Stop the Oppression

Nehemiah 5:1-13 · 2026-01-18 · Jason Wolin · Nehemiah | From Rubble to Revival

Nehemiah 5:1-13 · Poverty. Stop the Oppression — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

Stop the Oppression New Sermon So we are in the book of Nehemiah and we are thinking through how God is using Nehemiah to restore his people to the land and rebuild the temple as God had promised. Maybe at first it sounds exciting to lead a rebuilding project. If you are living in Persia and you are hearing all this from a distance, that’s a lot of positive energy. Good things are happening. And now Nehemiah says, I’ve been allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls. Who is with me? Well, the old people certainly would not be. They are old and frail and they can’t survive a journey and wouldn’t be much help anyway. So that leaves the young. Keep in mind, many of these people who returned with Nehemiah are so young and have been born and raised in the Persian empire and had never seen Jerusalem. So returning to the land and rebuilding a city, is for many of them, just an idea. And its probably pretty romanticized; they like the IDEA of rebuilding. They have the best of intentions but not much reality to go along with it. Even for Nehemiah it was hard to probably conceptualize the effort required and the lifestyle adjustment required. He hadn’t seen with his own eyes what he was getting into. Keep in mind Nehemiah served in the palace at Susa at the Apadana. He’s serving the king in the absolute finest palace the world had to offer. He’s going from this: Model of the Apadana of the royal palace of Susa to literally fields of rubble with no houses. Sometimes it’s helpful to just calibrate yourself on how extreme this transition would be. Sometimes it’s helpful to put this in modern terms. This would be like being a butler in Tracy McGrady’s home in Sugarland. Walking 900 miles, which is about the distance to from here to Mexico City and arriving to home sweet home. I mean, that’s a long journey to a very lame welcome. mm Maybe at first, there could have been some level of community excitement. But very quickly the reality is going to set in at the scale of the work. Not only that almost immediately we get this opposition from Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the People of Ashdod. And we have these men mocking and jeering and verbally attacking and raiding parties and terrorizing. It’s demoralizing. If that wasn’t enough, it’s hot and they just get tired. We saw how the people are just overwhelmed by the rubble. IT’s so much rubble. So we ended last week with the wall build back up to about half it’s height and the moral running a bit low. The Internal Threat Now it’s one thing to be beat down by harassment from the outside. It’s one thing to be beat down by an inanimate object like a rock. But it’s another thing entirely to b…

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