Waking up to the Crisis

NEHEMIAH 1

God woke Nehemiah up to the shameful condition of Israel. News brought to him by his brother, Hanani, distressed him (3,4). He learned that there was absolutely no sign of Jerusalem being rehabilitated - and in fact the remnant of Jews living in the ruins of Israel were being oppressed by their unbelieving neighbours and totally defeated. What should have been their territory was being used and abused by others with no concern for God’s name or his glory. The people of God were scattered. They could not meet together to learn, worship or serve God positively. The scattering of God’s people is Satan’s strategy and it is a crisis.

The degree to which the sad condition of the church does not affect us, is the degree to which we have lost our sense of God’s calling. Other things have captured our attention. The first step to reforming the church is to understand the state from which it has decayed. If we have no information about what the church should be - we have nothing to compare its current state with. We might easily assume that what we experience IS what the church is like. Worse still, we might then reject it - turn aside from the church as a waste of time because we have judged it based on what we have experienced, rather than what Christ intends it to be.

Start asking God some questions. Start reading the book of Acts. Read about reformations and revivals that have occurred all over the world. Ask God to open your eyes to what the church ought to be and ask him to affect your heart concerning its current situation. Like Nehemiah’s Jerusalem, the remnant of the church in New Zealand is in great trouble and shame. The walls have been broken down and its gates destroyed by fire.

It is not stretching the comparison too far to say that as the walls set the boundary for what was and wasn’t “Jerusalem”, so too there are broken down walls for the church. Those walls are the teachings of the Bible that define what it means to be one of the people of God – an inhabitant of the City of God. You either live inside or outside the walls. If there are no walls and anyone can come in and out, it is impossible to tell who is your brother and who is your enemy. The gates of Jerusalem allowed the people to admit or refuse admission to who they trusted.

The broken walls and burned out gates of Jerusalem illustrate the situation when the church no longer pays attention to the Bible and each person has his or her own idea of what it means to be ‘Christian’. Nehemiah was devastated to think that Jerusalem, the city of God, was being used and plundered by anyone who cared to break in and camp there. The church needs to be defined by Bible teaching. The vague, imprecise understanding that people have of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and a member of his church is evidence of the damage that must be repaired.