Built By Burden

That is a serious wall in decay today. This is happening on our watch. Here I am at the apex of my ministry life influence. And this is happening on my watch. You and I as adult followers of Jesus Christ need to step up to the plate. And we need to meet this need head on just like Nehemiah met the need head on in his day. Hey, uh if you have your Bible, open it to Nehemiah uh chapter 1. We're starting a new series today. Uh in the Old Testament, we were about a full year uh in First and Second Corinthians. In the New Testament, it was a great time of study there. So, now we're following that up and going back into uh the Old Testament book of Nehemiah in a series we're calling Build X. Uh and and those that know me as you're turning there know that u uh I'm sort of a walking billboard of slogans. I've kind of built my whole life and even a lot of the life of our church uh over the years around slogans. Uh we have slogans we use on our team. I think they're memorable and they they they keep us focused. One of the slogans we have on our team is we'll punch you in the nose, but we won't stab you in the back. Uh that's how we work around here. So just uh truth in advertising. Um one you've heard from the stage from me uh if you've been here any length of time uh is we don't know what we're doing. Now I know that's not incred incredibly encouraging for you today. Uh but it does keep us humble and hopeful that God does and that God can work through us today. Uh one of my favorite personal slogans and life mods is that cats are for kicking. Um, now that's not everybody's in the room. I actually stopped letting me preach every weekend because of that um line. Uh, but it is biblical truth. Um, we like to say often around here that every fault line is a front line for opportunity. Uh we train our young preachers and I tell all of our young preachers that are in our uh in our pipeline uh this slogan. Just remember you have never heard a bad five minute sermon. I've heard plenty of bad 50inute sermons, but I've never heard a really bad five minute sermon. Um, so when I retire from ministry full-time, I'm really trying to figure out how to apply uh to A DOT uh to write those billboard signs, right? You see going down the highway, you know, stay alive, drive 55, or uh it's not a race, leave some space. Uh I I saw one recently I thought was really good. Um uh camp in the woods, not in the left lane. Um some of you going to follow that guy home today from church. Um, if you have a cross church sticker, uh, don't honk. If you do, hon if you don't, uh, honk all you want. And, uh, let's clean that lane up. Um, if they ever put an A dot sign out here in front of the church and I get to write the A DOT messages, I'm going to say, uh, don't go to hell, Driving on Bell. Um, that that would be helpful. and also kind of an outreach for our church. You know, if you're gonna drive poorly, pull pull into church, get your life right first and and uh then you can do whatever you want, I guess. Uh well, as we we start this series in Nehemiah, there there are so many slogans as I was thinking about this message this week that that applied to to this book of the Bible. Uh one slogan that we might apply is leaders need a problem to solve. Uh, I've often told that to young leaders that leaders need a problem to solve. Nehemiah is going to be faced with a problem here in in chapter 1. It's going to go all the way through the end of the book. And uh the walls have uh uh come down. The gate the city gates have been burned. Uh uh the people are living in poverty and the glory of God has a stain on it in his holy city. And Nehemiah is a leader and he's got a problem and he's going to solve it. If you serve in any way position of leadership, just know that problems are gold for good leaders. They really are. Uh without problems, you really don't need leaders, right? And so uh when when a leader comes on board, there's problems and he or she gets to address them. Uh they are problems to solve. Another slogan or or saying that we might apply to Nehemiah this morning is leaders turn problems into possibilities. Uh anyone have a problem in the room today? You don't have to lift your hand cuz I know you are all problem children. Uh and we all have problems. But problems are just a possibility in disguise. That's all they are. You see for us as Christians uh we we are not someone who sees a difficulty in every opportunity. rather we see an opportunity in every difficulty. Another slogan, it's kind of the title of this message today is uh God burdens us so that he might bless us. Uh we're going to see that Nehemiah has a heavy deep uh God-given burden for the city of Jerusalem. And and God does that in order to bless him and to use him. And God is going to use his burden not only to bless him but an entire nation. So, as you begin this series in Nehemiah, be encouraged. Things may be bad or bleak, but as we've sung about, the essence of our worship time today was there is a God in heaven that can meet us at the point of our needs. And so, as we start uh Nehemiah, the whole book, I get the privilege of introducing it to you today. I I want to remind you of three biblical principles for good Bible interpretation. A and this is good for an entire book, but this is good anytime you read a verse or anytime you hear a sermon, you need to ask these three questions of the passage. And these are three questions that we're going to ask today. But we we want to serve as a guide as we go all the way through this book. The first question of biblical interpretation is always what did it mean then? What did it mean then? As we read Nehemiah's story, it is a different world. It is a different time. It is a different setting than today. And so we need to come to grips with the historical context. The second question of biblical interpretation is what does it mean now? Now just know that it will never mean now something completely opposite than it w than what it meant then. Uh that being said however we do have to translate it from yesterday to today. Uh for example Nehemiah is dealing with a specific problem in the nation of Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem. The walls have come down. We don't have walls around our cities any longer. At least not unless you live in Sun City Grand. All right, they have their walls. All right, everybody else is pretty open about life. And then there's there's the the Grand Deites. Uh but um so we have to like do some biblical interpretation. What does it mean now? What what are these walls? Uh what's the what's the equivalent for our world today? And then the third maybe the most important question in biblical interpretation is what does it mean to me personally? Uh you see the scripture is not just to be read for information. It is to be read for inspiration and application. And so what does it mean to me personally? How can I apply this to my life? So, so now that we're we're we're going to see that in Nehemiah, what what it meant then, and we're going to try to apply it during the course of this morning and then all the way through the rest of our mornings together in the book. What does it mean now, and what does it mean to me personally? Nehemiah took a problem and turned it into a possibility. So my question for you is how do you as a church and you as an individual, how do you take the problems in your life and turn them into possibilities in your life? Three quick things because you've never heard a bad five minute sermon. Uh I'm going to try to not preach a 50-minute sermon. All right. So three quick things. First of all, we must visualize. We must visualize. And that's what's happening in verses 1-3. We kind of pick up in verse two. Haniah and one of my brothers arrived with men from Judah. And I questioned them about Jerusalem and the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile. They said to me, "The remnant in the province who survived the exile are in great trouble and disgrace. Jerusalem's wall has been broken down and its gates have been burned." Nehemiah at the time of this writing is living in Persia and he and his friends have been to Jerusalem. His friends I should say have been to Jerusalem and they come back with a disturbing report. They come back with some negative intel. Nehemiah asks, "How is it there?" And they say it's, "Oh, it's it's really really bad. The walls have been destroyed. The gates have been burned. The people are living in poverty. And there is a stain now on the glory of God in his holy city. You see, remember Nehemiah, this is then, not now. Then Nehemiah didn't have cable television. He didn't have CNN or Fox News to get the latest updates. He didn't have the internet or a smartphone or a tablet or a laptop. And so he needed this physical presence of these young men who had been there to give him the real report. It was news of degragation, desolation, destruction, and decay. The walls have crumbled. The gates have been burned. The people are in poverty. And there is a stain on the glory of God in the city. I often give young leaders two tips about leadership and that is that real leaders do two things. They define reality and they paint a preferred future. That's the essence of leadership. If you could boil it down to two statements. Leaders define reality and they paint a preferred future. But you must first start by defining reality. What actually is happening on the ground? When I was much younger in ministry, I used to try to ignore problems. I'd stick my head in the proverbial sand and hope that they went away. How do you think that went? Not well. When you ignore problems, they just uh exas it exasperates them. Uh they intensify, they they fester and they get infected. So real leaders, and Nehemiah is one, defines the reality here in this passage. And later on in the book, he's going to paint a preferred future of how to deal with it. He's first of all what it meant. Then he he defines the reality of the literal walls. He has a visual of the literal walls. They were in need of great repair. In that day, a city without walls was a big problem. Now, we don't think about that being a problem today, but in that day, it meant that they were open to enemy attack. provisions could be robbed and stolen and they were unsafe. But what does that mean now? That's what it meant then. We don't have necessarily walls of that are destroyed now in our culture, but we have not literal walls, but we have many figurative walls that are being destroyed in our culture today. Uh I present to you the moral walls that are being destroyed in our culture today. Uh it has been said the things that used to hide in the back alley now strut down main street. Our nation by and large has lost its moral compass. You see that in the problem of pervasive pornography in our world today. Today, any 10, 11, 12year-old old enough to know how to operate a smartphone, and they all know better than you how to operate it can find pornography at their fingertips. You men and women are tempted as adults to do the same. They can find it on their gaming systems, their laptops, and our smartphones. I'm thankful for and he's here in the room today in our second service. Nick Cuper is one of our state representatives, a member of our church. His wife frequently plays keys here on our stage. But Nick is a freshman state representative uh put together wrote a wonderful piece of legislation for our state to outlaw the accessibility of minors to pornography in our state. Now, because of his work and those of his colleagues, it is now illegal for minors not to be vetted and properly identified their age before they're able to access pornographic sites within the state of Arizona. Yeah. Give it up for him. It might surprise you that he and his family have received death threats for that, been accosted on social media with vulgar and ranker comments. But sometimes we have to stand to rebuild the moral walls in our culture. I have a pastor friend. He had a counseling appointment just this past week with a young man in his church who is coming out of the pornography industry. And it's challenging and it's costly for him because this young man, it blew my mind to realize this, was making multiple thousands of dollars a week on his Only Fan site. And now he's under deep conviction. And to his credit, he's coming out of that and repenting of that. But he's also dealing with the financial realities of coming out of that lifestyle. Illicit sex, murderous abortions. What a horri what was horrible yesterday has become acceptable today and is becoming a stepping stone for something worse tomorrow. I read some time ago that there are nine steps to the fall of a nation. As we get to celebrate uh get ready to celebrate a milestone for our own nation, we be well to heed the milestones and the stages of decline, even the stages of rise and then decline of any nation. There are nine of those stages. Number one, a nation goes from bondage to spiritual faith in the early stages. Number two, it goes from spiritual faith to courage in those early stages. It goes from courage to liberty. And we celebrate those wonderful heroes of our our forefathers who fought and and brought liberty to our fledgling country many years ago. But then it goes from liberty to abundance. And that's a joyous time in the life of a nation. Number five, it goes from abundance to selfishness. And then it goes from selfishness to complacency. And then we go from complacency to apathy. Number eight, we go from apathy to dependence on the things that we think would brought us freedom. And then number nine, we go from dependence back into the same bondage that we sought freedom from. Our nation, I would say, is somewhere between number five and number eight. Right now, we need to rebuild the moral law walls of our nation. We think about domestic walls today. The American home is a disaster zone in many places today. divorce, teenage pregnancy prior to marriage, disaster zones. Some of you have watched, as I have, the the pictures and the videos, the images coming from the hurricane that hit Jamaica and then later Cuba. But I would say to you that just as we need disaster relief of Southern Baptist, who I'm so thankful that are going to those hard places with other caring organizations and agencies to offer care. We need disaster relief to go to our homes today and we need a revival in the family. But then he moves to I would move to church walls. We live in an interesting day and time where churches, the walls of the church is being destroyed. I've pastored now for a little over 40 years, and this I have determined is a unique moment in the history of the North American church. Never have I had so many churches come to me with keys for their buildings saying, "We've done everything we can. We're going to close the building down unless you help us." And those that don't come to us, eventually their buildings get resold to be restaurants or homes or worse even bars. that is happening all across North America today. I could tell you in my travels, I've been to Alaska and Montana and Utah and Idaho all in this past month, and I can tell you it's happening all across the Mountain West where churches are being shuttered and closed, and the gospel light that used to shine bright in those communities is being extinguished. That is a serious wall in decay today. And I would say to you that this is happening on our watch. Some would look at my lifespan in ministry and say you're kind of at the apex. That means you're about to fall off the edge of your ministry influence. And I would say here I am at the apex of my ministry life influence. And this is happening on my watch. This didn't happen when your parents or grandparents or greatgrandparents had something to say to do about it. This is happening right now. When you and I as adult followers of Jesus Christ need to step up to the plate and we need to meet this need head on just like Nehemiah met the need head on in his day. It starts turning a problem into a possibility. We must visualize. But secondly, we must agonize. I I I believe that's what happens in verse four of chapter 1. When I heard these words, I sat down and wept. I mourned for a number of days fasting and praying before the God of heaven. God wants to break our hearts for the fallen moral, domestic, and yes, even the fallen church walls in our world today. And be encouraged. God burdens us so that he might bless us. Nehemiah is found here in this text literally weeping over the city of Jerusalem. But this would not be the last time someone weeps over the city of Jerusalem. Jesus came to that city during his earthly ministry prior to his crucifixion and he did the exact same thing. He wept over that city and then he forecasted destruction that would that come to that city some 70 years later. God wants to break our hearts for our fallen moral walls, our fallen domest domestic walls, and our fallen church walls. And we need a burden like Nehemiah that would drive us to prayer. I'm not going to unpack all of what he prayed for. Pastor Andrew will be here next Sunday to do that, finishing out chapter 1. But just know in the prayer that you'll be studying together next weekend that he prays a prayer of contrition. He prays a prayer of a broken heart. Society has forgotten to blush but the church has forgotten to weep and we just shrug it off. We need a prayer of contrition. He also will pray a prayer of confession. He identifies not only the nation's sin but his own culpability and his own sin in regards to this. Thankfully, he also prays a prayer of confidence. He believes that God is bigger than the problems of the day that when God's people unite together to to to affect an issue that that God there is a God in heaven that provides for us. And then he prays a prayer of commitment. And I pray that you and I get there soon. That we are committed to doing whatever it takes to keep churches from closing, to keep the gospel light on wherever people are in need of the saving message of Jesus Christ. Now, I I appreciate that clap, but if you're going to clap, you you got to learn to clap. All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Um, but it it is true. We're going to have to put some commitment to it. As the old saying goes, we have to put legs to our prayers, feet and hands to our prayers. We have to put our hand to the plow and we have to do something. Prayer is just not mystical thinking. It's a call to practical action. And then finally, and I'm finished, in order to turn problems into possibilities, not only must we visualize and agonize, but we must organize. The entire rest of the book of Nehemiah will be Nehemiah taking action, putting a plan in place, and then rebuilding the walls. He will go to the king in chapter 2, and he will ask for three things. He will ask for the king's permission. the king of Persia that is who was the ruler of the world at the known at that time he will ask for the king's protection and then he will ask for the king's provision we have a greater king to go to in this season and in this season we go to the king for his permission Lord if you will we want to address this issue Lord would you give us your protection keep us safe while we do it and God give us your provision. I fully believe where God guides, he provides and that God will provide what we need to meet the needs of our time. Several weeks ago, I sent out an email to all of those on our email list telling you that in 2026, we're going to be unpacking some things at Cross Church that will stretch us and challenge us. Not just here in Surprise, but in Phoenix and in Elmarrage and in Cornville and even other places that will stretch us in ways that we have never been stretched before. Now, I think that's saying something because we've we've stepped up to the plate and been stretched before. When we built this building to worship in, that was a stretch. When we launched other campuses, that was a stretch. But in 2026, I'm believing that we are going to step into the most significant season of kingdom influence in the history of our church. and it's already started. Pastor Andrew informed me I I I gave the wrong year because the years just go by so quickly. I I said in the first service it had been eight years, but it was actually coming up on the 10-year anniversary that a group of people in a local association of Southern Baptists that we're a part of came to us with keys to a dilapidated building at the corner of 19th Avenue in Grovers in Midtown Phoenix. and they said, "We can't do this anymore." Before we arrived there almost 10 years ago, the year before, there had been six other churches trying to meet there and they all failed. When we came there, there was literally prostitutes standing on the street corner, drug needles all over the property, and human feces needed to be picked up almost every Sunday morning on the front porch of the church. 10 years ago, we asked Pastor Andrew, who gets to preach now here regularly, to go there. And he started that church with the help of this church. And today, Pastor DJ is the new leader there, and they're doing amazing. They're in two services, and they baptize people almost every single month of the year. About four years ago, some people in Cornville, Arizona. Where in the world is Kornville? It's just 30 minutes this side of Sedona and about 30 15 minutes um east of Cottonwood. And there was a group of people gathered at what used to be known as the First Southern Baptist Church of Kornville. There was a group of about eight people left in that church. The youngest was 80. They were a part of the youth group. We installed a pastor there. He's now since moved to Liberal, Kansas. We're about to install a new pastor. We already have agreed to the dude and we're just waiting to announce it to you soon. But I remember in that first year there was a Sunday that they baptized 12 people on one Sunday. That's right. They nearly doubled their church in one Sunday. Because you guys said, "We're not going to let the lights go out where the gospel needs to be." And then almost a year and a half ago, it's not quite a year and a half old, but about a year and a half ago, we started Cross Church El Mirage. Same situation. People came to us. They said, "Man, we can't do this anymore. Here's the keys." And we took over that property. All of those properties formerly deeded to Cross Church. And many of you helped. Bill, I see you here. We worked together trying to tear down walls and put stuff. I'm good at tearing stuff down. Bill's good at putting it back together. And we put some serious elbow grease into that property. And now a year and a half later, they average almost 250 people and they're completely out of room in two services. They're about to start a third service in January. Listen, that was a place where the light had gone out, but we said, "Not on our watch. We're going to do something about it." You've already been doing that, but in the coming year, I'm going to ask you to do it even more. As a matter of fact, on the screen, the pictures of two people that we'll be starting two new crossurch campuses with in 2026. One is Lyall Harrenstein. He's an elder here. He's been a part of our church for about seven years. But about five years ago, I came to Lyall and I said, "Ly, I think God's calling you to preach." And he laughed at me. But over time, he began to sense that call. He prepared himself going to seminary classes in the evenings, working a full-time job as a manager of a store here in Surprise. He was a part of our team, lead team that that left this church and went to help start the church at El Mrage. He's been there embedded in that church. His wife's been leading the children's ministry up until just a month ago. And we had another situation where another church said, "We can't do this anymore. Here's the keys." And so in 2026, Lyall is packing up the boxes in his house already and he's moving to a town called Mayor, Arizona. You say, "Where's Mayor?" It's just about 15 minutes out of Prescat Valley on the highway there between I17 and Prescuit Valley. Has its own high school, elementary school. Lots of people there that don't know the Lord. and Lyall and his family have put their yes on the table and they're moving their family. He's already resigned from his position at the store he manages. He's managed it for like 15, 16 years and he's moving there. Pictured alongside of him is another young man that's come out of our Elmarrage church, Jav Hernandez. Javi isn't moving anywhere. He's staying right where he is, but we're going to be using that building in Elmari to ho host two churches in. Javi will soon start in 2026, Eiglacia de la Cruz interpreted cross church. He and his family have felt called and he's going to serve God a different time than the other church meets. meeting right there at Cross Church Elm Mrage Eiglacia de la Cruz. You're already doing it. But there are more of these opportunities that will come to us. Would you be surprised to know that I turned down three sets of keys this past year? Churches are closing all over. The walls of the church are crumbling. We should visualize it. We should agonize over it. But right now, we're organizing to get ready to meet the pressing need of our day. Let me close with this thought. Walls don't rebuild themselves. It requires awareness of the problem, active praying, and allin participation. And so here's what I'm asking you to do today. Start praying. Visualize, agonize, and as we unpack in more detail in 2026 how we've organizing ourselves to meet these needs, start praying. Father, how can I be all in?