Great Work

And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”

Nothing will be impossible with God.

Or, as the NIV puts it

Luke 1:37 NIV

For no word from God will ever fail.”

The angel gave Mary a vision of her immediate future… to give her courage through all the hardship, the hard work, the judgment of her peers and family, all of the unknown to come. And Mary naturally wonders if it is even possible…

No word from God will ever fail.

Everyone ends up somewhere… a few people end up somewhere on purpose. Goals, or vision, are how we try to see and plan where we are going. A God-given vision takes us where He wants us to be.

At 15 or 16 years old, Mary was given her Great Work: to be the Mother of God. Anyone here older than Mary? Anyone here have a Great Work that great?

No wonder she is called “blessed above all women”… that is a insane and beautifully terrifying calling.

What great work are you called to? That may not be a once and for all thing that all of your life build to and builds upon… there may be the great work of 2019, or the great work of the 2020 decade to come.

What is God calling you to? What is His vision for your life?

You may know and see that clearly and be in the midst of pursuing that. For the last year, really the last several years, we have been talking about vision, praying and fasting regularly asking God to clarify that vision.

God has not yet given a fully formed vision for that yet… but He has given me, and I know many of you, some of the seeds of that vision.

So Acts 15 is coming. And Acts 15 is such an important chapter for the life of our church, because it is all about conflict. How to have it, what it looks like. The content of their crisis is fascinating for us, the way they go about resolving conflict is something we have to learn.

But before we go into all that, and in preparation for the New Year and the time of reflection and vision casting we each often do in that time… I want to tell the story of my favorite visionary in the Bible.

This guy isn’t overtly and obviously supernatural. He never performs an obvious miracle. But he is faithful to the Great Work God calls him to, and we get to see how perfectly God places him to accomplish His purposes.

Let’s Build a Wall

Almost 600 years before Jesus was born, the Babylonian Empire swept over the Palestine region, taking the city of Jerusalem and with it, the nation of Judah.

They torn down the walls of Jerusalem, the temple of Jerusalem, everything that could stand as a symbol of the people or any kind of military threat… and then they scattered people throughout their empire. 70 years later the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem. They rebuilt the temple, but they did not rebuild all of Jerusalem, in particular, there was no wall around Jerusalem.

Jerusalem which had been the fortress, the sanctuary, the military power in the region.

And another 80 years that is the way things were. The Jewish people were scattered exiles in the land of their enemies, just trying to hold on to the stories grandma and great-grandma told of Jerusalem the way it was.

A man named Nehemiah, likely born into slavery, became a trusted slave of the king… and God laid on his heart a divine dissatisfaction with the “state of the Kingdom.”

Nehemiah 1:1–4 ESV

The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the citadel, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, “The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.” As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.

God gives him this divine dissatisfaction, that drives him to tears, that drives him to mourning, that drives him to his knees fasting and praying before God!

Nehemiah prayed

Nehemiah 1:5–10 ESV

And I said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father’s house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses. Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples, but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen, to make my name dwell there.’ They are your servants and your people, whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand.

It isn’t just the wall, the wall is a symbol of the state of God’s people: Sinful, scattered and outcast and hopeless

Nehemiah 1:11 ESV

O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name, and give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.” Now I was cupbearer to the king.

Now right there at the end, we see that Nehemiah is already in the right place for what God is going to do through him. Even as Nehemiah prays, God has already perfectly placed him.

His years of faithfulness, of faithful service to the king whose very ancestors had brought about his nation’s destruction… likely he saw his job as a distraction to the vision God gave him. Instead it is the very thing that God will use to empower it.

Four months later (in the month of Nisan) the opportunity comes.

Nehemiah 2:4–5 ESV

Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.”

What an ask?! But after asking some questions, the King not only releases Nehemiah he gives him letters of passage and resources. Nehemiah gets to Jerusalem and sees the broken down walls and burned gates. He rallies the people:

Nehemiah 2:17–18 ESV

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.” And I told them of the hand of my God that had been upon me for good, and also of the words that the king had spoken to me. And they said, “Let us rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for the good work.

and they start rebuilding the wall. Family by family, tribe by tribe, people are given responsibility for one gate at a time, one section of wall at a time. They breakdown the work into manageable pieces. Either Nehemiah was a great administrator or he had a great one working for him!

But, of course, as there always is, there was resistance to the change. In particular, the local warlords were all the way upset. This was a threat to their dominance of the region.

Nehemiah 4:7–9 ESV

But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.

So they had half the people standing guard and half kept on building the wall.

And so, if they couldn’t get to Nehemiah by force, perhaps they could do it by trickery. By hook or by crook!

Nehemiah 6:1–2 ESV

Now when Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left in it (although up to that time I had not set up the doors in the gates), Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, “Come and let us meet together at Hakkephirim in the plain of Ono.” But they intended to do me harm.

Nehemiah 6:3 ESV

And I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?”

Nehemiah 6:15–16 ESV

So the wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty-two days. And when all our enemies heard of it, all the nations around us were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that this work had been accomplished with the help of our God.

And then, they read the law for the first time in a long time and had an epic part, the feast of booths celebrated for the first time since the exile.

In 52 days Nehemiah rebuilt the wall. It was a God-sized vision, but he was called to it, in retrospect he was perfectly placed to do it, and he was faithful and committed to it.

Doing a good-enough thing is way easier than doing a “great work.”

Doing a “great work” requires great courage, great sacrifice, great commitment.

I Am Doing a Great Work

What is the great work to which God has called you?

God laid that passion on Nehemiah: his heart was broken by the lack of a wall in Jerusalem.

What has God laid on your heart, what breaks your heart? What has you in tears before God? God knows there is tragedy among us, in our world, conflict and crisis enough to break our hearts 1000x times over. There was in Nehemiah’s time too… but it was the wall God called him too… what is He calling you to?

That feeling of dissatisfaction, that the world shouldn’t be this way… where is that directing you?

I will tell you where my heart is.

I believe God is calling us, I believe God is calling me because those are the moments that break my heart and have me weeping, praying and fasting before God.

Rebuilding Next Step Christian Church

We are a church that worships. That is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

We are a church that fellowships. That is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

Last week was such a beautiful picture of worshipping and fellowshipping together. That picture of all of us, in a circle, lit candles, singing praises to our King. That is church.

But there are other dimensions to who we are called to be as a church of God planted.

We are called to “encouraging and equipping one another...” and yet we have those among us who are discouraged and unequipped!

Many of us are engaged in individual practices of discipleship… but when someone walks through the door and wants something more than a weekly sermon, today, we have nothing to offer them.

We are commited to take “next bold steps in Christian belief, maturity and ministry...” but where is the fruit of our ministry, and what does that say about our maturity?

For the members of Next Step Christian Church, this is going to be a year of hard work. It has already begun. A few weeks ago we talked about doing the hard work of reconciliation. I have been so encouraged to hear story after story of those who took that conviction seriously, and went and had coffee, had lunch, had a side conversation… sought healing and reconciliation. That is powerful. That is hard. That is great work!

There will be times this coming year where it would be easier to just walk away from the work. To walk away from this church and these people. Or those people. We can be torn apart by our disagreements, by our frustrations, by different ideas about whether the wall should be build, how high, where it should be placed, or what color it should be.

If God has called you to build and to be Next Step Christian Church, here comes the hard work. Here comes the struggle.