his wife wrote: “Last night he was very sad and said he had now in the last two years had three very heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the crash, then loss of political position in the Conservative Party and now this terrible injury. He said he did not think he would ever recover completely from the three events.”
At that point, as he recovered in that New York hospital room, Churchill was fifty-seven years old. Nine years later, at the right moment in history, the government that had ignored him would turn to him in desperation. But he could not see the future from the hospital bed. In fact, his prospects looked so bad that at that moment one of his enemies was emboldened enough to pronounce a political eulogy: “Churchill is finished!” Famous last words! History proved that statement to be just a bit premature. (Adapted from Steve Farrar – Tempered Steel)

-Maybe you are like Churchill and have experienced some devastating events, losses, and reversals. You feel like the heat and stress from a dozen pressing circumstances and are slowly pressing you and bending you out of shape.

-But God is bigger than all of that, and there is a place with God that you can recover.

ll. LESSONS FROM NEHEMIAH

-From this great book we find a multitude of lessons (of which I do not intend to bring everyone of them to you, so take heart). Here is Nehemiah faced with the dilemma of a broken down wall and of an enemy who is attempting to thwart every effort toward reconstruction.

-No matter who you are nor how long you may live, when you start trying to reconstruct and rebuild something spiritual in your life you will be forced to face with the struggle.

-Sometimes when you look to this world around us, you may even echo the question of Sanballat:

< Will a revival come from a trash pile?
< Will there be reconstruction from the rubbish?
< Can riches come from the refuse?

-When we look at the trash pile of what used to be a wall and a Temple in Jerusalem, something within shrinks back and asks, “How in this world can anything constructive come out of this thing?”

-But within that element of mayhem and destruction there were some clear principles and laws that governed it. Refuse must have its fixed rules and the slag-heap will have certain statutes.

A. The First Law – The Law of Deterioration

-From the picture in the Bible it becomes clear that all material things, whether as sacred as the Temple or as natural as a forest, are on their way to the trash pile. To a man who places all of his trust in his material holdings that fact sounds to him as a funeral dirge.

-What he loves is going to deteriorate. That is the first law of the refuse.

-For the man who places his trust in his rituals of religion, that too will find a place among the rubbish. For those who place their trust in a building remember the words of the Lord:

Mark 13:1-2 – “1 And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!” “2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”

-And the prophetic words of the Lord came true when the Roman, Titus, came to Jerusalem and destroyed it. It is significant what the Lord had