Lesson Material
Phase #1: PASSION
How to Become Devoted to a Great Endeavor
(Nehemiah 1:1-11)
Nehemiah was a man with a mission—a mission he was passionate about. His “great project” (6:3 NIV) consumed his heart and energy. It was his passion that drew him into his mission and his passion that pushed him through it when it became difficult. This great inner compulsion is a requirement for successful leadership. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once said, “Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
Great leaders have a vision for what can be done and a passion for getting it accomplished.
John Knox was one such man. Although he died in 1572, he is still remembered for his prayer, ‘Give me Scotland, or I die.”
This wasn’t an idle puffed-up motivational speech. Some of his ministry partners had recently been executed for their faith. Patrick Hamilton, a student at St. Andrews University, discovered the joy of salvation by faith alone and wrote an enlightening book on grace that the religious establishment condemned as heretical. His bold preaching became so threatening that the archbishop executed him. The twenty-four-year-old maverick would be Scotland’s first martyr. Hamilton burned at the stake for six long excruciating hours before he finally died. His last words were, “How long, O Lord, shall darkness cover this realm? How long will you suffer this tyranny of men? Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” Patrick Hamilton became a torch in the darkness, and his death drew others to the light. His killing inspired widespread interest in the Reformation.
After Knox was saved in 1543, he sought to become part of this fledgling movement to bring the gospel to Scotland. He came under the influence of converted reformers and became an aide and bodyguard for the well-known Protestant preacher George Wishart. Wishart was eventually charged with false teaching, strangled, and burned at the stake under the direction of Cardinal Beaton—a religious leader who openly consorted with concubines and sired ten children. When John Knox contemplated the death of his mentor, he prayed, “Lord, make me like that man.”
Not long after this, John Knox was arrested and forced to become a French galley slave for nineteen months. His hardships resulted in permanent health problems. He was exiled outside of the country for a decade on his release. These years, filled with study and foreign ministry experience, equipped him for a triumphant return to Scotland.
With the declaration, “I love to blow my Master’s trumpet,” Knox began a relentless campaign of fiery oratory. He sought to purify the idolatrous, false religion in Scotland and bring people to true salvation. Another listener declared that his preaching was “able in an hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.”
The day before he died, Knox said: “I have been fighting against Satan, who is ever ready for the assault; I have fought against spiritual wickedness and have prevailed.” His campaign was a success. Through his powerful praying, dynamic preaching, and theological influence, John Knox helped bring the pure gospel of the Reformation to Scotland. God answered his passionate prayer by giving him Scotland.
Nehemiah’s book describes how God used him to accomplish an incredible ministry project. The first chapter shows how the leader developed a passion, planted it in intercession, and allowed God to grow it into a vision. It launches our study into eight phases of strategic action. Here is the first one:
Phase #1 – PASSION. You will ignite your passion when you 1) get close to people and explore their difficult situations and 2) get close to God and embrace his helpful solutions.
The Setting (Nehemiah 1:1)
The words of Nehemiah son of Hakaliah: In the month of Kislev in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa,
In the first verse, Nehemiah gives us the historical background. The time was the month of Kislev in the twentieth year. Kislev would be late November into December and the year was about 445 or 444 B.C. Susa was a key city in the Media Persian Empire. King Artaxerxes ruled from that location for at least part of the year.
After we get to the setting, the action immediately begins.
GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE and Explore Their Painful Situations (1:2-4)
Investigate the Needs of Others (1:2-3)
2 Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem. 3 They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”
When Nehemiah’s brother returned from Jerusalem to Babylon, Nehemiah learned that the people in Israel were living in constant danger and disgrace. The walls around Jerusalem that had been torn down a hundred and fifty years before were still scattered rubble, and charred pieces of wood were the only evidence of the once mighty gates. Since the Israelites had no protection, they lived in constant fear of raids by their marauding neighbors. They also lived in shame. A saying of that time was, “A city without locked gates and lofty walls is no city at all.” In all probability, Jerusalem was the punchline of many a joke.
As Nehemiah continued to question Hanani and his companions about the condition of Jerusalem, a burden for the people grew heavy in his heart. Their need became his “passion,” and for days, he mourned, fasted, and prayed. From Nehemiah’s example, we discover that we obtain burdens when we prayerfully probe needs. And burdens are prerequisites to ministries that matter.
How do we develop passion? Sometimes, I suppose, we see suffering, and God hits us with an immediate lightning strike of deep concern. But more often, it needs to be developed by actively investigating and personally exploring the needs of others. It takes action.
In an article entitled, The Biggest Question of Your Life: How Do You Develop Passion? John Brandon said, “Passion is elusive. However, it is not unobtainable. Saying passion ‘comes from within’ is an easy cop out. We’re not milk jugs, and we don’t contain milk. You don’t just tip us over and we pour out passion… So here it is. The only way to develop passion is to act. With action, you find out what you like, what you love, what you crave, and what you enjoy the most… One of the reasons people are passionless is because they are sitting around pondering instead of acting. Passion finds you through action.”[i]
Even though Brandon’s words were directed at the business community, they also apply to us. We need to get out there in the world of suffering and problems and probe the needs of people who seek real help. Some of this can be done from your armchair. You can read books or do internet research to find information on the plight of people needing ministry in various spiritual, social, and physical dimensions. This is good, but your passion will really get amped when you have personal face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball encounters with those in need or suffering.
Great ministries have often been started with simple first-person experiences. A man reluctantly agrees to become a camp counselor for a week, but after his time with the teens, he is led to become a youth pastor. A woman uses her Thanksgiving to serve turkey at a soup kitchen and eventually becomes active in a homeless ministry. An executive takes the time to listen to the agony of a co-worker going through a divorce and is awakened to a desire to get training to help people going through divorce recovery. A conversation with a cult member leads a couple to study apologetics and share their faith more aggressively, an uncle makes visits to his incarcerated nephew and a year later is actively engaged in a prison ministry, a short-term mission trip captures the heart of an eventual full-time missionary, frustration with the scriptural illiteracy of fellow church members prompts a man to start a small group that teaches the key doctrines of the Bible, the months with a relative dying from cancer is the first step to a future hospice ministry… These are but a few examples of what can happen when you develop a passion for investigating the needs of others.
Not every investigation will grab your heart. God will match you with the ministry that matches His plan and your gifts. However, exploring needs is an important part of discovering your ministry niche.
Empathize with the Hurts of Others (1:4)
4 When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.
After spending hours interviewing his brother and his companions, Nehemiah was brokenhearted. He was touched by the needs of the people. His thought was: “The walls are down? My people are not just living in continual humiliation; they are also vulnerable to surprise attacks by hostile neighbors.” In sadness, he wept and mourned, showing his empathy and grief. He also fasted, missing meals for the sole purpose of concentrating on the problem and God. He allowed himself to feel the full weight of the hurt of the Israelites in Jerusalem.
After we investigate the needs of others, we then make our discoveries matters of empathetic contemplation and immerse them in prayer. My brother Jerry, my favorite preacher, calls this “the godly art of burden-catching.”
Alan Redpath stated, “Let us learn this lesson from Nehemiah: you never lighten the load unless first you have felt the pressure in your own soul. You are never used of God to bring blessing until God has opened your eyes and made you see things as they are.”
In some measure, Nehemiah was a precursor of Jesus Christ. The Book of Isaiah prophesied the Messiah would be a man of sorrows. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4a). Jesus was burdened by the grief of others.
John 11 tells how he wept with Mary and Martha as they grieved their brother’s death. He did this even though He knew He was about to raise Nehemiah from the grave. This was the purest form of empathy as he felt their pain and shared their tears.
In Luke 19, as Jesus approached Jerusalem during His Triumphal Entry, he looked at the city and wept over it. He could see a future attack when the city would be ransacked, the stones of the walls would be torn down, and many would be killed.
Our Lord saw the plight of people, and it gripped his heart. These two men of different times both wept over the state of Jerusalem and its citizens.
I have made over a dozen trips to Mexico to teach in a program called, “The Mexican School of Church Leadership.” My cousin, Gary Sheveland founded it. In one of the classes, I asked Gary to come forward and share his personal testimony about how God gave him a passion for the people of Mexico. Gary had been a realtor, developer, and housing contractor in Colorado when he decided to use a week of vacation for a short-term mission trip. His visit allowed him an up-close view of terrible physical and spiritual poverty. Gary is very personable, and he uses his people skills to hold conversations and build relationships with people. And before the week was up, he had fallen in love with them.
As Gary shared this part of his story, he began to cry, and tissues from the audience had to be handed to him. We were all deeply moved by his passion for the people and his desire to help them.
He went back to Colorado, praying that God would allow him to come back and serve full-time in Mexico. It took a couple of years for him to rearrange his family and commercial affairs (and give his wife, Pam, time to also hear God’s call), but eventually, he did get to return as a missionary.
During his first phase of ministry, he used his construction background to lead work teams as they built clinics, churches, and homes. Then, seeing how many of the churches are led by people with inadequate training, he obtained a Master’s degree and began the “School of Church Leadership,” which now has classes happening throughout the year in locations all over Mexico. I was the professor of his first course and have been coming down for many years to be one of the teachers of further classes.
Gary’s passion is contagious and has been the catalyst for an exciting ministry. He said that he loves the book of Nehemiah and found his passion and project in the same way Nehemiah did by investigating the needs of others and empathizing with their hurts.
So how do we fuel our passion? First, you will ignite your passion when you get close to people and explore their difficult situations. But that is only half of the equation. You must also get close to God and embrace his helpful solutions.
GET CLOSE TO GOD and Embrace His Helpful Solutions (1:5-11)
A.W. Tozer says, “Nehemiah’s prayers reveal the importance of aligning our will with God’s will through constant communication with Him.” Our passion grows as we link our passion with God’s passion and work hard to do God’s work.
4b For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. 5 Then I said:
“Lord, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, 6 let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s family, have committed against you. 7 We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses.
8 “Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, 9 but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’
10 “They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.”
In Phase #2, Intercession, we are going to study this prayer in more detail as we learn how to pray as Nehemiah prayed. But for now, let’s carefully note what it reveals about God’s heart. Nehemiah recognized that the great awesome God of heaven had made a covenant of love with His people. Due to their sin, He had allowed them to experience the consequence of the loss of their land and become exiled in a distant land where they lived as slaves. But this was never God’s desire. As far back as the days of Moses, He had promised that if they would return to Him in repentance and obedience, He would gather them up and replant them in the land of promise.
God loved His people and longed for their return to His heart and the home He had prepared for them. He craved this far more than Nehemiah ever could. Nehemiah’s passion was a microcosm of their greater passion for God.
So, Nehemiah’s prayer shouldn’t be considered a pleading appeal to a reluctant deity. It was linking His heart with God’s heart and sharing his burden with a loving Lord who had the same care in His heart. Nehemiah went to the One who understood emotively what Nehemiah was feeling.
Like we often do, Nehemiah didn’t carry his burden around like a boulder on his shoulder. That accomplishes nothing except causing anxiety for the burden-carrier. Instead, he carried his passion to God in prayer. The name “Nehemiah” means “the comfort of the LORD,” and Nehemiah knew that the Lord could provide comfort, strength, and help.
If our passion is God’s passion, we should share it together intimately. If it isn’t, we should discard it; it isn’t worth our time and energy. This requires us to study God’s Word and seek His will to determine if our passion truly emanates from Him. We will never be used greatly by God until our hearts are in alignment with His. Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, said, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.”
My friend Carol learned this for herself. The Lord used her to start a group called “Teen Moms.” It consisted of a lending closet, a support group, and mentor moms. When I talked to her, she had two groups with ten to twelve young ladies in each, growing at the average of one new teen mom a week. It wasn’t easy; she was often tempted to quit, but she couldn’t because she had a burning desire—a fire planted within her that kept her going.
Where did she get her passion? It started with her adopted daughter Angela and her relationship with Angela’s daughter. When she saw the hardships facing a single mother, her heart ached. The passion grew as she read a book entitled If I Should Die Before I Wake, co-written by Jerry Falwell and an unwed mother. The escalation expanded when she attended a “how-to” seminar on the subject.
But even then, Carol didn’t feel adequate to start a ministry personally. Surely, she thought, someone else could do this better than her; she didn’t have schooling and qualifications, so she feared no one would listen to her. ButCarol committed herself to both talking and listening to God. One day, as she was praying about her hesitancies while driving down the road, she felt the Lord gave her definite direction. In her words, “It was as if God reached through the open window of my car, grabbed me and said, ‘I am qualifying you and that is all that matters!'”
There is a pattern here that can benefit you as a leader. If you will get close to real needs, God will give you a passion. And if you share that passion with God, He will transfer it into a vision.
A vision is a mental image of what could be and should be.
The book of Nehemiah describes how God used the leader to accomplish an incredible mission. The very first chapter showed us how Nehemiah became focused on his great project, illustrating how you can discern your vision and become passionate about it. You develop a passion by investigating the needs of others, empathizing with their hurts, and linking your passion to the passionate heart of God.
Nehemiah was a humble servant of God, a man of unwavering faith and determination. When he heard of the plight of his people and the crumbling walls of Jerusalem, he felt a stirring in his heart to take action. Despite numerous obstacles and setbacks, his passion for the endeavor and his faith in God enabled him to press forward in the challenging journey to rebuild the walls of the city.
Big Idea: You will ignite your passion when you 1) get close to people and explore their difficult situations, and 2) get close to God and embrace his helpful solutions.