DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT - NOW!

MELVIN NEWLAND, MINISTER RIDGE CHAPEL, KANSAS, OK

(This is the eleventh of a Leadership series featuring Nehemiah. Some ideas & illustrations in these messages were based on or benefited greatly from, to varying extents, the book “Hand Me Another Brick” by Charles Swindoll.)

(The Powerpoints used with this sermon are available free. Just email me at mnewland@sstelco.com and request PP #325.)

ILL. Ludwig Von Beethoven had a life marked with both triumph & tragedy. By age 5 he was playing the violin. By age 13 he was a concert organist. He became a prolific composer, composing 9 magnificent symphonies, 5 concertos, countless pieces of chamber music, & music for the piano & the violin.

But his life was marked with tragedy. By age 20 he was starting to lose his hearing. By 40, his hearing was almost gone. By 50, he was stone deaf. One day in his study he was heard pounding the piano & saying over & again, "I will take life by the throat & I’ll never let go!"

Those who knew him said that he was the most persistent man they had ever met & that he accomplished far beyond normal human ability because he faced up to his difficulty & was determined to do something about it.

PROP. This is a quality that is greatly needed today. Too often, when problems come our way, many of us try to ignore them & hope they will go away. There are only a few who are willing to take problems by the throat & do something about them. Nehemiah had that quality. When something was wrong Nehemiah would do something about it.

That is exactly what we find in the 13th chapter of Nehemiah. During the past few weeks we have seen the completion of the wall around the city of Jerusalem. We have seen Ezra & Nehemiah lead out in a revival among the people. We have also seen the people start moving back inside the walls to repopulate the city.

Evidently, around that time, Nehemiah left Jerusalem & went back to Babylon for a rather long stay. Vs. 6 says, "But during all this time I was not in Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, King of Babylon, I had returned to the king.” Nehemiah had promised the King that he would return, & he kept his promise.

But Nehemiah is still the governor of Judah, so as vs. 6 continues we learn, “Some time later I asked his permission & came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done…”

When he returned to Jerusalem he found that some things had gone wrong. Even then I guess that it was true that "When the cat is away, the mice will play."

And as a result they were now facing 4 major problems, & Nehemiah had to deal with them, & deal with them decisively before they destroyed everything that God was seeking to do through His people.

I. COMPROMISING COMPANIONSHIP

The first problem is seen in vs’s 4 9. I call it "Compromising Companionship."

Listen to vs’s 4 5, “Before this, Eliashib the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, & he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings & incense & temple articles, & also the tithes of grain, new wine & oil prescribed for the Levites, singers & gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests.”

A. Basically,