Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Hey everybody, thanks for spending some time with us at Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. We are so glad you're here. You know, no matter where you are in life or what you're facing today, God has a purpose and plan for your life. Today we continue our series called Building a Better Future. In this series, Rick Warren explores the lives of biblical leaders who rebuild after seasons of hardship and captivity. You'll discover practical biblical principles to help you move forward with hope and confidence as you trust God's plan for your life. And let's get right to it.

Here's part one of a message called Getting People to Work Together.

Rick Warren: If you want to know God's way to build anything or rebuild anything, you're going to want to study the book of Nehemiah, which is the story of one of the greatest building projects in the history of humanity. It was completed in record time. Now today, we're going to look at the third chapter of Nehemiah. So get out your teaching notes. Many of you know that I wrote a book many years ago. In fact, it was the first book I ever wrote as a young man called How to Study the Bible for Yourself. And one of the keys to understanding the Bible, any chapter is to first pay attention to what are the key words in that chapter.

Key words are often repeated over and over. And in chapter three of Nehemiah, there are four key words and several key phrases. And we're going to look at all of them in this message today. Using different translations, for instance, we discover that the word built is used 30 times in this chapter. The word rebuilt is used 29 times. The word repaired is used 31 times. And the word worked is used 24 times. Those are key words. So if you want to build anything or you want to rebuild anything or you want to repair anything or you want to get people to work together, you need to know and use the principles of chapter three of Nehemiah.

Now you remember that in our last study together, I pointed out that to fulfill any dream God puts in your heart, you're going to have to enlist other people to help you. Okay? You You can't do it yourself. You'll never reach your dream by yourself. God wired us to need each other. No one ever succeeds on their own. So last time, we looked in Nehemiah chapter two at seven principles that Nehemiah used to enlist an all volunteer army, helpers, workers to rebuild the wall around the city of Jerusalem. Remember, Jerusalem had been destroyed by conflict, war, and neglect.

Conflict and neglect. Now, by the way, conflict and neglect can make you vulnerable and make you defenseless too. So if you missed that message on how to enlist the help of others, you can watch it online. But once you've recruited some people to help you with your dream and build a better future, you also have to know how to get them to work together. And that's a whole different issue. You might get some friends to help you with your dream, but will they know how to work together? You know, one of the reasons I believe the world is in such a bad shape these days because people don't know how to work together anymore.

They work against each other instead of working with each other. And so as we look around in the world, we see the problems are just getting worse. What we're going to look at today is a skill that you need. You need it to succeed in life. Business studies and and home studies show that the number one factor in getting promoted in life is having good people skills. It's the number one factor, having good people skills, being able to work to get other people to work together. In contrast, the number one reason people get fired is poor communication skills, poor people skills, not knowing how to get along with others.

So this is a message that you need to take notes on, not just for yourself, but to help other people going through a tough time. Now let's just review the background. The city of Jerusalem was a pile of ruins, destroyed by war and 70 years of neglect while the Jews were held captive in Babylon. God gave Nehemiah the dream of rebuilding a protective wall around the city so it could flourish again. And I just want to say to you that as your pastor, my goal for you in this Building a Better Future series is that you will flourish, that you will flourish again.

Now if you read Nehemiah chapter three without any understanding, it just looks like one of those chapters that you want to skip over because on the surface, it just looks like a boring list of hard to pronounce names and funny sounding gates. This guy built this part of the wall, this guy built this gate, and on that. And and it just doesn't look like something that you're going to get a lot out of. But like in any passage of scripture, if you dig below the surface, you find treasure. Now before we get into that, let me show you a map of Jerusalem with the wall and the 10 gates that Nehemiah rebuilt.

This is what it looked like when it was all finished. All of these gates and the wall are mentioned in chapter three. And he starts at the north part of the town up there with the sheep gate. See that in chapter three verse one? And then he begins to go counterclockwise to the fish gate, the old gate, the valley gate, the dung gate, fountain gate, water gate. By the way, that's the only mention of politics in scripture, the water gate. We know what happened there. The horse gate, the east gate, and the inspection gate. Now I I wish I had time to explain all those gates uh and why they were named what they were.

But I want to get right to the point. Jerusalem is built on a steep hill, actually several steep hills with deep valleys on either side. And in chapter three, Nehemiah reports who built each part of the wall and who built each of the 10 different gates. Now right now, you're probably thinking, how in the world does this chapter relate to me today? And again, as I said earlier, the answer is because beneath the surface of this chapter, God gives us an example, an amazing example of how to get people to work together. If you're going to be a success in life, you're going to need other people's help and you're going to know how to need to know how to help people work together.

Nehemiah in this passage models six principles. Yeah, six principles you can apply to any dream that you have to build something or to rebuild something in your family, in your career, in your personal life, in your church, in your ministry, whatever. Now these principles, these six principles will affect whether the rest of your life is a success or a failure. So I really want to encourage you to write this down. Okay, let's get right into these six steps. Number one, when God has given you a dream, and we've talked about that in previous messages, when God has given you a dream, the first step to getting other people involved is to divide the dream into smaller goals and tasks.

Divide the big dream that you're given into smaller goals and tasks. Nehemiah broke down a huge dream into manageable chunks. Now in the contemporary English version of Nehemiah, the scripture, uh the word section is used 28 times in 32 verses. Repeatedly it says the next section was built by so and so. Now what's a section? Well, a definition of a section is a smaller part of a whole. Uh now Nehemiah had to think through how he's going to take this big goal, build a wall all around Jerusalem, and break it down into manageable chunks, into sections.

That took some thinking. It took some planning. And it probably was during that midnight ride that we looked at uh last week. I don't want to go into this because I think you understand it. But you know what? I still have the chart that I developed in 1979 before starting Saddleback Church with just K. And what I did is I took a 40 year dream and I broke it down into 480 monthly goals. I still have that chart. 480 monthly goals, 40 years divided on a monthly basis, figuring out what it would take each month to get where I believe God want us to be.

That's the first step. You break the dream, you divide the dream into smaller goals and tasks. Here's number two. You must let others share the ownership. Share ownership of the dream. Your dream, if it's ever going to be accomplished, must become our dream. Other people have to share in the dream for it to happen. You know, in 1980 uh with no members yet, I wrote an open letter to the community sharing a dream of a brand new church that we were going to call Saddleback Church. But I never used the personal pronoun I. Instead, I used the word we.

In that letter that we hand addressed and hand stamped and mailed out to 13,000 people, uh I never used the word I. I used the word we. Now here's the funny thing. When I wrote that letter, we had not even had a first service, so there was no we. It was just me and K. But I wrote it in faith. And the first In that first service when 205 people showed up at the first service, me became we. And we never looked back. Do you realize that our church today, all around the world, it exists because of shared ownership, this second principle?

Everything in our church has been built by millions of hours of serving, given voluntarily by volunteers, and millions of dollars given voluntarily out of love. That's shared ownership. Saddleback would not exist if we had had to pay everything that we were trying to do. It's done by I'm a volunteer. I've served this church for free for 42 years. Now you know, I can always tell who is a member of our church and who's an attender of church by how they talk about our church. Attenders will walk up to me in the grocery store and they say, you know, Rick, I love your church.

Members will walk up to me and they say, Rick, I love our church. Get the difference? It's our. It's we. Now if you're going to pay people to help you with your dream, they don't need to own the dream. They're just hired hands. But if you're going to use other people that you're not paying for uh to fulfill the dream, like Saddleback Church, you have to share ownership if you're building with volunteers. And you do that by showing how the dream will benefit them. Okay? You give ownership by showing them how the dream will benefit them.

Now another key phrase that's used many times in Nehemiah three is this phrase, by his own house. If you're taking notes, circle the word own. We're talking about ownership by his own house. Now let me just give you a few examples that they're on your outline. Verse 10. Jedaiah repaired the wall beside his own house. Circle own. Verse 17. Hashabiah, I don't know if he bought hash or what, but Hashabiah built the wall in his own district. Circle the word own. Verse 28. East priests made repairs near his own house. See that? And in verse 23, Benjamin and Azariah repaired the wall by their own homes.

These are just examples. Now these last two guys represent every dad who recognizes their responsibility to keep their family safe by building a wall of protection. Now today you may not need a physical wall, but sadly today many parents aren't protecting their families from harmful influences. That's our job as parents is to build a wall of protection around our kids. Here's the point. If you're going to have a dream and you and it's going to grow, you're going to have to share ownership because you're not paying everybody. Ownership increases motivation. Now in this case, people began to build the part of the wall behind their own house.

People were allowed to work in their area of interest. You know, and they're going, hey, you know what? This part of the wall protects my house, so I'm going to do my best at at building a good part of the wall. I 'm not building somebody else's wall. I'm building the house, the wall behind my house. Of course, this saved time because there's no commuting to work. If If you're building the wall behind your house, you walk outside your house in the morning, start building. You don't have to commute anywhere. It's also easier to feed the workers because you when you when you're hungry, you just go inside your house.

But also you could protect your family at the same time because you're not working in some distant location. People built by their own house. Shared ownership. Number three. Here's the third principle. Organize around natural relationships. If you have a dream and you're going to help get other people to help you with your dream, you need to create work groups that use relationships that already exist. We see this in verse 13. In Nehemiah 13, Nehemiah says for 13, I posted them by families. All right, we'll come back to that. But in chapter three, we see a lot of other examples of groupings using existing relationships.

For instance, in verse one of this chapter, we see a ministry based work group. In other words, people were working on a project together because they shared the same ministry. The Bible says there in verse one, Eliashib Eliashib and his fellow priests rebuilt the sheep gate. Now it's interesting, the sheep gate is where the sheep came in that they were going to sacrifice at the temple. So you'd figure they get priests, you know, rebuilding the gate that affects the temple the most. But these guys are serving in ministry together. It's a ministry based group. In verse two, we see a geography based work group.

It says the men of Jericho built the next section. Now what's this? These guys are all from the same city. They already had a community connection, so they knew each other because they all lived near each other. They had a a community connection, a location. It's a geography based group. In verse three, we have a family based work group. It says the sons of Hasena built the fish gate. And what are the sons of Hasena? They're brothers. Okay, they're related. They're family. Verse 12, we see another family based work group. Shallum and his daughters built the next section.

What are They all sisters? These are existing groups. They The relationships are already there. Now in ancient Hebrew culture, women weren't honored like this, so Nehemiah is given credit to where credit's due. These daughters built their part of the wall behind their house. And in verse 32, we see a career based work group. It says the goldsmiths, people who worked with gold, and the merchants, these are retailers, built another section. So you've got craftsmen, you got retailers. These are people being grouped by professions. Now why why am I pointing this out? Because at Saddleback Church, we do the exact same thing.

We have small groups based on each of these categories. We have groups that are based around a common ministry. They work with students or they work with young people or they work with people struggling with a different problem or whatever recovery. We have ministry, common ministry groups. We have common location groups that we all live in the same neighborhood. We have common career groups based on professions where certain groups get together with, you know, realtors or accountants or whatever. By the way, if you're not in a small group, why aren't you? I mean, what are you what are you waiting for?

What You're missing out on everything. It's interesting that in this chapter, there are no professional builders mentioned in the building of the wall around Jerusalem. Everybody was a volunteer. Everybody was an amateur. Everybody had another career. Everybody is building the wall, working on the dream together without being paid. They're all volunteers. Okay? So we divide the dream into smaller goals and tasks. We let other people share ownership Okay? of the dream. We organize around natural relationships. Who are people like me and have a similar interest and our background or location or whatever? And then number four, develop a team spirit.

If you're going to reach your dream, you're going to have to get your friends or the people who are working with you, whether it's two or five or 10 or whatever, you're going to have to develop a team spirit. What does that mean? You focus on cooperation, not competition. The emphasize what we're doing is something we're doing together. Somebody said you spell success t e a m w o r k, teamwork. You cultivate community. This is the fourth key. You You develop a team spirit on your dream team. How do you do that? By getting them to pay attention to those working alongside them.

You see, if you're only Listen to me to this because some of you have a problem with this. If you're only focused on your task, if you're only focused on your goal, if you're only focused on your dream, and you don't focus on any of the people, you're not going to value them. And in fact, you're not even going to notice the people who are serving with you. One of the reasons, another reason Nehemiah succeeded where other people had failed. They tried to build a wall around Jerusalem twice and failed. He succeeded where other failed because he created a team spirit.

Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to get other people to work together with a team spirit? It's a skill you need. He helped people feel a part of something bigger than themselves than just their own individual effort. He said, you know, look on either side of you. They said we we got this thing. We're We're doing this together. That's why another key phrase in Nehemiah, this phrase is used 21 times in 32 verses is the phrase and next to them and next to them. Nehemiah said, you know what? If you get tired and you're discouraged building your part of the wall, look to your right, look to your left, and you'll just see who's serving next to you.

Realize you're not alone. We're a team. In fact, in this chapter, Nehemiah mentions 18 different teams. And that's just a sampling. You know, I read this week the on the importance of working together, working in formation. We're I read that geese can fly 72% farther in formation. You've seen them in a V that they can fly 72% farther in formation than they can by themselves. I think that principle probably works with adults and children and any human being too. 1 Corinthians 3 9 says this, we are partners working together. Circle that. We're partners working together for God.

In the body of Christ, there is no place for primadonas. We develop a team spirit. I want you to write this down. Okay? This is really important because it's a reason a lot of people fail. God's work is always done in partnership. God's work is always done in partnership. Paul never did any of his ministry alone. He never went after any dream alone. He always took a team with him. Jesus' entire ministry was done with a small group of 12 people. When Jesus started his ministry, first thing he did is build a small group. If you're not in a small group, who's helping you with your dream?

Who's encouraging you? You've heard me say many times that there are 58 one anothers in the New Testament. That phrase one another is used 58 times. The Bible says we're to love one another, we're to care for one another, we're to serve one another, we're to help one another, we're to pray for one another, we to bear one another's burdens, on and on. What is that? That's this principle of developing a team spirit. One of Saddleback's core values is we're better together. Now why is a team spirit essential to your dream? Well, let's look at a couple of verses.

Ecclesiastes 4 9 to 12 says this, two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one because they get more done, notice, by working together. Underline that. They get more done by working together. If one falls down, the other can help him up. And two can resist an attack that would defeat one person alone. Three people are even better. And a rope made of three cords is hard to break. He's saying, you know what? God never meant for you to be a lone ranger. God never meant for you to go through life isolated, trying to do everything by yourself, trying to reach your dream just by you.

God wants us to have this team spirit in the body of Christ. Philippians 1 27 says this, above all else, you must live in a way that brings honor to the good news about Christ. All right? He says above all else, that means number one, you got to live If you're going to call yourself a Christian, live in a way that brings honor to the good news about Christ. And then he says in the rest of the verse how you do that. He says I want to know that you're working together. Circle that. Working together and striving side by side.

That's what Nehemiah is saying. Look to your left, look to your right. Next to him was this person serving. Next to him was that person serving. Next to her was that person serving. Working together, striving side by side to get others to believe the good news. Notice in that verse. Look at it again. What does God say brings honor to him? When we work together. Not individually, but when we work together as a team to bring others to Jesus.

Guest (Male): What a great message from Pastor Rick today. There's something I always take away from his message. Here's Rick to tell you how you can help support this ministry.

Rick Warren: Jesus told his disciples that they should live their lives according to five specific purposes. He said you've got to love God with all your heart. That's worship. And love your neighbor as yourself. That's ministry. That's called the Great Commandment. And then Jesus said, go make disciples. That's evangelism. Baptize them into the family of God. That's fellowship, a sign of fellowship. And then he said, teach them to obey everything I've taught you. That's discipleship. And we call that the Great Commission. We believe at Daily Hope that a great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will produce a great Christian, a great church, a great company, a great community.

You know, I started Daily Hope so I could spread the good news about Jesus, not just across America, but all around the world. And we want people to know that God's word is filled with hope and truth. And the power that we need to follow him every day is available to every single one. You know as well as I do that the word of God changes lives. It's alive, it's active, and it brings new life and new love into all of our lives. So wherever you listen to this, whether you listen on the website, whether you listen on a radio station, whether you listen through a podcast, you're a part of the Daily Hope family.

And I need your help. We could not do this without your support. We're 100% listener funded. Would you continue to pray for this broadcast and would you continue to support us? And let write to me. Let Let me hear from you. I absolutely love reading the stories that are sent to me. So write me, pray for me, and support this ministry. And God will bless it and God will bless you and we'll get to heaven and we'll thank God for all the people going to be in heaven because you cared.

Guest (Male): Hey, if you'd like to support Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, just go to pastorrick.com. That's pastorrick.com or you can text the word hope to 70309. That's the word hope to 70309. And really from the bottom of our hearts, we thank you so much for your support. Your gift to Daily Hope helps us share the hope of Christ with people everywhere. Hey, be sure to join us next time when we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.