I’m super excited to start this new series for the summer in the life of our church! I hope you are too. We will be spending the next 3 months looking into the book of Nehemiah and how this historical narrative of the post-exilic Israelite people speaks to our context today.
This Series is called Rebuild. As the name suggests, my prayer and my hope for our church is that we would enter a new season of rebuilding our community together on the foundation of the Gospel. My earnest desire is that each and every one of us would see him/herself as an integral part of this community because Christ has called each of us here and would recognize that he/she has a huge role in building up this community, which Christ has purchased with his blood.
Historical Background
This historical narrative takes place around 445-423 BC and recounts the post-exilic Israelites in Jerusalem. In 587BC, the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar completely destroyed the nation of Judah of Israel and they took the wealthy and educated Israelites captive into exile to Babylon. Two generations will pass before the Israelites were released from exile. As prophesied by the prophets like Jeremiah, God used the Persian Empire to destroy Babylon and to allow the Israelites to return to Jerusalem in 538BC. Zerubbabel led the first wave of Israelites back to rebuild the temple and re-establish the community of Israel. Almost a century later, under the Persian King, Artaxerxes, Nehemiah took another group of Israelites back to Jerusalem to rebuild the wall in 445 BC.
As you can see, God’s people in the book of Nehemiah were in terrible condition, needing to rebuild their community. They had returned to Jerusalem but they were without a nation of their own, lost their identity as Israelites, and were vulnerable to attack from outside enemies. Their city was in ruins without a wall, and they seemed hopeless. In these circumstances, however, God was doing something new. He was restoring the people to Himself and rebuilding the city and, ultimately, their identity. Through the powerful leadership of Nehemiah, God accomplished what seemed to be impossible.
Why Nehemiah?
There are three reasons for having this series in the current season of our church. Like the post-exilic people, we too are in many ways under hard circumstances and are hoping for God’s renewal in our community.
- Our world has been shaken by the Covid-19 pandemic. It has caused us to rethink how to live in community as a church and forced us into a virtual reality. If you are like me, it has probably awakened you to how precious the physical gathering of the saints is. How do we as a church move forward? When the shelter-in-place is over, what should we return to? Should we just go back to how things were or should we re-imagine what our church could potentially be as we seek to renovate our community?
- We live in an age where it is increasingly becoming secular and harder to live as Christians. There is hostility, and many people are opposed to the Christian faith, relegating it to the past. How are we to rebuild the church so that the gospel can shine as the hope for a hopeless world? How are we to deal with external opposition? Internal challenges and stagnation? How are we to solidify our identity as Christians in a secular age?
- One thing that I have felt as the pastor of this church in the past 2 years is that this community has been without vitality and vibrancy for some time. Before I got here, this church was without a pastor for a prolonged period, and there was no vision and purpose that grounded this community. There seemed to be an air of “let’s keep the status-quo”, a feeling of being defeated, tired, and even cynical. For the past 2 years, I have seen the Spirit at work in many of your lives and I see that slowly but surely the Spirit is breathing life, vitality, hope, and renewed vision and purpose into our church. This doesn’t happen over-night but I am certain that God will do it. He will breathe in us new life! But it takes all of us to rebuild this community from ground up. Are you up for the task of rebuilding that God is beginning in us?
Let’s dive in to this new series!
