Power leadership (Nehemiah 6:10-14)

 Power leadership

 

 

 

[Nehemiah 6:10-14]

 

 

If we look at the book “Power Leadership” by John Maxwell, there is a section called ‘Creating Focus’.  It tells us three things about how we can achieve the focus required of effective leaders (Maxwell):

 

(1)    70% of your focus should be on your strengths.

 

Effective leaders who have reached their potential need to focus more time on what they are good at than what they are bad at.  If you want to be a successful person, you need to focus on your strengths and develop them.

 

(2)    25% of your focus should be on new things.

 

A competent leader is one who always tries to improve and strive for change.  He's not afraid to step into new territory.  He needs to invest time in new things related to merit.  In leadership, if you stop growing, you stop everything.

 

(3)    5% of your focus should be on your weak points.

 

No one can work completely avoiding weaknesses.  The key is to make it as minimal as possible, and a leader can do it through others.  An effective leader is one who knows how to delegate what he or she is not good at.

 

     However, our human instinct is to keep focusing on our weaknesses so that we cannot even save our strengths.  That's why we tend not to make changes in order to develop ourselves.  We are also reluctant to delegate our weaknesses to others.

 

You could say that Nehemiah was a very focused leader.  What was his focus?  It was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  Nehemiah was a leader who was loyal with an unstoppable passion, not turning to the right or the left in order to accomplish this task.  Today, I would like to think about the three elements of “Power leadership” centered on Nehemiah 6:10-14.  I hope and pray that leaders who demonstrate strong leadership like Nehemiah will continue to be raised in our church.

 

The first component of power leadership is ‘Great Courage’.

 

Look at Nehemiah 6:11 – “But I said, ‘Should a man like me run away?  Or should one like me go into the temple to save his life?  I will not go!’”  If we look at the chapter “Courage” in John Maxwell’s “Power Leadership” book, there is a story about a person named “Eddie Rickenbacker,” America’s “best fighter pilot.”  He logged 300 combat hours (the most of any American pilot) by the end of World War I, encountering enemy aircraft 134 times and shooting down 26 of them.  For this reason, he is said to have been awarded the Medal of Honor, eight Orders of the Cross for Special Merit, and the French Legion of Honor.  It is said that the courage he showed led the press to attach the title of 'American Ace of Aces'.  When he was asked about his bravery in battle one day, he is said to have said: ‘Courage is doing what you fear.  If there is no fear, there is no need for courage’ (Maxwell).

 

In today's text, Nehemiah 6:10-14, we see Nehemiah, the leader of the people of Judah, who showed great courage in the midst of fear. If we look at Nehemiah 6, which we have already meditated on, we will see three trials approaching Nehemiah.  The tests were enough to frighten Nehemiah: (1) The first was when Sanballat and Geshem sent messengers to meet Nehemiah in the plains of Ono (v. 2) and attempt to assassinate him (vv. 1-4); (2) The second test was to stop the work of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem by making Nehemiah and the people of Judah afraid and discouraged through malicious rumors in 6:5-9; (3) The third test comes from today's text 6:10-14.  The test was the threatening prophecy of the false prophet Shemaiah.  Look at verse 10: “One day I went to the house of Shemaiah son of Delaiah, the son of Mehetabel, who was shut in at his home.  He said, ‘Let us meet in the house of God, inside the temple, and let us close the temple doors, because men are coming to kill you--by night they are coming to kill you.’”  The threatening prophecy of this false prophet Shemaiah was to hide in the house of God because Nehemiah's enemies would come at night to kill him.  In other words, Shemaiah proposed to Nehemiah that they flee to the temple together because an assassination attempt was imminent.  This reminds me Proverbs 27:12 – “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.”  Nehemiah knew that his enemies wanted to harm him when he asked to meet him in a village in the plain of Ono (Neh. 6:2).  Nevertheless, in today's text, even when the prophet Shemaiah heard that the enemies were coming to kill Nehemiah, he refused to hide and to preserve his life.  We think we can compromise and hide for a while to get past this threat, and then we can do more to preserve our lives while continuing to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  At that time, we can rationalize that we must live and extend our lives so that we can do more of the Lord's work for a longer period of time.  But how did Nehemiah react?

 

(1)    He said he would not run away.

 

Look at Nehemiah 6:11 – “But I said, ‘Should a man like me run away?  Or should one like me go into the temple to save his life?  I will not go!’”  Nehemiah knew that the morale of the Jews would suffer greatly if he showed cowardice (White).  This reminds me Proverbs 24:10 – “If you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength!”

 

(2)    Nehemiah said that he would not go into the temple and hide.

 

The reason is because Nehemiah was neither a priest nor a Levite.  In other words, Nehemiah told the prophet Shemaiah that he would not hide in the temple because hiding in the temple, even if it meant preserving his life, was an act of blasphemy (White).  Another reason is because Nehemiah did not even preserve his own life to fulfill the mission given to him, so he said he would not go into the temple and hide (v. 11).  This shows Nehemiah's strong sense of duty.  He valued the mission given by God more than his own life (Park).

 

                Here we see courage, an element of power leadership.  Here Nehemiah showed great courage.  Great courage is not the absence of fear, but a firm attitude to do the right thing whether we are afraid, anxious, or hurt (Packer).  Pastor White said of the “School of Courage”: Long before the work in Jerusalem began, when confronted with the question of making his first request to King Artaxerxes, Nehemiah confessed, “I was very much afraid” (2:2).  …  But he pressed forward in spite of his fears, which he said later did him great good.  It was at this moment that he enrolled in God's School of Courage.  A few months later, he was graduating from this school with honors when he shouted, ‘How can someone like me escape?’ (White).  Leadership is showing the courage to get people to do the right thing (Maxwell).  Nehemiah showed courage in telling the people of Judah to do what was right.

 

                The second component of “Power leadership” is ‘Great Discernment’.

 

                Look at Nehemiah 6:12 – “I realized that God had not sent him, but that he had prophesied against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him.”  We Christians live in an age of spiritual confusion, not spiritual discernment.  In his book, “That Incredible Christian”, Rev. A. W. Tozer has this to say about “spiritual illusions”: ‘There are times in life when it is not easy to completely escape from errors because it is so difficult to distinguish between true and false, good and evil.  …  The lie is so good at imitating the truth that we keep confusing the two.  Today, we must have a very sharp eye to distinguish who is Cain and who is Abel.  …  There are people who are very comfortable and fun to hang out with.  He is likable because he speaks softly too.  However, such a person can sometimes be a messenger of Satan.  On the other hand, there are people who keep avoiding him because he is harsh and outspoken.  But such a person could be a prophet sent by God to warn us of spiritual dangers and eternal destruction’ (Tozer).  This third test that came upon Nehemiah was 'spiritual seduction' (Packer).  That is, it was an attempt to tempt Nehemiah out of fear into committing the sin of blasphemy.  What is surprising is that Satan's strategy took a more savage form of attack at each stage of the construction of the walls of Jerusalem (White).  At first, in Nehemiah 4:1-3, it was openly ridiculed.  Then came the news of an armed attack by building a formidable united front (4:7-12), followed by an assassination plot disguised as an offer to settle it through dialogue (6:1-3).  Then came an open letter containing slanderous accusations in 6:5-6.  And when the walls of Jerusalem were almost completed, they tried to make Nehemiah sin against God through the false prophet Shemaiah and make the people of Judah lose trust (6:10-13).  This last stage, 'spiritual temptation', which came just before the completion of Jerusalem's walls, requires considerable discernment.

 

                We already learned from Nehemiah 6:2 that Nehemiah discerned that Sanballat and Geshem were sending messengers to meet him and to harm him.  At that time, it must have been difficult for him to discern the plan to assassinate himself compared to today's text 6:10-14.  The reason is that, at that time, the enemies sent messengers, but in today's passage, the enemies bought the prophet Shemaiah, a religious leader, as a bribe and sent him to Nehemiah.  If we apply this to our church, we can say that in order to stop the reconstruction of our church, our enemies bought a false pastor as a bribe and sent him to me, the senior pastor, to commit a crime before God, so that they can destroy the trust of the members.  The first thing Nehemiah discerned here was to discern whether Shemaiah was a prophet sent by God or not.  But do you think this would have been easy?  If we look at verse 10, it is not that the prophet Shemaiah went to Nehemiah, but that Nehemiah went to the prophet.  It seems that the reason was because Shemaiah was “shut in at his home”, that is, locked inside the house for an unknown reason, but in the end, it was nothing more than an excuse to bring Nehemiah into his house.  And the prophet Shemaiah said to hide in the house of God together with him as the assassination attempt was imminent, just like he did for Nehemiah.  How can we discern whether this prophet Shemaiah is a true prophet or a false prophet?  This reminds me John 10:12-13: “The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep.  So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.  Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it.  The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.”  The Bible says that “The hired hand” abandons the sheep and runs away when the wolf comes.  The false prophet Shemaiah proved himself to be a hireling prophet when he suggested that Sanballat and Geshem, who were like wolves, were coming to kill Nehemiah and proposes to Nehemiah that they ran away together to the house of God.  If the religious leader, the prophet, and Nehemiah, the leader of the people of Judah, ran away and hided in the house of God, then what would happen to the flock and the people of Judah?  The false prophet Shemaiah was not interested in it, but Nehemiah was.  Therefore, Nehemiah answered how he would preserve (only) his life (v. 11).  Another word that comes to mind is Deuteronomy 18:20 – “But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, must be put to death.”  Nehemiah knew that the prophet Shemaiah was speaking a word that God had not commanded.  In other words, in Numbers 18:7 and below, God entrusted the priests, the descendants of Levi, with “… Anyone else who comes near the sanctuary must be put to death.”  The prophet Shemaiah himself and Nehemiah were not even priests, but the words of going into the temple of God and hiding were against the word of God.  This is what Nehemiah was discerning.  Also, if you look at Jeremiah 23:32, it says that false prophets not sent by God are of no benefit to these people.  In other words, Nehemiah saw that Shemaiah had no interest in the safety of the people of Judah and discerned that Shemaiah was a false prophet.  Why did Shemaiah, the false prophet, tempt Nehemiah?  Look at Nehemiah 6:13 – “He had been hired to intimidate me so that I would commit a sin by doing this, and then they would give me a bad name to discredit me.”  In the end, Tobiah and Sanballat bribed Shemaiah to make a false prophecy (v. 12) in order to make Nehemiah sin against God and slander him in front of the people of Judah.  The bribe blinded the prophet's eyes and made him prophesy falsely (Exod. 23:8).

 

                One lesson we need to learn from Nehemiah's discernment here is that we must have a Biblical mind.  In other words, we must cultivate the ability to judge based on the standard of God's word, and it must become our habit.  What is “discernment”? It is ‘the ability to evaluate what you are seeing on a reasonable basis’ (Packer).  Nehemiah's proper standard was the word of God.  Because Nehemiah had the habit of thinking in terms of the standards of His word, he was able to distinguish between true and false prophets.

 

                The third and last component of ‘power leadership’ is ‘Great Prayer’.

 

                Look at Nehemiah 6:14 – “Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, because of what they have done; remember also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who have been trying to intimidate me.”  What we can learn from this is that not only Shemaiah was the false prophet who opposed Nehemiah, but there were the rest of the prophets besides the prophetess Noadiah.  In other words, there was a conspiracy of false prophets against Nehemiah.  This was a great pressure for Nehemiah.  The reason is because the Jews at that time had great respect for their prophets.  It was as if a conspiracy group of many false pastors were opposing the work of God that one layperson wanted to pursue.  At that time, Nehemiah did not surrender to the false prophets and prayed to God in that situation.  Nehemiah prayed and entrusted the false prophets to God who were trying to make him fearful and stop God's great work of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.  Interestingly, his prayer was not a long one.  One commentator has called these Nehemiah's prayers "telegraph prayers."  This short prayer occurs several times in Nehemiah.  An example of this is Nehemiah 6:9 – “…   ‘Now strengthen my hands.’”  This shows Nehemiah's life of prayer.  His life of prayer became a part of his daily life, and he prayed to God and relied on God for help amid various adversities and difficulties that approached him moment by moment.  And he went on to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

 

                If we look at “The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life” by Henry Nouwen, there is a chapter called ‘Constant Prayer’. There are these words about unceasing prayer: ‘To pray unceasingly is to transfer all your thoughts from fearful isolation to fearless conversation with God.  …  The prayer of the heart is like a stream whispering endlessly under the many waves of daily life.  There opens the possibility of living in the world without belonging to it, of reaching out to our God in the midst of solitude’ (Nowen).