greenville,
Florida, where I served as pastor years ago, sent me a story that illustrates
the point:
A Sunday School first grade
class teacher asked her young charges, "If I sold my house and my car, had
a big garage sale and gave all my money to the church, would I get into
Heaven?" "NO"! the children
all answered.
"If I cleaned the church
every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, then would I get
into Heaven"? Again, the answer was
"NO"!
"Well," I
continued, "then how can I get to Heaven?" In the back of the room, a 5 year old boy
shouted out, "If you wanna go to heaven you gotta be dead!"
That’s how it is with God
– He doesn’t use you unless you are willing to be dead – to sin and self!
Dying to self means coming
to the point of giving it all up to God, starting with who you are, and your
future.
Let me allow author and pastor
Leith Anderson describe what that kind of humility and dying to self is all
about:
Several years ago I
was visiting Manila and was taken, of all places, to the Manila garbage dump
and saw something beyond belief. Tens of thousands of people make their homes
on that dump site. They've constructed shacks out of the things other people
have thrown away. And they send their children out early every morning to
scavenge for food out of other people's garbage, so they can have family meals.
People have been born and grown up there on the garbage dump. They have had
their families, their children, their shacks, their garbage to eat, finished
out their lives, and died there without ever going anywhere else, even in the
city of Manila. It is an astonishing thing.
But Americans also
live on the garbage dump. They are missionaries, Christians who have chosen to
leave their own country and communicate the love of Jesus Christ to people who
otherwise would never hear it. That is amazing to me. People would leave what
we have to go and live on a garbage dump. Amazing, but not as amazing as the
journey from heaven to earth.
The Son of God made
that journey, and he knew what he was doing. He knew where he was going. He
knew what the sacrifice would be. He journeyed from heaven to earth on a
mission to save the human race.[1]
God called those missionaries to reach people in the
Philippines. In responding to
God’s
call, those missionaries gave it all up.
They went to the garbage people for God.
It is a hard thing to sacrifice. But the joy of sacrifice is in knowing that
the sacrificial journey Jesus made when He came from heaven to earth is the
promise of the journey He is preparing for us to go from earth to heaven.
¶ He calls us to that too. He wants voluntary draftees.
¶ Our pedigree means nothing in that too – only our
heart for Him.
¶ And, although He is the one doing the calling – it is
up to us to respond.
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