I. Introduction

A. Illustration – Philip Yancey wrote, The same tears that break our hearts may also nourish us in ways that matter most to God (as cited on PreachingToday.com).

B. We all face a lot of sorrows in life. Some of them seem to just drag us down. Some seem to strengthen our resolve. But others, the most profound sorrows in life, are ones that God uses to plant His dreams within our hearts in a way that we’re compelled to respond. And our world is changed because of those godly sorrows. Nehemiah experienced a time of godly sorrow that changed the history of his nation. Let’s read about it in Nehemiah chapter one, and I’m reading from the New Living.

C. Nehemiah 1 from the New Living – These are the memoirs of Nehemiah son of Hacaliah. In late autumn of the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes’ reign, I was at the fortress of Susa. 2 Hanani, one of my brothers, came to visit me with some other men who had just arrived from Judah. I asked them about the Jews who had survived the captivity and about how things were going in Jerusalem. 3 They said to me, “Things are not going well for those who returned to the province of Judah. They are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down, and the gates have been burned.” 4 When I heard this, I sat down and wept. In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven. 5 Then I said, “O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of unfailing love with those who love him and obey his commands, 6 listen to my prayer! Look down and see me praying night and day for your people Israel. I confess that we have sinned against you. Yes, even my own family and I have sinned! 7 We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, laws, and regulations that you gave us through your servant Moses. 8 Please remember what you told your servant Moses: ‘If you sin, I will scatter you among the nations. 9 But if you return to me and obey my commands, even though you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored.’ 10 We are your servants, the people you rescued by your great power and might. 11 O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you. Please grant me success now as I go to ask the king for a great favor. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.” In those days I was the king’s cupbearer.

D.

II. Sorrow that Brings God’s Dreams to Life

A. Notice in the first verse how Nehemiah brings to light the specific context of what God did through Him? In other words, Nehemiah is recording a specific time in history – November or December, which the month of Kislev includes part of, in the year 445 B.C. The first exiles had started returning in 538 B.C. The first exiles had been taken from Judah in 605 B.C. So that’s 67 years from the first exiles leaving to the first exiles returning, a period of time that seemed like an eternity to the Jews. Nehemiah is recording things that happened beginning 93 years after the Jews started returning, 26 years longer than the initial time of captivity. That helps us understand a bit of what’s going on.

B. I can imagine Nehemiah greeting his brother, asking him about his trip, and, over dinner, casually asking him about how things are going in Judah. After all, it’s been 93 years since the first exiles returned, so things must really be shaping up. Nehemiah is floored by what he hears. The Jews are still struggling just to survive, and the walls and gates of Jerusalem have never been rebuilt since they were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. The city of Jerusalem has been lying in ruins for 141 years! All that it holds are rubble and some houses and the Temple. That’s it. Any enemy that wants to can rob and destroy the people because there’s no wall to stop them. Any enemy that wants to burn down the rebuilt Temple, which had been completed March 12, 516 B.C., can waltz right in and destroy it. In the 71 years since the Temple was completed no one has rebuilt the walls and gates of Jerusalem, and Nehemiah is shocked. He is more than shocked. He is devastated.

C. But in the midst of that overwhelming sense of devastation, Nehemiah acted. He allowed that sense of loss to grow into a godly sorrow. He wept. He mourned. He fasted and prayed for days. And he took personal responsibility. Something happened during that process. God did something in Nehemiah’s heart that ultimately would impact millions of people. That’s the lesson God has for us today. Godly sorrow can change the course of history for a few or for millions. In 2 Corinthians 7:8-11 Paul writes, I am no longer sorry that I sent that letter to you, though I was sorry for a time, for I know that it was painful to you for a little while. 9 Now I am glad I sent it, not because it hurt you, but because the pain caused you to have remorse and change your ways. It was the kind of sorrow God wants his people to have, so you were not harmed by us in any way. 10 For God can use sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek salvation. We will never regret that kind of sorrow. But sorrow without repentance is the kind that results in death. 11 Just see what this godly sorrow produced in you! Such earnestness, such concern to clear yourselves, such indignation, such alarm, such longing to see me, such zeal, and such a readiness to punish the wrongdoer. You showed that you have done everything you could to make things right. Paul addressed a situation that grieved the heart of God, and the response was godly sorrow that led not only to repentance, but to total obedience to God’s will and His plan.

D. Nehemiah faced a choice. He obviously was a very godly man, one who followed after God with all his heart. But God needed to change something in Nehemiah that would allow God to accomplish His dream for Judah. All of us face a choice when we are confronted with godly sorrow. We can stuff it and ignore it or get angry about it. Or we can allow it to change our thinking and our behavior. Nehemiah had a position of high responsibility. The king’s cupbearer was the one who sipped the wine before the king drank it to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. Not a job I’d want, but one that the king had to have a lot of trust in. So Nehemiah could have just blown off or stuffed the bad news and gone on with his prestigious job. All of us face Nehemiah’s choice – to play it safe and settle for the status quo, or to risk it all to accomplish God’s dream. So let’s assume that we want to be like Nehemiah. How do we get there?

E.There is a burden that God wants to place on our hearts. It varies from person to person, but it will always involve something that grieves the heart of God and that He wants to make right. It could be something like wanting to help Christians grow up to maturity or facilitating true worship in the church. It could be leadership training or working with the children or young adults in our church. It could be working at or opening a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. It could be as a foreign missionary or a pastor or a chaplain. It could be working in the schools or after school programs or helping street kids or the handicapped or single parents or those who are addicted. It could be any number of things. Whatever the burden for you is, God wants to break your heart with it – even devastate you with it. When I became pastor here God had already been laying a burden on my heart for quite some time. My heart was broken over the things that I had gone through because nobody had shown me how to grow up in Christ. And that heartbreak was more than over the sins I had committed even though I knew what was right. My heart was broken over the fact that most Christians are in the same place I was in – not knowing how to grow up in Christ and defeat sin and love God and people with everything they are. Because inside, we all know that’s what we want. We may not want to go through the process we need to if we’re going to grow up, but we all want the goal. God has placed that in all of our hearts. So when I came down here I had a choice – to base what I did on my observations of church government over the previous twenty-five years, or to base it on the burden God placed on my heart.

F. So instead of a benevolent dictator, what you have as a pastor is a man who still carries that burden to see folks at every level of spiritual maturity to grow up in Christ and to be filled to overflowing with love for Him and for others. But I didn’t get there overnight, and neither did Nehemiah. Nehemiah spent days weeping and mourning and fasting and praying and confessing over the burden God had placed on his heart. And of course that continued even after he began to carry out God’s dream, but we’ll get to that in the coming weeks. When God places that burden on your heart, His dream for you, it will be something you see that isn’t right with the world and that burdens His heart. It won’t be any pet peeve or personal preference, not because God doesn’t care what we think, but because He knows that imposing our preferences won’t accomplish His dreams. What burden has He placed on your heart? What in this world does your heart break for? What has God gifted you to get done in this world? God will never give you a burden that He has not gifted you to fulfill His dreams by the power of the Holy Spirit. The burden can be a devastating responsibility. What is God devastating your heart about?

G. It isn’t enough to just be devastated by the burden. As we read, Nehemiah wept and mourned and fasted and prayed over the burden God had given him. I’ve spent countless hours weeping and mourning and fasting and praying over the burden God has laid on my heart. I still spend hours doing the same things – weeping and mourning over those who aren’t becoming what God created them to be because they just aren’t going along with His will. I still spend hours praying over those folks and over our church, not because I’m some kind of saint or something like that, but because the burden is so strong and the potential for negative consequences in their lives and in the life of our church is so great. I really learned to pray during my first three years here, because it was during that time that I was beginning to learn what specifically God’s dream was and how to begin to accomplish it. In some respects I’m still learning, not because God’s dream changed, but because as I grow and mature I learn more about God’s dream and how better to see it from His perspective. All of us are given a burden by God, and all of us have got to spend the time necessary to weep and mourn and fast and pray over it if we’re going to see it become a reality in our lives and in our church. It’s not enough to be devastated by God’s burden – we’ve got to spend time with God learning what He wants us to do about it.

H. And that’s the next step. Through the process of receiving the burden, through the process of weeping and mourning and fasting and praying over the burden, God revealed to Nehemiah what he should do about the burden. Listen again to Nehemiah’s heartfelt prayer: Then I said, “O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of unfailing love with those who love him and obey his commands, 6 listen to my prayer! Look down and see me praying night and day for your people Israel. I confess that we have sinned against you. Yes, even my own family and I have sinned! 7 We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, laws, and regulations that you gave us through your servant Moses. 8 Please remember what you told your servant Moses: ‘If you sin, I will scatter you among the nations. 9 But if you return to me and obey my commands, even though you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored.’ 10 We are your servants, the people you rescued by your great power and might. 11 O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you. Please grant me success now as I go to ask the king for a great favor. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.” What a powerful prayer! And it’s a powerful prayer for a couple of reasons.

I. Nehemiah took the time to remind God of His covenant. I don’t think that God needed to be reminded – I think Nehemiah needed to remind himself. Then he confessed the sins of his ancestors and took personal responsibility for his own sins and for his connection to his ancestors’ sins. Why? Because it would have been easy for him to say, “Look, God, they’re the ones who sinned and I’m not like them at all. So why am I dealing with this?” Nehemiah knew that he was a sinner and that he was perfectly capable of all the atrocities his ancestors had committed. So he took personal responsibility and confessed. One of the things God moved on my heart to do when I’d been here several months was to take personal responsibility for anything other pastors had done to hurt people in our congregation and confess those things and ask for forgiveness for them. Why? Because I know what I’m capable of, and I know that I can be just as evil as Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart or even some more local preachers have been. I know that I can get it wrong just as they did because I can very easily take my eyes off of Christ. When you allow that burden God has for you to devastate you, and you weep and mourn and fast and pray over it, God will show you what you need to confess, be it your own sins or the sins of those who have previously held your position or even family sins. There is freedom in taking personal responsibility and confessing these sins and asking God for forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

J. But Nehemiah did more than confess and repent. He allowed God to plant in his heart God’s dream for him. God gave Nehemiah a picture of the future and a starting point. Listen to the last two sentences in his prayer: Please grant me success now as I go to ask the king for a great favor. Put it into his heart to be kind to me. Nehemiah knew that he had to go and rebuild the walls and gates of Jerusalem. What an incredibly big job! I just read an estimate in Biblical Archeology Review that Jerusalem at the time of its destruction covered over one hundred thirty acres and had over twenty-five thousand permanent residents. That’s an incredibly big job if I’ve ever heard of one. But God gave Nehemiah a starting point to go along with that dream. God gave me a dream, an incredibly big dream for our church as I wept and mourned and fasted and prayed. God gave me the dream of remaking this church into one that brings people to Christ and disciples and trains and equips them – one that God uses on a regional level to transform hearts and lives and bring them to maturity in Him. A church that stands in our region as a beacon of hope for the lost and for those who want to know how to help people grow up in Christ. And that is such a big dream that it scares me to even share it. It scares me because I know it’s something I could never do. It scares me because it will more than likely bring the Border Bullies out in droves. But it excites me because hundreds and even thousands of people will know what I spent so many years longing for – that you don’t have to live a defeated life because in Christ, you can grow up and become more than you ever dreamed. It excites me because those folks don’t have to go through what I went through before I finally was taught how to become like Jesus. It excites me because of the joy I know people will experience in knowing Christ and becoming all that He created them to be.

K. When He gave me that dream He gave me the first steps – Discipleship Training and Saturday Seminars. Now granted, I haven’t taught any Saturday Seminars for a while but I’m planning on starting them again in the fall. But those two steps have born much fruit in the hearts and lives of those involved. Later He added another step – the simulcasts. Those are fantastic and have taught me a lot and helped me grow, and my prayer is that more folks will take advantage of them. The next steps include Alpha and Celebrate Recovery, and all we’re waiting for on those is for the folks who God is trying to give the burden for Alpha or for Celebrate Recovery to allow that burden to devastate them. To allow the burden for the lost and for new believers to learn more about Christ through Alpha to devastate them. To allow the burden for seeing people overcome abuse and addictions through Celebrate Recovery to devastate them. Or maybe God’s been giving you one of these burdens, and you just haven’t been sure about the first step. As I said before, God is giving each one of us a burden specific to who we are and to our gifting that will fit into His dream for our church, and we’ve got to allow ourselves to weep and mourn and fast and pray over that burden, to confess our sins and those involved in these ministries in the past, and to receive His incredibly big dream and take the first step with it.

L. I know all of this probably seems a bit overwhelming. Yet the first chapter of Nehemiah ends with a very encouraging phrase: In those days I was the king’s cupbearer. Not what I would consider the best job in the world but look what God accomplished through it. By placing Nehemiah in the position of the king’s cupbearer, God put him in the right place to accomplish God’s dream. Think about it – even now God has placed you or is moving you into the right place so that you can accomplish the dream He wants to burden your heart with – or that He has already burdened your heart with. That is a very comforting truth. God doesn’t expect us to blindly try to get into a position where He can use us – He’s already put us there or He’s about ready to. We’ve just got to walk in obedience. We’ve just got to receive the burden. We’ve just got to weep and mourn and fast and pray over the burden. We’ve just got to take responsibility and confess sins. We’ve just got to receive God’s dream, and receive the first step. Then, as we’ll see in a couple of weeks, act on that first step even as Nehemiah did. If we nurture our personal relationship with Jesus Christ every day, and we obey what He tells us, then the dream will become a reality. Because God always accomplishes His dreams. It’s not all up to us. God will do it if we will receive His burden and do what Nehemiah did. Then watch out! The Spirit’s gonna bust loose!

III. Conclusion

A. Please bow your heads and close your eyes out of respect for each other’s privacy. What burden does God want to place on your heart? Let’s spend a few quiet moments listening to what the Spirit is saying to us.

B. Again, what’s God been speaking to your heart? What burden is He wanting to place on your heart? Or what burden has He already put on your heart, but is waiting for you to be devastated by it? If you want to receive that burden, even beginning right now, please pray after me, either out loud or in your heart. Lord Jesus…I praise You for having a burden… that You want to place on my heart…. Thank You that this burden… is one that matches with… the gifts and talents You have given me. Lord, I confess my sins… and the sins of those who refused to act on this burden…. I take responsibility for these sins… and ask You to forgive me… by the power of Your blood…. Right now I receive the burden You have for me…and I surrender to Your call… to weep and mourn and fast and pray over it…. I surrender myself… to receiving Your dream wholeheartedly… and taking whatever first steps you have for me…. Thank You again for having this dream… with just me in mind…. May Your name be glorified… because I receive this burden… and all that You want me to do with it…. In Jesus’ name, amen. Now tell at least two people that you’re glad God has a burden for them that will change the world.