Restoring the Whole Personality, Nehemiah Series I and II

This is the first tape in the series Restoring the Whole Personality, a study in the Book of Nehemiah by Pastor Jay Passavant of North Way Christian Community. This tape contains the first and second of six messages. If you've been here at North Way at all over the last six weeks or so, it's very evident that the Lord is calling us to a major assault on the city of Pittsburgh. By the way, Friday morning at 6 a.m., the prayer warrior teams are growing. I'm going to ask you this Friday to come out in mass to assault the kingdoms of darkness in prayer. We're going to do that at 6 a.m. on Friday. The Lord is raising up a banner on Friday mornings. We're serious about our city, but you know God is serious about cities. In my studies, I only found two times that the Bible says that Jesus wept. When was the first time? When he saw Lazarus in the tomb and he saw the family's grief. What he saw was what an enemy death was. That's what he saw. And Jesus wept. And then the Bible says in Luke 19 and verse 41, that when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it. The city of Jerusalem. Now the book of Nehemiah is a story about a city and a servant. The servant Nehemiah of the city Jerusalem. And many times I've studied this book for the historical value of understanding how God brought a people back from exile and put them in a place where they could survive once again. And isn't it phenomenal, dear ones, that all through history, entire groups of people have been raised up and taken dominion and then been destroyed. Think of the Roman Empire. The greatest empire on the face of the earth. Is there a Roman Empire these days? No. There's just a city in Italy. There aren't Roman people any longer. Think of how many Chaldeans do you know? Or Amorites? Or any of the people through the generations? But listen, what has God chosen to preserve for the last 6,000 years? The Jews. They still exist as a people. And a nation. And God gives us the book of Nehemiah as a historical record of how He preserved that people. And I've also studied the book of Nehemiah as a strategy for building in the church. As a strategy for understanding how to get Christians together on a project. How many have had project kind of teaching from Nehemiah? You know, how to face opposition, how to motivate and all those things. But dear ones, there's a third level of understanding in the book of Nehemiah that we're going to look at today. And it has to do with what, if you will, is a coded message in the Scripture. There's symbolism in the book of Nehemiah. And it has to do with the whole matter of the rebuilding of the human personality. You could easily read Nehemiah 50 times, and if you don't understand this symbolism, listen, the Bible's full of it. The Ark of the Covenant was reality in the Old Testament, but it's a symbol now of what? Of the presence of the Lord. That's why we have journey through the veil and the Ark of the Covenant. It's all through the Bible. But the book of Nehemiah is symbolic of the restoration of the human personality. And I'm here to say to you today that we're still going to be looking at the city of Pittsburgh. We're still going to be launching our assault of love on the city, but I believe God wants to do something in our human soul by His Holy Spirit through the book of Nehemiah. About 12 years ago, I first caught this interpretation under the teaching of Pastor Jack Hayford, and I was so touched by the fact that God knew 500 years before Jesus walked on the earth, God knew that the Holy Spirit would be sent to rebuild broken lives and to restore human personalities. And so, Nehemiah is even a prophetic picture of what the Holy Spirit has been brought to do in our lives. See, God never intended for us to just live lives, just crawling along, making it. Now listen, I'm talking today to people who love God. I'm not looking out on a congregation that's like you're at war with God. Most of you love God. And if you're here today and you don't know Him, or maybe you just received Him a few moments ago, the Lord has a purpose. How many of you know God just didn't come to save you and just put you up somewhere to hold you until you die? But God not only redeemed you, He's come to bring rulership through you. He's come to cause you to be able to rule in life. Let me read it for you if you don't believe what I'm saying. Romans 5, verse 17 says, If because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life. Everyone say reign in life. Reign in life through the one man, Christ Jesus. God wants you to reign in life. And how many of you know it's not that easy? I mean it's a battle. How many of you have been through a battle this week? Reigning in life isn't that easy. Circumstances come along. People. Life would be easy without people, wouldn't it? If we didn't have to work, life would be a cakewalk. Let me tell you something. God knows exactly what you're going through and He allows it for the purpose of teaching you how to reign in life. So that you can come through victoriously as a man or woman of faith in Christ Jesus. This summer I was saying, Lord, what do you want to speak to the congregation through the word in the fall? And the Lord gave me two things. The second one I'll talk about next month. The first one was this. He said, I'm going to bring revelation on how to be released in the Holy Spirit. How many of you are just about ready to be released of some things? Ready to let the Holy Spirit just begin to flow through your life? You know, we're still kind of tight, folks. There's some visitors saying, if this is tight, what's going to happen later? It's so true that we are a product of what we've been shown along the way in our religious backgrounds. And when we find somebody that's really liberal, liberated in the Spirit, and liberal in their love to God, it almost seems like it's out of place. It's an incongruity. And Ray Mossholder, this week, it just was interesting to watch when Ray would come and pray on somebody, and he'd just lay his hands on them and that was it. I mean, it wasn't long. And we said, well, how can he just say that? I mean, he must be just making that up. And, you know, I was asking Ray about some of those things, and he said, well, I just come to the place where I expect God to do it as soon as I say it. Because he's put that reigning power in me. And I'm just believing today that God wants to do some processing of some human personality to bring us to the point where we are liberated in the Holy Spirit to be all that God wants us to be. Now, I was studying this and saying, well, okay, Lord, what is it here then? What is it about Nehemiah that's a picture of this? Now, understand that when Nehemiah was called, and I have to give you like a three-minute historical background so you know where we're coming from. About 90 years prior to this, the first exiles had returned from Babylon. You recall that God allowed Babylon to destroy Jerusalem and the people of God because of their willful disobedience. Listen, church, God never sends a judgment. He just allows the people to reap what they've been sown. And they had sown disobedience and rebellion to God, and so God just lifted his hand. And the Babylonians came and destroyed him, hauled the people off, and they totally, now listen, leveled the city. You know, in our culture, when we go to war with someone, after the war, what do we usually do? We help them out, you know. We went back into Japan and started pouring money in there and helped them get back on their feet. You know, now look at it. It's just, they're past us in a lot of things, technologically and so on. We help people. Back in that culture, what happened? They went in and they so wanted to crush that they literally went into a city and took every block off the other one so that not one brick was on top of the other. It was totally leveled. And if they didn't annihilate the entire population, they scattered them. They just sent them all off. And the message was this. You'll never be a people again. That's what they were trying to say. And so when Nehemiah heard the word that the exiles had returned, he asked about them. And it says back in chapter one in verse four, which we didn't read today. We read last time. It said this, the wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burned with fire. It was totally destroyed. And Nehemiah's job was to go back and build those walls. Now those walls stood for two things. They stood for security and identity. The security was obvious to keep out the intruders and the people, the trespassers. But the identity was this. You see, when a city didn't have any walls, people just could come in and do their thing and go out again. There was no one to control the access and the egress into that city. There was no one to be the authority. Now dear ones, many of us have a problem with that very fact. There has been in our lives no established point of authority. And so we find ourselves giving sway to the compromise that comes along. There's no one established in our personality who will say no when temptation comes. Who will say yes when an opportunity comes. And what God wants us to see is this. That just as Nehemiah came to physically rebuild the walls of that city to establish a security and an identity in those people, so too today God is coming in the Holy Spirit to reestablish the walls of your personality, the soul of man, the mind, the emotion and the will to restore it to the place where you have security in who you are and you have identity in who God has made you to be. That's what the Holy Spirit wants to do. And I was looking this over and thinking about it and I was thinking, Lord, not everybody needs that. Dear ones, you know, the Lord stopped me right there. Everyone needs to have their personality restored. You see, sin so scarred the human personality that we don't even know it sometimes. We don't know how prideful we can be. We don't know how presumptuous toward God, how hurtful. And God's coming here today and He's already been ministering here this morning to lift the scars of our broken personalities. He wants to heal depression today. God wants to restore some who have been broken off and not even communicating with other people because you've been so hurt. God wants today to heal the tears of some hurts of people whose personalities become kind of introverted and repressed because you've been hurt when you've reached out to people. God wants to build up those walls. God wants to bring some restoration to some of us whose temper so gets out of control that we can't even, we don't know when we're going to fly off the handle next. God wants to take a critical spirit in some people today and restore it so that it's merciful and caring and loving. It's all part of God's plan to restore His people. Now you say, well where is that in here? What does it say dear ones in Psalm 23? That He leadeth me beside still waters and He restoreth my soul. And Nehemiah is a picture of the Holy Spirit coming into our lives and doing just what I'm talking about. Now, here is where that, something very fascinating happened. I've often said that names are important in the Bible. Well the name Nehemiah comes from two Hebrew words, Nacham, N-A-C-H-A-M in the transliteration, Nacham and Yah. Yah you recognize from Yahweh, Jehovah. Nacham is the word for consolation or comfort. And the name Nehemiah literally in the Hebrew is the name comfort of Yahweh. Yahweh who comforts, the comforter, who does that sound like? The Holy Spirit is called the comforter in John chapter 14. So do you see that God even in the name of Nehemiah was already telling us, here is a picture of the Holy Spirit in His ministry. Coming to restore and rebuild the broken walls of our human personality. I was so thrilled when I discovered that because it said to me that I can learn something about the Holy Spirit. How many of you ever had a freak experience with the Holy Spirit? You've been in a place where somebody got really weird and they said, well that's Holy Spirit ministry. If you've ever been there once, put your hand up, alright. And I deal all the time with people whose greatest obstacle to going on with God is fear that it's going to get weird because anyone who's attributed the Holy Spirit to something has always done it in an out of control way. Well I want to tell you today, God isn't just interested in giving you a gift of the Holy Spirit. He wants you to know the Holy Spirit. He wants you to be friends with the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit wants to take you on and make you all that God the Father wants you to be. That's His purpose. And I see in this passage some beautiful descriptions of how the Holy Spirit works. Now where do we begin? First of all, understand this, before we look at the Holy Spirit, what did the Jews first do when they went back to Jerusalem? What did they do 70 years prior to this? What was the first thing they rebuilt? The temple. They went in first of all and said, we've got to restore the worship. And so 70 years prior to this story that we're going to read of, the Jews came back to Jerusalem, Cyrus let them off for no reason, Jeremiah had prophesied that he would do it, and right on schedule the Jews came out. They built the temple right in the center. The story of the rebuilding of the temple is in one sense wonderful, in the other sense it's sorrowful because what happened to the glory of the temple? Well it was nothing, it was a shadow of what it had been in Solomon's time. And the people built the temple, but 70 years had gone by and they hadn't done anything with the walls. Now dear ones, do you see the picture there? We have received, many of us, most all of us, Christ in our lives. We've put the temple of God. Some this morning said, I want God to live in my temple. But then we can go for years and never see the personality, the soul of our being restored in God. We can go for years and never see ourselves get out of the bad habits we've been in. We can go for years and never find ourselves able to love the person we're married to. We can go for years and never be free to be what God wants us to be in the marketplace. And the Lord is saying that today, He wants to begin restoring some of your souls, some of our broken parts, after His image and His likeness. Now let's look together and see how He does that. He's put the temple in and now He's coming to rebuild the walls. Let's pick it up in chapter 2 and verse 11. The Bible says, I went to Jerusalem and after staying there three days, I set out during the night with a few men. The first thing I want you to see about how the Holy Spirit works is, and we have an outline for this, Bob, I think. The Holy Spirit very often works in our lives in times of darkness. Darkness is the covering under which God often works. You know, I was talking not too long ago with somebody who had said, I have not really sensed God with me in the last six months. And I could see how they were weighted down. I could see the lines in their face. I could see the heaviness they were feeling. And you know, dear ones, I want to tell you this morning. If you've been going through a period of time when you haven't sensed the Lord is near, when you haven't sensed a breakthrough, when you haven't sensed a victory, when it's looked like when you've prayed, nothing's happened. When you've called out to God, it's just been like throwing your prayers up into the air. When you haven't seen any circumstances change, when it's been dark in your life, I want you to know something. God is there. God is working. The Holy Spirit, just like Nehemiah, often begins his greatest work in the dark times of your life. You all remember Sopal, the Cambodian man, the refugee that was here about six months ago? Do you remember the story he told of how, having been captured by the Khmer Rouge, he was thrown into this dirt, underground hole, where for months he was beaten, given just the minimum amount of food, and all during that time, it appeared that death was imminent. He was just waiting for his executioner to come. But he discovered that during that dark time, all that he could do was to sing that song, I've got a river of life flowing out of me. And how that power just began to keep him through the dark months that followed. And then suddenly, God came in. And through a series of events, he was set free and escaped from his tormentors. I want you to know, church, every single one of us faces dark times. When our career goes down and there seems to be no answer. When our husband or our wife says they don't love us anymore. When our children say, I'm not interested in your God anymore. When we hear about a sickness that we don't have any answer for. Those dark times come, but God is there. Does it say in your Bible, in Genesis chapter 1, that the earth was null and void, but the Holy Spirit was brooding over the waters? Do you read in your Bible how Paul and Silas were chained into prison? And when did the angel come and send an earthquake? Was it three in the afternoon? Midnight. What about when Jesus hung on that cross? What happened at the moment he gave up his life? Darkness covered the earth. Why? Because the Holy Spirit was preparing his greatest work. And I'm here to say to some of you today, and I don't know, it might just be one of you. It might be hundreds of you. That if you're going through a dark time in your life right now, the Holy Spirit is there. Never believe that because it's dark in your life, God's ignored you. Never believe he's far off. The Bible says that he clothed himself with clouds of darkness in the book of Psalms. God is there. And I don't know if that makes anybody a little bit comforted, but I pray that it does. God is there working in the times of darkness. Nehemiah went out and surveyed the walls, preparing to do his greatest work in a time of darkness. You know what I would do if I were you and it was dark in your life? I'd rest. Darkness is for resting. I'd just say, OK, God, I can't do anything about it. It's dark. It seems bad. I'm just going to rest. And the Lord told me this just a few weeks ago. I wrote about it to you in the keeping it said with the Spirit. The Lord said, trust me more than the fear you have of the darkness. Trust me. Trust me. The Lord is giving it as a word to some people this morning right now. Trust me in your time of darkness. All right. Secondly, the Holy Spirit then works verse 17 this way. It says this. Look with me. Then I said to them, this was the officials and the priests and the nobles of the of the remnant that had returned. Then I said to them, you see the trouble we are in. Jerusalem lies in ruins and its gates have been burned with fire. The second thing I see about the Holy Spirit here is his gentleness. He could have come and said, Nehemiah could have showed up and said, this is really a mess you folks got here. Who's allowed this to be like that? I mean, you've been here 70 years and this place still looks like a rat hole. And, you know, some of us think that's how God wants to treat us. Nehemiah comes and look at the pronouns he uses. We have this problem. We need to rebuild these walls. Three times he says, come let us rebuild and we will no longer be in disgrace. How many of you were just sort of touched by the story of this baby Jenny that fell in the well this week? Did you all see that? And wasn't that a stirring, I mean, just incredible saga as it went on for days. And I don't know about you, but just there was something about the value of human life that came through that, you know, just one little kid. We all know that whatever it is, five or 10,000 kids are going to die today of starvation. We all know that 4,000 little kids are going to die in a womb today somewhere. But one little life in a little tiny eight inch pipe and the whole world has its attention riveted on it. And one message that came through to me was this. Afterwards, they were interviewing the man that was primarily responsible for the rescue, the guy that really had engineered the whole thing. And they were calling him a hero for his perseverance and so on. And he said, you know, I just did what I could do. And all these other people were there to help. We're all sharing in the joy of this moment. And it just so struck me, you know, that's the way God is. God doesn't come in and say, yeah, you know, I'm just, you know, I made it all happen. God doesn't work in some kind of an arrogant way. God comes and said, hey, we're going to see some changes. We're going to bring about some transformation here. And Nehemiah is a picture of the Holy Spirit saying, we're going to do it. We're going to see changes. He doesn't demand his rights. He's not legalistic. He doesn't say, if you don't do it this way, you're out of here. He said, we need to come together. We need, listen now, we need to get past the disgrace of this situation. I don't remember a time in my Christian walk when the church has gone through more disgrace than it has in the last nine months. I want to say something very clearly here. I believe that what God allowed to happen with PTL and all that was not just to show us how bad the situation was at PTL. I believe it was a message to the whole church that we need to be responsible to the world for who we are and accountable to one another. And you know, there's a strong truth here. Disgrace, the word in Hebrew for disgrace is the word for scorn and mocking. And isn't that exactly what you've seen over the last months? It's been a scorning and a mocking. Look at that. You know, the newspaper cartoonists have had a field day and all this stuff. And at the same time, church, at the same time, the world can have these same kind of things happen. Remember Ivan Boesky, you businessmen? Remember him? What he did, he embezzled millions of dollars more than what happened here. His name's forgotten now for the most part. But you'll hear Jim and Tammy Baker for a long time to come because there's something in the world that wants to point the finger and mock and insult what the church is standing for. And we need to realize that when we compromise, when we sneak a peek at the pornographic magazine or have the extra drink with the men at the bar or do whatever we do to compromise or cheat on our income tax, we are giving the world license to mock and insult. The disgrace. And the Holy Spirit wants to come in today and say to you, I can bring healing into your personality so that you won't need to compromise. How many of you are ready for that? I don't want to be a compromiser. Do you hate the thing in you that wants to compromise? Don't you hate the thing in you that just kind of like shrivels back when you have an opportunity to stand and you say, well, I'll go ahead, you know. God says, listen, I want to heal that in you. I want to rebuild the wall of your personality. I want to restore you in gentleness. But look what He says very clearly in verse 17 once again. He says, come, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's rebuild it. And I see the third characteristic of the Holy Spirit here is that He works in completeness. He doesn't just do it half way. God wants to complete the work that He's begun. Remember those little buttons that said P-B-Y-P-M-F-G-T or something like that? Please be patient. God is not finished with me yet. I used to wear one of those. Now I put it on my mirror. Because it reminds me that God still works, even as the years go by. He's still working because He wants to make us complete. He wants to complete us. He wants us to be whole. The word holy, if you trace the derivation of it through Latin and English and so on, literally means to be healthy and full. To be whole meant that you had all that you needed to be complete. The English used to greet one another, hail fellow well met. That's still a saying we use once in a while. This was a healthy, well-rounded, complete person. The Holy Spirit is a complete spirit. That's what that means. It means that He is so completely sufficient, He doesn't need anything. God wants you to be whole. He wants you to be healed and complete. He doesn't want to leave the work half done. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit is to complete the work that God began in you. He's a God of completeness. And number four, the fourth thing I see there, is that He is also a God of fullness. Look at verse 18. Here Nehemiah says something very fascinating. He says this, I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me, and what the King had said to me. The hand of my Father, Father God, the blessing of the King, King Jesus, Heaven's blessing and Earth's blessing, Heaven's authority and Earth's authority. Nehemiah says, I've come with God's blessing and the King's blessing. I've come with Heaven and I've come with Earth. Who once said 500 years later, all authority in Heaven and Earth has been given to me? It was Jesus. So I send you. You see, the Holy Spirit comes to work with Heaven's authority and Earth's authority in your life. I want you to know, God wants you to be more than a conqueror in Christ Jesus. He doesn't want to just have you, you know, kind of wiggle your way through life. He wants you to know that He's given all authority in Heaven and on Earth to His Son Jesus to work that fullness in you. I don't understand the Trinity, but I know this. If you'll give your life to the Holy Spirit, all He will do will be to draw you closer to Jesus and the Father. He won't make you something weird or strange. He's just going to draw you closer to Him. And so those are the four things. Would you put them up again? The Holy Spirit works in darkness. He works in gentleness. He'll never force your hand. Listen, let me say something about that one more time. We can just shrink back and just say, well, God, I'll have to stay where I am. I don't want any more. I've had enough. Or we can say, God, I'm open. Holy Spirit, I'm open. Gently move in my life. Complete, number three, the work you've begun. Number four, bring the fullness of your purpose in me. And I believe this is a church where we want the fullness of God. Is that right? I want the fullness of God. Is that right? Are you with me in that? You want the fullness? Or do you just want most of it? Are you happy with just most of it? How many of you think we're there yet? That's right, we're not there. And so look what the people said as we conclude. Verse 18, they reply. You see, it's always in your court, dear one. Let us start rebuilding. And so they began the good work. And I hear the Holy Spirit saying, I'm here. I'm going to be moving in the church to draw your personality into fullness, to heal the broken down walls, the parts of you that have been destroyed. I want to do it. You need to say to the Lord today, then Holy Spirit, let's start rebuilding. Let's start putting together that which has been bruised and destroyed. Listen, there's only two kinds of people here. There are people here today who have been destroyed, who someone in your life was responsible for knocking your wall to the ground. Your personality has been marred or warped by some kind of a hurt, possibly a parental abuse, possibly a spouse, maybe somebody along the way that destroyed you. And the other kind of people that are here are the people who in your own life, in your own way, you've allowed sin to destroy your wall. It doesn't matter. God's here today. And His summons to you is, will you let me rebuild who you are? I'm ready to be one of those. Are you church? Are you ready to let the Holy Spirit rebuild? Well, let's close up our Bibles then. Let's stand to our feet. Would you just pray and say, Lord, let's start the rebuilding today. Let's start the rebuilding process. Let's start right now to be rebuilt in the soul part of us that we might be restored. Go ahead and pray where you stand. If that's your prayer today, Lord, I want to be rebuilt. Go ahead and start praying, would you? I want to be rebuilt today. I'm just going to wait on the Lord for a few moments as we conclude. Please fast forward this tape to the end and turn to the other side to hear the second message in this series. I was fairly well destroyed this morning in my staff meeting here at the church when I asked the staff about some things that I'd said on Sunday morning. And none of them knew anything that I'd said. Now, you know, that's right. They had wonderful excuses, just like I'm sure you do. As the person next to you kept snoring or whatever. But as I was praying, I knew more than a week ago what the topic would be tonight, but I've had a real strong direction of the Holy Spirit to just go ahead and lift this teaching right out of the book of Nehemiah where I think you'll see because of the application of it, it's just so evident. Now, how many of you turned on the television and said Monday evening and heard that the stock market had fallen 500 points and you said, big deal? It was a big deal, folks. How many were here in the years of the Great Depression? God bless you. I'm sorry. Well, how many of you remember the Great Depression? Okay. As I've read about it, one of the overriding emotions of that time was the sense that fear and panic just ruled and there was no rebounding. Bright Tuesday didn't follow. I guess in that case it was bright Wednesday. It never happened. We had an immediate bounce back, but that never happened. And folks, in virtually no time at all, people were wiped out. And, you know, it just so struck me Monday evening as this all took place and I was just pondering it, how many things we know very little about control our lives? How many of you feel like you could really just take 15 minutes and explain the market forces that led to the fall and the collapse of the stock market? But how many of you would be affected if that baby had just gone down another 500 points? We probably all would have been. And do you know that your life is far more controlled by things that you don't know than by things that you know? And that's why it should not be difficult at all when I stand up here on the basis of the authority of the Word of God and tell you that there are powers that are moving to control your life that you never see or really even understand. They're just described to you in the Word. And it's our responsibility as maturing believers to come into a place of coming to terms with what the Word says about those powers and principalities. You're all familiar with Ephesians chapter 6, but just for the sake of a little bit of preparation for tonight, look at it. Hold an EMI in place. And look, if you would, please, at Ephesians 6. For the sake of those who are newer to the Lord. Verse 11 says, Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in Ross Township, in the heavenly realms. So there it is. It's plain. I mean, that's as tangible as you can hope to see it. There it is. It's black and white. And how many of you know that we are indeed in a battle? We are in a battle. And I have to say to you tonight, as I come to share, about the schemes of the enemy. How to understand our adversary. I really believe that, number one, this message is timely for a number of you. Because I know just from conversations that I'm privileged to have with different ones that I am not the only one that struggles against the enemy. But I also know this, because our church is determined to take a bold stand in evangelism and being outwardly focused, we are getting the devil upset. And I don't say that in some sort of a flip, you know, old gospel-ish kind of a way. I'm talking about what I understand to be the powers and principalities of the air which are, for the first time, we are seriously challenging them. It has taken us now years of praying to finally get to the point where I think with authority we stand morning by morning and we assault those powers. We don't just whisper, we assault them. And so you're going to, as I share this tonight, I think you'll see, personally speaking, and for us as a church, why the Lord wants us to come to terms with understanding how the enemy would seek to steal, kill and de