A Relationship with God Changes Us

Nehemiah chapter 10 this morning. By way of introduction, maybe, just to recap last week, this is almost like a part two of what we discussed last week. Last week, we were in Nehemiah 9, where we saw the Jews celebrating a festival for the first time, probably since the time of Joshua. We're talking hundreds of years later, celebrating what is called the Feast of Tabernacles. This was a week long celebration where the Israelites remembered the forty years of wandering in the wilderness and they remembered God's faithfulness in that time and how He provided for them in their escape from Egypt.

Now, in the time of Nehemiah, we're about seven months into the rebuilding of the wall, which is the primary reason Nehemiah had gone back to Jerusalem. You can understand, probably, there's a lot of spiritual zeal at this time. They're in the holy city. They're rebuilding the wall. They've just rebuilt a temple of God in Jerusalem at the time as well, and so they desire to celebrate this festival, the Feast of Tabernacles.

During this week, Israel and Nehemiah read God's law, which explains the meaning of this festival. And we're told that they read God's law for hours on end, as they stand together in the courts. I can't remember if it's the temple courts or they stand together in one place, and they read the Bible together. Doing so, they realize, as they read God's word, they realise with dismay the extent of their sin, the cause of their exile that they have just returned from.

In that moment, on that day, they repent of those things with sadness and with mourning. And then specifically, last week, we looked at the prayer of confession that they prayed corporately, confessing their sin, remembering God's faithfulness to them and their forefathers and asking God again to be merciful and to be faithful to them. Today, we see them coming back a few days later after this event, coming back to reconfirm with God and with themselves the saving relationship that they are in with God by formally reconfirming the covenant that they have with Him. Let's have a read of what happens in Nehemiah 10 and we're going to begin from verse 28. You will see the first 27 verses is a list of a bunch of names that are written on a document that they sign as they make these promises to God.

Nehemiah 10:28. The rest of the 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 the commandments of the Lord, our Lord, and His rules and His statutes. We will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons. And if the peoples of the land bring in goods or any grain on the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or on a holy day. And we will forgo the crops of the seventh year and the exaction of every debt.

We also take on ourselves the obligation to give yearly a third part of a shekel for the service of the house of our God: for the showbread, the regular grain offering, the regular burnt offering, the Sabbaths, the new moons, the appointed feasts, the holy things and the sin offering to make atonement for Israel and for all the work of the house of our God. We, the priests, the Levites and the people, have likewise cast lots for the wood offering to bring it into the house of our God according to our fathers' houses at times appointed, year by year, to burn on the altar of the Lord our God, as it is written in the law. We obligate ourselves to bring the first fruits of our ground and the first fruits of all fruit of every tree year by year to the house of the Lord. Also, to bring to the house of our God, to the priests who minister in the house of our God, the firstborn of our sons and of our cattle, as it is written in the law, and the firstborn of our herds and of our flocks, and to bring the first of our dough and our contributions, the fruit of every tree, the wine and the oil to the priests, to the chambers of the house of our God, and to bring to the Levites the tithes from our ground, for it is the Levites who collect the tithes in all our towns where we labour.

And the priest, the son of Aaron, shall be with the Levites when the Levites receive the tithes. And the Levites shall bring up the tithes of the tithes to the house of our God, to the chambers of the storehouse. For the people of Israel and the sons of Levi shall bring the contribution of grain, wine and oil to the chambers where the vessels of the sanctuary are as well as the priests who minister and the gatekeepers and the singers. We will not neglect the house of our God. So far, our reading; this is God's word.

So in this passage, again, a lot of detail, but this is a contract essentially being set up and the stipulations of that contract is being made clear here. But we see in essence what's happening here is a reconfirmation of the covenant relationship the people of God have with God. Remember that the covenant of grace is the most important concept in the whole Bible. We don't realise that; we don't hear it preached often, but the concept of the covenant of grace is the single golden thread that binds the whole Bible together. It's what makes it make sense.

God, through the covenant, is busy redeeming a people to know Him as God, and He has made a promise to make this happen. This is the covenant. The covenant means a serious promise. And this promise is summed up by the line that's often repeated throughout Scripture, which is: I will be your God, you must be My people. I will be your God if you will be My people.

And so this morning, we read the second half of this process of what was happening at the time of prayer and repentance. This happens immediately after, well, a few days after, the prayer of confession was made. And here, they renew the covenant with God. They make a solemn pledge to walk in His ways again, to serve Him and worship Him alone as God. What we see this morning is the reaffirmation of a saving relationship that the people of Israel had with God.

It is what Hugh Williamson in his commentary on Nehemiah says applies to us as Christians even today. The concept, the significance of this moment applies to Christians even to this day. He writes this: neither Old Testament nor New Testament has any place for confessions of faith that leave lifestyle and practice unaffected. So as we will see, there's a profession of "You are our God" and then a stipulation of how we respond to You being our God. Neither Old Testament nor New Testament has any place for a confession of faith that leaves lifestyle and practice unaffected.

And so this morning, we're going to see that in God's saving relationship with us, we can't help but have our lives transformed by that relationship. And there are three things we will notice of what happened when God's people confirmed or reconfirmed their relationship with God. Firstly, that entering into a saving relationship with God begins with a personal decision. So we see after the prayer of confession, the Israelites pledging themselves anew to the covenant they had with God and we see this being done corporately. There's a group of people that say this together.

And yet, we see that the action they took, the document that they produced represents a crucial moment in the individual lives of those Jews, of those Israelites. In this moment, they drive a flag into the ground in which would become a rallying point for the subsequent families that would come. In a way, they erect a written monument much like the founding documents of Australia or the US Constitution that was laid out. They draft a type of constitution where they confirm their purpose as a people and their commonly held values. Now, obviously, this isn't a constitutional document per se or in a real sense because the whole law of God that they had just been reading was that document.

It was their constitution. It is what caused them to exist as a people. In other words, Nehemiah and the Israelites don't need to rewrite a constitution. They already have God's word, but here, they confirm in writing that we understand the covenant agreement, and we put our names next to that agreement. God wants to be our God and we will be His people.

The first point we see this morning is how the entrance into this promise, the entrance into a saving relationship with God begins with a personal commitment. We skipped over the first 27 verses of chapter 10. It lists there all the names of the representative signatories to this agreement. We're told that these people seal this document with their names. Now, here's a helpful tip.

Every time you come to a list of names, and there are lots of lists of names in the Bible, the temptation is to skip it. The temptation is to go, what does this mean for me? Well, one of the great takeaways every time you get to a list of names like this is: God cares about individuals. Individual lives, their decisions, their stories matter. God acknowledges these people.

He sees their names; He knows them. Remember how the people had come to this point. They have read the law of God for hours and hours. Along the line, they come to understand the enormous grace that God had extended to them by inviting them into the covenant of grace. They hear the law of God telling them how to live in light of this grace.

They would have heard for sure these wonderful words in Deuteronomy 7:7-11. God's saying to His people: it was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set His love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that He swore to your fathers that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations and repays to their face those who hate Him by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates Him. He will repay him to his face. You shall therefore be careful to do the commandments and the statutes and the rules that I command you today.

They realised that God never chose them as a nation because they were special in any way. They weren't more clever. They weren't more spiritual. They weren't more noble.

And that's exactly the same pattern for us as Christians. The New Testament shows us that we were chosen by God for no other reason than God loved us before we knew Him. And God made a promise long ago that He's going to create a kingdom out of people like you and me. Entrance into this kingdom, entrance into this saving relationship, however, we see is a personal decision. People put their names down on record saying: yes, I am in this covenant agreement.

I sign this with my life. Now, obviously, these people are representatives of the Israelites standing there. We couldn't have a whole list of all the thousands that would have been there, but they represent the people. What this means is that it takes individual people to know and understand (the verse tells us in 28) all who have knowledge and understanding. It takes people who know and understand to personally decide that they are accepting the gracious promise of God for their lives and in turn, conforming their lives to the kingdom.

It's exactly the same in the New Testament. Romans 12:1-2 tells us in almost exactly the same pattern what is going on. First, God has extended His mercy. He has saved His people in the work of Jesus Christ. And then we respond by faith and acceptance of what He has done.

And through that acceptance, our lives are conformed to His will. Listen to what Paul says in Romans 12:1-2. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

First, God saved Israel from Egypt, then He gives them the law at Mount Sinai. It didn't go the other way around. First, you obey, then I will save you. First, God saves us in Christ, then He tells us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. And the first thing we understand is that entering into a relationship with God is a personal commitment which requires understanding and knowledge.

With that understanding and knowledge, however, you decide by His grace to sign your name on the dotted line. God brings out in your life the desire to make that decision that you are part of God's people. And you have to grapple with the idea of: are you in or are you outside in the world still? The second point we see is that entering into a saving relationship with God impacts our lifestyle. Having a saving relationship with God impacts our lifestyle, specifically here, how we build our families and how we work.

Part of the reconfirmation of the covenant causes the people to explicitly mention a few stipulations of God's original covenant with them, and they make it clear. Why? Because these are some of the grievous sins that they committed. These are some of the huge disobediences that caused them to fall into this exile and into this situation. Verses 30 and 31 tell us explicitly that the people agree not to give their children to intermarry with the peoples surrounding them, the people of the land, and secondly, to honour the Sabbath day.

God had warned Israel of the danger when they entered the promised land of marrying non-believers. Deuteronomy 7:3-4 says: you shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following Me to serve other gods. God gives this just before they go into the promised land. Few hundred years later, we find the Jewish people surrounded by non-believers and they have been living in exile for an entire generation, and their whole existence has been one without the strength of numbers. And yet, they find themselves in a situation where the surrounding neighbours want God's people to become part of their own social, religious and business society.

And they discover here that the law of God prohibits God's people from entering into that. God was never going to play second fiddle to the whims of the false gods of the surrounding nations. There is only one God, the living God and the God of truth can't abide by fairy tales and superstition. So God tells His people: no, you will not marry unbelievers. You won't marry people who hold to another faith because you are Mine in the covenant.

Your families are Mine. Your children are Mine. You will not marry a non-believer. The same is true for us as Christians today. That doesn't change in the New Testament.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:14: Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? Friends, the temptation to marry people of other faith persuasions has been a snare for God's people forever. Don't think that you have it worse now in secular Australia than the Jews would have had when they were a few thousand coming back from the exile. You don't have it worse than other generations have had.

If you are single, I can't emphasise strongly enough that you must never enter into a marriage with a non-believer. God does not want that for your life because choosing that for your life is choosing an unbearably difficult road. In spite of what even the most well intentioned non-believing spouse may offer us, a non-believer will never be able to be an encouragement in you pursuing God. They will only ever make it more difficult. They will not share your commitment to instil the knowledge of God to your children.

They will not cheerfully allow you to give your time, your money to the work of God and His church. They will not seek God's kingdom and His righteousness first. Their values will always be at odds with yours and you will be torn in two directions at every single crossroad. You are choosing for yourself a lifetime of fighting. I think you can also say here that choosing to be married to a nominal Christian, so a Christian in name only, someone who says to you that they believe in Christ, but whose lives don't reflect an obedience to Him, they are essentially non-Christians and the same issues will come up.

If you're a parent here, please impart God's standards for marriage in your children before their teenage years. Pray for them and help guide them into God-centred marriages. The second thing talked about here is the Sabbath day and there's a promise again to keep that sacred and holy. Now, we know that the law of God prohibited the Jews from working on the Sabbath, but it doesn't say anything about buying goods from Gentiles when they come in to sell their work in the cities. So here's a funny loophole that they exploited.

And yet, the people here know in their hearts that while they're not technically working, they haven't brought those goods into the city to buy and to sell; they were still conducting business of some sort, and here, they agreed to stop doing that. They also agreed to let the land lie fallow every seventh year, and to forgive all their debts, the debts that fellow Jews have for them, as the law of God had stipulated. These two things, the fallow land and the forgiving of debts, is again tied with the Sabbath rhythm of every seven years doing this, of having a time of rest. In other words, the Jews here agreed to honour the Sabbath day rhythm again. John Piper, in a sermon he preached on this command in the Ten Commandments, remembering the Sabbath day, said this: the beautiful thing about the Sabbath is that God instituted it as a weekly reminder of two things.

One is that all true blessing comes from His grace, not our labour. That's the first thing remembered on the Sabbath. True blessing comes from His grace, not our labour. The other is that we hallow Him, we honour Him and keep the day holy if we seek the fullness of His blessing by giving our special attention to Him on that day. In other words, the Sabbath was concerned about two main things: resting and worshipping.

In that rest and worship, you remember how God has saved you, remembering that you could never have attained that salvation yourself. You receive it by His goodness and grace. And then you also rest from all your work on that day to remember that you don't have all the power, that God is the one who provides for you, even on the day where you are doing nothing to earn what you have. Not engaging in trade on the Sabbath day, or letting the land lie fallow for every seven years, or forgiving debts every seventh year. These practices essentially required the Jews to trust God in all their business dealings.

They had to trust that they had enough income from the six days they were freely given to work. They had to trust that God would make up the crops that they had lost from leaving certain parts of the land fallow, and that He would provide the money they needed when they would forgo the debts that were owed to them every seven years. There's a lot of trust involved in this. Now for us, while the civic laws of forgiving debts every seven years or the letting of portions of our land (not many of us are farmers here anyway) lie fallow, those things don't apply to us in the new covenant. We see this basic principle that again speaks to us today and that is that we need to think carefully about honouring God with our work, with our business.

Often, when you obey God in our work world, you pay a price in the short run. Honesty can often cost you in business. It costs you to pay taxes fairly. But believers now, just like believers back then, should trust that the God who sees everything will take care of those who obey Him. Our business practices, our work habits should reflect our Christian commitment.

And so that means that if we work on a Sunday, the Lord's Day, the time where we can apply the principle of rest and worship, if we work on a Sunday because we get time and a half or double pay, and that is the reason we work on a Sunday, we need to think about that motivation. That is not a good enough reason, God says, for forgoing worshipping the living God. God will sort out our finances. Have to believe on all the other six days that God has freely and gladly given us to work on.

So we consecrate our Sundays to fellowship and to worship. Now, I want to say that there are all sorts of exceptions to this suggestion as well and we had a great discussion in our membership classes a few weeks ago about how do we honour the Sabbath day as Christians. We have police officers in this church. We have nurses in this church who need to work on the Lord's day. People get sick and people commit crimes, but we are given the instruction here to weigh up our hearts again carefully.

I think the same can go for doing homework or studying on a Sunday if you're a student. You're not working, but that is technically your work. If God wants you to rest from that, you should rest from that. So we consider again studying on all the other days that we have available to study. So what we see happening here is in reconfirming their covenant relationship with God, their saving relationship with Him, the people stipulate that their lifestyles will now be conformed to God's will.

And this is what we need to understand: that when you and I become Christians, how we run our families, how we do our work, it is all affected and influenced by God's standards, not the world's. And we don't try and work something that can please both sides. It is God's standards that we conform to. And so you and I need to think carefully and regularly about how we live our lives in view of God's grace and mercy. Thirdly and finally, we see that entering into a saving relationship with God impacts our church commitments.

There's a massive section from verse 32 to verse 39, where the people make very detailed commitments on how they will support the newly built temple in Jerusalem, and how they will celebrate and worship the God that they are entering into or have entered a covenant relationship with. They, for example, agreed to pay a certain amount to maintain the temple, to do things like giving wood for the burnt offerings, to bring their first fruits as sacrifices to God and so on. Again, these stipulations directly don't apply to the church anymore. We believe that those ceremonial laws, as apart from the civil laws, have been fulfilled in Christ. But the pattern and the principle does speak to us still and it is carried into the New Testament.

The overall principle is that we should be committed to the work of God's church. Church buildings are not His house anymore, but people indwelt by His spirit are. And just like God's people committed themselves to supporting the work of the temple, so we, when we enter into a saving relationship with God, will be concerned about supporting the work of God's church. Giving the first fruits meant that the Israelites would give to the Lord their best income, not the leftovers. It's not wrong to give your leftovers too.

In fact, John will say: bring all your junk for the garage sale in two weeks' time. We'll take those leftovers. But this idea of giving your first fruits gives us the imperative that one should be giving with a planned and a systematic understanding, a cheerful demonstration that God has first place in our hearts. That is what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9:7. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

The New Testament standard for giving is not the Old Testament tithe. So while we sometimes may accidentally use the word tithe, we'll take up the tithes and offerings, we're not commanded to give a tenth of all our stuff. Rather, the New Testament holds out probably a more uncomfortable idea that we give in accordance with how blessed we feel in light of God's grace. I remember the audible silence when my professor of Christian worship, Murray Caple, told us: the 10% tithe doesn't apply to the church anymore and we all breathed a sigh of relief as students. But then he said: you are now much more free to give, much more in accordance to how blessed you sense yourself to be.

So maybe 10% is a good benchmark to have. It means that, maybe 5% for a student is good enough because we know you scrape by on the part-time work that you have. But it may mean as a business owner or as someone that has paid very well, 15% means you have plenty left over for your daily needs. We have to remember that God ultimately owns all our wealth, that we just manage it for His kingdom purposes. Here we see the principle that when we come into a saving relationship with God, our faith in Jesus Christ has an impact on our commitment to the work of the church.

Why do we choose to do this? Well, it's perhaps fitting for us to end with Paul's words to the Corinthian church when he wrote to them about being generous in their support for the work of the churches they were supporting. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 8:8-9: for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for our sake, He became poor, so that you, through His poverty, might become rich. What is the wealth of eternity in the presence of God's glory compared to the wealth or the lifestyle that we can attempt to pursue in this life? The more we realise how much Christ has given us, the less we will try to rationalise sin, skirt around God's commandments to us, the more generous we will be with our lives. And while it seems hard at first when you become a Christian to conform your lifestyle, to conform your work and your church commitments to God's way, the more you grow in your faith, the more you realise what you have received in Christ Jesus, the easier it should become.

So in closing, we see firstly that God's people will respond to His mercy for us responding to Jesus' death on the cross. We enter into that saving relationship through, firstly, a personal commitment that only we can make individually.

And then this saving relationship causes our lifestyles, who we pursue in marriage, what we do for work, how we do our work, to be conformed to His will. And then thirdly, that in this saving relationship, our generosity, our desire for the work of the gospel for the world is radically influenced. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we contemplate these things and again hear Your will for our lives in view of God's great mercy, we confess our wavering attitudes towards these things. We confess the weakness of our obedience but also the weakness of our wisdom on how we juggle these things.

Oh God, You know that we are weak. God, You know that we don't know all things and You are gracious with that. But we know that we have the mind of Christ in us and so Lord, even as we hear Your word, even as it is now brought to life in our hearts and our minds, we ask, Holy Spirit, that You will confirm this to us. Where there is a need for adjustment and tweaking and change, Lord, please do that. We thank You that we are in a saving relationship with You.

We thank You that we have entered into that by our profession and our faith that Jesus Christ has saved us from our sin and that we belong to the kingdom of God forever. And now, we promise that our lives will reflect what it means to live in that kingdom. Give us the strength, the wisdom, and the grace to do this. In Jesus' name. Amen.