From Burden to Breakthrough: Discerning Your Place in God’s Story

[00:00:05] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_00]
[00:00:05] Why don't you open your Bibles this morning to Nehemiah chapter 1. Nehemiah chapter 1. You have probably never heard the name Samuel Langley, but in 1901, Samuel Langley was determined to be the first man in flight. All the odds were in his favor. He was a brilliant, credentialed scientist. He'd written a best-selling book called Experiments in Aerodynamics. He had generous government funding. He lived in the nation's capital in Washington, D.C.
[00:00:35] alongside an elite fully financed production team. For more than a decade, Langley spun out prototype after prototype, but he just couldn't keep anything in the air. And so on December 8th, 1903, when the funding ran out, he declared publicly human flight to be impossible. He gave
[00:00:57] up and he moved on to other things. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles to the southeast, two bike mechanic stood on top of a hill in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Unlike Samuel Langley, Wilbur and Orville Wright had no formal training and zero funding. They worked out of the back of their
[00:01:16] bike shop on their own dime. Like Samuel Langley, they too experienced failure after failure. But unlike Langley, they didn't give up because they had an unshakable conviction that flight was possible. In fact, in 1901, in a letter to a friend, Wilbur Wright told one of his friends
[00:01:35] that it might take man another thousand years to figure this out, and maybe they themselves would not be the ones to achieve it, but it could be done and they would never give up. And so on top
[00:01:46] of that sand dune in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17th, 1903, they pushed off one more time and orville wright lifted off from the earth nine days after samuel langley had declared publicly on behalf of the government that human flight was impossible why do i share that story
[00:02:06] it is because conviction gives you a resilience that qualifications can't the wright brothers were not the most qualified they were simply the most convinced and that is why history remembers their names, not Samuel Langley's.
[00:02:24] The book of Nehemiah begins in much the same way.
[00:02:27] The book of Nehemiah does not start with a man in a place of power.
[00:02:33] It doesn't start with a man with a position or a plan.
[00:02:36] It is the story of a man with a burden, a vision of what could be coupled with a conviction about what should be, which a friend of mine says is the essence of vision, what could be coupled with what should be. Empowered by this vision, Nehemiah overcame
[00:02:55] incredible odds and literally changed history. Let's first discuss Nehemiah's time period and what was going on when Nehemiah was alive. Nehemiah's story takes place at the end of what we call the exile period, when Israel had been taken captive by Babylon and then Persia because
[00:03:16] of their persistent sin. Point of fact, Nehemiah is the last historical book in your Old Testament.
[00:03:23] Now, it's not the last book in your Old Testament list, but it's the last book that chronicles or the book that chronicles the last historical events. Some of the minor prophets like Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, they were written during the same time period, but the events recorded in
[00:03:43] Nehemiah marked the close of the Old Testament era.
[00:03:47] After Nehemiah, we enter into a 400-year period of silence, a silence that won't be broken until the coming of Jesus.
[00:03:56] Second point of fact, Nehemiah is actually part two of a two-part book originally called Ezra and Nehemiah.
[00:04:05] Now, in our modern English Bibles, Ezra and Nehemiah are separate books, but up until the early medieval period, in all the Hebrew writings, they were considered one book.
[00:04:16] When Jerome assembled the first Latin Bible, the Latin Vulgate in 405 AD, he split Ezra and Nehemiah into two books.
[00:04:25] He didn't change any of the contents, of course, he just classified them as two separate books.
[00:04:31] But it's important to know that they were originally one book because Ezra and Nehemiah tells the story of the three reformers who restored Israel after the exile, and each one builds on the progress of the one before.
[00:04:47] The first reformer in Ezra and Nehemiah was named Zerubbabel.
[00:04:52] And Zerubbabel led a movement to rebuild the temple.
[00:04:56] Okay, his story takes up the first six chapters of Ezra.
[00:04:59] By the way, you parents looking for baby names, let me suggest Zerubbabel, okay?
[00:05:04] It's fun to say, Zerubbabel, your friends will love it.
[00:05:07] 60 years after Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel's first, 60 years after him, Ezra led in the restoration and renewal of the Jewish community in Jerusalem.
[00:05:17] So he was second, Ezra. Nehemiah came last, and Nehemiah led in the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls. Okay, this is important. Biblically, this book serves two primary purposes.
[00:05:31] Negatively, the book of Nehemiah demonstrates the abject failure of social and political reforms to fix Israel's problems. Spoiler alert, this book does not end well. In fact, the whole Old Testament does not end well. Nehemiah will be, in some ways, Taylor Swift's original anti-hero.
[00:05:49] By the end of the book, Nehemiah is not an inspiring visionary. He's an exhausted, frustrated, bitter has-been trying to maintain control through threats, shouting, and pulling out his opponent's hair, literally. I'll show you that at the end of the book. His last prayer, Nehemiah's last prayer,
[00:06:06] the last recorded prayer in the old testament is nehemiah saying god remember me for good which is basically him saying listen god these people are terrible but remember me at least i tried if i were making nehemiah into a movie i would cue t's song to roll in the final credits
[00:06:26] i have this thing where i get older but just never wiser it's me hi i'm the problem it's me at tea time everybody agrees it's exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero it says a dad with
[00:06:35] three daughters okay the problem in israel is not weak walls or bad leaders the problem is their corrupt hearts something that no human leader can fix especially since israel's leaders like nehemiah have the same corrupt hearts that the people of israel do that is the negative point
[00:06:55] of the book positively the book of nehemiah shows us how god uses ordinary people to do amazing things by putting his vision and his spirit into them and calling them to follow him. Nehemiah is
[00:07:10] a man whose only qualification is that he's heard from God. Through Nehemiah's story, you're going to learn how to discern and to pursue the things that God is putting on your heart. I've been eager
[00:07:25] to study through this book for years. And the last time I preached or preached anything from the book of Nehemiah here at Summit Church was 2004. How many of you were not around for that series in
[00:07:36] 2004? Raise your hands. Okay. That looks like just about everybody. Maybe a better question. How many of you were five years old or less in 2004? Why don't you raise your hand? Okay. So point is it's
[00:07:45] time. You ready to dive in? Here we go. Here we go. Chapter one, verse one, the words of Nehemiah, the son of hakeliah now it happened in the month of chislev in the 20th year as i was in susa the
[00:08:01] citadel that han and i one of my brothers came with certain men from judah and i asked them concerning the jews who escaped who had survived the exile and concerning jerusalem and they said to me the remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame
[00:08:16] the wall of jerusalem is broken down the enemies have open access to it the gates have been destroyed by fire. Verse four, as soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for
[00:08:28] days. And I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. Now, I mentioned before turning Nehemiah into a movie. If I were making the book of Nehemiah into a movie, here's how I would do
[00:08:39] it. By the way, one of our tech geniuses here, Rob Lauder, heard me read through this description that I'm about to give you. And he said, hey, would you send me that? And he plugged it into
[00:08:48] an AI program, and this is what it came up with, okay? If I were making Nehemiah into a movie, I would start with a dark brooding shot, somber music playing in the background, as the camera panned the destroyed walls of Jerusalem. Everywhere you look, you see crumbling
[00:09:04] heaps of stones. The gates of Jerusalem are smoldering piles of firewood. Famous monuments are overturned as the camera pans to the once great city. You'd see small clusters of Jewish inhabitants grieving and weeping over the latest attack. A woman clutches the body of her murdered
[00:09:21] son. Then we'd zoom in on the charred, fractured remnant of a sign that said the house of David with a quote from the sign from Samuel 7, 16 below it, a promise from God. I will build you
[00:09:32] an eternal house and it will never perish. Let that linger for a moment. Then I do a quick cut to a prosperous, polished, bright city. On the bottom corner of the screen, it would say Susa,
[00:09:42] somewhere in Persia, in Kislev, 445 BC.
[00:09:45] That's the month it takes place in, basically November, right?
[00:09:48] A man named Hanani rides into the city.
[00:09:52] He dismounts from his horse.
[00:09:54] Hanani walks briskly into the palace library where he finds his friend Nehemiah, to whom he reports the news about the latest disaster in Jerusalem.
[00:10:02] Nehemiah is sitting at a desk reading from an ancient scroll.
[00:10:07] He's going over these things.
[00:10:08] Nehemiah, of course, is played by Nicolas Cage, okay?
[00:10:14] Why are you laughing? Okay. I think that's actually perfect casting. You're going to see Nehemiah when he's tested, respond with extreme cartoonish levels of emotion. You will see, I will be vindicated. Okay. Well, as Hanani enters the room, Nick Cage slash Nehemiah looks up from
[00:10:30] the scroll he's been reading from with that patented steely look in his eye. The camera zooms in on what he's been reading, right? Isaiah 44, 28 referred to there in Nehemiah 1, which promises that Jerusalem will one day be rebuilt,
[00:10:44] that God's salvation will again radiate it from it to the ends of the earth.
[00:10:47] Then the camera pans back up to Nehemiah's face who was looking off in the distance with a tear in his eye, right?
[00:10:53] At least that is how I would do it, okay?
[00:10:55] That's my debut as a movie producer.
[00:10:57] What do you think, okay?
[00:11:01] Big thanks, by the way, to Rob Lauder for that and to Kathy Keller, wife of Tim Keller, for giving me the idea to think of this as a movie.
[00:11:07] And I will probably be sued for that, so enjoy it while it lasted, okay?
[00:11:10] verse 4 verse 4 says that when Nehemiah heard Hananiah's words he was deeply troubled and he went into a season of prayer and fasting that lasted for days we find out in chapter 2 this
[00:11:23] prayer time lasted for nearly 16 weeks four months which meant that the prayer that you're going to see recorded in verses 5 through 11 is just a summary of his prayer themes not something he prayed once from the hip when he first heard about the disaster let me just read this prayer
[00:11:39] that he prayed, because we're going to see in it the first five principles for discovering God's call on your life, okay? Verse five, and I said, Nehemiah said, I said, O Lord God of heaven,
[00:11:52] the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. God, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your
[00:12:02] servant that I may, I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you, even I and my father's house have sinned.
[00:12:15] We've acted very corruptly against you and we have not kept the commandments, the statutes and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses.
[00:12:24] But remember, remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, because you said, if you were unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples.
[00:12:33] But you also said, if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven.
[00:12:42] From there, I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen to make my name dwell there. My name dwell there. O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant
[00:12:51] and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name and give success to your servant today and grant him mercy in the sight of this man, this man being King Artaxerxes, whom Nehemiah
[00:13:04] serves. And then Nehemiah closes chapter one with an important biographical detail, verse 11. He says, now I was cupbearer to the king. Now, like I said, we see in this prayer, the first five elements of discerning the call of God on your life. Before I give you those five, however,
[00:13:24] I want you to note that this prayer follows a three point outline, adoration of God, acknowledgement of sin, and an appeal based on promise. Interestingly, by the way, this is the exact same outline as the Lord's prayer, the model prayer, which means that this is a good pattern
[00:13:43] for all of your prayers. Adoration of God, acknowledgement of sin, and appeal based on God's promises. So let's break those down really quickly, okay? Adoration of God, this is verses five and six. This is where true prayer always begins, a vision of who God is. You see, you will
[00:14:04] never pray rightly until you see God rightly, our Father who art in heaven. And what does Nehemiah declare specifically about God? Verse five, you're a God who keeps his covenant, a God who is filled
[00:14:22] with steadfast, unchanging, never giving up love. A God who is attentive and aware of what is going on with his people, not distant and disinterested. A.W. Tozer very famously said that what you think when you think about God is the most important thing about you. Because it determines literally
[00:14:45] everything else in your life. It will determine the peace that you feel in life. It will determine the joy that you feel. It will determine how you see yourself. It will determine whether or not
[00:14:55] you trust and obey God. How you see God determines what you ask for from him. And just as importantly, it determines how you respond when God doesn't do things exactly as you think he should.
[00:15:10] So let me just ask you to consider, how do you see God when you're praying to him?
[00:15:16] When you close your eyes in prayer, what expression do you imagine on God's face?
[00:15:22] Is it the face of an angry judge? Is it the face of a disappointed father? Is it the face of a God who is too busy with other things to be bothered by your rather unimportant life? See, Jesus gave
[00:15:34] us a very different picture of the father. He's a father so intimately attentive to us, he said, that he knows when a single hair falls from our heads. He is a father so in love with us
[00:15:45] that even after we sinned, he kept looking our direction with arms open, filled with mercy and love and forgiveness.
[00:15:53] He never stopped looking at us that way.
[00:15:55] His expression on his face never changed.
[00:15:58] He's already fully forgiven us if we'll just turn to him.
[00:16:01] Yeah, it's true that Israel had sinned and they've been driven into exile, but Nehemiah trusted in a God still full of never changing love.
[00:16:10] The God who came running to his people with mercy in his eyes.
[00:16:14] What you think when you think about God is the most important thing about you because it determines everything else about you, including what you ask for in prayer.
[00:16:24] So first we have adoration of God.
[00:16:27] Second, we have an acknowledgement of sin.
[00:16:30] This is gonna be in verses six and seven.
[00:16:32] In verse six, Nehemiah confesses both his sins and the sins of his people, and then he throws himself entirely on God's mercy.
[00:16:41] The important thing to note here, Summit, is that Nehemiah didn't come with a list of requirements demanding that God owes him something.
[00:16:49] I point that out because one of the hardest things for me, for me in prayer, has been to learn to give up demands on what I think God owes me when I pray. Y'all, often my prayers, not the pretty
[00:17:03] polished ones I pray up here. I'm talking about the secret ones I pray, the ones in my heart.
[00:17:08] Often they sound like, God, you know, I'm the righteous one here. I did everything right. I did at all. And now you owe me. It'd be wrong of you not to give this to me. I deserve for you to fix
[00:17:20] this. I deserve this healing. I deserve this blessing. I deserve for you to bring this kid home. That is not where Nehemiah starts because it's not true. You see, the truth is, like Nehemiah, our lives have been filled with sin and selfishness and idolatry and inconsistency and
[00:17:42] unbelief and if you don't know that about yourself you don't know yourself very well and so appealing to our own righteousness in prayer is like trying to cash a huge check from a bank account with insufficient funds but see there's another account you can draw from
[00:18:00] and it's got infinite supply when my kids turned 16 they got their driver's licenses i gave each of them a little credit card tied to my account that they could use for emergency situations emphasis on emergency. Though I have since learned we have very different definitions of what
[00:18:18] constitutes an emergency. Well, we discovered this week, this week, we discovered that one of my daughters, and I will not mention which one, but it wasn't Karis O'Reilly, okay, that one of them had accidentally, and I do believe it was accidentally, tied her Starbucks app to my
[00:18:34] credit card. I think we'd put it in there when we set her account up, and somehow it got changed to auto reload. So she's going to Starbucks two to three times a week, right? She's buying for
[00:18:46] friends. She's amazed that her account never seems to run dry. So I'm reviewing my credit card statement and I'm seeing all these Starbucks charges and I'm thinking, I've really got to talk to Veronica about her caffeine habit. Eventually we figure out the problem and I have to open my
[00:19:03] daughter's Starbucks app and show her how to remove my card and select her debit card as the stores for the reload, which means her Starbucks runs have already gotten a lot less frequent because her account usually hovers right around zero. Okay. Now I'm just trying to be a responsible
[00:19:19] parent there, but God actually invites you to do the opposite. Your worthiness account hovers around zero, but Jesus's grace is an infinite supply. And God says, Hey, why don't you switch the cards on that payment plan to mine? Appeal to my grace, not your goodness, because there's a never ending
[00:19:37] supply there. So when I pray, I don't review for him all the great things I've done in parenting or all the things I've tried to do for him. What I come and I say is, God, I don't have any right
[00:19:46] to demand anything of you, but you're a good father. And your grace toward me is of infinite supply. And so I'm going to ask you because of that. Friend, you will find that's an account
[00:19:57] where there are always sufficient funds. The Old Testament commentator, Derek Kidner says, after adoring God's infinite highness and confessing our smallness, we realize God owes us nothing, and therefore we come empty-handed. But good news, Christian, our God is a God who
[00:20:15] loves to fill empty hands. Finally, we've got an appeal based on God's promises. This is verses eight and nine. In verse eight, Nehemiah quotes directly from Deuteronomy 9.29. He said, God, you said, you said through Moses that your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven.
[00:20:32] From there, I will gather them and bring them to the place I've chosen and make my name dwell there.
[00:20:36] there. Then he says, verse 8, God, remember your word. Your word, God. You see, around here we say that the prayers that start in heaven are the ones that are heard by heaven. I cannot emphasize this
[00:20:49] to you enough. Don't just read your way through that Bible. Pray your way through it. They say the Bible contains about 3,000 individual promises. Do not leave a single one unclaimed.
[00:21:02] When you're praying through daily revival on the Summit app, do what I do. Note whatever promises you see in the scripture and pray those promises over yourself your family your friends your church every day now listen every every day every day every day there's something in my bible
[00:21:21] reading i will turn into a prayer for my family and it will sound something like god you said you said remember your word in fact i wear around my wrist this little bracelet i had made
[00:21:33] and on it is engraved a verse reference jeremiah 32 40 which is a promise that says and i will make with your children an everlasting covenant and i will never stop doing good for them and i will put
[00:21:48] the fear of me in their hearts that they may not turn from me and on dark days when i am worried or i'm discouraged which happens to every parent i say god you said i put it around my wrist you
[00:21:57] said, remember your word. That is the shape of Nehemiah's prayer, adoration, acknowledgement of sin, and an appeal based on God's promises. It is the shape of the Lord's prayer, and it should be the shape of all of your prayers. Now, like I said, as important as that is, we're going to see in
[00:22:15] this prayer also five principles. The first five for discovering God's call in your life. Part two will be when we get into chapter two. Let me walk you through these. Here's the first principle we
[00:22:25] learn about discovering God's calling in your life from this prayer. Number one, you should find your personal calling in God's bigger purposes. This is verses 8 through 11. Nehemiah discerns God's will for him personally through God's stated purposes in the Bible. Nehemiah starts
[00:22:47] his discovery of God's will for his life by rehearsing God's promises about what God had promised that he would do in the world. You see, the story of Nehemiah, listen, the story of Nehemiah is not about himself actualizing or him achieving his personal dreams, even though I've heard a lot
[00:23:08] of people teach this book that way. Frankly, when it comes to the will of God, a lot of us in churches like this one often function like narcissists. It's all about me and my life and reaching my
[00:23:22] potential and actualizing my gifts. We're all into Enneagrams and StrengthsFinders and whatever.
[00:23:28] I'm special. I'm unique. I'm a snowflake. I'm a skittle, right? Now, can those tools be useful?
[00:23:33] I think so. I know, for example, I'm an Enneagram 8, an ENTJ. I'm a type D. I know that I thrive on words of affirmation, that the sorting hat would put me in Gryffindor, and that if I were a
[00:23:44] character on The Friends Show, I would be Ross, okay? I've taken all the tests. I've taken all the test. The point is that before any of those things are relevant, you got to understand what
[00:23:57] God is doing in the world, and you got to seek to conform your life to that. Stop pursuing the will of God like a narcissist and start pursuing it like a Christian. The Old Testament scholar
[00:24:07] Christopher J. H. Wright says it this way, we often ask, where does God fit into the story of my life? When the real question is, where does my little life fit into the great story of God's
[00:24:18] mission. God's got a global mission of having his glory cover the earth like the waters cover the seabeds and bringing his gospel to every nation on earth. And your life, your life, regardless of whether you do what I do, you're a dentist or you're a stay-at-home mom, your life has a part
[00:24:35] in that. Somewhere, somehow, your gifts, your callings are part of God's global mission to make his name famous and to extend his salvation to the ends of the earth. And you will never understand your gifts or your role or your purpose until you understand God's greater purposes. Years ago,
[00:24:55] I did an illustration on this. Toward the end of a message, I called five unsuspecting people up on stage. I told them they were going to act out the various jobs of firemen on a fire truck.
[00:25:06] I made one the driver, another the supervisor, two, I think, to operate the hose. I made one to drive the back of the truck. I think they called that the tiller, like Kramer on Seinfeld,
[00:25:15] that position. Then after giving each one their assignment and having them start to act it out, so it's like a sight gag, I go back with the mic and I ask each of them what their primary role
[00:25:25] is on the fire truck. Each one dutifully repeats back the job that I had assigned to them.
[00:25:30] I then told each of them that the one thing they all had in common is that they were all wrong. I was like, your primary role? Your primary role is to put out fires.
[00:25:42] Now, it wasn't a fair question.
[00:25:43] I'd set them up, which is why I have a really hard time getting volunteers for sermon illustrations anymore, okay?
[00:25:48] Because they know I'm just setting them up.
[00:25:50] But it illustrated an important point about our personal calling.
[00:25:54] Whatever your more narrow assignment, you gotta know how it fits into God's great purpose to see his name glorified and his salvation extended to every corner of the earth.
[00:26:06] Many of us don't know how to discern the call of God because we've never really been gripped by God's overriding purposes in the Bible.
[00:26:13] And that's because your whole approach to Christianity has been formed by spiritual snippets from Instagram and TikTok.
[00:26:22] Friend, you gotta learn the whole Bible.
[00:26:24] You're not gonna know the will of God any more than you know the word of God.
[00:26:27] That's why I'm committed to teaching it to you each week, not stand up here and sharing with you life lessons from Uncle JD.
[00:26:34] It's why you need to devote yourself to knowing this book.
[00:26:37] Don't depend on me to teach you the whole Bible.
[00:26:38] I mean, imagine if you only ate one meal every week.
[00:26:42] Even if that meal was awesome, you would be famished.
[00:26:47] You got to eat every day.
[00:26:49] The same thing is true with the Bible.
[00:26:51] You've got to immerse yourself in the scriptures.
[00:26:53] You got to read them.
[00:26:54] You got to know them.
[00:26:55] You got to think them.
[00:26:56] You got to breathe them.
[00:26:58] You've got to pray them.
[00:27:00] Principle number one.
[00:27:02] Principle number one is that principle number two, join God where he is already at work.
[00:27:08] Now, you notice this one doesn't have a scripture reference, and that's because unbeknownst to Nehemiah, plans for this operation had gone into effect years before Nehemiah was even born.
[00:27:21] You see, nearly a hundred years before Nehemiah, when Zerubbabel had started rebuilding the temple, some Persian governors up there in the region, right, where they were, they see Zerubbabel, they're rebuilding the temple, and they object about what's going on, and official memos start
[00:27:38] flying back and forth between Persia and Jerusalem at the speed of camel. And Persian King Cyrus gets brought into this, and he makes it crystal clear in no uncertain terms, and he documents it that he wants this to happen, and he establishes it in the Persian law as a firm, irrevocable
[00:27:58] decree. The point is that all the plans had been established long before Nehemiah got on the scene, and Nehemiah simply steps into something God was already doing. By the way, it is interesting.
[00:28:13] The reason King Cyrus authorized this in the first place is that Cyrus, they say, was paranoid about losing his power and he wanted to get on the good sides of all the gods out there. So he authorized
[00:28:26] the rebuilding of all these temples so that whichever God out there was the true one would be favorable toward him. So his motives are mixed at best, but God uses all kinds of things.
[00:28:37] The important thing for you and me to note is that Nehemiah not only discerned God's will from his word, it was confirmed for him individually through God's activity in history. The same is going to be true for you. Now, it's not going to happen for you like it did for Nehemiah. That's
[00:28:56] his story, his situation. But see, listen, when God calls you to something, you're going to see evidence of his activity around you. Now that might take the shape of a burden that just keeps recurring in your heart. Something that keeps re-emerging in prayer. That's what you're going
[00:29:15] to see happen with the MI. I'm going to show you that in the next chapter. But there's just some burden that grips your heart that will not let you go. You might see God's activity through divinely
[00:29:24] open doors, as in coincidences that seem too random to ignore. Now, there's a lot of pitfalls with that, but I'm going to show you those in chapter two. Or you might sense God's activity through God bringing other people into your life who share the same spirit-prompted vision
[00:29:39] that he's put into your heart. That has happened to me multiple times. Let me give you an example from our church. I consider this to be our church's Nehemiah moment. Years ago, God gripped my heart with a conviction that we were supposed to plant a thousand churches all over the world
[00:29:55] in our generation. It was a conviction that gripped me that I could not let go, and it kept resurfacing in my own prayer life, and God was really putting people around me who shared the
[00:30:05] same conviction. Y'all, here's where it really went into overdrive. In 2012, our church was preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and so I went back and did a little research into the founding of our church, which occurred in 1962. I found out that the original founder of our church was
[00:30:22] a man named Sam James, who was still alive. He was 86 years old at that point, and he was living in Richmond, Virginia. So I called him up and I asked him to tell me the story of the founding of our
[00:30:33] church. He told me that in 1961, he and his wife had applied to the International Mission Board to serve as missionaries to Vietnam. And by the way, I want you to get your mind around that,
[00:30:44] missionaries to Vietnam in the 1960s. But they had discovered in the process of getting ready to send them, they discovered that his newborn son had a hole in his heart that required serious medical attention before the IMV would send him. And so he and his wife had to move to Durham,
[00:31:00] didn't know anybody here, had to move to Durham so they could put their son into Duke Pediatrics.
[00:31:04] It was going to be at least a year, they told him. And Sam and his wife were pretty discouraged at the delay because they knew that they were supposed to be in Vietnam. And when he got to
[00:31:12] Durham. He started to attend the Grace Baptist Church in downtown Durham, and some laymen there approached him about helping them start a new church on the north side of Durham. Sam James said, well, why not? I got nothing else to do for the next eight to nine months. So Sam James worked
[00:31:26] with the core group there of lay people for eight months, and they set a launch date for this new church on March 4th, 1962. Well, just a few weeks before the official launch of the church, Sam's son
[00:31:38] got medical release and they were cleared to go to Vietnam. Sam was scheduled to leave the United States on the day that the church was supposed to launch. So Sam James preached that morning, March 4th, 1962, the only sermon he would ever preach at this church. The Homestead Heights
[00:31:56] Baptist Church is what it was called back then. And then Sam and his wife and his son got on a plane to go to Vietnam where they would spend the next 40 years. The text the Spirit led him to that
[00:32:06] morning was Isaiah 54.2, which is known as William Carey's famous missionary text, in which God commands his people to expand their vision to include the ends of the earth. And Sam James told this small new group of believers, you know, 10, 20 people, that he believed God was calling them
[00:32:26] to be a church that reached the nations. And then Sam and his wife got on a plane and left for the next 40 years. I became pastor of this church in 2002. It was three or 400 people big at the time
[00:32:38] and we changed the name to the Summit Church. Sam confided to me that he kept tabs on the church while he was in Vietnam and he told me he'd gotten pretty discouraged, pretty discouraged about the church because like a lot of churches, it turned inward and focused a lot on its own
[00:32:52] needs and didn't think that much about the nations. But then he told me with tears in his eyes, he said now seeing this church with a vision of planting a thousand churches in 40 years
[00:33:02] having sent out 700 people to go overseas to plant churches now I see that God has fulfilled what he told me 50 years ago but what I realized in that moment was that this vision of ours summit was
[00:33:15] something that God has set into motion long before any of us were on the scene that we were just stepping into something God had started years before us and that has given me incredible confidence in what we're doing. This is not our vision summit. It's not my vision. It's God's
[00:33:31] vision, and we are joining him in it. We're not making waves for God in ministry. We're riding a wave that he created. By the way, you younger people, these are the stories I want you to know.
[00:33:42] These are the deeds of our God in our generation. This is the God calling you to serve him.
[00:33:48] He's inviting you to step into what he's already doing. Listen, one of the most important aspects of discerning the call of God is distinguishing between good ideas and God ideas. You do not want to give your life to pursuing a good idea. You want a God idea. And the way you do that is by
[00:34:07] joining in something he's already doing. Here's principle number three. Dream big. Dream big. I love the audacity of Nehemiah's prayer in verse nine. Though you're outcast or in the uttermost parts of heaven, you've said, even from there, I will gather them and bring them to the place I've
[00:34:25] to make my name dwell there uttermost parts of heaven means god i don't even know where to find these people they're literally scattered all over the heaven not even the earth heaven i don't even
[00:34:37] know how to get there and you promise to gather them into a city that radiates your glory i'm not even sure how much building a city like that cost but i know i don't have that kind of money i'm a
[00:34:47] slave yeah but none of that's my problem is it god that's your problem because what you originate i I know you orchestrate.
[00:34:57] Nehemiah literally asked for the ends of the earth.
[00:35:01] Hear me.
[00:35:03] Many dreams fail, not because they're too big.
[00:35:07] They fail because they're too small.
[00:35:11] Listen, I wanna encourage you Summit family.
[00:35:14] I wanna encourage our missionaries and our church planters who might be listening in this morning.
[00:35:19] Don't ever settle.
[00:35:21] Do not give up asking for the ends of the earth.
[00:35:23] Parents, don't stop asking for miracles in the lives of your kids.
[00:35:28] Don't stop asking for miracles in unreached people groups or miracles on your college campuses, miracles and open doors among the homeless, orphaned prison or unwed mother in high school, drop out here.
[00:35:39] Don't settle.
[00:35:40] History is changed by people who perceive God's great love for the world and asking for great things because of it.
[00:35:48] Told you that one of my fears is that Matthew 13, 58 will in some way be true of me or you.
[00:35:54] Matthew 13, 58, Matthew says, many mighty works, Jesus did not in Nazareth because of their unbelief. Nazareth was where he was from. He loved the people in Nazareth. His first grade teacher was in Nazareth. His best
[00:36:05] friends were in Nazareth, the ones he grew up with. And yet there were a lot of miracles he did not do there, not because he didn't want to, but because they just never believed him for them or
[00:36:17] asked him for them. I don't want that to be true of you or me or my family or your family or our community. Don't ever settle. Don't ever give up. Dream big. But then number four, serve small.
[00:36:33] Serve small. Verse 11, the last chapter of the, or excuse me, the last verse of the chapter is, it's not just an incidental detail. I was cupbearer to the king, by the way.
[00:36:41] Now that detail is integral to the story. It also teaches a very important lesson.
[00:36:47] You see, in one sense, hear me, cupbearer was not that important of a job. He's just a servant.
[00:36:52] he was a table waiter. Literally his main job was to taste the food and drink the wine before the king did to show that it wasn't poisoned because that was one of the primary ways that political
[00:37:02] leaders got assassinated back in those days. Nobody at the royal dinners cared anything about Nehemiah. They didn't want to hear his opinion on anything. And yet for 30 seconds at the beginning of every meal, every eye was on him as he drank a swig of the wine to see if his eyes crossed and
[00:37:21] he started gagging. It was the job of a slave. In another sense, however, to get the job of cupbearer, well, you had to be an extremely trustworthy slave because you were the only one allowed to handle the king's dishes. I was in London a couple of years ago visiting our church
[00:37:40] plant over there, and I had a guy take me on what they call the Christian Heritage Tour of London in the British Museum, which is one of the stops on the tour, which has to be the greatest museum
[00:37:49] on earth. They have one of the bowls that Artaxerxes ate and drank from. And my tour guide, Ben Virgo, look him up, by the way, if you're ever in London, it's definitely worth doing this.
[00:38:00] He said, this is very likely one of the bowls that Nehemiah held up to his lips.
[00:38:06] Nehemiah's faithfulness with this bowl, he said, was the means God used to open the door for him to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. And then Ben made these two points. I'll never forget them.
[00:38:14] He said, the first is that your job, your assignment, however small it is, is significant to God. To cupbearers everywhere, God is saying, I see you. I see you. Second, he said, you need to learn to be faithful with your cup because faithfulness in the small is how you prove
[00:38:36] yourself to God. And you have no idea what God is doing through your faithfulness in that cup.
[00:38:42] Jesus said it this way, Luke 16, 10, whoever can be trusted with very little will also be trusted with very much.
[00:38:48] Whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.
[00:38:51] Now, I wanna be careful here because I'm not saying that every faithful Christian right now is given some kind of important job on earth.
[00:38:57] I'm not saying to you high school students, hey, just do well on your computer science quiz and God promises one day to make you the CEO of Apple, okay?
[00:39:05] No, a lot of faithful servants die as cupbearers.
[00:39:10] But see, a lot of scriptural promises are not fully fulfilled until eternity.
[00:39:15] Jesus consistently connects our faithfulness and the small things here with the responsibilities that were given there.
[00:39:24] What I'm telling you is that this time of tedium, when you're a student taking classes, you're like, I have no idea how this connects to my life.
[00:39:35] Or when you feel like you're stuck in a dead-end job, or when you spend most of your days changing diapers and nobody notices and nobody says thank you, I'm telling you, it's more than that. It's always more than that. It's a time of testing and
[00:39:51] training for God's kingdom. God takes all of his servants through a cupbearer phase. Don't rush through it. Y'all, even an empire strikes back. When Luke didn't complete his training we go to before rushing off to save his friends, it didn't turn out well. It led to Luke losing his arm and
[00:40:08] Han Solo getting frozen in a block of carbonite. I know that all took place in a galaxy far, far away, but even in this galaxy, okay? Action without preparation usually spells disaster.
[00:40:19] Dream big, serve small. Here's your last one. Let brokenness drive you from the comfortable.
[00:40:29] See, Nehemiah walked away from a lot. He had a comfortable job. I mean, for a slave, it was a pretty cush job. He served in the palace. He was good at it. Everybody liked him. He ate
[00:40:38] awesome food and drink every meal. But then, out of nowhere, he becomes broken over the state of Jerusalem. Some of the greatest works that God does on earth, in fact, I might argue all of them,
[00:40:57] is when God takes people, his people, from somewhere they're very comfortable, something they're really competent in, and he breaks their heart for something, and he leads them to step out in faith to make a difference. In fact, we thought this week about our young
[00:41:13] adults pastor here, Dustin Wells. When we approached Dustin a couple of years ago about taking on the role of reaching young adults in our community, because there are so many of them in this area to reach. Well, at the time, Dustin was the Blue Ridge campus pastor, which is one
[00:41:27] of our biggest campuses. It was a comfortable job. He was good at it. Everybody loved him.
[00:41:32] So Dustin told us, I'm not interested. But he said, out of respect for you, JD, I'll at least pray about it, which is usually how Christians kill things and then blame God for it, right?
[00:41:44] I'll pray about it.
[00:41:45] No, God told me no, okay?
[00:41:46] So, well, this week he showed me something that he'd written in his journal during that season of prayer.
[00:41:53] He'd said in his journal, he said, God, I'm broken for the young adults of our city, but why would I leave a job that I'm competent in, a job that I love, a job that provides for my family
[00:42:02] to pursue an unknown?
[00:42:05] And he told me that God brought him to this story of Nehemiah.
[00:42:10] God used brokenness over the state of Jerusalem to drive Nehemiah from the comfortable.
[00:42:16] And I believe that this is happening right now with some of you.
[00:42:24] And I believe it's gonna happen to a lot more of you in the coming weeks.
[00:42:28] And all I wanna tell you is listen to the Holy Spirit.
[00:42:32] I know it's gonna be scary.
[00:42:35] I asked Dustin this week how he felt about his decision now.
[00:42:39] He said, well, this next weekend, we're doing our young adults retreat.
[00:42:42] We got more than 200 signed up to go.
[00:42:45] That ministry is really growing and flourishing.
[00:42:48] By the way, if you're a young adult, you just heard about that for the first time.
[00:42:50] Dustin told me there are a few spots left, so go check it out.
[00:42:53] The bottom line is Dustin said, no regrets.
[00:42:56] Who knows, who knows what kind of life God will bring to others through your obedience?
[00:43:04] Let me give you one parting bonus thought, okay?
[00:43:10] Keep it about Jesus.
[00:43:15] You're gonna learn a lot about calling and vision from Nehemiah, but like I said at the beginning, Nehemiah's in the Bible in part to show us that no human salvation, no reform, no vision, no leadership can bring the ultimate
[00:43:27] redemption that we need. And so to use Nehemiah primarily as a template for career change or social activism misses the point. The point of Nehemiah is that there was a reformer, capital R, coming who would bring far greater reforms than Nehemiah ever could.
[00:43:46] he was greater than nehemiah in every way think about it nehemiah was a servant a slave who left a palace for dangerous hard labor jesus was a son who left the heavenly palace to come into a world
[00:43:59] with the certainty of death nehemiah was cup bearer for the king which means he tasted wine to make sure it wasn't poisonous jesus intentionally drank from a poisoned cup the wrath of god for our
[00:44:13] sin. Jesus prayed and wept for his people just like Nehemiah did. But unlike Nehemiah, he didn't do it as one sinner among many. He did it as a sinless substitute who would die in his people's
[00:44:25] place. Nehemiah literally means in Hebrew, it means the Lord comforts. And yet Nehemiah's book does not end with comfort, does it? It ends with strife and despair. Jesus was the great comforter because when Jesus' story ends, our sins are paid for.
[00:44:44] The curse of death is broken.
[00:44:46] He sat down at the right hand of God and he's promised to wipe away every tear from our eyes.
[00:44:52] For whatever God is calling you to, whether you're a college student, high school student trying to figure it out or a retired person trying to figure out what's next, the point is not self-actualization.
[00:45:02] The point is not realizing your dreams.
[00:45:04] The point is not becoming the best version of you.
[00:45:07] That may all happen along the way, But the point is putting Jesus on display.
[00:45:12] He is the truer and greater Nehemiah always.
[00:45:15] And his glory on earth is the ultimate point of all of our ambitions.
[00:45:21] I want you to bow your heads with me if you would at all of our campuses.
[00:45:28] Here's how I want us to end today.
[00:45:29] Two ways.
[00:45:33] The first here is in this moment, I want you just to ask God for his vision for you.
[00:45:40] Maybe it's a renewal of the calling that you've experienced a long time ago.
[00:45:47] Or maybe it'll be something brand new.
[00:45:48] because you just say, God, I want to know it. Speak to me. Now, by the way, here's the second part of that prayer is your yes on the table. Meaning, have you already said yes before you
[00:46:04] know what the question is? Because here's what I've learned. God will never communicate his will to you until you've already pre-surrendered to do it, whatever it is. So can you say, God, I don't even know exactly what it is yet, but my yes is on the table. Whatever the question is,
[00:46:19] the answer is yes. Would you continue praying about that this week as we prepare for the next several weeks in Nehemiah. Here's the second thing I want to do, and keep your heads bowed, but if you can find the little communion cup that you got when you came in, if it's around,
[00:46:51] just reach around there, figure out where that is. Open up the bottom of the cup. That's where you'll access the bread. We're going to end our time together today with a moment of reflection in the presence of Jesus as we celebrate the bread and the cup together. Now listen,
[00:47:18] two things are happening in communion. There's something first from you to God, and that is remembering. That's what we always talk about, remembering. I'm remembering the sacrifice God gave. I'm letting him renew this in my heart. I'm remembering. I want that to happen.
[00:47:35] Jesus said, as often as you do it, do it in remembrance of me. But there's also something happening from God to us because he promises, you see, to use that time of remembering to renew
[00:47:46] his grace to refill us with the Spirit. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, we literally partake in this moment of the body and blood of Jesus, not because these elements change into something else, but because his presence surrounds them and renews and refreshes us, which is why, listen, which is why
[00:48:05] we say if you're not a believer or you're a believer who's not surrendered to Jesus, not walking with Jesus, you're in sin right now, do not touch this. It's actually very dangerous for you if you do, because it comes with a promise that God himself, his spirit, renews you in this.
[00:48:22] If you're not a believer, what I would invite you to do is while others take the symbol of this, you experience the reality. Surrender to Jesus, receive him. But for you that are believers, you want to be renewed in fellowship with the Holy Spirit, you want to be renewed.
[00:48:37] Jesus said, I want you to take this bread. I want you to do this often. And whenever you do it, whenever you do it, I want you to remember and receive. And then Jesus holds up the cup.
[00:49:04] cup bearer for the king. This is a cup that reminds you that I intentionally drank the cup of poison for you. I want you to remember that. I want you to let it renew your faith and my spirit
[00:49:23] in you as you go with confidence. Jesus said, as often as you do it, remember and receive.
[00:49:39] Summit Church at all of our campuses, would you stand to your feet? Every week, we gather for just a few moments and you go from here into the calling that God has given to you. I'm going to
[00:49:55] ask our prayer teams, elders, their wives come up around the front at every campus like they always are. We often say this is the most important part of our service because you've heard about God.
[00:50:08] You may have heard from God. This is a chance for you to bring a burden to God. So when I send you out, I want you to, if you've got a prayer burden, they'll be here as long as you need them to be.
[00:50:16] Just come and find one of these brothers or sisters and say, pray with me. You got questions about a relationship with Jesus. Find one of them. But for the rest of you, you're going to go from
[00:50:24] here, having met with Jesus, hopefully being filled with the Spirit. You're going to go from here to the calling that he has for you. Summit Church, you are loved, you are called, you are sent.