Reformation

Well, we're continuing our journey through Nehemiah. I pray that you've been blessed by it so far. I really encourage us to be reading it. If you haven't been, be reading through it as a family or individually because there's just so many good things happening here. And this morning we're going to be continuing in Nehemiah chapter five as there's really a changing of gears, a switching of gears happening here that we may not notice initially.

We don't have the time, I don't think, to read the entire chapter. So open your Bible to it and we'll try and work through it more or less verse by verse telling you exactly what's happening here. We will be referring back to it often. But what we have seen up until this point is a man by the name of Nehemiah gets called to Jerusalem, a place of his people, the Jews. Nehemiah was living in the Persian Empire.

He was a servant of the Persian king, a cup bearer. He hears about the terrible tragedy of the walls of Jerusalem being destroyed and that they are unsafe and that God's people are under threat. And he senses so strongly God's calling to go back and to help with the repair of these walls. That's why Nehemiah is known to be the man who rebuilds and restores. He goes back and he rebuilds and he restores the walls of Jerusalem.

We saw last week how while they were doing this, there was opposition to this, both from outside and inside. The Samaritans, the Ammonites, the neighbours of Jerusalem and their leaders were mocking and ridiculing Jerusalem, the Jews there, and Nehemiah saying, I mean, what are these feeble Jews going to be doing? Are they really going to rebuild this massive wall? And then we see that even the countrymen of the Jews living in the surrounding areas say to Nehemiah and to the people living in Jerusalem, you guys can't do this. It's terrible.

These neighbours are going to attack you while you're doing it. Stop. Ten times over, and Nehemiah says, they said this to us. Ten times they came back and said, stop doing this. It's not worth it.

It costs too much. It's too much work. And Nehemiah and the Jews resolved that they're going to do this and they continue building but they put a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other. They defend Jerusalem on the one hand, but they build Jerusalem up at the same time. But now we see, like I said, a switching happening here.

In chapter five, we see Nehemiah take on the people of Jerusalem, and he challenges them and he confronts them with sin, with their own sin, and says, we have to reform, we have to repent of what is happening. And so we see actually Nehemiah continuing with this mission of rebuilding and restoring God's kingdom, but it becomes a spiritual restoration. It becomes a reformation of the heart, a reformation of their faith. In the midst of all this building that's going on, an issue arises. The Bible says in verse one, the men and their wives raised a great outcry against their Jewish brothers.

Some were saying, we and our sons and daughters are numerous. In order for us to eat and stay alive, we must get grain. Verse three, others are saying, we are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our homes to get grain during this famine. Still others are saying, we had to borrow money to pay the king's tax on our fields and vineyards. Although we are the same flesh and the same blood as our countrymen, and though our sons are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery.

Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless because our fields and our vineyards belong to others. What we see here is Jews borrowing money to their fellow countrymen, charging interest on that which they were lending, and if they couldn't repay that interest or they couldn't repay the loan, they sold their kids into slavery. They were taking the money back and Nehemiah is absolutely appalled at this. We see Nehemiah urging the people to keep working on the wall, but at this point, what good is a wall if God's kingdom is internally fracturing? Verse one mentions that the men and their wives raised an outcry.

And what was this outcry? Why were the people upset? People were losing their livelihood. People were starving. To pay some of those taxes, according to scholars, king's taxes, because they were a puppet kingdom of the Persian empire, the king loaded taxes onto these people.

He said, I don't own you in a sense. I haven't conquered you. I haven't raped and pillaged you, but you're going to pay. You are going to pay. And so the king loads up these taxes on the people and they can't afford it so they have to borrow funds.

And all of this happens to the massive dismay of Nehemiah. Now I want to be careful this morning not to say that every person that is in a powerful position, of what some of these men were, that were lending money, that were borrowing to other people, rich people, wealthy people, businessmen. I don't want to say that every person like this is necessarily a greedy, scheming person, or that every poor person on the other hand is virtuous and oppressed. We don't want to go around blaming the rich for everything. There are godly rich and there are evil rich just as there are godly poor and evil poor.

But what we see happening here is that the Jews complained about their fellow Jews because they were using immoral methods to increase their own wealth regardless of the consequences. Nehemiah writes, when I heard their outcry in verse six, he says, when I heard their outcry and these charges, I became very angry. And then I accused the nobles and the officials, I told them you are exacting usury from your own countrymen. You are charging your own people interest. Now for us, this might seem weird because, you know, our credit cards have interest, our mortgages have interest, our loans at, you know, lending shops have interest and so on.

When Nehemiah heard what was happening however, he becomes really really angry. Why does Nehemiah become angry? Because this was an issue that God had forbid in the Bible. Three times in scripture, Exodus 22, Leviticus 25, and Deuteronomy 23, we see the law of Moses stating that a Jew should not charge another Jew interest. And we kind of know that if God repeats something, right, He sees that it's pretty important.

These rich Jews were going against God's law and they showed no compassion to the impoverished. It was an insult not to Nehemiah. It was an insult to God. Moreover, the law said that a Jew should never be a slave to another Jew, and here they were selling people's kids into slavery. When Nehemiah confronted the nobles and the officials, however, in verse eight, what happens?

They have nothing to say. They realise their guilt. Nehemiah continues in verses nine to eleven. He says, what you are doing, friends, is not right. Shouldn't you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?

I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain, but let the exacting of usury stop. Give back to them immediately their fields, their vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the usury, the interest you are charging them. The hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine, and oil. So they were charging 1%, which is pretty good deal nowadays actually if you think about it. They were charging interest.

And so Nehemiah calls on the nobles and the officials and he motivates them by saying two things. Firstly, this is not right in the eyes of God. Importantly, this is not right in the eyes of God. He's forbid this. And secondly, the Gentiles looking at us are expecting something of us to live in a different way.

And here you are selling our own people into slavery to these Gentiles. You are making a mockery of God's people doing this. And as Nehemiah is rebuking the officials and the noblemen, he does another thing. He admits that he was participating in this as well. It doesn't come across in my NIV translation here, and that's probably because there's a translator that had a particular view of this verse, but the verse actually says, let us stop charging interest.

And so scholars are debating whether Nehemiah really was involved in this or whether he was righteous enough to sort of see it and then condemn it and tell people to stop. There's a split jury on this, but I think the Hebrew itself is probably indicating that Nehemiah was a wealthy man, who was a nobleman himself, was probably involved in lending money, was probably involved in charging interest, he may have discovered in God's word, you know, when he read through Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus, that this is not how God's people should behave. And so he is cut to the heart. He becomes angry, not simply at himself or the officials and nobleman, he becomes angry at this sin. He says, this sin has to stop.

Let us stop charging interest. And so, for us to reflect on is what was happening in this time was not necessarily illegal. In society, it wasn't bad to charge interest. Everyone was doing it. The Persians were doing it.

The Babylonians were doing it. Everyone was doing it. The Egyptians were doing it. There were no laws stopping Nehemiah and the people from making money from their brothers. But according to God's law, this was wrong.

And this conviction of sin brought change to Nehemiah's heart, and he wasn't above reproach. He wasn't above being convicted by God at this moment. And he made sure that everyone knew that what they were doing and what was happening was not right, and that they had to give back, that they had to stop this. Verse 12 says, all the nobles and all the officials said, we will give it all back, and we will not demand anything more from them. We will do as you say.

As this passage continues on, it shows how Nehemiah's heart had been changed in this moment. The verses following this, Nehemiah explains what his life that was changed looked like. He says, moreover from that day, from the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when I was appointed governor of the land of Judah until the king's thirty second year, twelve years in total, neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the governor. The entire time that Nehemiah was the governor of Jerusalem, he didn't take any food that was allotted to him. He didn't take any extra taxes that was meant to be paid to the king.

Unlike the governors that preceded him, he didn't take any extra money. In fact, he went so far as to invite 150 people to his dinner table every night. A 150 people ate from his own funds every night. God does something amazing in that moment. Now what I wanted to really see and recognise in this passage is what true repentance looks like for us as Christians.

What true repentance looks like for us as Christians. And we talk about this a lot. You know, in our church, we don't skirt around the issue of brokenness, of flawedness, of inequity before God. We call it sin. But this is what repentance of sin looks like.

We first see that there is a conviction of this guilt. The noblemen have nothing to say. They've got no they've got no ground to stand on, no leg to stand on rather. They've got absolutely nothing to say, the writing is on the wall. Verse 12 says, they are convicted and they say, we will give this back.

You are right, we will give this back. The Holy Spirit was at work. They had guilt in their hearts. Now friends, firstly, guilt is not a bad thing. Whatever, you know, people may say, guilt is not a bad thing in and of itself.

It says that something is wrong. It's like the nervous system saying that you've cut your hand and that hurts. Guilt is not wrong in and of itself. It shows that your heart, in fact, is open to God, is a good thing. It shows that the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives.

But we see that repentance doesn't end with a feeling of guilt. Repentance doesn't end with being really sorry about what's happened. We see the second part, true repentance is a turning around of actions and thoughts. The people stopped what they were doing that day. They said, you are right, we will give back everything, and they did.

We won't continue doing this, they say. They make a promise to one another then and there that we will not be enslaving people in this sort of way. So there's a turning away from that. But then the third thing I really want us to see and what struck me this morning is that there is a part of restitution that takes place as well. Restitution means to make amends, to fix the wrong.

And sometimes I think this is the hardest part because as Christians, we may wrestle with sin, we may feel terrible about what's happened, we may repent and say, I don't want to do this again, I'm changing my life, I'm heading back to Christ. But there's some wrongs that may have happened. There's some stuff that we may have done. There's some things we may have said. There's some whatever that may have happened that we need to fix. And I think that that part of true repentance, effective repentance, is restitution because it cements that process.

It can be a powerful lasting spoke in the wheel of repentance. It starts impacting those around you. It starts fixing the problem that may have been caused by you. And at the end, it may hold you more accountable to the process of what God's been doing in your life so that goodness may prevail, righteousness may prevail. This is not a really sexy topic to be talking about.

And some of us may not be able to relate to what's happening here. You know, we're not big business owners. We're not government officials that may have the power to exert, you know, influence in such a way to enslave people or anything like that. But there is a common thread relating to all of us that we see in this passage, and that is the issue of living for ourselves. And we see how devastating the consequences can be for that.

In order to gain money, this is simply what was happening here. In order to gain money, in order to make a living, in order to provide security for our families, other people were willing to enslave the families of other people. Now, we can say, that's surely far removed from us today. Right? But I want to challenge us.

That cheap t-shirt that we buy for five dollars at JJ's or H and M or or whatever. Who makes five dollar t-shirts? And we buy it because it's cheap and it's going to, you know, make our budget work better. But do we think about those consequences? In that moment, it can be a very narrow view of enriching ourselves or at least not making ourselves too poor.

The album that you downloaded illegally, how much money did people really lose, we might think, at the distribution of, you know, in that process? It's, you know, just fifteen or twenty dollars or or whatever, but we know that millions are lost in revenue from illegal downloads. And again, our society says that's a grey area, so many people do it. They're multi-million dollar producers who really gets impacted by this. But we don't see every person that's involved in that process.

And again, this interest wasn't a big issue in that time. It was not illegal, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. It was kind of legal, but God said no. A few years back, Pepsi redesigned their bottles. And along with the redesign, they brought out a brand new slogan saying, live for now.

And when I first heard that, it made me stop and think because they were effectively saying, don't think about the implications and the consequences of tomorrow. Do what you want to do now. Live for now. And on the one hand, this is nice because it's encouraging us not to worry and to live a happy go lucky sort of life and in a sense that's great. We have freedom maybe to be like that but on the other hand it is saying perhaps that we don't have responsibility for our actions tomorrow.

We don't need to take up responsibility for our choices. But the truth is, the truth is that every action we take, every decision we make has consequences, and we don't outrun those consequences. They always come back to us, whether it is in this life or the next. And as Christians, we believe that every action and every decision we make matters. Every action we make carries some weight.

Every action is recognised by God. When we are selfish, people will get hurt. There is no two ways about it. The nobles and the officials of Nehemiah five were simply thinking about a little bit of extra money. There's a famine, I need to protect my family.

But real people were being hurt. Living in the now meant that business was made, profits were made, but it had terrible consequences. People were being sold into slavery. Imagine that. It's just outside my frame of reference.

And we can apply that to so many things in our lives today. We can talk about sexual promiscuity. And we can talk about sex outside of marriage that is so pervasive. We can talk about pornography that is so pervasive. But it all has consequences, friends.

It all has consequences. We can link unwanted pregnancies. We can talk about relationships that break down, husbands not being as attracted to their wives because of it. We can even come down to abortion, murder because of this. Our actions have consequences.

But God has given us something by which we need to constantly return to for clarity. And we have His word, and we have His promises, and we have His blueprint for life. In the midst of thousands of philosophies that may muddy the water, that may label all sorts of things as grey areas for the sake of a guilt-free conscience. We know as Christians how easy it is to fall into sin. And we find a need within us to find something that is good, truly good.

We find a need within us to find something that is truly perfect by which we can calibrate every action we make. At one point as a Christian, you found that need, and you found it in Christ. For Nehemiah, when they were building the wall, they needed to find a cornerstone for that first layer of the wall. They needed to find the perfect cornerstone by which everything would be measured, and that cornerstone was laid I'm sure. And as it was placed into position, it gave stability to the entire structure.

But here in Nehemiah five, we see that spiritual lasting cornerstone for Nehemiah was God. That everything he did, that he encouraged his people to do, was traced back to the perfect, stable, foundational God He served. He said, out of reverence for God, we change these things. And so it's no surprise that in the New Testament, Christ is called the chief cornerstone of our faith. Jesus is the measuring stick.

If you're wondering whether you are living correctly, just look at Jesus. What is genuinely good? Look to Jesus. What is genuinely fake? Look to Jesus.

He is our cornerstone because on Him we build our lives. And the good news of Christianity, the good news of the gospel is that Jesus doesn't simply fix our crumbling walls and try to bend them back into shape. Jesus rebuilds the whole thing. He tears us down and he starts building us back up from that cornerstone. Like Nehemiah and the giant spiritual reformation that was taking place on that day, when we realise that something is out of place, we need to change things in our lives.

Don't be satisfied. Don't limp through life. We need to change things and turn ourselves back to the cornerstone of Jesus who offers us real healing and real help. We need to repent and often. Don't simply feel that being convicted and being guilty is where it ends because that's not where it ends.

We need to change. We need to find our true north in Christ. We need to stop stealing. We need to stop lying. We need to stop being promiscuous friends.

And I'm preaching to myself this morning. God expects His church to be pure. God expects His church to be better than it is. But we can also accept that in doing so, we find a saviour who releases us from the snares. Psalm 25:15.

And so our eyes are constantly on Him. Our eyes are ever on the Lord, for He is the only one who will release us from the snares for our feet. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we need you. We need you to create in us the vision of your church that you have so longed for.

Father, we thank you that this is not a hopeless task, that you have empowered us by your spirit to do this. Lord, that you don't view it in a negative way, but you are positively inclined towards your church, that you are encouraging your church, that you are dealing with your church graciously. And Father, this moment where we see real reformation, restoration, rebuilding of your people and their hearts taking place in Nehemiah five. We see your grace all throughout it. We see your grace awakening within those hearts a sense of, wow, Lord, you are holy.

Wow, Lord, you do expect us to live differently. And yes, Lord, we will change. Father, the act of or the sensation or the knowledge of guilt, Father, is the first step in mercy. Father, may our lives reflect what you desire of us more and more. And Father, we cannot end this morning without looking to the cross, without looking to our cornerstone on whom we build our lives, our example, the one we imitate, Jesus Christ.

We cannot end this morning by looking to Him and the cross and seeing our brokenness and our imperfections and our crooked crumbling walls being laid upon Him. And that in Him was the sacrifice made once and for all that bought us righteousness, that made us acceptable in your sight. And so, Father, we thank you for that truth. We do not leave here at this place this morning people burdened down by shame and guilt. Father, we take up with grateful hearts the task you are calling us to.

Father, we love you because you first loved us. While we were still sinners, you sent your son for us. This is love. Not that we loved you first, but that you loved us and sent your son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. These are all true.

These are all promises in your word. Father, create in us, create in our hearts lives that are truly repentant, lives that will make restitution for wrongs, lives that will reflect your glory and your character more and more. So that we may not bring reproach to your church, and that we may make believers out of unbelievers. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.