I've entitled this sermon “Time for a Fresh Start.” And you're going to see why. I want you to
stand with me while I read the first twelve verses of Nehemiah 8. Would you stand in honor of
God's word? I want you to notice as I'm reading the passage how there are similarities between
the saints there in Nehemiah’s time and the saints at GraceWay Bible Church.
Starting in verse 1. And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water
Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had
commanded Israel. They want to hear the word and it’s the people asking for that. Verse 2 – So
Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could
understand what they heard. Who do you think those are? We’ve got men and women, and all
who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it
facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the
men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were
attentive to the Book of the Law. And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had
made for the purpose. And beside him stood these thirteen guys. Six on the one side, seven on the
other.
Down to verse 5 – And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all
the people, and as he opened it all the people stood up. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great
God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” (just like we do here at GraceWay) lifting up
their hands (which we probably need to do more of). And they bowed their heads and worshiped
the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also these next thirteen guys were in the crowd and they
helped the people to understand the Law (these are like the Grace Group leaders), while the
people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and
they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who
taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.
” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Then he said to them, “Go
your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready,
for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
So the Levites calmed all the people, saying, “Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.”
And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great
rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.
Oh, this is so much stuff. I can hardly wait to get into it. Why don’t you go ahead and have a seat
there.
Picture the scene here. This is the seventh month, the first day of the month. This is New Year's
Day. This is the Feast of Trumpets. And you might be saying, well, how could it be New Year's
Day because New Year's Day would be the first day of the first month. But just like in our own
culture, we have this celebration or we start moving after summer into the fall. When we do, that
becomes kind of our new year. That's the civil new year for the people in Nehemiah’s time. So
they're celebrating the Feast of Trumpets. This is a really special day when the people are
coming together. They're thinking about the day that they had over this last year, all of the work
that they’d done. It took fifty-two days to build the walls. And then they stationed the guards and
the Levites and the singers, we read in the last chapter. We see that people are organizing and
moving in and houses are being built. Lots has happened in this last year. Often as we get to a
new year, we think about the previous year and what’s yet to come. This is where they are. They
come together at this place, the square outside of the Water Gate. And they're all together as one
person, as one man it says. Unified. And they call on the scriptures to be read on this special day.
We want to hear the scriptures and we want to hear what they have to say to us. So let's go into
this passage a little bit more and see what's taking place and see what God has for us as we leave
this passage and leave this square, this special gathering place today.
It says that they asked for the word of God to be presented to them. So Ezra the priest brought
the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they
heard. Well, if they’re not men and they're not women, probably not animals, we're probably
talking about the kids. The kids who could understand. I would suggest those are the kids that
stay in our worship service. Those who are eleven or are in sixth grade. They stay in our worship
service because they're the ones who can understand. If you're here today and you're a young
person, I welcome you here. Because we want you to be able to understand the word of God in a
way that you can grab and take away from and run with. That's the power of God's word.
All of those who understood it is what he's saying here. He says it again. Notice he says on the
first day of the seventh month because it's just noting that this is the special Feast of Trumpets
day. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until
midday. Probably a four-hour service, four-hour sermon. But it’s not really speaking all the time.
What he’s doing is apparently speaking and then the others are having little groups and talking
about it. That’s what it seems to indicate here. For they took the whole morning to do that, in the
presence of the men and the women and those who could understand.
And notice the attitude of the people. In the next verse, it says they were attentive. At the end of
that page there in verse 5 it says and they stood because they valued God's word. God's word is
so strategic. It's so important for our lives.
There's some people who look at the Bible as a wisdom book. That is, I'm going to look at the
Bible and try to gain some ideas about how to be wise. And it is that. It's good to look at the
Bible as a wisdom book. But it's much more than that. Some people look at the Bible as a
morality book, a book about right and wrong. It surely is that. It's helpful to learn what is right
and wrong, especially in a world where there's all this kind of confusion about what is right and
wrong. But it's much more than that.
The Bible is designed to be this book where God speaks to us, where we hear about Him, and we
get to know Him. We see how big He is and then we see in perspective how small we are. And
we see our place in God's kingdom program and what He wants for us to do. The Bible is written
for us to be this living thing. If I read the Bible today and then tomorrow I read the exact same
passage, I may get a new truth out of the passage tomorrow than today because the Bible is living
and active it says. Living and active. Which means it’s continuing to interact with me and we
continue to learn new things. That's why we study the Bible. You don't just read it once and get
it. You read it over and over again. Because every time you read it, you get more. And so God is
doing some powerful things in our lives when we open the word of God. They knew that and
God's going to do something very special in their lives. I want you to see what happens as they
read it.
So now we have these people, these thirteen guys on the stage. Six on one side, seven on the
other. They seem to represent the fact that this is authoritative, that the scriptures are the
authoritative word of God, that we stand in unison as leadership regarding this. And so they read
and opened the Bible and all the people stood up.
It's really interesting. Notice in verse 6 it says this – and Ezra blessed the Lord. Blessed is our
word baruk. Remember we sang the song last week, Baruk hashem hamasheak Yeshua, baruk
hashem Adonai. Bless the name of the Lord. That's bless (baruk) the Lord, that's Adonai or
Yahweh there. The great God. So you can circle blessed and on the other side of your booklet,
you can write the word blessed or baruk. And then it says the great God. This is the word gadol
again. Remember we saw this word when Nehemiah said, “I can't go down to you. I am involved
in a great work.” We talked about that great work that God has allowed us to be a part of, this
great work that He has for us. And now we're talking about the great God. We get to know God
and how great He is when the scriptures are opened up for us. And Ezra knows that as he opens
it up.
And all the people answered, “Amen, Amen.” Now that's a Hebrew word. When you say that
word, it's a Hebrew word. Amen. It's used in the New Testament. It's amén in the Greek. Amén,
Amén. Jesus uses it a lot. He says – Truly, truly (amén, amén). Truly, truly I say to you. It's a
word that means I agree or this is true. Or when we say it, it means I agree with this. I'm in.
Count me in. Oh, I like this. This is good. That's why we say amen. Amen? Amen.
And they're lifting up their hands and they bow their heads. Notice all the different postures that
they have to worship the Lord and draw attention to that.
Then there's these other thirteen guys that are mentioned here. And they are the ones that help the
people understand what's going on.
Don and I had a discussion this week about the Grace Groups for fall. We always have to plan
ahead. So we're thinking about the fall. We're wondering, what will those Grace Groups look
like? I mean, they're going to look like what they looked like last year. But should we add
another one? And where should that one be? What location should it be in? And if we're going to
facilitate as many people as possible. The Grace Groups are designed to talk about the sermon.
The sermon, maybe the one before, but certainly the one coming up. Those Grace Groups are
designed to look into God's word and to talk about the sense, as it's described here. To talk about
the sense of what's meant in the passage. Maybe we should have a Grace Group for all those who
could understand, the children and parents together. Wouldn’t that be interesting – a family
Grace Group where you're discussing the words of the Lord in the midst of that special small
group. But that's what they're doing. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and
they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
It's very interesting their response. Because when they read the book, they started crying. All the
people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Why did they weep? They wept because as the
word of God was read (and this is reading out of the Law, the Old Testament, the first five books
of Moses), as those words were written, they come to this conclusion that, man, we've really
messed up. Wow. I regret or maybe I regret what our parents did. Because we were then taken
into exile when we lost so many years. Those years were unproductive in our lives. We missed
out on so many good things that God could have for us. I think that's what they're feeling.
I want you to imagine you're at the square and you are listening to the word of God. I'm going to
read you part of Deuteronomy 30. This may have been a passage that Ezra was reading to them.
Listen to this and imagine then how they're feeling when they hear these words, knowing their
history, knowing where they've been. Because I know that some of you have some history, some
history you might not want to talk about. There's regrets that may exist in your life. I think God
is going to speak about that right now in our lives. Listen to this. Deuteronomy 30.
Imagine you're there saying – For this commandment I give you today is not too difficult for you
or beyond your reach. It is not in heaven, that you should need to ask, ‘Who will ascend into
heaven to get it for us and proclaim it, that we may obey it?’ And it is not beyond the sea, that
you should need to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it for us and proclaim it, that we may obey
it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may obey it.
Not till you can just know it in your head. So that you may obey it.
See, I have set before you today life and goodness, as well as death and disaster. For I am
commanding you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His
commandments, statutes, and ordinances, so that you may live and increase, and the Lord your
God may bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and
you do not listen, but are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare
to you today that you will surely perish; you shall not prolong your days in the land that you are
crossing the Jordan to possess.
I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live, and that
you may love the Lord your God, obey Him, and hold fast to Him. For He is your life, and He
will prolong your life in the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob.”
They're listening to words like those, if not those very words. And it causes them to weep
because they realize they've missed out on something. Something very powerful, something that
they have lost in the course of their life that they don't have now. And now they're regaining that
and they're weeping about the regrets that they have in their lives. Oh, man. Does this talk to
you? Do you have regrets in your own heart, in your own life? You go, “Oh, Lord, I messed up.
Oh, Lord, I just feel so bad about this.” And so they're weeping about the regrets that they have.
My brother's name is Mark. He is also a counselor. He works with people who are addicted to
help them and he helps people with anger management. He was telling me a couple of weeks ago
when I was with him, “You know, I see a lot of people in their thirties are coming to me because
they really messed up in their teens and they got involved in things they shouldn't have gotten
involved in. They do old patterns that they shouldn't have gotten involved in. So they really lost
out on some of the benefits they could have had, and now they know it in their thirties. And now
in their thirties are coming in, they're saying, ‘I want to get my act together.’ And so they're
coming for counseling.” Now, some get it together earlier than that. In fact, I asked him, well,
that's really great that you're helping these people when they're in their thirties to come to a place
where they're back to some stable place and moving forward. Because they've lost about twenty
years, or at least maybe not lost them, but they wandered around for these twenty years. And my
question to him was, how can we help this next generation? The ones who are now twelve and
thirteen and fourteen and seventeen and eighteen and twenty and twenty-five. How can we help
them not take that path so they have those regrets? How can we help them stay on that road that's
going to lead in the right direction? That's what we need.
But that’s not what we're talking about today. We're talking about these people have regrets and
they're feeling so sad, disappointed in their lives. Maybe because they caused the problems
themselves, as sometimes we do in our lives. Sometimes it's because other people cause
problems in our lives. We live in a broken world. So we grieve, we have regrets about things that
have taken place. And these people were weeping as they heard the word of the Law.
So Nehemiah says to them, “Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” The
joy. How can joy be a strength? I think what he's saying is opening your hearts up to that place
where you're grieving or where you have these regrets, and allow God to come into that place of
your life with His joy.
Now sometimes when we're talking about joy, we make a distinction between joy and happiness.
Happiness comes from the word ‘happenings,’ which has to do with circumstances, and your
happiness can go up and down. But joy is something solid. It's something rooted in God and in Christ.
I could make you happy today. I could give you a check for $5,000. I can write you a
check for $5,000. How many of you would be happy with that? You could be happy until you get
to the bank and try to cash it. You might be happy when that new dress arrives in the mail that
you ordered. And then you try it on and you realize you have to lose ten more pounds before you
can fit into it. That's the up and down of happiness. We can feel good at one moment and down
the next. That's what happiness is.
Joy is something very different. I describe joy as this calm, confident delight. Calm, confident
delight that we can have this rooted in something. Not just in joy itself. Notice it's the joy of the
Lord. Is that the joy of knowing God? The joy of serving God? The joy of getting to know Him
more? The joy of seeing Him work? Yes, I think all of those things is this joy of the Lord. It's
this calm, confident delight that we walk in because we know Jesus Christ. And He gives us this
as a form of strength in our life.
So if you're despairing, if you're discouraged today because of past regrets or problems that you
have had in the past, this is the time to say, “Oh, I'm going to live differently today. I'm going to
rely on the joy of the Lord. It's going to be my strength.”
I'm going to take that same slide and just leave it there. But I'm going to change the colors. I
want to just look at some different words that are being said there. Because I think what
Nehemiah is saying is that this day is holy to the Lord, your God. What does he mean by that?
He's saying don't grieve about the past mistakes or problems that have taken place because this
day, today is a fresh start. This day is holy and set apart for the Lord. This day is the day we're
moving forward. Not because of something we've done; it's because of something Christ has
done for us. I wish there was a pill you could have for self-forgiveness. There is no pill for selfforgiveness. But God has designed something much better. He's designed something that we all
need. And that is the salvation that we have through Jesus Christ, the recognition that we are
sinners and the forgiveness of our sins. If you look at a psychology textbook and you want to
have good self-esteem, it's going to tell you look at all the good things about yourself. Look at all
the good things you've done. And you can do that and you might feel happy for the moment. But
you know that you're a fraud because there are other bad things that are there that nag you.
See, when you come to Christianity, it deals with the root stuff. It says don't just think about the
good things you've done. Recognize that you're a sinner, and because you're a sinner you can't
come to God. You may as well give it up in that sense. What you need is a Savior. That's why we
call Jesus our Savior. He comes in and saves us from our sin so that now we have forgiveness in
God. Now we can receive that forgiveness of God and we can trust Him to forgive ourselves. So
that today can be this holy day. Today can be the special day that's moving us forward. Today is
the day we can have a fresh start.
This is something that so permeates the scriptures that says that God is fresh for us regularly. In
fact, Psalm 118:24 says this: This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in
it. Let's not be consumed by the brokenness that exists. Yes, we are called to be out there to help
those people who are struggling, help those people and bring joy into their lives. That is our
calling. We don't ignore those things. We don't isolate ourselves. We're part of the world and
we're trying to influence it. But we're not going to let it control our emotions. We're going to
rejoice in the Lord because today is the day that the Lord has made. In Lamentations 3:22 it says
– The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. You can't move out of God's love. He loves you
every day, even if you have messed up. Even if you're ugly, God loves you. Okay? God loves
every one of us, no matter what we've done. The steadfast of the Lord never ceases; his mercies
never come to an end; they are new every morning. When you get up in the morning, you may
feel, “Oh man, yesterday was a bad day.” It's okay. Because God's mercies are new every
morning. And we can enjoy them, we can take advantage of them, and appreciate them. We can
experience this joy of the Lord, which becomes them the strength for us to live today.
Some people say, “I'm just so discouraged. I am so despairing. I feel like I've lost hope.” And
that message that you need to hear is the same one that Nehemiah was saying to the people.
Today is the day, it’s holy to the Lord. He says to them – The joy of the Lord is your strength,
which allows you then to go forward, not because you have your own strength, but because the
joy of the Lord is your strength. That knowing Jesus Christ is the most powerful thing that could
ever happen to us. It gives us freedom to move forward and not to look back. Oh I love that,
what Nehemiah is saying to them.
Don't miss this last part, where he says to them – “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine
and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready.” Because there will be some people who
may not have the strength of the Lord yet and they need you. They need me to come along and
say, “Let me tell you about the joy of the Lord. It can be your strength today and I want to give
you something to help you with that.” In this case, they're having a party and they want to bring
the food and take it to them. But there's a message behind it that says I'm bringing you something
that's bigger than the circumstances around. I'm bringing you something that God wants you to
have in your life. This is the joy of the Lord. This is the strength that we have and we enjoy in
our lives.
In this last section, this is a summary of the whole passage. This is the whole idea encapsulated
in verses 11 and 12. Listen to the summary statement here. He says – So the Levites calmed all
the people. It’s okay. It's okay. You don’t have to cry. You don’t have to weep. You don’t have
to be so despairing about your mistakes that you’ve made in life. It’s okay. He calms the people.
“Be quiet, for this day is holy. It is separate. We’re going forward; we’re not going back. This
day is holy; do not be grieved.” Don’t spend your time weeping. We’re all broken people. We
just have to admit it. We are broken people. There are bad things that have happened to us. We
are struggling in our lives. We’ve got challenges we're working on in our hearts. All of those
things take place in our hearts and our lives. Yes, they exist there. We don't want to be grieving
over them.
And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions. Do you remember?
Don’t forget. It’s not just about you; it’s giving it to somebody else. If you're at school and you
want to help somebody else, share joy with them, the joy of the Lord. People need the joy of
Lord. So send portions and to make great rejoicing, because (this is the key part) they had
understood the words that were declared to them. When we come to God's word, we're looking
for the words that He has declared to us. And we take those words and we go out.
There's a term being used now, gospel-centered preaching. Maybe you've heard of it. Gospelcentered preaching. We need to be focused on the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think that is so powerful and very important because we need to know that the gospel is at the center of everything that we do. The good news of Jesus Christ. But I don't think that's enough.
I think we need Great Commission preaching. Because Great Commission preaching has that one phrase in
it that says – Make disciples and teach them what? to do all that I've commanded. To take in and
obey. To go and do something with it. And so when we listen to God's word, it does help us. It
does make us feel good or bad or whatever, convict us. It helps us deal with our inner stuff. But
it's also something we want to go out and obey. We want to take it out there into the marketplace,
take it into the family. We want to take it into the schools, anywhere we're going. Because the
joy of the Lord is our strength. It's a very special thing that God has given to us that we want to
pass on to other people. It's a beautiful picture of what God has for us. And God's people said,
amen.
