Overcoming Obstacles

Sermon Summary:

In this sermon, Dennis Wiles delves into the challenges of rebuilding, drawing parallels between the Biblical accounts in Ezra and Nehemiah and modern-day situations. He highlights how the Jews faced opposition when rebuilding the temple and Jerusalem’s walls, and compares these to obstacles we encounter in personal and spiritual renewal.

Watch The Service Here

Sermon Points:

Lessons for Re-Building (or Building)

       -Kneeology: We must begin with prayer!

       -You Are Here: We must accept an honest assessment!

       -Planning and Zoning: Make a plan and get to work!

CONTEXT: In Ezra 4 and 5 we read of the opposition faced by the Jews who were attempting to re-build the Temple in Jerusalem. Nehemiah 4 records the obstacles faced by Nehemiah and his workers as they were re-building the wall around Jerusalem.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

1. In any journey of building or re-building, obstacles are inevitable.

2. Obstacles can have a positive effect—they can force us to be more focused and determined.

3. Obstacles can be overcome!

4. Pray!

5. Often, we have to make real adjustments to face obstacles.

6. Obstacles can be overcome!

Download a copy of the “Together…for the Future” Devotional Book – HERE

Obstacles can have a positive effect—they can force us to be more focused and determined.

Key Takeaways:

• Obstacles are inevitable in any journey of building or rebuilding
• Obstacles can have a positive effect by forcing focus and determination
• Obstacles can be overcome with faith and perseverance
• Prayer is essential in facing and overcoming obstacles
• Making adjustments and being flexible is often necessary to overcome challenges
• Discouragement is a tool of the enemy that must be resisted

Watch other Sermons Here

Scripture References:

• Ezra 4 and 5
• Nehemiah

Stories:

• The rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem under Zerubbabel and Joshua
• Nehemiah’s efforts to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem
• The exploration of Lewis and Clark and their encounter with the Rocky Mountains
• The pastor’s personal experience with a church renovation project and overcoming opposition
• The current crisis of “dechurching” in America and its impact on society
• Testimonies from church members about rebuilding after personal challenges and civic responsibilitie

Transcript

And as we were making our way through Ezra and Nehemiah, I want to make sure that we all know that there are multiple lenses that you could use to read Ezra Nehemiah. And that will probably dictate some of the lessons that you’ll learn along the way. And there are just several ways to study Ezra Nehemiah. The most fundamental way probably to study Ezra Nehemiah is to think about and evaluate and make your way through the lens of the promise of God, because that’s at the heart of Ezra and Nehemiah, the promise of God. God warned Judah that they would be scattered and taken into exile because of their unfaithfulness to him.

So you read the book of Jeremiah, and you hear this prophetic warning. But God promised them, however, that he would bring them back to Jerusalem and he would rebuild the nation of Israel. So when you read the book of Ezekiel, you read that very promise that God says to them, even though I’ve allowed you to be scattered for a season, I’m bringing you back to Jerusalem. And he says, when you come back, you’re no longer going to be given to idolatry, but you’re going to be purified in your faith. And when you read the story of Ezra Nehemiah and then follow the history of the Jews to the time of Christ, that’s exactly what happened when they returned from the exile and made their way back to Jerusalem and repopulated land of Israel.

It’s interesting that they were no longer guilty of idolatry. It seemed that the temptation of idols was no longer as prominent during that era in Israel’s life, even though it had been a struggle for them for the previous generations. And so when you’re reading Ezra and Nehemiah, one of the lenses, probably the fundamental lens to read it through is the promise of God and how God keeps his promises, and that not even the strongest powers on earth can thwart the promise of God, not the Babylonians, not the Persians. In other words, if God says he is going to promise something, he will fulfill the promise regardless. As a matter of fact, he might even use earthly powers who do not even realize they’re being used to accomplish his purpose.

That’s exactly what happens in this story. You could read Ezra Nehemiah through a much larger lens, and that is the lens of just the great, grand plan of redemption general, that God is redeeming and restoring the world and all of creation to himself. He’s chosen to work through these people that we know as the people of God. And that promise is threatened many times through their history. This will be one of those times when they’re in exile in Babylon.

And yet God continues to keep his promise and his plan in place, and the great plan of redemption continues to move forward in history. You could study Ezra and Nehemiah through the lens of leadership, and that’s what some people do. I’ve done that myself. You can find principles of leadership in Ezran, Nehemiah. There are some great principles of leadership.

I’ve chosen to use the lens of rebuilding, understanding that there’s a theological underpinning in these two books. But we have been studying together what it means to rebuild your life, and we’ve talked about this a little bit already. We never know when we’re going to enter into a season of rebuilding. Sometimes things just happen to us, things that were beyond our control. And because of that, we’ve now got to rebuild.

We can have a health crisis or some type of family crisis or a vocational crisis. Sometimes it’s our own doing. Sometimes it’s just that we’re in a season where we sense that God is directing us in a new direction. So whatever it is, we find ourselves sometimes in that place where we are rebuilding our lives. And that’s the lens that I want us to look through this study and learn from.

So we’ve already had some lessons in rebuilding. Let me just remind you. The first lesson was neology. We learned that a few weeks ago. We must begin a prayer.

Whenever you encounter a season to start rebuilding your life, we always start with prayer. We’re the people of God, and then you are here. You have to take an honest assessment of our lives and actually come to grips with where we really are, not where we wish we were, but where we actually are. Last week, the lesson was planning and zoning. We have to make a plan and then get to work.

Now, y’all, once that happens, it’s just smooth sailing, and you just float gently downstream to your destination. You’re welcome.

Don’t you wish as high it was? Y’all know the story of Lewis and Clark. We have a slide to show you of Meriwe Lewis and William Clark. Lewis worked for Thomas Jefferson. He was a brilliant naturalist.

He was an adventurer. He was a frontiersman. And he accepted the commission from Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana purchase and to find the great northwest passage. There was a theory that had existed for over 300 years that somehow or another, if you could get to the head of the Missouri river, you then could just cross over a little bit of land, and you would find another river that flow gently downstream to the Pacific Ocean, and somehow you could connect those two bodies of water, if you will, and you could circumnavigate your way across our continent. Meriweather Lewis was assigned to go find the water passageway.

Thomas Jefferson actually hand wrote a ticket to give to any captain once they got to the Pacific Ocean, who would be willing to take their sailing vessel and sail all the way back and go down the Mississippi river and dropped them off. And it said, I’ll pay you as the president of the United States whatever it costs for you to make your way through those two bodies of water. So Lewis and he decided to hire William Clark to make their way and find the Northwest passage. They left May 14, 1804. April or May.

It was of 1805. A year later, Mayorwe Lewis records in his journal, for the first time, he saw something that no American had, no caucasian American had ever seen. The Rocky Mountains. In fact, by the time they get to September, and they’re staring the Rocky Mountains in the face, one of the men who’s with Leis Meywe Lewis said this, we saw mountains. Not just any mountains, terrible mountains.

And so they came to a place where they had to decide what to do, and they had canoed their way there. And there they stood at the head of the Missouri river with canoes. It was an interesting time in history. They encountered an obstacle. Well, this morning, I want us to talk about overcoming obstacles.

We’ll use two passages from the scripture, one from Ezra, one from Nehemiah. That’s what we’ve been doing this whole time. So if you have your copy of the Old Testament, Ezra four is’where we’ll start. We’ll look at two passages from Ezra, and then we’ll look at Nehemiah overcoming obstacles. Any of y’all ever faced an obstacle in your life?

Have you ever stared down the unexpected rocky mountains? Well, let’s think about that as we look at these two stories. Ezra four. Ezra is recording the story of Zerubabel and Joshua. They’re rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem.

They’ve been set free by Cyrus, king of Persia, and they have the opportunity to rebuild the temple that was burned down by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. They start the work, and they’re excited about it. Come to verse four of Exodus four. I mean, Exodus Ezra four. Then the peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building.

They bribed officials to work against them and frustrate their plans. During the entire reign of Cyrus, king of Persia, down to the reign of Darius, king of Persia. So they’re building, rebuilding the temple. And the people around them start to discourage them and tell them that they can’t do it. Now look at chapter five of Ezra.

The last verse of Ezra four says, the work on the house of God in Jerusalem came to a standstill. So they stopped. 16 years pass. They start again. They begin their work.

You come to Ezra five, verse three. At that time, Tani, governor of trans Euphrates, and then Shathar Bozanai and their associates went to them and said, who authorized you to rebuild this temple and finish it? They also asked, what are the names of those who are constructing this building? Verse five. But the eyes of their God was watching over the elders of the Jews, and they were not stopped until a report could go to Darius and his written reply be received.

So these leaders said, who has authorized y all to do this? And we need to make sure that Darius the king agrees for you to rebuild this temple. So one obstacle stopped the construction. The next one is going to slow it down tremendously. Now, if you’ll fast forward a hundred years, just a few pages in your Bible to Nehemiah four.

Temple has been rebuilt. The worship practices haven’t been restored as they should have been. The wall still hasn’t been rebuilt. Around the city, the people are in disarray. There’s chaos in Israel.

Hardly anybody lives in Jerusalem because it’s not safe. And the people are discouraged. Nehemiah shows up, surveys the wall, and he rallies the people and says, let’s rebuild this wall. And the people say, okay, and they start rebuilding. It was a beautiful time in the history of Israel.

Then you come to Nehemiah, page four. Look at what this text says. When San Ballot, he is a king, a ruler, a governor in Samaria, he heard that we were rebuilding the wall. He became angry. He was greatly incensed.

He ridiculed the Jews. And in the presence of his associates in the army of Samaria, he said, what are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish it in a day?

Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble, burned as they are? One of his associates, verse three. Toia, the ammonite who was at his side, said, what are they building? Even a fox climbing up on it would break down their wall stones. Y’all hear that?

They don’t know how to build. And whatever they build won’t last. Verse four. Nehemiah, he prays hear us, our God, for we are despised. Turn their insults back on their own heads.

Give them over as plunder in a land of captivity. Do not cover up their guilt or blot out their sins from your sight, for they have thrown insults in the face of the builders. So we rebuilt the wall to all of it reached half its height, for the people worked with all their heart, he says. But then Sanballat and Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, the people of Ashtdod, heard that the repairs to Jerusalem’s walls had gone ahead. The gaps were being closed.

They were very angry. They all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and stir up trouble against it. But we prayed to our God, and we posted a guard day and night to meet this threat. Now, let’s just set the context of these two stories. Ezra four and five.

He’s recording the rebuilding of the temple. And he’s recording in these two pages the opposition faced by the Jews who were attempting to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Nehemiah, a hundred years later, is recording the obstacles faced by Nehemiah and his workers as they were rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. So let’s look at the first story first, Ezra, for they’re beginning their work. They’ve laid the foundation.

They’re starting to rebuild the temple. And they they face obstacles and opposition, so much so they just quit. They take a break. 16 years passes. They decide to take up and start the work again.

When they do, the officials all around them said, here’s the thing. Every time Jerusalem seems to be in power, they rebel against authority. And it looks like that’s what they’re about to do now we’re going to tell Darius the king what y’all are doing. And we think all y’all are doing is mobilizing yourselves to rebel again. We need to hear from Darius that it’s okay for you’t to be building this temple.

He’s our king. So they slowed the work down until they could hear back from the king. Now, again, fast forward a hundred years, Nehemiah. Get to Jerusalem, the temple rebuilt. But the people are in disarray.

Hardly anybody lives in Jerusalem. The worship life really hasn’t been restored yet. Ezra has helped with some of that, and they decide, we can build this wall. So they start the work. Nehemiah says, we’re about halfway done, and all of a sudden, we get threatened.

The people around them began to say, we don’t want Jerusalem restored. We don’t want Israel coming back together as a nation. That’s going to threaten our ability to govern this area. And so they issue threats, and then they continue to make the threats even more real. And so Nehemiah finds himself in a really hard place because the people are frightened.

It’s a challenging time, y’all. So what did they do? Well, here’s the good news. Ezra, he agreed. I mean, Ezrael records the stories.

Zerubabl and Joshua agreed. Let’s write Darius the king and ask him. He’s the one. That’s the king in Persia. And let’s see what he says.

And Darius wrote back and said, you can keep rebuilding. And so they did. Well, what about Nehemiah? Nehemiah’s story is more complicated. If you’ll look back in your Bibles, in Nehemiah four, you get to the end of verse nine, like we just read in.

Nehemiah said, well, let’s put a guard up around the city. Let’s pray. But then if you look at verse ten, the workers said, this is too much. Retired. We can’t do this.

The wall is too hard to build. And not only that, we’re hearing from our friends outside of Jerusalem because some of them still lived out there. And they said, the threat’real Tobiah Sanballad, they’re assembling an army. They’re going to come kill us. And here’s what our friends are telling us.

They’re not just going to kill y’all, they’re going to kill us, too. And, y’all, here’s what’s interesting about that moment in history. These Jews knew that Nebuchadnezzar had come to Babylon one time and tore down the wall, burned the temple to the ground, killed a bunch of jewish leaders, hauled a bunch of them off into exile. So they no longer thought, we’re good. They no longer thought, these people can’t come in here and take over our city.

It had happened. So they’re thinking to themselves, you know, this, this could happen. I mean, it’s happened before. And for all we know, it can happen again. And they said to Nehemiah, we’re scared.

Nehemiah says, okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. Look at verse 13. He said, I want you all to move inside the city. Come on, inside the wall. Now, here’s how we’re going to do it.

You’re going to be assigned a certain part of the wall, and your family is going to live right where you work. So I’m going to shorten your commute to work. You’re going to step outside of your little hutch, your little tent, your little house, and you’re going to work right there. Does that make sense? So we posted families all along the walls.

So that meant these men were getting up every day. And when they went to work, their wives, their children were just right there behind them. Well, what was Nehemiah’s rationale? He said, if they attack us, if the Arabs, the ammonites, the Samaritans attack, I know these men are going to fight, even if they don’t fight for Jerusalem, who are they going to fight for? Their families.

So they’ll fight to the death for that. But then he says this. If you look at verse 14, he says, don’t be afraid, y’all. The Lord is with us. And by the way, fight.

When they show up and they again, they say, man, the enemy, they’re watching us, Nehemiah, and they’re aware of what we’ve done. They’re still going to come. Nehemiah, you get to verse 16. Nehemiah says, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to divide y’all in half, and half of y’all are going to be in charge of going to get all the materials, the stones and everything we need.

But here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to work one handed, and in your other hand, you’re going to carry a weapon and you’re going to be armed. Now, those of you that are building the wall, you go ahead and wear your sword to work, but you start building the wall. Meanwhile, the guys that are going to get all the materials for you, they’re going to defend you because they’re going to have a weapon while they’re at work. And we’re going to let the enemy know that when we show up to work, we’re showing up armed.

Half of us are going to be ready for battle. The other half will be ready if they need to be. Then he said, we’re going to put people all around the walls and we’re going to come up with a system where we can sound 911. And if you hear this trumpet, play this tune, everybody come to that spot, because that means we all need to show up and fight. And when they did that, y’all guess what?

They kept working. They put a plan in place. They realized they had real obstacles and they just kept working. Isn’t that a great story? I mean, come on, Nehemiah.

Good job. So what do we learn from it? Well, here’s what I want to do this morning. You know, I’ve told y’all before, whenever I number stuff, I want to tell you how many they are so you don’t freak out. So there’s six lessons.

So let me walk through. There’s really only five because I’m going to repeat one of them twice, so that even makes it easier. Okay, here’s the first lesson about obstacles. In any journey of building or rebuilding, obstacles are inevitable. Here’s the thing.

When you start rebuilding your life, rebuilding your business, rebuilding your church, whatever it is, there will be obstacles. Frank Clark said, if you find a path that doesn’t include obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere. So if you think it’s just going to be smooth sailing and you’re going to float downhill to the Pacific Ocean, you’re not. That’s just not how it works, especially for christians. Because the last thing Satan wants is for you to make progress, either as an individual, as a family, as a church.

So he’s set up to oppose everything that God’s involved with. God is going to rescue Egypt, I mean Israel from Egypt. In fact, he’s going to send a special person who’s going to be the lawgiver, if you will, and he’s going to be used by God to redeem Israel. His name is Moses. A special baby.

Guess what the Egyptians did? They started killing all the boy babies. In fact, God was going to rescue the whole world and send a messiah to be born in Bethlehem. Guess what Satan did? He started killing all the babies in Bethlehem.

In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised that the devil’s going to throw things in our face whatever we start rebuilding. That’s just how it works. There are going to be obstacles in opposition. Jesus said, in this world, you will have trouble. Take heart.

I’ve overcome the world. Obstacles are going to come to you whenever you start rebuilding. They just do. Sometimes it’s people you know. Not everybody wants you to be successful.

Start rebuilding your life and you’ll find that out. You can’t do that. You don’t know what you’re doing. If a fox was to walk across this wall, it’ll just fall down. You can’t rebuild anything.

You’re always going to walk with a limp. Everybody’s always going to look at you because of your failure. You’ll never get over it. There are all kinds of people like that in the world, particularly in now days with social media. Lord help us.

That’s a whole not other sermon I’m going to preach before it’s over with it, but I got to get. I got to get in a better place to preach it. So just stay tuned. Sometimes it’s circumstances, just things just happen, and next thing you know, you’ve got an obstacle, and it’s a challenge. Years ago, I was pasting another church, and that church decided before I came that they wanted to renovate the sanctuary and do some renovations on the property.

It was a big undertaking, one of the biggest things they had done in a long time. So when they called me, his pastor, they tell me, this is already at work. We’re already doing this. We just need you to push it over. Finish line.

I said, okay. So I started meeting with him, met with the committee, met with leaders of the church, put a campaign team together, visited with small groups, started getting people’s hearts ready. So we put it before the congregation, and we had that fateful Sunday morning when we voted, and the vote was 70% in favor, 30% opposed.

Now, how many of y’all have ever been in a baptist church? Any of y’all? How would you interpret a 70% vote?

I had some people in the church come to see me. Preacher, this is a majority rules church. 70% of us vot in favor of it. Let’s go.

For some reason, I couldn’t help but think about the 30% who voted no. That’s a lot of people. And we found ourselves facing an obstacle. So we had a history book. That church did.

This is oldest church in Alabama. Solon ban. Read our history book, and here’s what I found. They encountered something just like this many years ago when they moved to the location they were currently in. When I became their pastor, the had of vote wasn’t as overwhelming as they would like.

And so the pastor called together the deacons and committees and asked them to have a meeting. They met, they talked about it, and the pastor said, what if we just stand in front of the church and say to the church, we can do this, y’all. We don’t know everything, but here are the deacons, here’s the committee. We’re in agreement. We’just ask you to join us by faith.

And they did. They did that. The deacons and the leaders of the church stood in front of the church, and the pastor said, we don’t really know everything, but we’re asking y’all to just trust this group of people and let’s go forward. And the church said, let’s do it. So they did it.

They moved. Everything was fine. Well, I read that, and I thought that’s a pretty good idea. So I called together a meeting of our deacons and our committee, and I said, y’all told them that story. Some of them actually remembered that story.

And I said, all right, Sunday morning, I want us to stand in front of the church, deacons, committee members, leaders, and let’s say to the church, we don’t know everything. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but let’s go ahead and move ahead. And they said, no, you can stand down there if you want to, but we’re not going to stand with you. I said, okay. So I did.

I went down from the pulpit and stood at the floor of the church, and I said, y’all don’t know everything. Seems like a lot of people in favor of this. And I’m standing in front of y’all to tell y’all that I think we ought to do this. One deacon got out from where he was seated and come and a little short guy stood right next to me. When he stood next to me, he did this.

I never forgot that. It was a hard time we’d face an obstacle. Question was, what do you do? Well, here’s the thing, y’all. They’re inevitable.

Second lesson, obstacles can have a positive effect that can force us to be more focused, more determined.

Opposition, Warren Wesby says, is not only an evidence that God is blessing, but it’s also an opportunity to grow. When you face an obstacle, you can be more focused. James Montgomery boy says opposition is almost always caused by success and not failure. Boyce says, very few people oppose failure. It’s when you’re achieving something.

Ezra they were making progress. Facd an obstacle. Nehemiah half the wall was built. Obstacle. It’s what happens.

So that church, I finally, in my study one day, I met with some of our leaders, and I said, you know, I think we need to find out what’s really going on with our people. So I asked the people who voted no to just come visit with me, and they did, and I listened. Good people, just like the people who voted yes. They were all good people. They all loved their church.

But the ones who voted no had some concerns that I hadn’t even thought about. And all of a sudden, I got more focused, became more determined to figure out a path forward that we probably never would have thought of had we not faced that obstacle. Man Lewis and Clark disease, disruption in the troops, weather, grizzly bears, enemies, the Rocky mountains. And all of a sudden, they stood there that day and they looked across the Limhi Pass and there was no river to navigate. All they saw were mountains, not the Smoky mountains.

Have y’all ever seen the Rocky Mountains? You see, I grew up in Alabama. I’d never seen Rocky Mountain. Plus, I’m afraid of heights anyway. I’d seen the Smoky Mountains.

They’re bad enough. You see the Rocky Mountains, you don’t belong in there. You realize it when you see it. They’re too tall. And the people that built the roads in there, they didn’t know what they were doing.

They didn’t put guardrails up. I mean, they act like everybody wants to see out. I don’t want to see out if I’m driving through the Rocky Mountains. That’s not the point. We should have tunneled through those dudes, man.

We got technology and dynamite and all kind of things nowadays. Well, they’re staring down the Rocky Mountain. It was a moment in history. Here’s the good news. Number three, obstacles can be overcome.

It can be. They don’t have to stop you. There’s life on the other side of opposition. You know what happened to that group of people in era? You know what they did?

They rebuilt the temple. Do you know they rebuilt that temple? And some 400 years later, Jesus Christ will be dedicated in that temple. That’s where he’ll go to worship. They did it.

As a matter of fact, when Jesus went to visit the temple in Jerusalem, guess what he did? He went through a gate that was built by these people in Nehemiah, and he was protected by a wall that these people built. You can get past obstacles. They did. You can.

But here’s the thing. Discouragement is the tool of the enemy, maybe his chief tool. And one of the things he wants to do while you’re on a journey of rebuilding is discourage you and keep you from making any more progress. Don’t let him win. Don’t give up.

In fact, the fourth lesson, pray. That’s what these guys did. Nehemiah said, we stopped and we prayed. We prayed and we posted guards. We prayed and we made decisions.

Because, see, everything has spiritual overtones. If you’re a Christian, the rebuilding journey is a spiritual endeavor. That means we have to use spiritual weapons. We’ve got to encounter these obstacles from a spiritual perspective, not just reasoning it out. You’re a life.

You’re a Christian. You need God’s wisdom. You can’t just trust your own ingenuity. Do you know churches right now across America are facing a huge crisis? We’ve talked about this.

We’ve talked about this research. That’s been done by Jim Davis and Michael Graham, published in their book the great D Churching. In the last 25 years, 40 million american adults have left the church and Qu attending. That’s according to the research they’ve done. Right now, for the first time in modern history, more american adults don’t attend church than do.

In fact, one of the things they say in this book is the size and scope of this shift away from the church is unprecedented in our country. De Churching is an epidemic and will impact both the institutions of our country and the very fabric of our society within our lifetime. This seismic shift in religious belief in church attendance is a new era in american history. We now call the great D churching. And it’s caused a crisis that’s growing because it’s affecting communities.

There are fewer volunteers in our schools, in our nonprofits across America, because guess where so many of those volunteers historically have come from? People the church, who are learning and growing and being spiritually formed and understanding. They’re supposed to serve their community. And that number is starting to dwindle, and it’s having reverberating effects across our society. So guess what churches are doing?

They’re reevaluating because the status quo doesn’t seem to be working. So they’re praying. They’re asking God, what do we do? How do we address this? They’re reevaluating things.

That’s what we’re doing. We’re praying. We’re reevaluating. What’s the Lord saying to us? We’re not just using our brains.

We have brains. We’re asking God for wisdom. What is it you would have us to do? We’re trying to let this obstacle refocus us to be more determined in prayers at the heart of it. You know, yesterday morning, we had a prayer breakfast in our fellowship hall.

I wish you all could have been there. We had two powerful testimonies from church members. One of our church members gave a testimony about how he’s rebuilding his life after a re debabilitating physical diagnosis. Our other church member gave a testimony about rebuilding our city after he was elected to serve as mayor. You know what was at the heart of both of those testimonies?

The power of prayer. They both gave testimony to prayer and how prayer changed them. How prayer energized them, how prayer helped them be more resilient. How prayer gave them a pathway forward. So the people of God, what we do when we find ourselves facing obstacles, we pray.

And then this lesson, which really is the last one, often we have to make real adjustments to face obstacles. We can’t just keep doing what we’re doing. Obstacles get our attention. They focus our energy. Nehemiah said, okay, so y’all are a little scared they may attack us.

So how are we going to fix this? It didn’t make sense to raise up an army that would just be ready to fight because they’re trying to rebuild a wall. So he said, ok, here’s the first thing we’re going to do. We’re going to move our families inside the wall and you just work right there in front of your family. That’s step one.

Then he said, step two, those of you that are going to get all the materials, don’t go unarmed. You take, you take in one hand, it’s going to slow the work down because you can’t haul the stones with both hands, but you’re going to be armed. So you do what you can, bring the materials you can, but you send a message to the enemy. If anybody happens to be spying on Israel, here’s what they’re going to see. The people that are doing the work are armed and ready.

And the guys building the wall, their armed too. We’re going to send a message. In other words, we’re going to make a plan here. We’re going to develop this communication system with these trumpets. And if you hear an alarm sounded, you go to it.

That means we need you. Well, guess what? Sometimes you got to make adjustments. The church I pastored, I listened. I had people saying things to me like this pastor, we love this church.

It’s been years and years since we’ve taken our mission call seriously in our opinion. And now we’re going to do another building project. I thought, that’s interesting. And I just kept listening. So finally we brought some of those people together and some of our leaders and we said, what if we do this?

What if we acknowledge we’ve got to address our mission or call. What if we set up a fund and we will tithe every gift we receive to this building project. We’ll give a 10th of it to this new mission fund and we’ll invest in a new mission endeavor. We brought that to the church. 98% voted yes and we did both.

We did the renovation with unity, with Grace, and we started a new mission fund that supported some of the mission work that’still going on today. In other words, we made an adjustment. Lewis and Clark, you know what they did? They ditched their canoes. Turns out it’s really hard to canoe through the Rocky Mountains.

They traded them. They decided they needed to investigate some new relationships. So they had a young lady with them that they turned to for help. We think she was about 17 years old. She had a new baby.

Her name was Sacagawea. Turns out she grew up in the Rocky Mountains. They didn’t look unfriendly to her at all. It was her home. Her brother was the chief of the Shoshone tribe who lived there.

He also knew Native Americans who lived on the other side of the Rocky Mountains that he had had a relationship with. So he gave them one of their guides. They listened. Think about it. Lewis and Clark, these seasoned, adventuresome, frontiersn, brilliant men, had navigated in these canoes all the way to the top of the Missouri river, staring down the Rocky Mountains.

And they turned to a 17 year old girl for help. I love that. And they made a relationship with those Native Americans who gave them passage to the next group of Native Americans. And guess what? They mated over those mountains.

They eventually made their way to the Pacific Ocean. They then came all the way back to meet with President Thomas Jefferson. And they gave him an honest and realistic picture of what this land was really like. And they changed history. But they had to make adjustments.

That leads me to this final point that we’ve already shared. Can obstacles be overcome? Yes, they can. Obstacles can be overcome. What are you facing?

I don’t know. Are you on a work stoppage? I get it. Are you pausing to figure out what to do next? Good.

Can you get through it? Yes, you can. With the Lord’s help and your resilience. Don’t let discouragement win. You.

Keep working and give God a chance to show you what to do next and give him the glory for it. May it be so. Let’s pray together.

Lord, today we come into your presence realizing we live in a very challenging world these days. It’s a broken world. And we look all over our world and we see people’s lives that are just littered across the face of the globe. People right now who are facing the tragedy of a hurricane, our own countrymen, they’re going to have to rebuild their lives. Some of them right now, they don’t have power.

They don’t have clean water. So we pray for all those folks who are engaging in disaster relief to care for people and provide next steps for their future. We look across our world and it’s instability and chaos. Bombs going off here and there, lives being affected. And as always, anytime there’s war and hatred and strife, innocent people suffer.

So right now, there are just innocent people. They’re not engaged in a military conflict. They really don’t necessarily have political opinions. They’re just living their lives. They just happen to live in Syria or Sudan or Israel or Lebanon or Gaza or the Ukraine.

They’re just people. Many of them are brothers and sisters in Christ, and they’ve got a challenging season in their lives. We just lift them to you. We lift our world to you. Pray for peace today, for wisdom, for leaders to emerge like Nehemiah.

We even pray for leaders like Cyrus, Darius, who don’t call on your name, but, Lord, your word tells us that the heart of a king is like the channel of a river in your hands. So we pray, Lord, for peace, for good decisions to be made by people who may never seek your counsel. And may we see your purposes and your promises fulfilled. And there are those right now within the sound of my voice, Lord, who are trying to rebuild their lives. And they’re facing a tough time right now.

Some of them feel like they’re staring down the rocky mountains. I just ask you, Lord, to give them ingenuity, imagination, wisdom and resiliency and find their way to keep rebuilding to your glory. And we trust, God, that we’ll just see your hand at work in our lives, in the life of our church, in churches like ours across this nation and world, for your sake. And we pray in Jesus name. Amen.