Recommitting to The Lord

Well, it is November, and here’s what happens in November. You have, uh, the candy season of October, and then the second that you hit November, everybody turns their eyes towards that next big holiday. If you go out to the stores, they’re all promoting that next big holiday. And that next big holiday is Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Month of Thanksgiving. So growing up, there was some of you maybe have never heard of it growing up. There was this, this holiday in the middle there called Thanksgiving, and we used to have it, it was a thing, and then it’s just slowly disappeared. And I think largely the reason that it has disappeared is because it’s counterintuitive to our culture. There’s always something to sell in the month of Octo, October, we’ve got candy just everywhere right now in my house. And then there’s a lot of things that our culture sells in the month of December with buy stuff for other people, buy stuff for other people.

But the month of Thanksgiving, it’s like, well, man, that’s, that’s hard to sell because it’s actually the opposite. You’re not supposed to be buying anything. You’re supposed to be thankful for what you already have. But we live in a very consumer driven culture. And advertising today is way better than advertising has ever been because they know you and they know me better than they used to in 2015. And I’m sure that this is advanced radically since then. But in 2015, university of Stanford did a big scientific study on how well an algorithm for social media understands your likes, your dislikes understands your personality compared to other people. And here’s what they found. 10 clicks in 10 clicks. The social media algorithm knows you better than your coworker. So that person that you work every single day with, after just 10 clicks, social media could fill out a profile on you that is more accurate than your coworker.

After 70 clicks, social media knows you better than your roommate. After 150 clicks, social media knows you better than your parents or your siblings. And that’s kind of crazy because I, my kids don’t have social media, huh? Jokes on them. Uh, so I definitely know my kids better than the algorithm right now, but someday, when they do have social media, I, I feel like I would understand them better than it would. But after just 150 clicks, it knows them better. And here’s what’s even more wild. 300 clicks. After 300 clicks, social media knows you better than your spouse. That means that if my wife sat down and took a whole test about my likes and my dislikes and my personality, that Facebook or Instagram or whatever algorithm exists out there, that they know me better than my spouse does. And so why do they want to know you so well?

Because they’re trying to convince you that your life is not as good as it should be. Because if your life was great, then you wouldn’t need to buy something. But if your life isn’t great, that means that they can find that exact thing that today, right now, you should need, but you don’t know that you need, and they’ve gotta convince you of it. And we live in a world that nonstop is trying to convince us that we need more and more stuff. And in the middle of that world is a holiday where we stop and we recognize that we don’t need more stuff, that we should be thankful for what we have. If you’ve got a Bible turn with me to Nehemiah. Uh, we’ve got one week left in Nehemiah after today. So next Sunday, I will be wrapping this up in the book of Nehemiah, but today we’ll be in chapter nine.

And here’s what happens in chapter nine, that you have an entire community that has a moment of pause and then goes radically counter-cultural from the world around them. We have different moments where we, as a church, we as individuals, we as Christians, should be able to stop and pause and back up and say, wait a second, does my life look the exact same as everybody else around me? If it does, then there’s something wrong. We should be counter-cultural. So if you’ve got a Bible, Nehemiah chapter nine, we’re just gonna look at the first five verses. This is what it says. Now in the 24th day of this month. So pause. We’re gonna unpack a few things in the first few sentences. Uh, it is the seventh, seventh month. In the seventh month. Seventh month of the Jewish calendar is an important month. There’s a lot of different festivals that happen.

They have just come out of the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Tabernacles or Sukkot. All three of those names are the exact same thing. And what those mean is that they are remembering back to that moment in Israel’s history where God brings them out of Egypt and then they roam around in the desert for 40 years. And in those 40, 40 years, they don’t have permanent housing. So during those 40 years, they are living in tents, uh, similar to a tent, uh, or a, a booth. And so it’s, it’s a little bit more permanent than a tent, but not quite as permanent as a house. And so the Feast of Booths, or Scot, means that for one entire week, everybody is supposed to come out of their house, live in this temporary shelter called a booth. In order to remember that God had been faithful, it’s this reminder that God had been faithful.

So they’re coming outta the Feast of Booths, and now they’re into the 24th day of the seventh month. And this is all the Israel were assembled with fasting. We’re gonna talk about fasting and really unpack that here in a second. So they’re fasting as a whole nation, and while they’re fasting, they’re in sackcloth and with Earth on their heads. Now, physically what they’re doing is they’re expressing outward signs of mourning. Something that we don’t do as a culture, uh, that at that time, if you had a loved one who would die, you would exhibit physical signs of mourn. So you would wear sackcloth or you’d rip your clothes, or you would wear dirt on you. Uh, because it’s trying to demonstrate on the outside what you are currently feeling on the inside. That’s, that’s not something that we do. Uh, probably if you started showing up at sackcloth with dirt on your face, uh, you, you’d, you’d raise a lot of eyebrows.

People would say, what is going on? What is wrong with that person? Uh, but this was a form of mourning. But they’re mourning not because of a death. They’re mourning because of their sin. And it says in the Israelites, separated themselves from all the foreigners and sitting and confess their sins. So now, pause. Uh, ’cause uh, this theme happens often in the Old Testament, and let’s understand what it means and what it doesn’t mean. Uh, this isn’t dividing by race so much as it is dividing by religion. They’re saying that, look, we are about to confess our sins and we’re going to worship God. And Israel, their God was Yahweh. They worship Yahweh. And so they’re saying, okay, if you are in our midst and you don’t worship Yahweh, uh, then our corporate confessional doesn’t make sense for you to participate in. And so we’re just gonna ask that you go ahead and sit this one out.

So they stand together, they confess their sins and the iniquities of their fathers, whoa, that’s also a little countercultural. So not only are they confessing their own sins, who else’s sins are they confessing the sins of their fathers? Probably in your life, in my life, we’ve never done that. We never confessed the sins or fathers. But scripture is really clear that the sins of fathers get passed down from generation to generation. And probably in a tangible way, you’ve either personally experienced that or you’ve seen someone else experience that. You know, someone whose parents struggled with substance abuse and there’s a good chance that their parents struggled with substance abuse, and they are going to be more prone to struggle with substance abuse because that was the norm that they grew up in. Can they, in that, can they be the one that, that that breaks that generational curse?

Yes, they absolutely can, but that sin is more likely to be passed on down. Uh, another very tangible one of how you argue with people. If you’re in a household, you grow up in a household where arguments take place with anger and yelling, then most likely you’ll learn to deal with arguments with anger and yelling, which means most likely you’ll use that same technique with your family and your kids. And so how do you prevent that from getting passed on down? You be the one to stop it. You be the one to say that multiple generations back have struggled with this same thing, but not any more starting with me. That’s for me and my household. We are going to break free of that. And so that’s this idea that they are confessing not just their own sins, but also the sins of the nation, the sins of their forefathers.

Uh, we’re gonna see in a little bit that there’s this cycle of sin that had been happening over and over and over again. And so they’re confessing that, recognizing that it says, and they stood up in their place and read from the book of the law of the Lord their God for a quarter of the day. That’s a long church service. For another quarter of the day, they make confession and worship the Lord their God. On the stairs of the Levites stood Yeshua Banai cad meal, AYA Boonie, AYA Banai and Shanay. I said that wrong. Uh, man, if I would’ve just kept going with confidence, then, uh, I I I think it’s, uh, ani is actually how you say it. But see, here’s the thing. It’s just the thing about Hebrew is that everybody who speaks Hebrew today speaks it very different than they did 2,400 years ago, uh, when, when there would’ve been saying it then.

And so if you just say it with confidence, then keep going. Uh, you should never stop. So I stopped. I apologize. You’ll understand that I don’t actually know it as well as, as I sometimes make it seem like I know it. It says, and they cried with a loud voice to the Lord their God. Then the Levites Yeshua cad mill benaiah, AYA ho Shania Pessia said, stand up and bless the Lord your God, from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise. And so you have the nation come together and they’re doing a couple different things. They’re recognizing the greatness of God, and in recognizing the greatness of God, they’re confessing their sin, both individual sin to each other and collective sin as a nation. And one of the things that they’re participating in is fasting. Fasting.

We see it all through the Old Testament. We see it continue in the New Testament. In this book. We see that Nehemiah at the very beginning, he hears about what’s happening in the nation. His heart breaks. And so he weeps, he prays, and he fasts Ezra, which is a book that is happening simultaneous to the book of Nehemiah, that when Ezra is bringing people back out of exile, that in order to pray for safety, it says that he’s fasting while praying for safety. Now we have this collective fast of the people. So what is fasting? So fundamentally, fasting means to go without food for a set amount of time in order to more fully focus on our need for God. You’ll hear people sometimes say, well, I’m fasting from social media, or I’m fasting from television, or I’m fasting from, insert the blank. And those are wonderful things, but that is not what it means to fast. A fast is specifically to abstain from food. Now, is there benefit from, from

Abstaining, from social media or technology? Absolutely. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s a great thing, but that’s not what scripture is talking about when it’s talking about a fast. Now, fasting in the capital C Church was very, very common for a really, really long time. And yet now it kind of doesn’t exist. Uh, fasting for the first 1500 years of the church, the, the, the church primarily would fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. I mean, almost everybody inside the church fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. And yet it is perhaps the most neglected of all the spiritual disciplines in the church today. Why? Well, I, I would say that fasting probably more so than any other spiritual discipline is pretty counter-cultural because our culture says you need and you want. So you should just fill up whatever, whatever thing that you need and you want, you just need more of that stuff.

And food is one of those things that I, I don’t know about you, but I personally really enjoy food. I’m kinda like a hobbit. I don’t just have three meals a day. I, I got breakfast and second breakfast, and then there’s third breakfast, and then you got lunch, and then you gotta have that snack about an hour, 90 minutes after lunch, and then you got dinner. And then every night before I go to bed, I have a bowl of cereal. Sometimes when I’m trying to be really healthy, I’ll eat fruit loops. So a little bit of fruit right before I go to bed. And so rarely, and I mean, rarely does my body go without food for an extended amount of time. And so why do we fast in in scripture? Uh, we fast in scripture because when you go without food, you recognize the need that your body has for food.

Your body starts to tell you, some of us get hangry. So when you haven’t eaten, like you can tell that you haven’t eaten. I’ve got kids, they get very hangry. I mean, they are hungry. And that demonstrates itself by them being angry. It happened yesterday morning. We, we got, we had the late breakfast and it, it passed that amount of time. And so then there was just. And so your body physiologically recognizes the need for food. And here’s why we fast in order to help us feel that need for food and say, spiritually, my soul longs for God even more so than my body hungers for food. Uh, I need God more than I need food. But we rarely feel it. Look at what John Wesley describes. Uh, this is in the 17 hundreds. So John Wesley’s, the father of the Methodist Church, uh, here he is describing the lack of fasting that he sees.

And he says this, and I fear there are now thousands of Methodists. So-called both in England and Ireland, who following the same bad example, have entirely left off fasting who are so far from fasting twice a week that they do not fast twice in the month. Can you imagine? That goes on to say, yay, are there not some of you who do not fast for one day from the beginning of the year to the end? But what excuse can there be for this? I do not say for those that call themselves members of the Church of England, but for any who profess to believe the scripture to be the word of God, since according to this, the man that never fasts is no more in the way to heaven than the man that never prays. Now, I, I’m not trying to tell you that I agree with Wesley, that if you don’t fast and you’re not a Christian and you’re not gonna have it.

So, so back up from that. But here’s what I am recognizing, that for 1500 years, this was a normal practice inside the church, and then it just kind of went away. And I would bet that most of us in this room do not have a regular habit of participating and fasting, and yet we see it throughout all of scripture Jesus. In Matthew chapter six, he says, when you fast, and then he describes the right way to fast, he says, don’t fast like the Pharisees who do it in an outward expression of their holiness. But he says, instead, fasten a way that demonstrates between you and God internally. Yet other people don’t need to know when you’re fasting. And so Jesus didn’t say, Hey, if you fast one day, he doesn’t say maybe sometime occasionally. No. He says, when you fast and expectation that we would be fasting, fasting helps us to recognize our need for God.

There’s some specific reasons to fast inside of scripture. Number one, we fast in order to hunger for God. We’re trying to feel that hunger physically and say, I need that same hunger spiritually. Number two, to grow in holiness. That in the Old Testament that the temple, it housed the presence of God, the holy of Holies. And the temple was meant to be this set apart for the nation of Israel. That what made them different is that they had the presence of God, of Yahweh, and it made them distinct from every other nation of the world. And if they would live according to God’s ways that God would set them apart, of course they don’t end up doing that. Then after Jesus comes the the Holy of Holies, it says that the curtain is ripped. Why? Because now the Holy Spirit is inside the temple, but the temple is no longer a physical location.

Where’s the temple? It’s inside of our body that as Christians, we are the temple of God. And that when I am pursuing God, that the Holy Spirit lives inside of me. And I am meant to be that light on a hill, that because of what Jesus has done for me on the cross, I now can have free reign in my relationship with God and the Holy Spirit indwells me. And so when I’m fasting, I’m attempting to grow in holiness that me as the temple of God might further demonstrate the gospel by how I live to the world around me. That in scripture we fast to overcome temptation. If you have sin in your life, fasting can help mourn that sin. It can help name that sin. It can help say, I, I’ve been struggling with this over and over and over again. And so I’m going to go on a fast to try and finally break this sin in my life.

We can fast to seek answers to prayer. You’re seeking discernment from God. And so you fast in that season, we can fast to become more compassionate, that we are fasting in a way that recognizes that there are other people in the world that don’t have all the things that I do. There are other people in the world that don’t have all the food that I have. And so in fasting, it is a compassionate act that helps me to sympathize with what they are walking through Dallas Willard in describing fasting says this, fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding him and a source of sustenance beyond food. Through it, we learn by experience that God’s word to us is a life substance that is not food, bread alone that gives life, but also the words that proceed from the mouth of God. And he goes on to say, fasting teaches temperance or self-control and therefore teaches moderation and restraint with regard to all fundamental drives.

Now, if you’re in this room and, and you’ve never fasted before in your entire life, and let me give a a, a few different asterisks around it. Uh, number one, not everybody should fast. So like if you’re a child in the room or you’re, you’re still growing and you should not jump into fasting, uh, if you’ve got any health concerns right now that you should not fast, if you’re even questionable on whether or not you have health concerns and you should ask your physician. But if you are of normal health, then fasting should be something and you are a Christian that you should say, okay, how could I implement this into my life? And I’m not telling you that you should start with a 40 day fast. Alright, let’s, let’s back it on up a little bit. Start really easy, start by fasting one meal.

But, but if you just choose not to eat and don’t do anything with it, then you’re just going hungry. Replace that meal by feeling that hunger and translating it into prayer, into time of God, into something that is pushing you towards a pursuit of God and holiness. Uh, that oftentimes if people fast a day, the early church for a long time, uh, the typical pattern is they would fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, but they would either fast from dawn till dusk, so they would eat either before the sun came up and then again after the sun went down. Or, uh, oftentimes you see people inside of church history that they would fast on Thursday night. So Thursday night they would have a, a meal like at six o’clock, and then they would not have another meal until Friday at like, um, seven o’clock. And so they would do that because Jesus died on the cross on Friday.

And so it was a way of relating to the gospel and the crucifixion of Jesus. So if you’ve never fasted before, I would just challenge you to consider it and to say, okay, how could I just baby step my way into it? But I would also add this, can you imagine if we became a church that actively pursued a holiness through fasting? Can you imagine if we were a church that was on our knees praying to God for God to do a work in our community, in our city, in our state, and we were seeking the face of God through fasting, uh, God will do an amazing work. And so here’s what we see in Nehemiah Chapter nine, the people of Israel, they’re fasting, they’re confessing sin. They’re mourning for their sin, and then they remember the goodness of God. Now, now that word mourning, mourning is not a common thing that we do.

Everything about the word mourning sounds icky and uncomfortable, and I don’t really like that. But mourning isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Scripturally, mourning is a really healthy and good thing. Look at what it says in Ecclesiastes chapter seven, verse two. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Now, if you gave me the option, Hey, do you wanna go to a feast or you wanna go mourn? It’s not, I’m not thinking very long before I determine which one I’m gonna go to. And yet, if we just try and constantly be up here in life, everything’s a high, everything is celebration, everything is great, everything is wonderful, then we miss out on the fact that that’s not how life is.

There are seasons that we go through of mourning that throughout scripture. Here’s what we find. We find seasons that go up and down, up and down, that there are whole books, and there’s definitely huge chunks of scripture that are about lamenting. There’s a book in the Bible called The Book of Lamentations, and it’s an entire book of lamenting out mourning, pain and suffering and sin and confession. And so there’s this practice of mourning that is a beneficial and healthy thing that we should see inside of our own lives. Mourning helps us to recognize the really good times because when, when we’re always trying to be up here and all of a sudden the bottom falls out, then we’re so taken aback. But you should have seasons in your life where it, it’s okay to say, Hey, I’m, I’m mourning the loss of this. I’m mourning the loss of something that I had expected that didn’t end up happening.

I mourning the loss of loved ones. And you, you never stop mourning the loss of loved ones. If you’ve lost a loved one coming into this Thanksgiving and Christmas season, that can be a really challenging time. And that’s okay. You don’t need to feel guilty or bad. And I sometimes we, we don’t like being around uncomfortable people that are mourning. We’re like, Hey, can you just get over it? Can you just stop that? But mourning is a natural human response, and God gives us mourning as a way to lean into him in a divine and holy way. And then what happens in the rest of this chapter, verses six through 38, we see the longest prayer in all scripture. I would encourage you to go spend some time this week, maybe time this week while you’re fasting, read all of Nehemiah chapter nine. It’s a beautiful prayer.

And here’s what happens in this prayer. They’re remembering the history of Israel and the history of Israel, that they’re going step by step through the whole thing. And here’s what we see happen. Over and over and over. We see this sin cycle that first Israel walks with God, and because they walk with God, there are these blessings that happen. Then Israel forsakes God. And because they forsake God, it leads to disaster. Then they recognize their mistake. Israel then repents of their sin, they say, God, please help us. God answers them. God brings about deliverance. And then it repeats. So God brings deliverance, it brings them back up to them walking to God and blessings, which then leads to them forsaken God disaster, repent over and over and over and over again. That’s, that’s really the Old Testament. There’s this cycle that happens over and over.

And so Nehemiah is the people recommitting themselves to God and they’re looking at their individual sin, the national sin, and they’re saying, okay, we are going to recommit ourselves to you. Here’s a couple of really important things that we see in Nehemiah Chapter nine. Number one is that God was always there with them. You, you see some really bad stuff in Nehemiah nine. They’re mourning all these terrible things that have happened to their nation. And can I just tell you, inside of our church, there are bad things that are happening every single day. Every day our church gets a call about somebody who has lost a loved one. Every day our church gets a call about someone who is in the hospital every day. We have marriages that are falling apart every day. We have adults who grow, their grown children have walked away from the Lord, and there’s just brokenness that exists there.

But that is an ongoing thing that exists inside of every community of believers. And we don’t shy away from that. Why? Because scripture tells us that’s that’s going to happen. That is happening all the time. But here’s the promise that we see in Nehemiah chapter nine, that no matter what you are going through, no matter what happens when the bottom falls out of your life, that God is there, that God is not forsaken you, that God is walking with you. And there’s these two beautiful gifts that God gives us for every season of our life. Number one is that he gives us the word of God. He gives us the Bible that when we’re walking through those seasons, that we can read through scripture that God that relates to us. And so that’s why we have whole books called lamentation about mourning. There are celebrations in scripture and there’s mourning in scripture.

And both of those things are going to be a part of our lives. And we shouldn’t shy away from those moments, but we should lean into those moments and say, God, what are you teaching me during this struggle? During this challenge? God, what are you teaching me? The other thing that we see that God gives us, and you see it in Nehemiah chapter nine, is community. Community is not just a large gathering on Sunday morning. I I, I know that it’s in our name is a church, and what we talk about the community of believers, but community is a small group of people that you are doing life with. That’s why we’re constantly encouraging you to try out a connect group, try out a small group, try out a Bible study class, because it, this is healthy, this is wonderful. And scripture tells us that we should not neglect the gathering together in worship.

And so the assembly of believers is important, but there’s this next step where you need to be doing life with people that can call you out when you’ve got junk in your life, when you’ve got sin in your life, you need to be doing life with people that when you are in a season of mourning, you don’t have to mourn alone and they will mourn with you. That’s one of the beautiful things about a multi-generational church. And that’s our goal and our desire is to continue to be a multi-generational church because you want the wisdom and actually scripture commands us to be pouring into the next generation. So if you’re an empty nester in here, it’s probably easy to sometimes to come to church. And you see that young family and they got four kids and they got the stroller, and they got that little diaper bag, and there’s snot everywhere.

I don’t know how that happens with young kids, but kids have snot on their face, and mom and dad have snot on their shirts and they’re wiping their snot on another kid’s snot. Then it’s easy when you’re past that stage to look at people in that stage and say, whoa, man, I do not miss that. Huh? That stinks for you guys. Good luck. Ha. Instead, what? What could happen if, if we’re a church where multi-generationally, an older generation says, okay, I’m gonna walk alongside, I’m gonna be a mentor couple to younger couples so that I can give them the encouragement that, Hey, it does get better. Hey, you’re gonna have days where it feels awful and it feels like you can hardly get anywhere, and it’s so hard to get to church, but can I just encourage you that it’s gonna get better? You’re gonna get past this not stage, I promise you’ll get there.

And even as crazy as it sounds, you will have moments in life that you look back and you missed the stage that you’re in. And oftentimes, people that are in that, in that stage, they hear that and they don’t wanna hear that because they’re like, I just went out of this stage. But that’s the, the beauty of community and multi-generational is pouring into people with the experience, the wisdom, the discernment that God has given you. Community also helps us to recognize our own junk. Do you have people in your life that have the open invitation to call out sin, that they can call you up and say, Hey, Kurt, hey, this is something I’m noticing in you, and it’s a concern that I’ve got. And do you know what happens when people call out sin in your life? You get defensive. That’s the natural human reaction.

If someone says, Hey, you need to do better than this. You’re like, oh, yeah, well, you also need to do better. How about that? But you need people that can call out the sin in your life. Here’s the thing that when I read Nehemiah, especially chapter nine, here’s a question that comes to my mind. What about the sin in our lives in Nehemiah nine? They’re mourning their sin, they’re repenting, they’re turning to God. And and the same is true for us, that if our sin doesn’t cause us to mourn than something is wrong. In Psalm 1 19, 1 36, it says this, my eyes shed streams of tears because people do not keep your law. The psalmist is mourning that people have God’s law and choose not to follow it. And John Piper has this beautiful quote where he says, the gospel becomes glorious when the depth and the power of our sin is seen as grievous.

You see our sin, when we really understand it, when we really mourn it, when we really wrestle with it, it helps us to more fully comprehend the gospel. That Jesus didn’t come to die on the cross for good people didn’t. Jesus didn’t come to die on the cross. For people that just needed a little bit of help, Jesus came and died on the cross for sinners that were totally separated away from God, that were totally incapable of ever getting to God in their own and I and one of those sinners. And you are one of those sinners. So our sin should cause us to mourn because in the mourning of our sins, it helps us to better understand and grasp the gospel.