Tag: Stiff-Necked

Humble Service

“They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.”

 

Psalms 18:22
For all his rules were before me, and his statutes I did not put away from me. I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt. So the LORD has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.  With the merciful you show yourself merciful; with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;  with the purified you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.  For you save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down.  For it is you who light my lamp; the LORD my God lightens my darkness.

Psalms 119:13
With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth.

Psalms 119:128
Therefore I consider all your precepts to be right; I hate every false way.

John 5:14
Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.”

Psalms 119:112
I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.

Psalms 119:117
Hold me up, that I may be safe and have regard for your statutes continually!

Psalms 11:7
For the LORD is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.

Psalms 17:3
You have tried my heart, you have visited me by night, you have tested me, and you will find nothing; I have purposed that my mouth will not transgress

Psalms 37:27
Turn away from evil and do good; so shall you dwell forever.

1 Samuel 26:23
The LORD rewards every man for his righteousness and his faithfulness,

1 Chronicles 29:17
I know, my God, that you test the heart and have pleasure in uprightness.

God saves the humble.  When I read this I think of the time I was humbled  through His word.  I had people speaking Christ into my life and sharing His word with me for over a year.  Through these acts of discipleship God’s word became alive.  I became aware of what God required to be right with Him.  I learned that I could not be good enough to gain His forgiveness.  Then one night God opened my heart and mind to His forgiveness through believing in the redemptive work of His son.  I was humbled and knew there was nothing I could do to be right with God and had to trust His word that by believing in His son I was saved from my sin.  I was made new.  All my past sin was forgiven.  All the guilt and shame was taken away in that single moment.  I dug into His word, learning, training, wanting to know more and more of Him.  I would like to say that I grew and grew and never lost sight of honoring and glorifying Him in my daily life.  However, after some years I became  a very luke warm follower of Him.  Playing the role without much of His word being active in my life.  I was very good at pretending but the fact of the matter was I was not growing at all.  I had stopped reading His word on a regular basis.  I became complacent.  I was not listening for His voice leading me.  I was going through life with no thought of humbly honoring and glorifying God everyday.  It was more about me and what I wanted.  Things of this world seemed to have grabbed my attention and I lost sight but God did not leave me there.  Through His great plans and purpose He humbled me and then used my wife to place scripture back in front of me.  She would place His word on my computer screen.  He used her because she was listening and obeying when she could have easily followed my lead.  I tell you all of this so you know that following God is not a one day a week.  If you find yourself where God does not seem to be very near it is not because He is not there.  It is because His word is not active in your life.  Go back to that first desire.  Read His word.  Commit to being His humble servant ready to listen and obey His leading. Don’t waste a single day apart from Him.

Remember God

They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them

Nehemiah 9:8
“You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham. You found his heart faithful before you, and made with him the covenant to give to his offspring the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite. And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous.
“And you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt and heard their cry at the Red Sea, and performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of his land, for you knew that they acted arrogantly against our fathers. And you made a name for yourself, as it is to this day. And you divided the sea before them, so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land, and you cast their pursuers into the depths, as a stone into mighty waters. By a pillar of cloud you led them in the day, and by a pillar of fire in the night to light for them the way in which they should go. You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant. You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them.
“But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments. They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them. Even when they had made for themselves a golden calf and said, ‘This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,’ and had committed great blasphemies, you in your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go. You gave your good Spirit to instruct them and did not withhold your manna from their mouth and gave them water for their thirst. Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness, and they lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell.

It is good to be reminded of who God is and what He has done.  Do we believe it?  He created the heavens, earth, and everything on it.  He split the Red Sea and the people went across on dry ground. He gave mana from the sky each day.  He gave water from a rock.  He gave them good statutes and commandments.  He led them by day and night.  He made their 40 years in the desert so that that their clothes did not wear out.  These are a few of recorded acts of God that were communicated to the people in a time of confessing, worship and understanding.  It is good to be reminded of who God is and what He has done.  Over time families and then generations forget and do not remember God and drift away.  They forget who He is, what He has done, and the purpose of living for Him.  I don’t see much difference from the time of Nehemiah to now.  We don’t spend time in His word. We don’t live each day with awe and wonder of what His hands have made.  We don’t live in His power.  We worry about things rather than give them to God.  We are closer to the culture around us than to being a light for it.   God open our eyes to how far we are from living for you and guide us in a path that brings honor and glory to You.

Understanding Instruction

so that the people understood the reading.

Nehemiah 8:7
And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

Leviticus 10:11
and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them by Moses

Malachi 2:7
For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction

Acts 1:8
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.

Acts 2:36
And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Acts 7:51
“You stiff- necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.

Can you imagine what it was like to live in a time where the Holy Spirit did not indwell you. (this assumes you have repented of sin and trust in Jesus Christ for forgiveness) There are two points that come to mind today.  We know that Jesus promised to send a helper (the Holy Spirit) to us after His resurrection.  The Holy Spirit will guide and lead us into all truth, convict of sin, and confirm in our heart where God is leading us.  In the time of Nehemiah people did not have this indwelling and required instruction to be explained so that they could understand.  This is much like our understanding of what was being preached/taught prior to being saved.  We could not understand or connect the promises of God to our everyday lives.  However upon receiving the Holy Spirit we are given this gift.  It is not all at once but a life long learning – precept upon precept, line upon line, promise upon promise, application upon life’s journey.  The second point is that the people chose and wanted Nehemiah to teach them.  Since Christ’s death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are given great opportunity to grow in our understanding of God, His purpose, and how to live in this world so that we can be used by Him.  It seems our lives get so caught up in everyday stuff that we lose sight of this gift.  And because we do not guard our selves and keep Him first we lose sight of our purpose.  How can the Holy Spirit speak to our heart if we spend no time in God’s word?  How can we know our true purpose if we neglect the source of our leading?  How can we grow if the only food is what we hear in a 30 minute teaching from our pastor?  The answer is we will not grow.  As Paul said “You are infants on milk when you should be eating solid food”.  It is good for us to see people of Nehemiah’s time who chose to be taught as an example – And for us to commit to spending time each day feeding on God’s word with a desire for Him to teach us.