Thought from today’s Bible reading from Nehemiah 6-7.
As the walls of Jerusalem were nearing completion, the enemies of the Israelites made an effort to pull Nehemiah away and disrupt the work.
“Then Sanballat and Geshem sent a message to me [Nehemiah], saying, ‘Come, let us meet together at Cherphirim in the plain of Ono.’ But they were planning to harm me. So I sent messengers to them, saying, ‘I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?’” (Nehemiah 6:2-3).
Though these men invited him, Nehemiah refused to come. Even when they spread false rumors about him and threatened to report him to the king, he refused to abandon the work (Nehemiah 6:5-9). There are two important lessons that we can learn from Nehemiah:
- We need to be busy “doing a great work” – A “great work” in this context is not great by the world’s standards. Rather, the “great work” in which we should be involved is serving God. There are various things we can do in our service to God – worshipping Him, learning His will, teaching His word to others, helping those in need, encouraging our brethren, etc. We need to be busy doing these things.
- We must not allow others to distract us from our work – When Nehemiah refused to meet with these men, he was not avoiding conflict at all costs. After all, he and those with him remained armed at all times while the wall was being rebuilt in case they were attacked (Nehemiah 4:15-23). Attacks may come while we are working for the Lord, and we must react to them. But we should not leave the work in order to address outside distractions.
As we serve God today, we must be actively engaged in doing His will and promoting His cause. While we do this, we must not allow anyone to hinder or interrupt our work.
Tomorrow’s reading: Nehemiah 8-10
[I’m using the Chronological reading plan on the Bible Gateway website if you’d like to follow along, too.]
Daily Notes & Observations contains all 365 articles from this series and is available in paperback from Gospel Armory.
