This Sunday we begin a new sermon series at Logos Community Church. I'm pretty excited as it's one of my favorite books of the Bible. We will be walking through the book of Nehemiah beginning in July (which is tomorrow) through the Fall; finishing somewhere in November. The title of this series is "For The City."

I am honored to be preaching through this series during the opening month and because it's one of my favorite books, I thought I'd add further thoughts on here in case you wanted to do a little more digging on Nehemiah. But essentially, this Sunday will be "setting scene" so to speak. Nehemiah was written about 400 years before the birth of Jesus Christ and about 15 years after the book of Ezra. In fact, in the Hebraic bible and up until the 15th century, scholars considered Ezra and Nehemiah as one book ("Ezra-Nehemiah"). The history is enormous and when you dig around you can uncover a lot of connection in not only Ezra and Nehemiah but also Esther.

As we take a look at the opening verses of Nehemiah, we need to consider the amount of historical events that have happened before diving into our boy. Events such as the fall of the Northern and Southern kingdoms followed by the conquering of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (not to mentioned the capturing of the Jewish people for nearly 70 years). Later, the Jewish people were then released and allowed to go back to the Promised Land, but only about 2% (along with Ezra) returned. Here's some perspective: the Babylonians captured anywhere between 2-3 million people and only 2% of them (roughly 50,000) returned. The rest? They set up shop in Babylon. Nonetheless, Ezra goes back to Jerusalem and is tasked with the rebuilding of Solomon's temple but the city of Jerusalem is still in rubbles; it was a ghost town.

I understand I'm giving you the cliff-notes version of all of this history, but it's impactful because the connection of these events to the response from Nehemiah upon hearing about Jerusalem's destruction is astounding. I won't give it away here because I'm still blown away by it. I know I've written a lot about everyone else except Nehemiah and the truth is that the bible doesn't tell us much about Nehemiah prior to the momentum of his calling and heart transformation. We do know, however, that he was working in the city of Susa which is the capital of the Persian empire. And here's where you come in as we prepare for Sunday:

Nehemiah was just a dude working a job. He was faithful to his work and the Lord. Then one day, God radically changed his heart for Jerusalem (a city he'd never been to). As Christians, we either complain about where we're at in life or are utterly confused on what to do. But from Nehemiah, we see that God can choose anyone at any moment for an immense task. I believe one of the reasons God had favor on Nehemiah was because he was a faithful-bible believing-God fearing dude and his response is evidence of that.

If I've given you enough ambiguous detail, then let me give you some specifics: join us this Sunday during our 9:00 a.m. or 11:00 a.m. service to learn about Nehemiah and how God impacted his life radically and what that means for you and me. The coffee is on us and the music is pretty rad. I'll see you then.