Pastor Steve

In the seventh chapter of Nehemiah, we come to another list of names, similar to the list of the builders of the wall in chapter 3. But this list is even more sparse in information than the earlier one. It is really only a census from the archives. Nehemiah did not write it. We know…

In order to have a public meeting Nehemiah must have pulled his workers off the wall. In normal circumstances this would not have been remarkable, but these were not normal circumstances. Nehemiah’s one goal was to build the wall and to build it quickly before the effort could be stopped by Israel’s enemies. He had…

How is a leader to deal with injustices, particularly when they are practiced by the influential against the uninfluential? How can a person confront evil when the strong have the law on their side? The first thing Nehemiah tells us is that he got angry about these injustices: “I was very angry when I heard…

The easiest way to oppose something you do not like is to ridicule it, and this is the first thing Sanballat and Tobiah did. In Nehemiah 4 the text is vivid at this point, showing how Sanballat got Tobiah, his associates, and the army of Samaria together and made fun of the Jews in what…

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters of Nehemiah, we see how he dealt successfully with opposition. Opposition is almost always caused by success and not failure. The first thing we should know, if we are trying to do something worthwhile and are being opposed, is that it is because we are achieving something. We…

In Nehemiah chapter three, we see two more things that need to be said about Nehemiah’s relationship to his work. First, he coordinated the effort. He not only divided the task into manageable units and then assigned the right people to each part but also fit the whole together so there were no gaps and…