From His Heart

Speaker 1

Today on From His Heart, learn to face your fear, find your faith, and be ready for the fight of your life.

Speaker 2

Now, one of the reasons that we get whipped in the battle for many of us is we don't understand that there's a battle. We don't understand what's going on around us. We don't understand our enemy.

So in Nehemiah 4, we see a very vivid picture of how the enemy operates. And although we don't wrestle with flesh and blood, the devil uses flesh and blood. He uses people as his pawns, so to speak, to get his devilish work done.

And we're going to see that very clearly in Nehemiah 4. Real truth, real love, real.

Speaker 1

This is From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve. Thank you for joining us today. You know, as believers, we have an enemy who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking to devour us. So how do we recognize and stand firm against the schemes of the devil?

In Pastor Jeff's enlightening message we're about to hear, he shares three insights on how the devil works to oppose us and how we are called to courageously stand up against the enemy and fight for the truth. The message today is taken from Pastor Jeff's new series, Strong and Courageous.

You can get more information about this new series when you go to fromhishheart.org right now. If you can, open your Bible to Nehemiah chapter four, as Pastor Jeff begins the lesson, fear, faith, and the fight of your life.

Speaker 2

Now, we know from scripture that we have an end enemy. Be of sober spirit. Be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour, but resist him. Firm in your faith. The Bible says, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For we don't wrestle with flesh and blood, Paul goes on to say in Ephesians 6, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Now, one of the reasons that we get whipped in the battle for many of us is we don't understand that there's a battle. We don't understand what's going on around us. We don't understand our enemy. We don't understand how he operates. But God has revealed in his word how the enemy operates. And as Paul said, we're not ignorant of his schemes. So in Nehemiah 4, we see a very vivid picture of how the enemy operates. And although we don't wrestle with flesh and blood, the devil uses flesh and blood. He uses people as his pawns, so to speak, to get his devilish work done. And we're going to see that very clearly in Nehemiah 4.

If you remember your Bible history, you know that God's people came out of Egypt. They wandered around in the wilderness for 40 years because they didn't have enough faith to go into the land when they were supposed to go into the land. They finally go into the land under Joshua, they take over the land, they set up their kingdom. They do well for a while. When David was king, they do really, really well. But after David, after Solomon, then you have a split in the kingdom. You have the northern kingdom, which is called Israel, 10 tribes, and the southern kingdom, which is just the two tribes, Judah and Benjamin. It's called the kingdom of Judah.

In 722, Israel had gone off the rails very quickly, that northern kingdom. And they were subdued and taken over by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. but Judah lasted a little longer. But they didn't learn the lessons from their sister Israel. And they went the way of idolatry too. And God says, if you go that way, I'm going to bring destruction. And he did. And destruction came to Israel or to Judah in 605 BC under King Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. He came in 605 BC and he subjugated Jerusalem and Judah. And he took back a bunch of captives. He took Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, those guys took them to Babylon.

And then there was an uprising again where Judah was rebelling against Nebuchadnezzar. And he came in in 597, slapped them around a little more, showed them who was boss, took more captives back to Babylon. And then in 586 BC they rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar one last time. And he came in and just destroyed Jerusalem. He destroyed the temple, he broke down the wall of Jerusalem. He left it in just a shambles, and it was rubble. And if you want to know how bad it was, there's a whole book in the Bible about how awful and horrible it was. It's called the Book of Lamentations. It's five chapters of the worst lament that you can possibly read about from Jeremiah, because he witnessed firsthand the awfulness of watching Jerusalem destroyed.

Well, now that happened in 586. And God's people were held captive, exiles in Babylon. But then Babylon got overthrown in 539 BC and Cyrus the Great became the king of the Medo-Persian empire. And in 538, he let the Jews go back home and rebuild Jerusalem. And Zerubbabel led 50,000 of them back home to Jerusalem. You remember that guy Zerubbabel? His friends called him Bubba. And Bubba leads this 50,000 back. And what are they going back to? They're going back to rebuild the temple. The temple that had been destroyed. The Temple of Solomon that was so beautiful. And he was going to rebuild it, but it took them a long time to rebuild it. They went back in 538 BC; they didn't finish the temple until 515 BC, and still the wall of Jerusalem was destroyed.

The Book of Nehemiah opens with Nehemiah. He's the cup bearer, the butler to the king of Persia, Artaxerxes. And Nehemiah learns that Jerusalem is in distress because the wall is still broken down. It's been broken down for 142 years, and they still haven't repaired the wall. And the Lord put into Nehemiah's heart, you go and you repair the wall. And so he does. And God paves the way for him. He gets the king to okay his mission. He comes back and he surveys the situation, goes to Jerusalem. Never been there before, but he goes there and he gets the people excited about rebuilding the wall.

But not everybody was excited about the Jews rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. You know, it's important to have a wall. You know, we hear about a border wall today. It's important to have a wall in Jerusalem. If you didn't have a wall around the city, that's like having a house without doors. I mean, just anything can come in. And so you have to have a wall so you can protect it. And so without walls, there's no protection, there's no safety, there's no city. And so the enemy cities around Jerusalem, Samaria and these other places, well, they liked to have Jerusalem down. They liked it because that helped them to have more power.

And so when Nehemiah comes back and gets the people to arise and build, they don't like it and they're upset, and they're a picture of the enemy. We can learn a lot about the enemy from Nehemiah 4 and how the enemies of the Jews reacted. I'll begin reading in verse one. Now, it came about that when Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became furious and very angry and mocked the Jews. He spoke in the presence of his brothers and the wealthy men of Samaria and said, what are these feeble Jews doing? Are they going to restore it for themselves? Can they offer sacrifices? Can they finish in a day? Can they revive the stones from the dusty rubble, even the burned ones?

Now Tobiah the Ammonite was near him and he said, even what they are building, if a fox should jump on it, he would break their stone wall down. Nehemiah says, hear, O our God, how we are despised. Return their reproach on their own heads and give them up for plunder in a land of captivity. Do not forgive their iniquity and let not their sin be blotted out before you, for they have demoralized the builders. So we built a wall. And the whole wall was joined together to half its height, for the people had a mind to work.

Now, when Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites heard that the repair of the walls of Jerusalem went on and the breaches began to be closed, they were very angry. All of them conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause a disturbance in it. Hey, how do you stand firm against the schemes of the devil? Well, you recognize how the devil works. Three insights from this great passage of Scripture.

Insight number one: Opposition will always come to those who do God's will. It will always come to those who do God's will. Now, sometimes we get the idea that if we're doing God's will, everything ought to go smoothly for us. I mean, I'm walking with God and so it's just sunshine and rainbows and everything is great. And if I run into a problem, well, that must be that I've sinned or I've done something wrong. Because if I'm walking with God, it should just be great. There should be no opposition. But that's just not true.

The Apostle Paul said in 1st Thessalonians, chapter 2, verse 18, for we wanted to come to you, Thessalonians, I, Paul, more than once. And yet Satan thwarted us. Satan stood in our way. Satan opposed us. Nehemiah is on a mission from God. And does God want the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt? Yes, it's been far too long. 142 years and no wall and just a broken-down wall. And he wants Nehemiah to lead the people to rebuild it. He's doing the will of God and there is opposition to the will of God and to the work of God.

You know, when Paul and Silas went on their missionary journey, the second missionary journey in the book of Acts, Acts chapter 16, they went to Philippi and they had a Macedonian vision to come to Philippi. And so they did, and they preached the gospel in Philippi. And there was a little servant girl who had a demon. And Paul cast out the demon. And that was a good thing, preaching the Gospel, casting out demons, a good thing. And what did they get for their good deeds? They got beaten with rods and they got arrested and they got put into prison, into the inner prison, and their feet were in the stocks.

And you ask yourself the question, well, why were they there? Were they there because they disobeyed God? No, they were there because they obeyed God. They were there doing the will of God. And when you do the will of God, you will experience the opposition from the enemy who wants to thwart the will of God. Now remember this. The devil doesn't waste his time on compromisers. If you're compromising and you're not walking with God, you call yourself a Christian, but you're like one. John, chapter one. If we say we have fellowship with him and walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

And if you're doing that stuff, you know, the big compromiser in the Bible is Lot. Lot, Abraham's nephew. And Lot was the guy that pitched his tent towards Sodom. Lot was the guy that was living, trying to live with one foot in the church and one foot in the world. He's a compromiser. The devil doesn't waste his time with compromisers. Why should he? I mean, the devil's not a dummy. He's not going to spend a whole bunch of time on a guy that's making no impact at all for the kingdom of God. So he just leaves you to your own devices. You're shooting yourself in the foot. He's going to go after those people who are walking with God.

You say, well, man, I guess I better not walk with God because I don't want the devil coming after me. Well, listen, the Bible says you adulteresses. Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to make himself a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Do you want to be an enemy of God or do you want to be an enemy of Satan? Well, years ago, when we had some trouble in the church, I remember a guy told me, he goes, well, I just don't understand why we're having all this trouble, Jeff. If we're walking with God, we should not have trouble.

I said, if we're walking with God and doing what God wants us to do, we are going to have trouble because the devil is going to stir up trouble. That's what he did to Nehemiah and the people as they were rebuilding the wall. So opposition will always come to those who do God's will. Just get ready for it. It is coming.

Secondly, opposition will come in various ways. And so this is how you understand the devil. What did he do? What do we see in chapter? Well, he works through Sanballat, who is the governor of Samaria. Samaria is to the north of Jerusalem. And you remember, Jews and Samaritans have no dealings. Samaria was the capital city of the Northern Kingdom. And it got so filled with idolatry, and it just became the antithesis of what God wanted his people to be. And so Sanballat is the governor of Samaria. And he likes it when Jerusalem is weak because when Jerusalem is weak, that helps him be strong.

And, you know, if you're the big guy on the block, you don't want to see a new kid move into school that's bigger and tougher and stronger than you are. So he liked it when Jerusalem was weak. To have a weak Jerusalem with no wall was better for him politically. It was better for him in influence in the area. It was better for him financially. So he's upset. He's very upset, and he begins to mock the Jews on this plan to rebuild the wall. And what he does and his buddies, Tobiah and the other guys, gives us an insight into how the devil works.

First of all, the devil will use ridicule to try and come after you and me. It says in Nehemiah 2:19, when we first are introduced to Sanballat and Tobiah, it says, but when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Gisham the Arab, heard it, they mocked and despised us and said, what is this thing you are doing? And they make fun of the builders and they make fun of the wall. And Tobiah even says, you know, they're building this crummy wall. Even if a fox should jump on it, he would break it because the work is so puny and so pathetic.

And Nehemiah said, their words demoralized the builders as they mocked, as they scoffed, as they laughed. It was the English writer Sir Thomas Carlyle who said, this ridicule is the language of the devil. The devil will get people to laugh at you and me when we stand up for Jesus. That's not a new thing. How many have ever been ridiculed because you stood up for Jesus? You took a stand for Jesus Christ and people laughed at you. People made fun of you. You're in good company because they did the same thing to Jesus.

You remember in the story in the Gospels where Jesus healed Jairus' daughter, his 12-year-old little girl, come and heal my daughter because she's deathly sick. And Jesus, as he was going there, the servant came and said, don't bother the teacher anymore, your child has died. And Jesus told Jairus, don't fear, only believe. And when he came to the house, the mourners were already there. They had people that would come whenever there was a death. And they would come and they would mourn and wail and all that. And he said, don't mourn, the child is not dead. She is just asleep. And when he said that she is just asleep, the Bible said they started to laugh at him. King James says they laughed him to scorn.

This is the son of God, the king of kings and Lord of lords. And they laughed him to scorn. If you get mocked, if you get ridiculed because you take a stand for Jesus Christ, you're in good company. But that's how the devil will work. He will work with ridicule. And then secondly, he will use threats. Threats to get you to stop the work. So it says in verse 7. Now in Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites heard that the repair of the walls of Jerusalem went on and that the breaches began to be closed. They were very angry. All of them conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause a disturbance in it.

Verse 11, our enemies said they will not know or see until we come among them, kill them and put a stop to the work. When the Jews who lived near them came and told us 10 times, they will come up against us from every place where you may turn, there were threats. We're going to kill you. When you least expect it, we're going to come upon you and we're going to kill you. And they threatened Nehemiah and they threatened the people. We're going to come and we're going to kill you.

Now you may get a threat. You stand up for Jesus at work. Well, we're going to threaten you with your job. We're going to threaten you with promotion. We're going to threaten you with a loss of privileges. We've had doctors that have stood up against the tyranny in the medical community with pushing a certain procedure when they said, wait a minute, we need to look at this more closely. And they've stood up against it and they lost their medical credentials for it. But you know, we have Christians today, pastors today, that are so afraid to stand up and speak the truth and let the chips fall where they may because they're being threatened.

Oh, wait, you guys, you're getting too political. We're going to come after you, we're going to take away your tax-exempt status. We're going to do this to you, we're going to do that to you. And we back down because we are afraid. The devil uses ridicule, the devil uses threats, and the devil uses discouragement. It says in verse 10 in the God's Word version. Then the people of Judah said, the work crews are worn out and there is too much rubble. We can't continue to rebuild the wall.

Now the Bible tells us they were at the halfway point. That was a miracle of God. They finished the wall, told in chapter six, in 52 days. It had been down for 142 years. They finish it in 52 days. But here's, they're at the halfway point. And you know, when you're doing a big project, you can be all jazzed at the first. You know, you get the T-shirt, everybody's got the T-shirt, we got the T-shirts for the weekend, and you're wearing the T-shirt, you're all jazzed. But then you hit opposition and you hit the hard work and you're at the halfway point and it looks like you have to climb Mount Everest. And you just say, I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm just out of gas.

That's the way they were. And they were discouraged because they were being laughed at and mocked. And even if a fox jumps on your crummy little wall, it'll break it down. And they began to look around and say, you know, I guess it is a pretty crummy little wall. What were we thinking? Why were we thinking we could do that? We can't do this, can't, never could do anything. We get discouraged. That's one of the devil's chief tools, is to discourage you and me. One of the things that you can do to really make a difference is determine to be an encourager, but encourage one another. Hebrews 3:13. Encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called today, lest any of you should be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

They said we can't do it and they were so discouraged. What's the use? The devil uses all those things: ridicule, threats, discouragement. For what purpose? He uses all that to get you to fear and to quit. To get you to fear and to quit

Speaker 1

Ridicule, threats, discouragement. Do they have a hold of you and you think they just will never let go no matter what you do? You would be wrong. You just heard part one of this lesson called "Fear, Faith and the Fight of Your Life." And there's much more power and proof of that to come in the next broadcast where, after a brief review, Pastor Jeff will continue by explaining how opposition from the enemy is conquered by prayer, faith, and action. Make sure you're with us.

Then, when he continues in his new series "Strong and Courageous," stepping up to the plate, a stake in the ground, milk, honey, and excuses. Going up against Goliath, fear, faith, and the fight of your life. Cut to the quick, all of these are the titles of the messages in the series "Strong and Courageous," and we've been airing it this month. This powerful and encouraging set of lessons, over four hours of sound teaching, will help you stop letting fear call the shots. We all feel it, and we want to be free of it. We want to walk confidently in God's promises and help you live out your faith boldly in a culture that desperately needs the truth of Christ.

This six-lesson series "Strong and Courageous" is Pastor Jeff's thank you for your support this month of any amount to the ongoing outreach of From His Heart. Would you pray about how you might help and then listen to the Lord and contact us to request your copy? Today, you can make your gift and get this series when you call 866-40-BIBLE (866-40-BIBLE) or go online to fromhisheart.org. Again, the series is "Strong and Courageous," and know that we literally couldn't be here without your prayers and support. Thank you for believing in the mission of From His Heart and for helping shine the real truth of Christ into more lives around the world.

And one more thank you: thanks for joining us today on From His Heart. I'm Larry Nobles, trusting you'll visit us on our website to catch up with any programs you may have missed by clicking the listen link at fromhisheart.org. We also trust you'll be here tomorrow for part two of today's offering, "Fear, Faith and the Fight of Your Life." That's on Friday, when we'll open up God's Word and share real truth, real love, and real hope. From His Heart.

Speaker 2

There is treasure, there is blessing, there is hope.

Speaker 1

From his heart is the Listener supported Broadcast Ministry of Dr. Jeff Shreve speaking the truth in love to a lost and a hurting world.

Remember, no matter what, God loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life.

Find out more about that when you go to fromisheart.org.