A Life of Sacrificial Worship

1:05And yet, that's exactly what we find in the scripture over and over again. Look on the screen at Jesus' words from Luke chapter 9. He says, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Today, we We'll be looking at Nehemiah chapters 11 and 12. And in the past few weeks, we've seen them come together as a great assembly to confess their sin to the Lord and then to renew the covenant between them and their God.

1:44And now they are gathering together to dedicate both the wall and themselves to the service of the Lord. This is going to be a great challenge and reminder to us today. And what we're going to see in these two chapters is that presenting ourselves to God as living sacrifices is our spiritual worship. So let's take a look here at the beginning of chapter 11 together. You have to remember that at the outset of this chapter, for the past century, Jerusalem was somewhat of a ghost town. When the first wave of exiles returned with Zerubbabel in 538 BC, there was almost no one living there. Those returned exiles rebuilt the temple and fits and starts over a period of 20 years, but the people who were living there and helping with that project, most of them didn't live in the city because there was no wall to protect them. So then some 70 years later, Ezra returns and he helps to rebuild the spiritual life of the community and rededicate the priests and the Levites and the service to the Lord. That's in 458 BC.

2:53And then in 445 BC, Nehemiah returns with a third wave of exiles, and they rebuild the wall as we've seen in this book. In just 52 days. But of course, at this point, most people are still living outside of Jerusalem, even though the wall is now rebuilt. Why is that? Well, it's because the people had established their families, their businesses, their social networks all outside the walls of Jerusalem. They've been living this way for over a hundred years.

3:24But remember, God's vision for Jerusalem was for it to be a city on a hill, a bright light shining in the darkness that would draw all nations to know and worship God through their holy and worshipful lives. Remember that most cities, nearly every major city, had a wall and a temple at this time. So the wall and the temple did not make it a city on a hill. It made it just like every other ancient city.

3:52What would make it a city on a hill was the people living inside of it, their bright, holy, worshipful lives shining for all to see. So here's the challenge. Big visions, big ideas, big projects are fairly easy to get behind. I don't want to minimize the challenges or sacrifices that the people faced as they rebuilt the temple and they rebuilt the wall. Those things were significant. But in one sense, rebuilding those structures of the temple and the wall, that was the easy part.

4:30The harder part was going to be rebuilding the spiritual life of the community, a community who lived in holiness and worship before the Lord. That was the tough part because that was going to require not just a sacrifice for a defined short-term period of time, but ongoing sacrifice forever. And if a vision requires sacrifices, well, then the first people to sacrifice should be the leaders. And that's exactly what we see here in verse 1. If you look at Nehemiah 11:1, the leaders of the people are living in Jerusalem. They are leading the way. Nehemiah and the priests and the chiefs of the people are living in the city. They're not calling people to do something that they're not doing themselves.

5:19They're already living there. But the leaders alone can't repopulate the city. There's not nearly enough of them. So they need more people. And so they call upon 10% of the people, one out of every 10, to come and move into the city as well. Now, remember, in old covenant Israel, people did not have the Holy Spirit residing inside of them. And so one of the ways they determined the will of the Lord was by casting lots. Those were usually small stones with symbols on them. And so they would cast these lots. And that seems random to us, but I want to remind you of what the word says in Proverbs chapter 16. Look on the screen.

5:57The lot is cast into the lap. But it's every decision is from the Lord. What's amazing to me is that these leaders were casting lots to determine who was going to move into the city. And in verse 2, what we see is that the people willingly offered to live in Jerusalem. In other words, they accepted the outcome of this casting of lots as God's will for them, and they voluntarily moved into the city. Look at this quote from Raymond Brown.

6:36However primitive the casting of lots may appear to be to us in our more sophisticated culture, one can hardly fail to admire the faith, love, sacrifice, and heroism of people who were prepared to uproot themselves from familiar surroundings in Judah and sever established relationships because by this means, that is, casting lots, they were persuaded that it was the will of God for them to do so. Friends, we've seen in Ezra and Nehemiah that the people were excited to rebuild the temple and the wall.

7:14It wasn't that they were never discouraged, but there was an excitement about those things, an excitement about seeing Jerusalem rebuilt with these great structures. And that shouldn't surprise us because these are human beings. And as human beings, we like. Projects that have a clear beginning and a clear end, where it's easy to define what success looks like, where results are measurable. At New Life, those things may look like renovating facilities, or special events like our Day for the Nations, or even church membership, or baptisms.

7:57Those things are measurable. They're easy to see and define. But just like repopulating Jerusalem, it can be harder to get excited about things that don't have a clear beginning or end. Things that are difficult to define success, things that are difficult to measure. Things like growth in faith, hope, and love. Things like spiritual growth with respect to discipleship and evangelism. Things like faithfulness in the small everyday things of life. Those are hard to measure. It's hard to define success.

8:34It's hard to know whether or not this year was better than last year. You see, rebuilding the temple and the wall was never going to be the hardest part. The hardest part was always going to be rebuilding the spiritual community in Jerusalem. And in the same way, it's great when we're able to acquire more space. It's great when we're able to pull off special events like Day for the Nations. It's great when we see people joining us. Join the church. Those are all wonderful things. But it's a harder thing to establish a spiritual community with deep roots that is growing in faith, hope, and love, growing as disciples and discipling others, growing in evangelistic faithfulness. Those are harder things because they require sacrifice year after year after year.

9:29But that's exactly what these people did. And that's exactly what we're called to do. In these next sections, starting in verse 3 of chapter 11, from verse 3 to verse 36 of chapter 11, we're given a list of all of the people in the tribe of Judah, Benjamin and Levi, who moved back into the city, who made this sacrificial decision to uproot their families from wherever they were living and to go and live in Jerusalem, to re-establish it as a city on a hill. And then as we move into chapter 12, from verse 1 to verse 26, we're reminded here of all the priests and Levites who made the sacrificial decision 100 years ago in 538 BC to return with Zerubbabel to Jerusalem. And remember, at that time, there was no temple, there was no wall, there was no infrastructure, there was almost nothing to come home to. And yet they made that. Sacrificial decision.

10:33See, when these faithful believers came back to Jerusalem, when they moved into the city after the temple and wall were completed, they were not signing up for a short-term building project. They were making long-term decisions that were going to alter their lives, that were going to alter their families' lives forever. It would have been far more comfortable for those people 100 years ago just to stay in Persia. That was a wealthy, expansive empire that had developed infrastructure and services and a strong military.

11:05It would have been easier for these people in Nehemiah's time to just stay living out in the suburbs, so to speak. That would have been easier. It would have been more convenient for them. But they didn't do that. They made the sacrificial decision to present themselves to God as living sacrifices, to go and live in the city so that it could be re-established as the city on a hill that God envisioned. And so it's fitting that after they do this, they have a worship service to dedicate both the wall and themselves, their own lives, to the worship of God.

11:45And so here we pick up in verse 27 of chapter 12. And as you look at this verse, you see that right at the outset, the people bring all of the Levites into the city from all over. Now remember, There are 12 tribes in Israel. All of them were assigned a portion of land within the promised land, except for the tribe of Levi. And that's because the Levites were the spiritual servants, and some of them were priests as well. And so to keep them from all being concentrated in one area, they were dispersed among all of the territories of Israel so that they could do ministry to the people and they could perform the religious sacrifices and services required by God's law. So they're scattered all over the place, and so they bring them all into Jerusalem for this momentous occasion, this great worship service. And they come, look at what the verse says, to celebrate the dedication with gladness and thanksgivings and singing with cymbals, harps, and lyres.

12:57And you notice as well, if you skip down to verse 30, that they purified themselves before they worshiped. So what I want to do right now is consider four aspects of their worship that should inform the way that we as a believing community worship God as well. Those four aspects are joy, gratitude, praise, and purity. Joy, gratitude, praise, and purity. The first aspect is joy. The Levites were called in to help the people celebrate, the text says, with gladness.

13:39Now it's significant that even when sacrificing, the people were marked by great joy. You can sacrifice gladly when you're sacrificing for a worthy cause, and there is no cause more worthy than God and his work in the world. Joy and sacrifice are not mutually exclusive. The people gladly sacrificed for God because they believed that he was worth it. And I want you to notice that their joy was heard far away. As they celebrated, people from all around them could hear them singing and celebrating. And that reminds us of what they are called to be: the city on a hill that's drawing all nations around them to know and to worship God.

14:29Friends, there may be no greater witness to Christ than joy. People in our world have happiness over a wide variety of things, but that happiness is always short-lived, isn't it? Because experiences end and products disappoint us, people let us down. We can't always be happy, but as believers in Christ, we can always be joyful. And perhaps there is no greater witness to Christ. Then, joy that persists throughout life, even in the midst of sacrifice, even in the midst of suffering.

15:09In fact, times that we are sacrificing, times that we are suffering, those can be some of the greatest times in our life to witness to Christ because of the joy that's not taken away from us, even in our suffering. The second aspect of their worship is gratitude. You see that not just in verse 27, but if you look also in verses 31 and then 38 and verse 40, you see the word thanks or thanksgiving. The people of Israel, when they thought back on how disorganized they were before Nehemiah arrived, all of the opposition they faced as they rebuilt the wall, they sincerely believed that they had only accomplished what they had accomplished by the power and grace of God alone.

16:04See, we will not give thanks as long as we think that we are earning what we're getting in this life. As long as we believe that God owes us something, I think, maybe more than anything else, entitlement is what keeps us from giving thanks. It locks us into a lifestyle of complaining. When we don't believe we have earned the good things that we've gotten in life, when we don't believe that God owes us anything, that unlocks us from that lifestyle of constant complaining and frees us up to be people of gratitude. You see, the Israelites knew they hadn't earned anything, God didn't owe them anything. He could have left them in exile forever. That's what they deserved.

16:59But he didn't do that, he delivered them. And giving thanks was the most appropriate response to a gracious God from a grateful people. The third aspect of their worship is praise. See that the people sing to God, probably from the Psalms, and it's accompanied by cymbals, harp, and lyre. I feel like I should hit this thing. It's right here. It's right next to me. It's never been this close to me before. The whole time, I've been thinking alternately, like, I'm going to run that thing over. It's going to fall down. And, like, I want to hit that thing. So I did. I'm going to do it again.

17:44The third aspect is praise. And I think we take singing for granted in the church. And have you ever stopped to think about, you know, why do we sing? I had this hilarious conversation. I was doing a wedding last summer. I was hanging out with a group of guys at this house, and they were talking about Sunday morning worship. And the guys who will remain nameless, some are still here, some are gone, they called it the sing-along.

18:15Which just was so funny to me because it's kind of like, you know, that part of the service, you know, I struggle more with that. That doesn't really appeal to me. That's the sing-along, you know. And I just thought that was really funny. But it but it but it illustrates the fact that you know a lot of us can't really define why it is that we get together and we sing. In the West, it makes sense to us that we would all gather into a room, we would sit down, and somebody would stand up at the front and teach us something. Well, for one thing, you know, what we're doing when we're preaching is not primarily teaching. Teaching is information dissemination. My big goal up here, and any pastor's goal up here, when we stand and preach, is not that you would necessarily walk out the door smarter than when you came in. The difference between teaching and preaching is we're calling ourselves to repentance and faith. That's the difference. And so, the reason that singing is so important is because this is not a show that we're all watching together up here. We're not being entertained on Sunday mornings. We are all full participants in worship. And when we join our voices together in singing, whatever your individual voice sounds like, when we join our voices together in singing, what we are doing is we are saying together. In unison, what we believe about God.

19:35Jesus said that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. So you have heart and mind in there. We should be worshiping God with our minds, but we should also be worshiping God with our hearts. And singing helps us to unite both our hearts and our minds together in unison in praise and worship to God. So singing is important for that reason. And that's why we prioritize congregational singing, because we're loving God with our hearts and minds together as His people, the body of Christ.

20:13The fourth and final aspect of their worship is purity, as we saw in verse 30. You see there that the priests and Levites and all the people purified themselves before worship. I want to remind you of Psalm 24, verses 3 through 5. Look on the screen. Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand at his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully, he will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

20:56What this reminds us is that you can desire to Praise God joyfully and thankfully. But if you're not coming before Him with a pure heart, it doesn't matter. You can want to praise God joyfully and thankfully, but you must be pure. See, the bad news is that we are born with impure hearts that lead us to dirty our hands in sin. So those things are connected in that way. But Jesus came to be our mediator, He came to be the way to know and worship God. He was born pure by the power of the Holy Spirit, and He maintained His purity all throughout life by being tempted in every way and yet never committing sin in thought, word, or deed.

21:53After He died and rose again, defeating sin and death, all who believe in Him are justified. We are counted pure, just as He is pure. And now, through faith in Him, we can approach God with clean hands and a pure heart, which are the requirements to come before God and worship at all. So, friends, this purified people, these Israelites whose love for God was shown in their obedience to His Word, they now assemble to worship God joyfully and gratefully with singing. So, as you heard earlier in verses 27 through 43, half of the leaders, along with Ezra and a choir, go south along the wall, singing praise to God. The other half of the leaders, along with Nehemiah and a choir, go north along the wall, singing praise to God, so that the city is surrounded with worshipers. It's a beautiful symbol, isn't it? The whole city and everyone in it, they've all gathered to worship God. It is surrounded by worship and praise to God.

23:03And this special service culminates with them all entering into the temple and making great sacrifices to God. Friends, all of this was possible, not just this special time of worship, but everything the Levites did, everything the priests did daily and weekly and seasonally, all of that was made possible because of what we read in verses 44 through 47. The people are keeping the promises that they made back in chapter 10 to generously provide for God's work and God's workers.

23:38Because the people are keeping their promises to do that, the Levites and the priests are able to devote themselves fully and completely to leading the people in worship, leading the people to know and to appropriate and apply God's word into their daily lives. That is such a great thing, and it's such a necessary thing. Corporate worship, what we do together, yes, on Sunday mornings in this room, but also when we gather to worship through prayer at other times, when we gather together to disciple each other, all of those aspects, corporate worship is the most important part of the believing community.

24:18In America, I think we have it backwards. If you ask most professing believers in America, they will say that Christianity is primarily a vertical relationship between you and God, and any corporate worship, any corporate dimension, is an optional supplement to your personal worship of God. But, friends, when we look at the scripture, we don't get that picture at all. I often remind people when I have those conversations with them that it would have been hard to worship God prior to the 16th century because you wouldn't have the scriptures, you don't have an iPod, you don't have a laptop. So, exactly, what would that look like for you to worship God on your own? You can pray, you can walk along the way and singing. They're commanded to do some of those things in Deuteronomy, aren't they? But it would have been very difficult, and it would have been rather inconceivable for any ancient believer, any medieval believer, any believer really from just prior to the last few hundred years to conceive of personal worship being the cornerstone. Of the Christian life. The cornerstone of the Christian life is corporate worship. Individual worship, which naturally flows out of that, is the supplement. A necessary supplement, to be sure, but a supplement. Robust corporate worship, marked by joy and gratitude, praise and purity, those things flow out of our relationship together, the body of Christ, with God and with one another, through the person and work of Jesus.

26:07See, the beauty of this scene in Nehemiah 12 is that God's people, his family, his body on earth have come together to present themselves as living sacrifices as an act of worship. And friends, that's the very thing that we're called to do. That's what we do afresh each Sunday morning when we gather together for worship. You see, God had done so much for Israel. He never left them. He never forsake them. He kept every promise that he ever made to them.

26:41And I think some of us need to honestly reflect on our lives. We are all living for something. We are all sacrificing for something. We're sacrificing money and time, energy, and resources for whatever we consider to be most. Valuable in life. We're all living for something. We're all sacrificing for something. And it may be that as you reflect on your life, even for some of you who have always professed to be Christians, that you begin to realize that you're actually living for, you're actually sacrificing for something or someone other than God.

27:24That God is not your greatest joy. His worship is not your greatest concern. And so you haven't been offering him worship marked by joy and gratitude, praise, and purity. And so today I want to invite you to consider the person and work of Jesus anew. Consider that he sacrificed his own perfect life in your place. He was willing to give up everything, including his own life, that you might be reconciled to God through him. And as Hebrews tells us, he did all of this for the joy that was set before him. He laid down his life willingly for you.

28:06Would you be willing to lay down your life for him? And if you're already a believer in Jesus, our text today presents us with the opportunity to evaluate whether we are offering God all of our lives or only just a small part of our lives. See, that's. Think if you're a believer, you're probably sacrificing at least a little bit. Sacrificing some time, some money, some energy, some resources for God and His work in the world. But maybe this morning we need to be challenged to offer all of our lives, all of ourselves to God, who gave all of Himself for us.

28:55Let's end with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Let's pray. Father, what a challenge we received this morning from Nehemiah 11 and 12. We see these people who we know are imperfect, who we know struggled with wanting the things of the world and wanting those things more than you sometimes, just like we do.

29:49And yet we see their sincerity this morning as they sacrificed and as they worshiped with joy. In gratitude, with praise, and with purity. And we ask, God, that you would help us to offer our lives, all of our lives, for you and for your people, the body of Christ, for whom Jesus died. Thank you, God, for calling us to be a part of your family. Thank you, God, for sending Jesus to sacrifice Himself so that we could be reconciled to you. You are worthy of worship.

30:33In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio from New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.