Restoring the Whole Personality, Nehemiah Series III and IV

This is the second 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 third and fourth of six messages. Nehemiah chapter two. I'm going to be on Wednesday nights, by the way, continuing this teaching through Nehemiah. So as part of this series, you'll want to be here Wednesday night to receive what the Lord is giving to us. By the way, I know I can't, I just, in a group this size, there are going to be people here who say, well, I don't understand the Bible, and I particularly do not understand or care for the Old Testament. Anyone here ever have a problem understanding the Old Testament? Oh God, you people are so dishonest. You didn't understand that. Yeah, wake up now, come on. How many of you have had problems understanding the Old Testament? I feel better, because I've had problems. But listen to this. This is from the New Testament. Romans 15.4. Let me read it to you. For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. Everything that was written was to teach us, so through that endurance and encouragement, we might have hope. How many people need a little bit of hope today? Is there an area in your life where you're just not where you want to be, but you hope to be somewhere else? That's the purpose of the Old Testament. And so as I share this Scripture today, please don't see it as some attempt to be theological and deep, so as to impress you, because it probably won't. But if you'll receive it as encouragement and a support in your pursuit of hope, dear ones, I believe it's going to really minister. I said to the elders at the second prayer time this morning, this isn't so much a message that's going to get you all jumping up and down and saying hallelujah, as it is a foundational message. Do you believe that foundations are important? You know, the most beautiful skyscrapers down in the Golden Triangle will topple if their foundations are not deep and solid. And this is really a foundational message. My desire today is that scores and maybe hundreds of you will leave here with your foundation down further than it's ever been and the basic pinions of our doctrine and belief in the power of God, as we see it here in the Word. Now, the book of Nehemiah, as we said last time, can be interpreted three ways. Bob, we have three ways to interpret this on an overhead. The first one is simply historical. Everyone say historic. That means you look at the facts and say this is what happened. Now, Nehemiah wasn't wandering around when he did this thinking, I wonder if everyone will understand I'm a type of the Holy Spirit. He was just doing his job. His job was to reconstruct the walls of the city. Secondly, we can interpret the Bible in a spiritual, strategic kind of a way. We can gain lessons from what's being said there. There's more practical instruction in this book of Nehemiah as to how Christians work together than practically any other book. And then third, and I've pointed this out last week, that there is the interpretation symbolically. There is a symbolic message. There is a hidden meaning here. There's something underneath what you read in the obvious. It's a coded message, if you will. But listen, if you have the Holy Spirit, He is the great decoder. He's going to give you this truth today and make it simple to you. Isn't that neat? He wants to make it alive to you. And part of that code we said last Sunday was the fact that Nehemiah represents to us a picture of the Holy Spirit of God moving to reconstruct our human personality. The soul of man, mind, emotion, and will. Listen, 15 years ago, the Charismatic Movement swept across the country. And hundreds of people that are here today, this morning at North Way, followed along in the Charismatic Movement. Get in their cars and go somewhere to hear someone preach about the baptism in the Spirit and see the gifts. See the gifts. Let's go where the gifts are moving. And now, dear ones, God has moved on in the Spirit. And today, God is saying to His people, Know me. Don't just pursue my gifts, but pursue me, the giver. Know my heart. And the Holy Spirit wants you to know Him today. If you've been burned by Charismatic churches somewhere, today I trust you'll know something more of the Holy Spirit as a person and how He works in your life to establish some strong foundational things. Listen, God doesn't want you to be blown back and forth. Too many people lay along the highway of God's purposes, wounded and some of them expired because they never laid down these three foundations that I'm going to share with you today. And I just pray the Holy Spirit makes them alive to you. You see, historically what happened here was that the Jews had gone off in rebellion. They had followed their own ways. They had rebelled. God kept calling to them through the prophets. They said, forget it. We want to do our own thing. And so God allowed, in around 600 B.C., for the Babylonians to come in and destroy the city. I want you to put up the overhead of the walls, please, Paula, Bob. This is a rough diagram of the walls of the city of Jerusalem. And these walls had about a two-mile circumference. They were built giant, huge walls. We're talking here about 15 to 30 feet high, 30 to 60 feet deep. Many times there was turrets on top of these walls to fight off the attacking enemy. And you'll see around there little openings where the gates were positioned. And those gates, there are ten of them listed here, were very important in the lives of the Jews. The people did all their business activity at those gates. They were the center of commerce. They were the center of government. They were the center of decision-making. They were the place where authority, now listen, authority was issued. And they became a point that everyone understood. When you needed something decided or determined, you'd go to the city gates. That's where the elders would be. That's where the city council would be, the Sanhedrin, all the biggies. They'd be there at the gates. Now, it was a disgrace to any city to have its gates burned down and its walls crumbled because, number one, that means the city lacked any sense of identity. I mean, where is this city? No one really knows. There's no definition. And number two, there's no authority. There's no authority there to determine what's going to be the order of things. Over the last couple of years, there's been an increasing frustration with our border situation and the crossing of illegal aliens. Have you seen on the news those kinds of stories? A boxcar full of men die of heat prostration or whatever because they're locked in and crossing the Mexican border? Did you ever wonder why that's so important? Why are we making such a big deal about keeping the Mexicans and other people out of our nation illegally? I used to think, well, why don't you just let them in? We've got a lot of space here. But do you know what happens if you don't control those points of egress and access? Pretty soon, you have an influx of things that you do not know anything about and you cannot control. And what happens is these people come. They're not submitted to the government. They don't pay taxes. They're not under the authority of the government. They kind of do mix in and out as they please. And, dear ones, it isn't long before anarchy is the rule. And I want to say to you today, if there's confusion in your life, if you're struggling with anarchy of the spirit, what do I mean by that? I mean where you're not really sure what you're supposed to be doing with your life. Where there's a struggle inside of you as to what is right and what is wrong and what am I to do? How do I do it? Listen, the gates of your personality need to be built up. You need to control what comes in and what goes out. And I want to say to you today, God wants to give you that provision. God wants you to have the ability to control what goes into your life and what goes out of your life. And that is the purpose of studying the walls of Jerusalem and what exactly the Lord provided for each of us. Now, there's three gates I want us to read about. Let's look together now and read along Nehemiah 2, beginning in verse 13. If you don't know where Nehemiah is, it's after Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. Nehemiah 2.13 By night I went out through the valley gate toward the jackal well, some call it the serpent's well, and the dung gate, examining the walls of Jerusalem, which had been broken down, and its gates, which had been destroyed by fire. And then I moved on toward the fountain gate and the king's pool, but there was not enough room for my mount to get through. In other words, the gate had been so destroyed that he couldn't even crawl underneath the rubble. That's the picture of this thing. You have to picture your garage 40 times over. Well, my garage, anyhow. Rubble, just piled up, just destroyed. Then he says, So I went up the valley by night, examining the wall, and finally I turned back and re-entered through the valley gate. Now, from this diagram, roughly you can see that the valley gate points more or less toward the west, to where the sun would be setting as people looked out. The valley gate was the place that overlooked what was called the Valley of Hinnom. Now, a little history is helpful here. The Valley of Hinnom was the place where years before, centuries before, the Canaanite people, that was not the Jews, but descendants of Ham and Jephthah, their people were there, sacrificing to their gods in the Valley of Hinnom. Do you know what they sacrificed to their gods? Their children. They had a ritual of human sacrifice to the gods of Baal, and at the altar of Moloch. It was said that night and day you could smell the incense of the flesh being burned, and offering children to the god of Moloch and the god of Baal. Now, amazingly, even though the people of God had the revelation of the prophets and so on, do you know that the people still fell into the trap of doing the very same thing? Of offering their first born children to these false gods. It got so bad that Jeremiah prophesied to them, in Jeremiah 32-35 he said this, They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Moloch, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, says the Lord, that they should do such a detestable thing. And make Judas sin. Dear ones, can I just interject here? Would you let the Holy Spirit examine your heart today to see if there's a place where you are beginning to follow the practices of the world? Don't think that because you're called a Christian, you're not susceptible to the temptation of just kind of going along in the flow of what the world is doing. You know, it is so difficult. How many of you know it's difficult to stand when all the world around you says compromise? You know, when after work at 6 o'clock on a Friday night, the guys in the office say, Hey, let's go out and have a few together. And they know that you're a Christian, and you know that they know. You say, well, what am I going to do? Make no mistake, dear ones, that compromise is always at hand, it's always a temptation, and it always is sin. And the smell of the burning flesh of our compromise will not go away until we come to the point of dealing with the valley gate. You see, that valley gate symbolized for the people. It symbolized the burning of judgment. In fact, in the New Testament, the word Gehenna, which in Greek is Gehenna, comes right from this word in the picture of this word, and the word Gehenna, if you know your New Testament Greek at all, means literally hell. Jesus in Mark 9.43 said that's the word he used, Gehenna, or hell. Revelation 21.8 says hell, Gehenna, is a place where unquenchable fire burns through eternity in judgment of the devil and his angels and those who have followed him. And so you see, the valley gate is a picture of us dealing with our past, dealing with our sin, and as our first point tells us, freeing us from condemnation. I mean, you know it's important to be free from condemnation. Now what am I talking about here? Let me just back up a second. You may be sure that somewhere along the line you receive the love of God in Christ, but you find that even though you want to stop some of your sinful practices, it's difficult. And therefore, when you sin, you begin to hear this voice that says to you, you call yourself a Christian and that's what you do? You say that you love God and look what you're doing? And dear ones, I'm talking to some people today who this week, you heard that voice saying to you, you're not a Christian. If you died tonight, you'd be on your way to hell. I had a person, I don't know if he's here today, I know him very well, we had a discussion a year ago or so, he said, what if, just what if you, you know, he made up this story, he said, what if you committed adultery, stepped out of the lady's house, walked out and were hit by a car? Would you go to heaven? Should we take a vote? We had quite a discussion about that. And I said, well, let's not make it quite so far-fetched, well, not impossible, let's just say you got mad and screamed at your wife, lost your temper, got angry, walked out and the same car hit you. What about then? Oh, well, that'd be okay. Right? Who said that one sin was worse than the other? And so you see, dear ones, I'm not giving you a license to go out and do as you please and then just know that God will rescue you. I'm saying this, you've got to come to the settled point in your experience where you know you are free from hell and the judgment of hell because you trust in the blood of the Lamb of God. You've got to come to that point. Now, many of you have come there, and I know I'm talking to some who 20 years ago, you said, I knew that. But I'm also saying this, be sure, just be sure of this, that you will be coming across someone this week who's struggling with this very point. It is such a prevalent thing. And condemnation holds many down under its weight who never are free to rise up and conduct business in the gates of their lives to do things for God because they're never at the point of saying, I know that I know that God has rescued me and I am not going to be carrying on my past the weight of my sin. But God has freed me from it. It's interesting that outside of that, look at your scripture, outside of the valley gate is the serpent's well. Now, Wednesday night, I talked about five ways that the enemy wants to destroy you. And I talked about characteristics of him, so I won't go into that again. But that serpent's well was probably named as such because odds are that there, it was like a folklore thing, you know? It's just like the Snake River. Something happened there when someone was passing through and that's what they named it. Or Devil's Elbow in North Park. I always wonder why they called that place Devil's Elbow. But I know I never have any picnics there for what that's worth, all right? And so, you see, the serpent's well is a picture of the fact that there was a place of refreshment just outside the walls of the city. But because the serpent had coiled himself there, he kept the people of God from enjoying the refreshment of it. And condemnation will keep you from receiving the refreshment of God. Oh, so many Christians I know are always morose and gloomy and down because they're laboring. Condemnation. Condemnation. Rather than that, let's look at the second gate. The second thing that God wants to do. He wants to free you and enable you to flow in purity at the Dung Gate. Now, everyone say Dung Gate, but don't smile. Thank you, Michael. Only you could have done that that way. The Dung Gate, I mean, it's a picture of exactly what it sounds like. It's the place where all the refuse of the city was carried out. They didn't have, you know, a countless township sanitary authority there. It was a lot cheaper to live there, I guarantee that. But they carried out all their trash and all their refuse. Everything displeasing. But you know, it's funny and kind of uncomforting as that thought is. I don't know, we need to have a cleansing system in place every day of our lives. Right now, your blood is being cleansed. How? Breathing in and breathing it out. What would happen if that didn't work? You'd be a mess in a hurry. Our whole body is designed to function that way. Listen, spiritually, it is the exact same thing. Spiritual cleansing has to happen as a flow. And the Dung Gate represented the place where the Holy Spirit wants to quicken in you the ability to flow in the purity of the provision of God in your life. I'm glad to be able to say today that if you'll trust God, He will quicken to you your conscience will become your greatest ally. You'll know when you're moving into sin. You'll know when you're beginning to displease God and you'll hear the Holy Spirit say, not there. Then you have the choice of doing what the Bible says. And the word is to make confession. Confession. When we confess, that doesn't mean that we crawl up some long staircase to the throne of God weeping and begging. I remember seeing down in Mexico City at the Shrine of the Sister of Guadalupe people who had crawled for miles on their hands and knees confessing their sin on cobblestone trying to get their way to the Shrine to get forgiveness. That's not what God means. Homo Legao, the word confess means to say the same thing that God says. When we confess our sins, it means this. We say, God, I heard you say that's not right. I agree with you and I'm sorry. And to flow in purity simply means that when the Holy Spirit prompts you and says this isn't right in your life, instead of arguing with God, instead of defending yourself, you just say, okay, Lord, I'm sorry and I'm going to turn from this. Now, my experience, I see two kinds of things that people do with sin. One is they get casual about it. Hey, well, you know, I know Brother So-and-so and he's not a whole lot better than I am and he's an elder. I've heard that. Or I know, you know, I know I've got some problems, but listen, compare it to and then we find someone who's got worse problems. Listen, God does not work. He doesn't grade on the scale. God has His own absolute... This is how the Lord says it. I want to say to you today, church, do not wink at sin because God doesn't. Do not minimize what sin does to you because God doesn't. It was sin that put Jesus on the cross. When you think that your sin doesn't matter, think that one sin that you think doesn't matter. It's all it took to bring Jesus down to this earth. But the other kind of person, I guess I feel even more strongly about, is the one whose life never gets out of the pit, the sloth of despair, because all they see about themselves is their sin. They just see how over the last 10 years they've never been able to stop smoking and so that's the worst sin and therefore... You know, did you see the movie The Mission? There's a beautiful illustration there. You all remember that? Where a man committed murder and it was a terrible sin. But he became grievous over it and repentant, but he thought that he had to pay his penance to get free from it. So he took parts of a suit of armor, I mean all kinds of metal scrap pieces and breastplates and helmets and all that, and put them in this big fishnet and wrapped it all up and then tied it to himself with these big thick ropes. It looked like it weighed 150 pounds. And he started dragging this thing along and he joined a mission team up to the natives up in the jungle and dragged this thing through the thickest jungle. I mean, chopping through with... And up these 100 and 200 foot cliffs carrying this weight. It was such a vivid image of what so many people do with their sin. I mean, they tie it to themselves and then, by God, I know I'm forgiven but I'm going to carry this thing because I don't deserve to be forgiven. And I want to say today if you've received the forgiveness of sins in Jesus, drop that thing. Let go of it. Let your past be your past and let God give you a new future. You say, well, Pastor, I just did the same thing yesterday. I did it five years ago before I was a Christian. Then confess it. And the Bible says He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness. That's worth saying hallelujah about. God forgives your sin today. You say, I wish it was that easy. I wish I could just be free from all this. Well, let me read to you what the Bible says about your sin. So great is His love for those who fear Him that as far as the east is from the west, so far He has removed your transgression from you. How far is the east from the west? Some of our pilots here today. How far is that? You know, if the Lord had said north from the south, I could measure that. I've got poles. How far is the east from the west? You see, the image is that God takes them where you'll never see them again. One Scripture says He puts them behind His back. Listen, God isn't looking. If you've trusted Jesus, He's not looking at your sin. Not even yesterday's. If you confess it, you can be free today. I just want you to know when you get a hold of that, you'll no longer be looking over your shoulders. Oh, I was divorced five years ago. I'll never be much in the body of Christ. Listen, if there was sin over that, God is faithful and just to forgive and cleanse you of all unrighteousness. That should give somebody some hope today. There's some people here struggling with drug and alcohol problems. Listen, it doesn't matter how many times you fail, find forgiveness today. Flow in purity. And let the power of God set you free. The third gate that we want to talk about briefly is the fountain gate. The fountain gate was the place where we discovered fullness of the Holy Spirit. Now, the fountain gate was where the people would go out to get their water, to bring it in and be refreshed and meet their necessities and what have you. Now, the Scripture is talked about. It calls itself milk, the milk of the Word, 1 Peter 2. It talks about honey in the Psalms. It calls itself a hammer. But it also calls itself water. Listen, Jesus said in John 15, 3, You've been made clean by the word which I've spoken to. Ephesians 5, 26 talks about washing of water with the Word. The Word stands for that which... I mean, the Word that God gives us is symbolized by the water that we receive at the fountain gate. And that is established in you as you allow the Holy Spirit to quicken the Word to your experience. How many people found that when the Holy Spirit came alive in you, the Bible started making sense where it never made sense before? If you're not a Christian or you've never received the Lord and you read the Bible and it doesn't make any sense, the reason is you need the interpreter inside of you to help it make sense to you today. Now, just outside that fountain gate... Put up the wall again, would you please, Bob? There was a place called the King's Pool. And the King's Pool, just outside the fountain gate there, actually was... Let me flip it around the other way. It was inside the fountain gate and there was a stream that came in underneath the wall. Hezekiah was a good king, one of the few good kings of the Jews. And about 700 B.C., he built an underground solid granite conduit to carry water from outside in the kindred brook on in under the walls to the place where people could drink freely of the water inside the gates of Jerusalem. It was an engineering marvel. History records that a group of the Jewish engineers started on the inside and a group started on the outside and they met underground within one foot of each other. This was 2,700 years ago. Solid granite. And that conduit carrying water from the kindred brook on in inside the walls of Jerusalem did these three things. Number one, it gave them a source of water so that when they were attacked by the enemies they didn't have to fear being shut off, which had happened for all those years before. Gave them security. Number two, it provided for their daily nourishment. They could go there and just draw water out of it. And number three, Jesus, in the Gospel of John, touched somebody at that same pool. It was called the King's Pool in the Old Testament. It was called the Pool of Siloam in the New. Jesus touched a man and his eyes were healed. And dear ones, if you'll let the King's Pool, the Holy Spirit, bring the Word of Life alive in you, three things will happen. Number one, you'll find the ability to resist your enemies. Number two, you will find yourself drinking refreshment every day. And number three, you'll move in healing power in your life. You say, well, is that automatic? No, but I'll say this. Without it, you'll never survive the fight. Just as surely as you need to know that you're saved, so you need to know the fullness of the Spirit in order to minister to a hungry and dying world. I told you before that as I began this message, it wasn't a big emotional message. It was a foundational message. But church, hear me as I appeal to this. Unless these three gates, the valley gate which has to do with our past history and our freedom from sin and condemnation, the dung gate which has to do with our daily cleansing in the power of God and power to walk pleasingly to God, and the fountain gate which has to do with the Word washing over us in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Unless those three things are true in your life, you'll never be able to rise up and be what God wants you to be. You'll never rise up and begin to touch a world that's hungry. You'll never be able to be all that God purposed before the foundations of time for you to be. And Nehemiah is a picture of the Holy Spirit surveying each of our lives. Coming alongside and saying, can we rebuild this gate together? Can we come and give confidence? Can we come and give a touch of security? Can we come and build some identity in the Holy Spirit? That's what he wants to do. The Holy Spirit wants to come and build those parts of our personalities back into wholeness. Do you want that? You've got to want that. Remember last week, I ended by reading this verse, and I'm going to do it again. And so they replied into verse 18, let us start rebuilding. Let us start the process of having each of those gates rebuilt in our heart. Let our soul be renewed. And God will change us. Are you a candidate for that? Are you? I sure am. I want God to let those things be established in me so that I can be all that God wants me to be. Let's pray together. Father, I ask You in the name of Jesus to so establish a point of identity that every person here who does not know with certainty that they have come in to forgiveness of sin, that they could build that valley gate in their lives right now, Lord. For everyone that's not in a place of walking in a daily flow of confession and cleansing, that You'd restore them into fellowship. And Lord, for everyone who doesn't know the fullness of Your Spirit, that You'd move to baptize us in the Holy Spirit and in power. That we might be a fountain, Lord, just a flowing river of living water to the world around us. In Jesus' name I ask. Amen. Please fast-forward your tape to the end before turning your cassette to the other side. Two verses for tonight and a couple of references. Nehemiah 4. We looked on Sunday at the rebuilding of the valley gate, the dung gate, and the fountain gate. Unless the Lord directs otherwise, on Sunday we'll be looking at how we work together in the Spirit to see God's temple, His people, His church built together and their personalities healed one to another. Let's look at Nehemiah 4.1 and 2. When Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became angry and was greatly incensed. He ridiculed the Jews and in the presence of his associates and the army of Samaria, he said, what are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble? Burned as they are. And Tobiah the Ammonite who was at his side said, what they are building, if even a fox climbed up on it, he would break down their wall of stones. One of the things that you learn in studying anybody in combat is that the best way to defeat an enemy is to study how they do something and how they are prone to attack and meet them at that point. For many months, we had a raccoon who would come up in our backyard and very happily dismember our trash can. And I just couldn't figure out what to do with this thing. Finally, we got one of those trash cans that have the metal handles on them that lock underneath. And when you put some trash in that thing, you had it locked tight. Well, I remember one morning I woke up figuring I've got this thing. And this raccoon had been studying me, I guess. Because literally, I'm talking about I think it was like a 32 or 40 gallon, whatever those big trash cans are. Here was this thing pulled down into the woods. I'm serious. Down and over this steep embankment. All the way down in the woods, laying on its side. But it didn't get the handles open. So, we had a Mexican standoff then. Because I either had to decide that every morning I was going to have to get up and go down in the woods and pull my trash can up with the handles. Or at least, you know, just give them something to eat out of the old trash. Well, tonight, from what I think the Lord has told me, this is going to be the last teaching on this phase of the book of Nehemiah, which is understanding how the enemy works. I talked about it last Wednesday. And really, these two tapes of Wednesday nights will go together. Because, dear ones, it is very, very important that we know this. I want to say to you tonight, you're here by divine appointment to learn something about how to stand firm in your life. I just wonder, how many people tonight, honestly, don't put your hand up. I don't want you to feel any kind of crowd power here or anything or any peer pressure or whatever. But how many people would just say honestly tonight that over the last weeks or maybe even a few months, you've sensed an inordinate stress in your life that you would have to say has the description of an attack of the enemy in your life. How many of you just say, I've been more attacked in the last few months in a strange way than I can remember in a long, long time. Put your hand up. I told you not to put it up unless you were serious. Look at that. That is amazing. That is amazing. That is no coincidence. And I have a lot of reasons why I believe that's true. And one of the chief ones is because you've decided to be part of a church that's serious about doing something for the kingdom of God. When you align yourself with someone that's serious, you are a target. And I've told you about that. But I'm here to say tonight it's nothing to be afraid of. For greater is He that's in us than he that's in the world. And what I'm going to share tonight is not to in any way bring some attention to the devil. I am not for that system. But I do want to expose the devil. Because Paul said to do that. Paul said we are not ignorant of his strategies. We are not ignorant of his schemes and designs. And if you're ignorant, you're very vulnerable. Do you know that? But once you know him, I find it delightful. The minute I sense an attack and tonight we're going to look at five specific places where he's prone to attack. When it starts to happen, you're going to stand up and say, wait a minute, I know you. And I'm standing here right now in the name of Jesus and on His word. And I'm saying to you, Satan, be gone in Jesus' name. And you're going to have the power to do it. So when you leave here tonight, you're going to be a lot stronger to stand against the powers of the adversary. Now, these are the five points. Five places. I'm going to have to keep this a little bit short because I promised that children's ministry would be done pretty much on time. The first thing I see, Sand Valley. Remember, we said now if you've missed the last few weeks, Nehemiah is the story of the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. But it is a picture of God rebuilding the human soul. This isn't something that I dreamed up. A number of teachers have shared this over the years. Jack H