Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Facing our Failures | The Writings | Nehemiah 13

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Do you ever feel like a spiritual, moral, or religious failure? Are you distracted from the main thing? Do you see God's commands as irrelevant? In today's episode, Tanya shares how Nehemiah 13 reminds us that Jesus is the only firm foundation for our identities. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Nehemiah 13

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. Have you ever felt like a spiritual or religious or moral failure? I use all of those words because I think we experience these things in different ways and at different times and different extremes. It can be a Bible reading plan and intention to pray every day that only lasts so long. And maybe it makes you feel like God is disappointed in you. It can be a lapse in church.

It can be a broken relationship in your faith community that taunts you about going back to worship with your church family. It can be a moral failure, maybe even a repeated one, that makes you feel unworthy of God's presence. A feeling of disconnect with God and a lack of desire to be with God our experiences believers have all the time. In the language of our day, let's normalize feeling out of sorts with God, while also completely not normalizing it.

instead of letting it discourage us and tell us we aren't good enough, let's bring it into the truth of his word which tells us we do need a rescuer, time and again. The last chapter of Nehemiah is a narrative that invites us to place our experiences with failure into a bigger story, where people fail time and again, and God rescues time and again. It's a story about our lack of faith and God's inexhaustible faithfulness. It's not a try-hard story, but a love- story. Today, we're talking about the last chapter in Nehemiah, and this is a book that started really with Ezra and a very special time for the Jewish people. They had been living in exile for a long time, but they returned to the city of Jerusalem. They were equipped with resources from the

king of Persia to rebuild the city walls and shore up the gates. When the hard work was finished, they had a worship service called a covenant renewal, and they thanked God for bringing them back and fulfilling his promises to rebuild the city. They also made their own promises to take care of the temple and the priest with their tithes and their offerings. They made promises to honor the Sabbath and to keep themselves pure from idol worship. Nehemiah must have felt pretty solid about where the people were physically and spiritually when he traveled back to Susa after his 12-year stay in Jerusalem.

But the last chapter of Nehemiah is not a happy ending. It's a story of compromise and rebellion that we can identify with. It's an ending that can make us uncomfortable where we examine the ways we have neglected our first love. It is also an ending that can give us great comfort in the way it points to our need for a Savior, a Savior who has come and intercedes at the right hand of God for us. When Nehemiah returned to the city of Jerusalem to see how the people were doing, there were issues he addressed that can be lumped into three categories. First, there was a new legalism.

They were adding to what God said to look and sound more spiritual. Second, they were not keeping the main thing, the main thing. And third, there was compromise for self-gain. Now, the first issue Nehemiah gets to is a problem with new legalism. When the people heard the law read from the book of Moses that prohibited Ammonites and Moabites from worshipping with them for 10 generations, they went beyond the law. Rather than just the two nations named and for the time given, 10 generations, they wanted to add to God's law that was meant to protect them from people whose king had tried to curse them. Nehemiah chapter 13 verse 3 says,

as soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. Now, how are we drawn to look like Christians by separating our children? By separating our or by adding things that are not necessarily forbidden to our list of expectations for the Christian life. Why do we care more about these outer things sometimes than the inner things? What does that reveal about us and what we need? The next issue Nehemiah confronts is a lack of care for the temple and the priest working there. The temple and worship were the main priority, because this is where the people make sacrifices and come to worship God and to be with God. This is where the relationship between God and man symbolically happened in the Old Testament.

If the temple was desecrated, it was an illustration of the way people were dishonoring God. Nehemiah was outraged, because the room that was meant to hold the tides and offerings that would supply the needs of the priest was now occupied by a man named Tobiah. This meant the priest had to go to the fields to provide for themselves, so they were not solely dedicated to the service of the temple. And like a stack of dominoes falling, the lack of a stack of, priest, meant a lack of worship services, mental lack of teaching and repentance, and a lack of vertical relationship with God. You know how it goes. How are we distracted from the main thing?

Our relationship and service to our Lord Jesus Christ. How do our distractions lead us away from giving our time and money to our church and those that serve God in our communities? The last thing Nehemiah addressed was compromise for profit. Now the things he saw happening on the Sabbath absolutely outraged him. Rather than keeping the Sabbath holy and honor to God and entering into a time of rest and Thanksgiving, the city inside the walls was transformed into a Sunday market, or a Sabbath market. All kinds of things were being sold and traded, and the Israelites had allowed an idol-worshipping clan to come in and sell fish to increase their prophets on the Sabbath. It wasn't just that they were dishonoring the way God said to spend the Sabbath, but they were not caring why God had commanded the

Sabbath. Instead of trusting God to care for their needs as they worship and rested one day a week, they were using that day to get ahead. It was another outward illustration of an inward lack of godly dependence. Does it seem like Nehemiah is making a bigger deal of these things than they really were? How might we be led to think God's commands are irrelevant or petty instead of helpful and all knowing for our good? It's obvious as the book concluded that Nehemiah is frustrated. He repeatedly ask God to remember him and not forget all the good he's done. Nehemiah sounds like someone who is really tormented over failure. Where is Nehemiah going to place his identity when he feels like this?

Is he going to put it in the wall he helped rebuild around Jerusalem? Is he going to put his identity in the city gates that he helped restore? Is he going to place it in the purity of these people he hoped to protect from sin and failure? Are those signs that he's done enough that he will be remembered by God? If Nehemiah places his identity and his hope in any of those things, he has reason to doubt, because those things cannot give him what he really needs. Just like the people of Israel, just like Nehemiah, we need a rescuer. The temple, the city gates, the laws, they all point to Jesus.

We can let our failures and frustrations point us inward and make us more self-righteous, make us forget the main thing, make us more susceptible to compromises, or we can let them point us to Jesus. The biblical story does not end in darkness. Jesus is the light Nehemiah longed for. Lord, we know we are constantly tempted to look at outward signs to measure our value. We do it in our relationship with others, and we do it in our relationship with you. But Lord, we know you care about more than that. We need to be reminded that you love us even when we flop. Help us want to come to you with those feelings. Help us look more like you and less like the world. Amen.