“Never! Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can she feel no love for the child she has borne? But even if that were possible, I would not forget you! See, I have written your name on the palms of my hands. Always in my mind is a picture of Jerusalem’s walls in ruins.” (Isaiah 49:15–16)
As we turn to look in detail at the characteristics of Nehemiah’s leadership, consider a passage from Isaiah:
Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;
Your walls are continually before Me. (Isaiah 49:16 NASB)
God was saying to His people, “Your lives are like walls, continually before me. I have inscribed your life on my hands.” What the walls were to Jerusalem, our lives are before God.
Quite frankly, I think the walls of our lives often lie in ruins through neglect. The leader who brings us to rebuild the walls is the Holy Spirit, and it is He who continues the work of reconstruction inside us. He tries His best to bring to our attention the condition of our walls, but sometimes we don’t hear what He is saying. We are not hard of hearing; we simply don’t listen.
Some of you are living within the walls of your life surrounded by ruin, and it all began so slowly. First there was a loose piece of stone or mortar. Then there was a crack that appeared in the wall. And then it broke into pieces, and there was a hole. Because of further neglect, the weeds of carnality began to grow through the wall. By and by, the enemy gained free access to your life.
You may be known as a solid Christian man or woman. But you know in your heart that although you are a Christian in the same sense that Jerusalem belonged to the Jews, the wall around your spiritual life that protects and defends you is in shambles. Such things as selfishness, lack of discipline, procrastination, immorality, not making time for God, compromise, and rebellion have come and sowed their ugly seeds. And they have begun to bear poisonous fruit.
Take serious inventory of your true condition. Before his project was ever undertaken, Nehemiah was informed and concerned. The first phase was evaluation. I sense in our day, among a number of people in the ranks of our evangelical family, a shallow frivolity concerning God. We tend to take Him lightly, as if He is our great big buddy. Then we hide behind the rationalization that “Nobody is perfect.” “After all,” we tell ourselves, “I’m better than so-and-so and certainly better than I used to be.” There’s sort of a shrug of the shoulders and a mental rationalization: “Well, He’ll understand.” If this is your attitude, the enemy is living in your camp. Your walls are down.
Taken from Hand Me Another Brick by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 2006 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Christian Publishing. www.harpercollinschristian.com
