Good Work
6 min read
17 Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.” 18 I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me.
They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began this good work.
— Nehemiah 2:17-18
The leaders of Jerusalem had been living in those broken-down conditions for many years. Did they not see the ruins; did they not feel that they were living in disgrace?
The broken-down conditions of Jerusalem had become their “normal,” and the Jewish people had became comfortable and complacent in that “normal” state, as pathetic as it was.
In a similar way, we can become comfortable and complacent in our spiritual life, not realizing how stagnant we really are. OR (and this is actually much worse) we may recognize that we are spiritually stagnant but spend what little spiritual energy we have on blaming external factors for our stagnation. But this blame game is really just a tactic to bypass responsibility and accountability.
Probably, any person who feels spiritual dry has gotten to that state because he or she is deathly allergic to the slightest sense of discomfort. Their spiritual stagnation has become their comfort zone, and they will fight, tooth and nail, to protect it.
In physics, the term inertia means, “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force” (OED).
In Jerusalem, the gracious hand of God was that external force, and Nehemiah was the instrument in His hand to break the spiritual inertia of the Jewish leadership and inspire spiritual progress.
It is not right to blame external factors for our spiritual dryness. The truth is that God has provided everything we need to promote spiritual growth. And if we don’t get it, God may bring a hammer like Nehemiah to shake us up.
We don’t need to wait for that hammer. If we spend our lives waiting for that hammer from God, how long will we wait in stagnation? We will suffer in dryness, and our children will suffer in idolatry until God so chooses to do something really drastic to wake us up.
What does rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem have to do with spiritual growth? What Jerusalem and the temple were to the Jewish people back then is what the local church is to believers today.
You see, the very purpose for which God has created each and every one of us is to fill the earth with His glory in Jesus’s name through God-fearing, God-honoring, God-worshiping, God-loving communities and families, the church (Genesis 1:1 - Revelation 22:21). If we don’t get that, we really don’t get IT. And if we don’t get IT (or refuse to get IT), we will shrivel up like a wrinkly, dry leaf in the winter without even the benefit of snow.
To embrace and pursue this calling for our lives is what it means to be a holy priesthood (1 Peter 2:5), as Pastor Jeff exhorted us to be during our retreat. That is what it means to “dwell in the house of the LORD” (Psalm 23:6).
Father, You have given us the good work of building up Your holy temple to the ends of the earth. May Your good work direct the course of our lives. In Jesus’s name. Amen