Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Well I don’t know about you, but thanks to our family getting COVID, my New Year has not begun the way I wanted it to.

I had all these plans, you know?

Plans to spend some special focused time with my family.

My wife Neva and I had plans to do a fun New Years cocktail class together online and that was scrapped.

I had plans to preach this text, and I had a whole obligatory illustration using new years resolutions all planned out, and of course now that would just feel forced and awkward.

But you know that’s just how it goes right?

We make the best of plans, we have the best of intentions, we get really excited about the goals we set, and then you know, life just has to get in our way.

Now I’m being a little cheeky here about crashed New Year plans.

But I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say every one of us here knows what it feels like to set good goals or to have godly intentions that only lead us down a path of resistance, discouragement, or even fear.

I’ve talked with a number of you who moved here to Indianapolis just weeks or days before the pandemic hit.

You had the best of intentions to get plugged into a church and grow in your faith, and then the pandemic all of a sudden made you just press pause on all of that for well over a year.

Now it just feels so much harder and more awkward to actually get connected in the way you once intended.

Still others I know have had real challenges with employment, or finding a true sense of calling when the whole world just seems like its on fire right now.

Many of us have faced a lot of loss these last couple of years, and the thought of moving forward with our grief and sadness can just feel like too much to bear.

I think there are really two big questions raised by the text before us this morning.

The first question is, “How do we faithfully build or rebuild our lives around Jesus without compromising our convictions?”

This is the question that I think is really raised by verses 1-3, and if you could just set that aside this morning, Charles will be addressing that question next week when he revisits this passage.

But the other question, and the one I want us to consider, is what do we do when faithfulness and the best of godly intentions put us on a path of opposition, fear, and discouragement?

Speaking of godly intentions, one that I know many of us share is a desire to spend more time in God’s Word.

Maybe this year a Bible reading plan was one of your resolutions.

You may have heard before about a plan called the “M’Cheyne Reading Plan.”

Robert Murray M’Cheyne was a 19th century Scottish minister, and his Bible reading plan is sort of regarded as the gold standard.

If you follow his plan, you’ll read 4 chapters a day, and by the end of the year you’ll have read the Psalms and New Testament twice, and the rest of the Old Testament once.

Now what makes his plan so unique is that it actually has you starting in 4 different places in the Bible.

So if you started this plan on January 1st, you would be reading Genesis 1, Ezra 1, Matthew 1, and Acts 1.

And the reason why he chose these 4 places is because they are 4 new beginnings in the Biblical story: Creation, the return from Exile, the advent of Christ, and the beginning of the church.

Each one of these new beginnings are filled with such hope, promise, and expectation.

But by day 4 of the plan things start to look a little different for God’s people.

Genesis 4 is the tragic murder of Abel by his brother Cain.

In Matthew 4, Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted and confront Satan.

In Acts 4, the Apostles are arrested and put on trial by the religious leaders.

And here in Ezra 4, God’s people returning from Exile meet intense resistance from their enemies.

At this point in God’s new beginning and redemptive work in his people, a hopeful story becomes one of conflict and opposition.

This conflict will now hang over the rest of the narrative.

God’s people - hopeful and expectant for what life would be like as they return to their land - must now deal with the reality of resistance, oppression, fear, and discouragement.

You see, there is a pattern in Scripture that plays out again and again.

Faithful living and godly intentions often put God’s people on a path of great opposition, discouragement, and fear.

In fact, what the Scriptures tell us is that more often than not, this pattern is normative for God’s people.

Jesus spoke of it as the need to carry our cross.

The Apostle Paul said that is only through many hardships that we will enter the kingdom of God.

Opposition, discouragement, and fear, are to be expected for those trying to live faithfully in a fallen and sinful world.

We aren’t told much about the specifics of the opposition these exiles faced.

The inhabitants of the land, these enemies, they wanted to thwart the plans to rebuild the temple.

Their first strategy was to try and join the exiles in order to disrupt the building from the inside.

But when their help was declined, these enemies responded with much more deliberate and outward forms of resistance.

Through some combination of verbal threats, psychological intimidation, and political influence, these enemies set about to frustrate the plans of the exiles to rebuild the temple.

Whatever this campaign of opposition looked like, the feelings of discouragement and fear must’ve been very intense.

Fear was not a new experience for these exiles.

In fact, we are told in Chapter 3 that despite the fear of the people around them, the exiles built an altar and made their sacrifices.

So it was not a new experience of fear that afflicted the exiles here in Chapter 4; it was the severity of their fear.

The discouragement and fear were so intense that we are told in verse 24 the work on the temple came to a halt until the second year of Darius of Persia.

The temple building began in about 537 or 536 BC.

The second year of Darius would be about 520 BC.

This is a period of about 16 or 17 years.

So for nearly 2 decades, these bold, courageous, and faithful exiles are so overcome by fear and discouragement that they stop the work God had called them to altogether.

Let this sink in for a moment.

These are the same returning exiles of whom it was said that God had moved in their spirit to bring them back to Jerusalem.

These are the same exiles who sacrificed family, friendship, vocation, possession, and safety to make this perilous journey and follow God’s call.

And yet even they, these heroes of the faith, met discouragement and fear that was simply too much for them to overcome.

The author here does not tell us what happened in the intermediate time.

The prophets Haggai and Zechariah give us more detail on how the people responded to their discouragement with apathy and selfishness, and we will hear from them in a few weeks.

But the author’s intent here was not to report those finer details.

They simply wanted us to know what was: a bold and courageous people who met opposition that just simply became too much.

From this we can conclude that even the most courageous and strongest of faith are not impervious to the pain of discouragement nor to the suffocating anxiety of fear.

Have you ever found yourself in a place where you were overwhelmed by fear and discouragement?

Maybe you’re feeling a little of that this morning.

I know I have.

Several times, even.

One of the most difficult seasons for me was when I started my seminary training in 2012.

This was just a couple years after I became a Christian in 2010.

I remember being so excited at the thought of beginning my studies and entering vocational ministry.

I thought for sure that since I was “doing this for God”, everything would go exactly according to my plans.

But nothing could’ve been further from the truth.

First, I lost my church.

I was working part-time at the church where I had become a Christian just 2 years prior.

And when they found out I was becoming Reformed in my convictions, they asked me to resign and leave the church.

I was heartbroken.

And then, just a couple weeks later, my full-time job where I worked as a consultant, they decided they wanted to switch my contract to working night hours.

The thing is, all of my seminary classes were at night.

When I told them I was taking night classes and couldn’t make the switch in my hours - they fired me.

So here I was , barely a Christian for 2 years, trying to start seminary now with no church and no job.

It was a very painful and confusing time.

The fear at times was so severe that I would wake up at night with panic attacks.

I thought for sure that either I had done something very wrong, or that God had turned his back on me.

But God was faithful, as he always is, and he led me through that season.

He gave me the grace and faith I not only needed then, but also to face the many other hardships that have been a part of my story since then.

As I mentioned a few minutes ago, opposition and conflict will remain a key part of the story for the rest of Ezra and Nehemiah.

And as we continue to seek God together and discern what he might be building or rebuilding in us during this next season, I think wisdom and sobermindedness would lead us to expect that continued hardship, discouragement, and fear might be a part of our narrative as well.

So what do we do when we, like these returning exiles, find ourselves meeting hardship of various kinds?

How do we remain faithful when our discouragement, fear, make us want to give up, or retreat from one another?

I think we find our answer by turning once again to the book of Hebrews.

A few weeks ago Charles reminded us that this altar and all of these sacrifices, which had to be made again and again for the sins of the people, while they were sufficient for their need, they were never meant to be permanent.

They were never meant to be the main thing.

They were meant to remind the people of their sin and drive them toward their need for God to deal with sin once and for all.

And what the author of Hebrews tell us again and again is that Jesus is the one who fulfills everything these sacrifices pointed forward to.

He is the final priest who now lives forever to intercede for his people.

He is the final sacrifice who paid for the sins of his people once and for all.

Now, because of Jesus, Hebrews 10:18 says that sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.

Jesus paid it all.