Pray Lots. Work Hard.

Will you please pray with me? Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Especially with this passage, I have emphasized that the story of Ezra and Nehemiah moves in a cycle. The cycle is common to many stories in Scripture. God gives a decree, as he did through Cyrus. He provides for his people so that they can accomplish his will. Then God’s enemies attack his people as they try to perform that will. God’s people defeat their enemies with God’s help. They consecrate themselves to God. And then, over and over again in the Old Testament, they compromise in their allegiance to God.

In Nehemiah 4 we are at the point in that cycle where God’s enemies prepare to attack his people. We are watching that part of the story unfold for the second time. We already saw it in Ezra. Now we are watching it again in Nehemiah. We should pay close attention, because Paul told us in 2 Timothy 3:12 that all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

Attack from God’s enemies did not disappear when we moved from the Old Testament to the New. The question is not whether you will be attacked, but when, if the attack is not already on you. So we had better ask how we will respond. Where can we look for an example of how we should answer when the enemies of God attack his people? Nehemiah 4 is a marvelous example. It is a kind of call and response. God’s enemies act, and Nehemiah and his men react in a godly way, four times.

In this sermon I am going to walk straight through the passage, one piece at a time. There are four sections, and we will take them in order.

Despised, They Pray and Work

The first section is Nehemiah 4:1–6. When God’s people are despised, they pray, and then they work to prove their enemies wrong.

A few weeks ago I preached from chapter 3, the list of the men who built the wall. That chapter is a kind of 10,000-foot view of the story that chapters 4 through 6 will cover. Here in chapter 4 we pick up the story that the end of chapter 2 left off. At the end of chapter 2 they had just decided, with Nehemiah’s help, that they would build the wall. As the story picks up in chapter 4, we find Sanballat and his friends doing what they are always doing. It is just what they were doing in 2:19, at the end of the last chapter. They are making fun of God’s people, taunting and jeering.

But after the list of mighty men, the jeering sounds a little different to me. I argued a few weeks ago that chapter 3 copies the structure used earlier in the Old Testament for the list of David’s mighty men. It says, in effect, this is the list of Nehemiah’s mighty men who built the wall. After that list, the jeering does not have the same gut-punch that the earlier jeering had.

Verse 1 of chapter 4 says that they were angry and greatly enraged. Jeering only really works if you are not angry and greatly enraged. Some of us were older siblings. When we were sinfully teasing our younger siblings, we were not offended by the jeers that came back once they were upset and angry. We were trying to get a rise out of them. We thought we had succeeded when they jeered and taunted us out of anger. Sanballat finds himself on the younger-brother end of that equation. He is upset. He is angry. And why is he so enraged if he really believes what he is saying?

He does not believe that the Jews are a feeble, weak people who will never finish the wall. Otherwise he would not be so angry. Tobiah does not believe that a fox will be able to knock down their finished work. Otherwise he would not be so upset.

From where we stand in God’s fight against evil, the jeering is starting to sound the same way. Making fun of white heterosexual Christian men does not have the same mic-drop energy it had just a few years ago. You can call it a vibe shift. You can call it a momentum swing. Call it whatever you want. The jeering does not land the same way, because our enemies are angry and greatly enraged. It has become clear to them that we are not dead and gone. We are still a force to be reckoned with, and it makes them angry.

Sanballat and Tobiah call the Jews feeble. They say the project will fail. Today we are called losers, or backwards, bigoted, unkind, racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, whatever it is we are called. We are jeered at. We are taunted. How do you respond when you are jeered at?

Notice that Nehemiah and his men do not start dishing it back. They do not turn to their enemies and jeer in return. They do not try to take verbal vengeance. They turn to God. They trust him. They pray, and then they get to work. Brothers and sisters, we have the same choice when we are maligned. We can try to take matters into our own hands, or we can trust the God who says, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay.” And we can pray.

They Pray

Look at the prayer in Nehemiah 4. The bare fact that Nehemiah’s reaction to the taunt is prayer is worth noticing. Prayer will be your first reaction, or your reaction at all, only if you really believe that God is on your side.

You need to unlearn the secular-sacred divide entirely. You will turn and pray, “Lord, help me,” when a competitor treats you unfairly only if you believe that God is interested in your business and actually wants to see it advance. You will turn and pray when political opponents malign you only if you believe that God actually wants you to win that campaign. If you think that what you are doing does not matter much to God in the first place, you will not turn to him and ask for help.

A couple of summers ago I got to play church-league softball. We would pray before the game as a team. We prayed that we would be sportsmanlike and honorable. We prayed that we would not get hurt, which mattered more as we all got older. We would not pray that we would beat the other team into the ground. We did not think God wanted us to win and them to lose. We were Christian brothers playing a game of softball. This was not an us-versus-them thing.

If you think your whole life is basically one big softball game, and that God is not really on your side or anyone’s side, you will not ask him to help you defeat your enemies. But when you realize that you are in a war, a war between the powers and principalities of darkness and the God of light, and that your commander Jesus wants you in the fight and wants you to defeat your enemies, then you will turn to him and ask for help.

Now look at exactly what Nehemiah prays. “Hear, O God, for we are despised. Turn back their taunt on their own heads and give them up to be plundered in a land where they are captives.” He starts by praying that their jeering would come true of them, that they would be punished by exile the way Israel had been punished by exile.

Maybe because the book you are holding has gilded edges and a leather cover, you did not notice how serious that prayer is. Sanballat and Tobiah basically made fun of them and said, “You’ll never amount to anything.” Nehemiah turns to God and says, “Make that true of them, God. Turn it back on their own heads.” That is a serious prayer. And he is not done.

He continues, “Do not cover their guilt, and let not their sin be blotted out from your sight, for they have provoked you to anger in the presence of the builders.” Whoa. He is praying, “Lord, do not cover their sins the way you have graciously covered ours. Do not pass over their iniquities and let them continue in patience. They have provoked you in the presence of the builders who are doing your work. They have discouraged your workers, Lord. Cut them down. Wipe them out. Do not forgive them.”

This kind of prayer is called an imprecatory prayer. It is a prayer that calls down a curse on your enemies. First, why is Nehemiah so angry at their taunting? Then we will deal with what the prayer itself is doing.

Nehemiah is so angry because their jeering is an obvious propaganda campaign, designed to make God’s builders afraid. It is an obvious attempt to stand in the way of God’s will. He has just built momentum at the end of chapter 2, and right away they step in to slow the people’s momentum for building the wall. They are trying to prevent further construction, and further construction is God’s will. That is why Nehemiah is so angry.

You cannot read a prayer like this and not wonder, “Is it even okay to pray like that? Am I ever supposed to pray like that?” Start with an easier question. Was Nehemiah right to pray like this?

That question is easy, because in biblical narrative, when a character is doing something wrong, the author leaves clues. He shows us that the character is dangerous, or that the character is making a sinful mistake. There are no clues at all that Nehemiah is doing anything wrong. He is held out in the entire book as an example for us to follow, including in this prayer. And he is not alone in praying this way in the Old Testament.

In Psalm 109, David prays:

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children wander about and beg, seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit. May the creditor seize all that he has. May strangers plunder the fruits of his toil. Let there be none to extend kindness to him, nor to pity any of his fatherless children.

In Jeremiah 18, the prophet prays:

Hear me, O Lord. Listen to the voice of my adversaries. Should good be repaid with evil? Yet they have dug a pit for my life. Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them, to turn away your wrath from them. Therefore deliver up their children to famine. Give them over to the power of the sword. Let their wives become childless and widowed. May their men meet death by pestilence, their young be struck down by the sword in battle.

A quick sampling of the Old Testament shows godly saints, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, and David, who all pray imprecatory prayers on occasion.

You might ask whether something changed when we got to the New Testament. Maybe a shift means we should not pray like this anymore. That is what almost every commentator I read on this passage said. One of them, speaking for the rest, said something like this: the Christian has been shown a better way to answer evil. In other words, they did not know better back then, but now Jesus has told us to love our enemies, and so we know better. That is bad reasoning, and it ignores many passages of the Bible.

It is bad reasoning because we cannot say that the New Testament gives us a whole new standard of good and evil. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If he holds something out as exemplary, as a good example and not merely as something allowable, it will not later become embarrassing. God’s standards do not change. God allowed divorce because of the Israelites’ hardness of heart, but he never held divorce out as a good example to follow. It was an allowance. These prayers in the Old Testament are held out as righteous examples for the saints.

That way of thinking also ignores and misunderstands many passages, starting with the one it quotes. The commentators are usually quoting Matthew 5:44, where Jesus corrects the religious leaders’ faulty understanding of the Old Testament. Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” But he starts like this: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” That is not an Old Testament quotation. It is nowhere in the Old Testament. It was the faulty understanding of the religious leaders of the day, which Jesus is correcting. The Old Testament was very clear that we must love our enemies. The principle Jesus gives, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, comes straight from Exodus 23.

Exodus 23:4–5 says, “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it. You shall rescue it with him.” That is love of enemies in the form of case law.

The biblical tension between imprecatory prayers and the command to love your enemies is not a tension between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is a tension within the Old Testament itself, and it is a tension within the New Testament. There are plenty of New Testament imprecatory prayers and desires. In Galatians 1:8–9, Paul says that if anyone preaches another gospel, he wants that person to be accursed. We read a few minutes ago from Revelation 16, which is another clear example, and from Revelation 6, where the martyrs in heaven pray and long for God to avenge their deaths. The New Testament also commands us to sing the Psalms, which includes the imprecatory psalms.

So we are supposed to learn to sing with David in Psalm 139. Your enemies take your name in vain. “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? Do I not loathe them with complete hatred?” And at the same time we are supposed to obey Jesus’ command to love our enemies. The apparent tension is not between Old Testament and New Testament. It is there in the Old Testament, and it is there in the New.

So how are we supposed to pray, with Nehemiah, “Lord, destroy them,” and also love our enemies? How does that fit together?

Pastor Dustin gave a really good answer when we were talking about this in our men’s group thread recently. He said that we should love our enemies the way God loves his enemies, and we should hate God’s enemies the way God hates his enemies. We should be imitators of God. The Bible commands us to do both, so we need hearts tuned by God’s grace well enough to emulate God in both.

God loves his enemies. While we were still sinners, he sent Christ to die for us. He makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust. Plenty of wicked men will fall asleep tonight with their bellies full of food. God loves his enemies. And yet he is a God who feels indignation every day, who hates all evildoers.

So we should learn to love our enemies, preach the gospel indiscriminately, and show them love and kindness, just as our God showed love and kindness to us when we were sinners. And we should learn to hate God’s enemies with a complete hatred when they stand against the God we love more than life.

Yes, we should sometimes emulate Nehemiah’s imprecatory prayer against God’s enemies. This text gives us a good example of when we would pray them, and of whom we might pray them against. Nehemiah does not pray this against every random unbeliever he runs into. He prays it against enemies who are actively opposing God’s good plans, people who are high-handedly standing in the way of what God has said should be done. He is confronted by people who have made themselves the enemies of God by trying to undo what God has said should be done.

Here are a few modern examples of when you might pray imprecatory prayers. You might pray an imprecatory prayer against those who run abortion clinics or advocate for abortion. It does not get much worse than infanticide. You might pray imprecatory prayers against the bad guys in a just war. You might pray imprecatory prayers against political tyrants who purposely misuse their power to hurt the people under their charge. Those are only a few examples.

As you pray them, a few principles should temper what you mean when you say, with the Psalms, “Oh, that you would break the teeth of the wicked, O God.” As you pray that, remember that the anger of man still does not produce the righteousness of God. Be angry and do not sin. Remember that vengeance belongs to the Lord. It is not for us to take into our own hands. And do not be like Jonah, who is disappointed when God grants his enemies repentance. We are not against the wicked personally. If God turns his enemies into his family, as he has done for us, then we should rejoice and welcome them into fellowship, not hold them at bay.

They Work

In verse 6, God’s enemies have taunted his people. God’s people pray this imprecatory prayer, and then they set about to prove their enemies wrong. Nehemiah says that the people had a mind to work, so that the wall was built up to half its height.

They did not have a mind to sit around discouraged and throw a pity party because all their neighbors were against them. They had a mind to get after it and prove them wrong, because God was on their side. The jeering did not get under their skin. They let it motivate them.

Attack Coming, They Pray and Set a Guard

The next section is verses 7–9. God’s people hear that an attack is coming, so they pray and set a guard.

In verse 7, Sanballat and his friends hear that their taunting turned out to be wrong and that the work on the wall is going along swimmingly. No problems so far, despite the jeering. Then Nehemiah hears that all their neighbors, all kinds of people groups, are banding together to attack Jerusalem. They plan to wreck the building by launching a military campaign. The goal does not seem to be only an all-out frontal assault. Their goal is to cause confusion, and so they keep the propaganda campaign going.

How does Nehemiah respond in verse 9? First he prays. He turns to God and asks for help. Again, brothers and sisters, when you are attacked, pray lots. Not just once. Pray lots.

After Nehemiah prays, he sets a guard. Good, profound, obvious theology is happening right there in verse 9. Pray, and set a guard. There is no inconsistency between praying for God’s help and setting a guard to defend the people.

Some people try to be more spiritual than God. They say, “Well, Nehemiah, if you prayed, why are you setting a guard now? Don’t you trust God to keep you safe? After all, you prayed.” Nehemiah would say, “Of course I trust God. I trust him to use this guard to keep us safe.”

Brothers and sisters, we should feel no inconsistency about working our hardest and trusting God. The Bible puts those things right together. I am sure you remember Philippians 2:12–13. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” We work our hardest because we trust in God.

Maybe we have forgotten that even our effort is a gift from God. God is the one who gives us the effort and the desire to do good works in the first place. When we are blessed to do good works, that was his gift, working through us. His power on display in us. David Mathis puts this in a pithy way somewhere. He says, “You receive the gift of effort by doing.” Amen. When we try our hardest, we are not relying on ourselves instead of relying on God. We are relying on God to give us the gift of effort and the desire to work. That is why Nehemiah prays and sets a guard.

Perhaps you have heard someone say, “You should rely on God and not on yourself,” and the insinuation is that it would be hypocritical to tire yourself out working your hardest and also rely on God to help you. The popular way to express this theology is, “Let go and let God.” Thinking this way sounds like a call to quit working so hard, quit trusting your own efforts, and just trust God to take care of it. That is not the way the Bible tells us to think. It will never create a people who are excited to build and fight together.

Nehemiah is not condemned for praying for God’s protection and setting a guard. He is trusting that God would use his efforts to protect the people and the project. We know this naturally in all kinds of settings. God uses means to accomplish his purpose.

We do not say “let go and let God” in evangelism. We believe that God saves, yes, but God saves through his word, and so we preach the good news. We do not say “let go and let God” when a marriage is on the rocks. You should buy flowers and chocolates, write a great love letter, and take your wife on the best date she has ever been on. You do not say “let go and let God” in the middle of a home invasion. You do not hit your knees when you hear the front door open at 3:00 a.m. You hit the intruder, praying for strength and accuracy. You do not say “let go and let God” when money is tight. You do not just pray that money would magically appear in the bank account. You look for side hustles and ways to save money. You are not thinking “let go and let God” when you pray for a baby. People are not usually just praying and hoping for another immaculate conception. We understand that means are involved.

Do not try to be more spiritual than God. He loves to use means to accomplish his will. “Let go and let God” thinking is really just a way to avoid responsibility. As Andy Naselli says in his book on higher life theology, it emphasizes passivity and not activity. If you want to learn more about why “let go and let God” is a terribly harmful idea, read his 2017 book, No Quick Fix. It is excellent.

So God’s people hear that this attack is coming. They pray and they set a guard. They see no inconsistency between having a mind to work and trusting in God. They set their minds both on the work and on the hope that God is for them, and they press ahead in the work as well as they possibly can.

Friends Fear, They Remember and Stand Firm

The next section is verses 10–14. When friends and family fear, God’s people remember God and stand firm.

Even before Sanballat and the others launch an attack, they continue the propaganda campaign. Rumors are flying. In Judah, the friends and family of the builders start saying, “The strength of those who bear the burdens is failing. There is too much rubble. By ourselves we will not be able to build the wall.”

Hear that last sentence. “By ourselves we will not be able to build the wall.” In other words, we cannot afford to alienate those enemies. We need their help. Remember when they offered to help us with this project? We are going to have to go back and get their help. That is the only way we will be able to finish.

At the same time, the attackers are making sure the word spreads. “They will not know or see till we come among them and kill them and stop the work.” So friends and family start showing up in Jerusalem. Verse 12 says they come ten times, begging the builders to return and leave Jerusalem.

Gentlemen, imagine you are there working on Jerusalem. The village leader shows up. Your wife and your kids need you alive, he says. Who will care for them if you are gone? Come home. Return to us. We are not strong enough to defeat all these people allied against us. And they do not come just once to ask you to return. Ten times. Ten times they keep coming back. “Please, honey, come home.”

Gentlemen, what would you have done?

Nehemiah organizes a guard in verse 13, and then he addresses the people in verse 14. “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.”

Notice why he says they need not fear. They ought to remember the Lord, who has worked salvation for his people over and over and over again. Remember God. This is just what he does for his people. He saves us. Remember him. Do not fear. And then fight. Fight for your family and your homes.

When he says, “Fight for your family and your homes,” he must not mean fight merely to preserve your family and your homes. The best way to preserve their families and homes was to abandon Jerusalem, head back to the village, and hole up. He must mean something more like this: fight for the civilization you want your home to be in. Fight for the future you want your family to live in. If we retreat now, these enemies will rule over us as far into the future as we can see. But right now we have a chance. We have a chance to defeat the Ammonites and rid ourselves of the pagan influence of Sanballat. We have a chance to worship God on his holy hill as a joyful nation again. So do not give up. Stand firm. Fight for your family and your homes.

Nehemiah’s speech reminds us that the list of things we should be willing to die for, and fight for, is longer than the basic gospel truths. I grew up in an era of individualism and societal self-loathing. The air around me taught me that nothing is more important than my own freedom and autonomy, and that society is pretty bad. Certainly not worth dying for. It never would have occurred to me, growing up, to die for the country I saw represented on the news.

I knew that if I were ever at gunpoint and someone demanded that I disown Christ, I would not do it. But anything short of that, I was probably willing to live and fight another day. I am not convinced that is right anymore. I have had to unlearn that skepticism and that pessimism about the world.

Brothers, we need to believe again that there are things so precious they are worth dying for, just as these men were willing to die, even if it meant their families would be without them. Jerusalem was worth it to them. Sisters, you need to regain a sense of values so precious, so abidingly good, that you would of course be devastated, but ultimately proud, if your man gave his life for them.

This is not some crazy new level of faith. This is what Jesus has called us to from the beginning. He told us to count the cost. He told us that if anyone loves brothers or sisters, or wives or mothers, more than him, that person is not worthy of him. He told us that if we want to be his disciples, we must pick up our cross and follow him.

Biblical examples like Nehemiah and his men, or the conquest in Joshua, or David’s mighty men, all show us that we ought to be willing to lay our lives down for God’s mission in our time. In the days of Joshua and David, that mission was to conquer Canaan, and many died for it. In the days of Nehemiah, it was to rebuild Jerusalem, and they were ready to die for it. They put their lives on the line to fight for the society, the civilization, the biblical ideal they wanted the world to move toward, because they loved God and wanted generations yet unborn to live closer to that God.

Learning the history of our own country has helped me wake up from my selfish, individualistic mindset. In the early 1600s, William Bradford and his church moved from England to Holland because King James would not allow them to worship the way they believed God’s word required. They picked their families up and moved so that they could worship the way they believed God was commanding them to worship. The conditions in Holland were simply awful compared with England. They remained there for some time, until they decided that the degeneracy of the youth in Holland was affecting their kids too much. They were finding it difficult to give their children a Christian education and inculturation. They knew they could not go back to England, and Holland was not a place to stay. So they contracted the Mayflower, sailed sixty-six days in rough seas, and spent eighty-one days sailing Cape Cod in search of a settlement.

When they finally made it ashore, they dug holes in the ground and covered them with sticks for shelter. Half of them died in the first year. And they counted it worth it, to worship God the way he had commanded and to give their children a Christian inculturation.

Would your name have been on the passenger manifest of the Mayflower? Would it have been worth it to you?

The vision of William Bradford and the vision of Nehemiah are quite similar. Both want to create a civilization where they can worship God the way he requires, raise their children to worship him the way he requires, and see that continue for generations. That vision is still worth dying for today.

And God has given us an astonishing opportunity to advance it, to make a great dent with his help. Our society is beginning to reap the fruit of its foolishness. We are entering a crisis of competency. The education and inculturation most people have received is not enough to deal with life and be productive members of society, let alone rulers in it.

These are the days God has called us to lay our lives down in. We get to lay our lives down to raise children who will be tomorrow’s kings, to give them the best education we can so that no one can accuse them of incompetence, so that responsibility naturally flows to them. We get to pave the way for them. I consider us something like David, who gets everything ready that he can for the temple so that Solomon can build it. We get to accumulate the land and store up the wealth, build and reform institutions, create new family traditions, regain biblical literacy, and relearn the Psalms, so that our children can launch farther than we ever could have.

Nehemiah and his men fought for a society ruled by God. They were building among the rubble. God has given us a chance to take up the same mantle. It is a vision still worth living and dying for.

All of Nehemiah’s men had a choice. They could stay in Jerusalem, or they could abandon the project. Because our enemies are not at our throats, we actually have to make that choice in the opposite order. We have to choose to opt into the fight. By default, a comfortable American lifestyle leaves us on the sidelines.

Will you fight for your brothers and sisters, your wives, your sons and daughters, and your homes? Are you excited to join the cause against secularism?

When friends and family fear, Nehemiah and his men remember God, and they stand firm.

God Saves, They Get Back to Work

The final section is verses 15–23. When God saves his people, they get right back to work. When the immediate danger passes, because God has frustrated the plans of their enemies, God’s people get right back to work.

They do not take a break. They do not go on vacation. They do not pat themselves on the back and say they deserve a couple of weeks off after all that standing firm. They keep the swords on. They pick up the shovels, and they get right back to work.

They get organized so that they can build and be ready to fight at a moment’s notice. Half of them are working on construction. The other half have the weapons ready at hand. Nehemiah tells them exactly what to do if the enemy attacks. He has the trumpeter with him, and they are supposed to rally to him and fight there.

This section has been the inspiration for our church’s strategy to build and fight. Arm yourself with the sword and the trowel. It is right here. “Those who carried the burdens were loaded in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other.” These are the days we get to live in. To build and fight is simply what it means to labor in the time before Christ returns.

There will be enemies. There will be evil ideologies, doctrines of demons, to combat with teaching. In the world those evil ideologies will start bearing bad fruit, because bad doctrine hurts people, and that has to be pushed back. So we must fight, and we must build.

• Build personal lives committed to walking in holiness and to loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
• Build households that show the love between Christ and his church in a healthy marriage, and that produce fruitful offspring.
• Build bold churches that stand unashamed of God’s word and obey together without blushing or hemming or hawing.
• Build excellent schools that partner with parents to educate children, so that they are equipped to rule our cities and businesses, and then to train their own children to do the same.
• Build profitable businesses that love our neighbors by providing valuable goods and services.

What an opportunity. What a calling God has given us. We get the joy of a warrior vanquishing his foes, and the satisfaction of a craftsman building.

After Nehemiah and his men have already stood firm, their commitment actually increases as they prepare to fight. Previously it looks as though some of them had gone home to spend the night and then come back to work. But Nehemiah asks them all to stay in the city all night. No one leaves the danger zone. The work must be protected at all costs. They do not even change their clothes. They just keep working around the clock, sunup to stars out.

They can work like this because they understood that they were merely servants of God. They did not consider it drudgery, or a real big ask on God’s part, that he would ask them to build this. It is a privilege to be in the ranks of God’s builders and fighters. So they did not give themselves some incredible congratulations for standing firm. It was simply their duty.

You remember what Jesus tells us in Luke 17. “When you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” We do not get to act as though we have gone above and beyond when we have spent ourselves in building and fighting. We have only done our duty. Our master deserves so much more. It was our honor to be poured out for the cause of his name.

See the rallying cry of Nehemiah in verse 20. “Our God will fight for us.” Church, let that be your confidence. Let it flow all the way into your soul. You serve a God who is more committed to you than you are to him. You wander, and he remains. You waver, and he is steadfast. You doubt, and he does not reject you. You sin, and he forgives. In Christ, God is invincibly for you. Because Christ, our high priest, has taken us under his wing, the all-knowing, all-powerful God who planted mountains and hung galaxies is now on your side as much as he is on Christ’s side. He will fight for you. What greater confidence could we ask for?

As we come to the end of this passage, let me pull it together before we come to the Lord’s table. Enemies will come and attack. They did in the days of Nehemiah, and they will in our days. All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. All the saints must be prepared for how we will respond when the enemy attacks.

The basic response of Nehemiah and his men is simple. Pray lots. Work hard.

Brothers and sisters, God is on your side. So pray lots. Trust him. Ask for his help. Remember that you are soldiers in his army and builders in his workforce. Come ask your general. Ask your foremen for help. When challenges arise, cry out to God. Sometimes those prayers may be prayers asking God to knock down the wicked enemies who stand in the way of his will. When you pray that way, make sure you are hating as God hates and loving as God loves.

Work hard. There is no incongruity between trusting God and doing your very best. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Keep your hand to the plow. Keep a mind to work. Remember that the cause of Christ is worth dying for. Fight for your family and your homes, for the society you want them to live in. We have an incredible opportunity if we will stand firm and work hard, remembering God and not fearing our enemies.

Do not give in to the temptation to pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself when you stand firm. Remember, we are only servants doing our duty.

Please pray with me.

Lord, we are your humble servants, and we are honored to be called by you to build and fight. Please prepare us through your word, especially this word in Nehemiah 4, to respond rightly when we are attacked. Give us grace to trust you completely and to pray for your help. Remind us that you fight for us, that you are invincibly on our side. Please give us grace to work hard as your servants. Help us to have hearts that care more for your great cause than for our personal comforts. We ask for these blessings because we are in Christ, your beloved Son. Amen.