Open your Bibles to Nehemiah chapter 13. I'm going to start reading in verse 4. We'll read to the end of the chapter. We're not going to make it nearly that far this morning. I had hopes of doing that, but not today. I'll just be looking at verses 4 to 14. Let's read the whole thing to get the context. It says, now prior to this, Eliashib the priest who was put in charge over the chambers of the house of God being related to Tobiah, there's a name we haven't heard for a few chapters, had prepared a large room for him where formerly they put the grain offerings, the frankincense, the utensils and the tithes of grain, also new wine and oil, commanded for the Levites, the singers, and the gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. But during all this time I was not in Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I had gone to the king, and after some time, however, I asked leave from the king, and I came to Jerusalem and discerned the evil that Eliashiv had done for Tobiah by preparing a chamber for him in the courts of the house of God. And it was very evil to me, so I threw all of Tobiah's household goods out of the chamber. Then I said the word, and they cleansed the chambers, and I returned there the utensils of the house of God with the grain offerings and the frankincense. I also came to know that the portions of the Levites had not been given them. So the Levites and the singers who did the work had fled, each to his own field. So I contended against the officials and said, why is the house of God forsaken? Then I gathered them together, and had them stand in their posts. All Judah then brought the tithe of the grain, the new wine, and oil into the storehouses. In charge of the storehouses, I appointed Shelemiah the priest, Zadok the scribe, and Padiah of the Levites. And in addition to them was Hanan, the son of Zechur, the son of Mataniah, for they were counted as faithful. And it was their task to apportion everything to their relatives. Remember me for this. Oh my God, and do not blot out my loving kindnesses, which I have shown for the house of my God and its responsibilities. In those days, I saw in Judah some who were treading wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sacks of grain and loading them on donkeys as well as wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of loads, and they brought them into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. So I testified against them on the day they sold food. Also men of Tyre were living there, who brought in fish and all kinds of merchandise and sold them to the sons of Judah on the Sabbath, even in Jerusalem. Then I contended with the nobles of Judah and said to them, what is this evil thing that you're doing, even profaning the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers do the same? So our God brought on us and on this city all of this calamity, yet you are adding to his anger on Israel by profaning the Sabbath. Now it happened that just as it grew dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I said the word and the doors were shut. Then I said that they should not open them until after the Sabbath. Then I had some of my young men stand at the gate so that no load would enter on the Sabbath day. Once or twice, the traders and merchants of every kind of merchandise spent the night outside Jerusalem. Then I warned them and said to them, why do you spend the night in front of the wall? If you do so again, I will send forth my hand against you. And from that time on, they did not come on the Sabbath. And I said to the Levites that they should cleanse themselves and come as gatekeepers to keep the Sabbath day holy. For this also remember me, oh my God, and have compassion on me according to the greatness of your loving kindness. In those days I also saw that the Jews had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. As for their children, half spoke in the language of Ashdod, and none of them was able to speak the language of Judah, but only the tongue of his own people. So I contended with them, and cursed them, and struck some of them, and pulled out their hair, and made them swear by God, you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take up their daughters for your sons, or for yourselves. Did not Solomon, king of Israel, sin regarding these things? Yet among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was loved by his God, and God gave him to be king over all Israel nevertheless. Foreign women caused even him to sin. Do we then hear about you? That you have done all this great evil by acting unfaithfully against our God by marrying foreign women? And even one of the sons of Jehoiada, the son of Eliashib, the high priest, was a son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite. So I made him flee away from me. Remember then, oh my God, because they have defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites. Thus I cleanse them from everything foreign and ensured that the responsibility stood for the priests and the Levites each in his work. And I arranged for the supply of wood at fixed times and for the first fruits. Remember me, oh my God, for good. Let's pray. Father, as we stand before you and before this text this morning, we pray that you would help us to learn the wonderful lessons that it has for us, the instruction that it gives us, and the warnings that it has for us, that we might be and remain your holy people. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. One of the greatest revivals on the North American continent was called the Great Awakening. It was a Holy Spirit-empowered revival with effects very similar to what happened in Israel in Nehemiah chapters 8 through 12 that we've seen over the last few months. In the Great Awakening, New England was the epicenter of that Great Awakening, and after that, there was even a second Great Awakening that happened some years later. It was here in Massachusetts where preachers like Whitfields and Edwards thundered their sermons. And the impacts of those revivals were clear. They were powerful. They impacted the culture. And they even impacted the world. People throughout the world would never be the same. Or so they thought. Many even mistakenly believed at that time, so great were the impacts and the effects of the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening, many mistakenly believed that New England was the start of God's physical kingdom on Earth. Imagine it, the start of Christ's thousand-year millennial reign here, right now. That's not where we are, is it? Many Puritans believed that they were ushering in the return of Christ himself. It doesn't take a lot of discernment for us to see that those impacts faded. Sadly, if you look at the churches in New England today, nearly all are in the death throes of compromise. Gradually, over time, people began to yield their lives of faithfulness and their lives of holiness to the corruptions of sin. What happened in Israel then was very similar to what happened here in New England. We saw in this revival that began back in Nehemiah chapter eight, people were saved, commitments were made, reformation happened. There was genuine real change that was taking place within the nation of Israel. The church in the time of the great awakening and also in Israel was reformed. Holiness was real. And those are all exactly the types of things that we would want to happen. But sin is the ever-present adversary, isn't it? And that sin, combined with poor leadership, worked together to take Israel right back to where they were before the reforms. And so after all of the excitement and all of the reformation we've seen in the last four chapters of the book of Nehemiah, we want to see a happy ending. Don't we? We want to see at the end of chapter 13, verse three, and they all lived happily ever after. That's not what you're going to see because that's not what happened. This is not so different from our circumstances at FBC, is it? Over the last few years, we've seen a great return to biblical faithfulness and a reform of the church to a much more biblical pattern than it's ever been. We're enjoying a tremendous season of ministry, phenomenal unity that we have within our church, and that's exactly why we cannot get sloppy now. Exactly why we cannot compromise now. It's exactly why we cannot allow ourselves to become complacent in all that's happened within our church. We need vigilance now more than ever. And we must remain committed to confronting sin, committed to growing individually in the Lord Jesus Christ, committed to continuing to reform, and committed to keep and continuously training leaders for the future. In short, we must remain faithful to obey the word of God or our fate will become the same as the nation of Israel in the book of Nehemiah. Why? Because disobedience corrupts. Everything. Over the past couple weeks, we've seen that our everything, and by that I mean the whole of our lives, are to be lives of worship. And we cannot allow our lives of worship to be corrupted. And so the warning that is in this text for us is the same as the text's central idea. And that central idea is this. Disobedience will corrupt your life of worship. I'm gonna show you this in three separate headings, but we're only gonna have time to see one of those today. So the first heading, number one, is this. Disobedience corrupts the priority of worship. Disobedience corrupts the priority of worship. Again, look at verse four. The text says, now prior to this, Eliashib, the priest who was put in charge over the chambers of the house of our God, being related to Tobiah, had prepared a large room for him where formerly they put the grain offerings, the frankincense, the utensils, and the tithes of grain, also new wine and oil commanded for the Levites, the singers, and the gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. But during all this time I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had gone to the king. After some time, however, I asked leave from the king. I came to Jerusalem and discerned the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah by preparing a chamber for him in the courts of the house of God. Now when we left Israel in the city of Jerusalem last week, we were at the pinnacle of this book. The world was a happy place. Under Nehemiah's leadership, they had rebuilt the walls. They had done it in an astonishingly fast amount of time. They had accomplished it in 52 days. They had been aided by a pagan king who was previously opposed to them rebuilding the walls. And at one point in his history, previously had even stopped the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. They had stood against the devastating attacks of their enemies, among whom were Tobiah and Sanballat, two people that reappear in this chapter. And this was, in fact, at the risk of their own lives. The Israelites had banded together. They trusted the Lord. Yahweh gave them courage. He gave them strength to rebuild. There were days when they were rebuilding with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. piled around them from the walls, the old rocks that had collapsed so high that the building was difficult and nearly impossible to do. And yet they did it. They accomplished it. Then in Chapter 8, they experienced a massive revival. The Holy Spirit moved among them to awaken their hearts to the Word of God. They were convicted to the core over their sin. They confessed it corporately in Chapter 9. They demonstrated their repentance in Chapter 10 by the renewal of the covenant with God. They repopulated the holy city with the people who were now holy. They literally gave a tithe of themselves. We think of a tithe as something we give financially as 10% of our income. No, they gave a 10% of themselves to repopulate the city of Jerusalem at great personal cost, we saw. Why? Because chapter 12 demonstrates to us the faithfulness of God and that he is worthy of that worship. Then last week we saw them rededicate the walls of Jerusalem in chapter 12, verses 26 through chapter 13, verse 3. And those walls, we said, were really an extension of the temple. The temple is where God's worshiping people come to worship. The walls are what contained those worshiping people. And the priests and the Levites and the people and even the walls were cleansed and set apart to God distinctly only for the purpose of Him and whatever He wanted done with them. In other words, they were set apart to Him as holy. They prepared themselves for worship and holiness. They sang, they gave an offering. They heard the word of God proclaimed. This was the pinnacle, this was the high point of a reformed worshiping people. It was astonishing what had happened in Jerusalem in such a short time. It appeared that nothing could stop them. And if the book ended with chapter 13, verse three, then you would have your happily ever after ending. And so what we find when we start reading again in verse four is shocking. It has an almost whiplash-like quality to it. How do you go from the faithfulness of these people in verse three to the compromise in verse four? What in the world happened to them? Well, what's really easy to miss is the timeframe that's involved here. All the reformation and rebuilding that we have seen took place in the first seven months of Nehemiah's first year in Jerusalem. He was in Jerusalem for about 12 years, the text tells us, and then he returned to Babylon to be in the service of King Artaxerxes. And during that time, a new governor would have been appointed in place of Nehemiah. And we don't know for sure exactly how long he was gone. Verse six tells us, gives us a little bit of information, but not incredibly detailed. It says, during all this time, I was not in Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I had gone to the king. So Nehemiah's saying, look, at the end of 12 years, we know it's 12 years because in chapter one, we know that that was in the 20th year of King Artaxerxes. Now we're in the 32nd year. So 12 years have passed. since the reforms of the first seven months that he's in Jerusalem. So you've had 11 years and five months that have passed since then, since verse 3. Then he goes to be back into the service as the cupbearer of King Artaxerxes again. And then it says, after some time, however, I asked leave from the king. So there's some additional time tacked onto that 12 years. We don't know exactly how long it was. We know it can't be any more than 10 years. That's impossible because 10 years after that, Artaxerxes was no longer on his throne in Babylon. So all of that has transpired. There's been quite a bit of time that has happened. And we know that all of those reforms take place, and so then you've got about 15, maybe 20 years that have transpired since then. And so Nehemiah is coming back to Jerusalem now in verse four. And so between verses three and four, you've got this, like I was saying a moment ago, this 15 to 20 year span. And in chapter 13, verse four and following is the chronicle of what Nehemiah finds after he returned. And so in spite of all of that happening, all of the reforms, the revival that the Holy Spirit brought during Nehemiah's first term as governor, he returns to find the walls are still standing, but the people are not. They've returned to their old ways. And what we learn here is that walls can keep out the influence of an unbelieving world, but walls cannot protect you from the influence of a sinful heart. And though many are saved during the great revival of chapter eight, there is another entire generation that has grown up since then. Even many of those who were alive during the revival slipped back into their sin. They'd forgotten that their lives were to be dominated by worship every single day. So this is not just a sin problem, this is a worship problem. They'd let their sin back in again. And it had over the years eroded and devastated them. Almost like a python slowly constricting around their chest. Sin is suffocating. So verse four begins, now prior to this. That's a difficult phrase for us to grasp for the English reader. The this that Nehemiah is talking about is a return that he later mentions in verse six. So that's how you need to see it because that's what he's talking about. And so the events of verses four and five are what has happened after Nehemiah left, but before he returns. And what we find here in verses four and five is absolutely stunning. It is unconscionable what happens. Because in verse four, you have Eliashib, who is the high priest. We find that out later in the chapter. Eliashib, the high priest, who's in charge over everything in relation to the temple. Clearly the man over the temple and over the worship that took place there, also under his control then would have been the chambers, the text says, of the house of our God. And those chambers are a series of large rooms that are attached to the outside of the temple itself. And those rooms are there to place the offerings that were given to God and to be distributed to the priests and to the Levites. Those were placed in those rooms. the grain offerings, the frankincense, the new wine, the oil, the money, the contributions that were given as an offering to the Lord. And we mentioned last week, those were the offerings that were for the worship of God and the financial provision and support of the priests. These are the rooms in which critical offerings were kept so the worship of God and the support of his ministers was not hindered. In other words, what we're saying is without these rooms doing their job, Worship at the temple could not happen the way it was supposed to happen. So the function of these rooms is critical. What did Eliashib do? Well, the high priest took those rooms and he made them into a home for Tobiah. You remember him, right? The great adversary of God? The one who worked together with another guy named Sanbalat in chapters 2-6 to attack the Jews and to stop the building and to secretly carry out plots of assassination against Nehemiah and to try to threaten the Jews with killing them when they were in their sleep? The ones who tried to stop the rebuilding? The high priest, what you have here is the high priest, the one responsible to guard the worship of God and to guard the function of the temple. This man has invited one of the Jews greatest adversaries to live in the temple complex. How in the world does that happen? Well, verse four, it tells us. Look at it again. Now, prior to this, Eliashib, the priest, who was put in charge over the chambers of the house of God being related to Tobiah. Tobiah is related to Eliashib? How in the world is that? Well, it's likely by marriage. And where have we seen anything like this before in Israel's history? Oh, right, we remember, it was King Solomon, the prominent ruler in Israel, marrying foreign women who worshiped other gods. The parallels are uncanny here. The worship, the idolatrous worship of other gods coming into Israel through marriage. Tobiah's heritage has to be at least somewhat Jewish. You'll remember from the past when we talked about him, his name literally means Yahweh is good. You would think with a name like that he would be a good guy, right? Well, Tobiah clearly betrayed his name. We find out later in the chapter that Eliashib was also related to Sambalat by marriage. So Eliashib is sending his kids out to marry all kinds of unbelievers. And so we have the high priest himself uniting with unbelievers and foreigners in marriage. Now, you'll remember, we talked about this in the past, that the end of the book of Ezra, which is just before Nehemiah, in fact, they were originally, we believe, one book. They're now split into two. You have the book of Ezra and the book of Nehemiah that dovetail right up to each other. The ending of the book of Ezra, it ended with the Jews divorcing their foreign wives in the rain, in the misery. I wanna suggest to you something. Could it be that Tobiah has an ax to grind with the Jews because he could be a child of one of those marriages? And if that's the case, do you see why he might not be happy? The walls go back up around Jerusalem, worship is going to be restricted to only genuine worshipers of Yahweh alone, and he had been expelled out of that community years before. Can you see why he would be upset when Nehemiah determined by genealogy who was allowed to live in the city? And by genealogy and then also by salvation, who was allowed to live in Jerusalem? And why Tobiah would think he had a legitimate right to be inside those walls and even perhaps live on the temple grounds. I mean, he was related to the high priest after all. Now you have the very high priest in Jerusalem has compromised to allow this unbeliever to live at the very temple of God. And not only that, but he made his house out of rooms that were necessary for temple function. And without those rooms, they had no place for the offerings and the provisions for God and for his ministers to receive their means of support. Him living there was literally an abomination to God. His living there was a hindrance to God's worship. It was a hindrance to the people who conducted worship. Remember the entire point of chapters 8 to 12 was to establish and define and sanctify a holy people to inhabit God's holy city. And so this compromise is absolutely shocking for many reasons. The holy city is to be comprised of holy people. The city is now clearly, at this point, corrupted again. This is a foreign official who is not a worshiper of Yahweh, who is clearly opposed to the Lord's work and purposes and saw them as evil. And he is now given a place of prominence within the very building of the temple itself. He has defied, by his presence there, not only defied God, but defiled the temple of God. And all the chambers that he has inhabited must be cleaned out and purified. He has turned the temple into a place of hypocrisy, a place of mockery of God, a place of derision, just simply by his presence. The temple couldn't even function right now as God had designed. His ministers couldn't do the job that they were supposed to do. But they were willing to tolerate an idolatrous God-hating pagan with a hypocritical name to literally live on the other side of the wall where the presence of God was supposed to dwell. It's astounding. It's an act of blasphemy of the highest nature. Tobiah had made the house of God his house. And that reveals to us two things. It reveals to us, number one, what Tobiah thinks of God. Number two, it reveals to us what Tobiah thinks about himself. This disobedience, this corruption of the high priest, it placed the enemies of Israel in a position of higher priority than the worship of God. Do you see what happens when you remove the priority of the worship of God and you defile what he has set apart as holy? Tobiah and the high priest have taken what is intended to be used for worship and used it for their own personal aggrandizement. They have taken what's to be used for worship and made it blasphemy to the holiness of God Himself. And we might ask, where is the opposition of the Jewish people to this? Where's the outrage on this trampling of the holiness of God's worship? How could this possibly especially after the covenant that we just read that they had cut with God in chapter 10. They said specifically there that they would not forsake the house of God and yet that is exactly what they've done. Look at Nehemiah's response. Nehemiah responds as a man of action exactly as we would expect Nehemiah to respond based on what he's done in the past. Verse 7, And I came to Jerusalem and discerned all the evil that Elisha had done for Tobiah, by preparing a chamber for him in the courts of the house of God. And it was very evil to me. It should have been evil to him. So I threw out, so I threw all of Tobiah's household goods out of the chamber. Can you see Nehemiah doing this? Can you see this guy, like a tornado, tearing through these chambers that Tobiah had taken as his residence, Nehemiah throwing, pitching, Tobiah's chairs and his furniture and all of his personal belongings, pitching them out into the ground. Nehemiah here is enraged with a righteous indignation. He's zealous for the worship and the glory and the honor of God. And he refused to let anyone's sin get in the way of the honor and the worship and the glory of God. Some have looked at Nehemiah's responses here and criticized him for his quick, harsh demeanor. I'm going to suggest to you his demeanor was exactly what it should have been. This is not sinful anger on the part of Nehemiah. It is righteous anger. over the blasphemy of Tobiah and the compromise of the priests. And by the way, doesn't this remind you of somebody else who had righteous anger over the misuse of the house of God and it being used in a sinful way? John chapter 2 verses 13 to 17 it says this about Jesus. He says, And the Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves and the moneychangers seated at their tables. And He made a scourge of cords, that's a whip, and drove them all out of the temple. with the sheep and the oxen. He poured out the coins of the money changers, overturned their tables, and to those who were selling the doves, he said, take these things away. Stop making my father's house a place of business. And his disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me. This is righteous. because it's wrath for the offense that's caused to God and for the way that he had been treated. In fact, one of the key ways you know if your anger is righteous or not is that if you have anger over something that's done to you or that's perceived that you're being wrongly attacked for or wrongly suffering for, if it's you that you're worried about, it's usually not righteous anger. Usually. If it's anger because someone has blasphemed or offended God, that is different. Dear friends, now this morning I ask you, what things do you allow to hinder and get in the way of the worship of God? Either in your daily worship, and by that I mean the scope of your entire life, because all of your life We've been talking about this for three weeks now. All of your life is to be worshiped, right? So what things do you allow to hinder and get in the way of the worship of God, either in your daily worship or their hindrance of God's corporate worship on Sunday? What sins are you holding on to? Sins that you treat like they're a pet and refuse to repent of. Sins that you carry with you into the worship of God. Because you hold on to them, you have prioritized them over His worship. Dear Christian, it's time for you to clean the closet. It's time for you to throw out your sin the way that Nehemiah expelled Tobiah on that day. And this puts a spotlight on something else for us, doesn't it? What we see here in the book of Nehemiah that's happened in Jerusalem over the time since Nehemiah left is an utter failure of leadership. And this is what happens when the leadership of God's people refuse to take sin seriously. It's what happens when we compromise and allow things that might not seem like a big deal in. Things that maybe are named by God as sin, But to the modern perspective, we don't think they're so bad. I mean, after all, God is really picky, isn't he? And everyone is going to see me as weird if I obey what God says in certain areas of my life. And what happens in that is a progression of compromise by the leadership. First, the leaders allow things that are sin, but they're culturally acceptable sins. And then they simply just don't discipline sin. It's not that it's not there, not that we don't care, but we're just gonna choose to turn the other way. Then they compromise further to allow more sin. And then that compromise encourages others to sin. And before you know it, the leadership is celebrating. Sin, do you see how the progression goes? And before you know it, Tobias setting up rooms in the temple of God to be his own home. Or in our own day, sin becomes celebrated in the church. You think it can't happen? I refer you back to the introduction of this sermon. Look at all the churches that are all around us in New England. There is celebration of sin everywhere. Do you see why sin's a big deal? Why the leadership of the church has to deal with it? Do you see how our not dealing with it encourages others to commit the same sins or even worse? Do you see how it impacts worship if we just wink at it? Do you see what happens if we don't do all we can to maintain the holiness of the church? Beloved, your leadership has a mandate from God to keep our lives holy before Yahweh so we can call you to that same holiness so we can confront when people forsake that holiness. We have a mandate from the Lord to confront each other in leadership when we see sin in our own lives. We have a responsibility to do the same with one another And the question I would ask within our congregation, are you doing that? Do you have the courage and the love to confront a brother or sister in Christ when they're in sin? Now, what else does Nehemiah do here? Look at verse nine. Then I said the word, that's Nehemiah saying, then I spoke. Then I spoke, then I said the word, and they cleansed the chambers. And I returned there the utensils of the house of God with the grain offerings and the frankincense. So what does Nehemiah do? He speaks, verse nine, they, the Levites, cleansed the chambers. Nehemiah returns the utensils, he returns the grain offerings, all the other offerings. What did he do here? He expelled sin and restored worship to the house of God. And there's one other thing that Nehemiah had to do to restore the priority of worship. Not just to the people, but to the priests as well. As he's removing Tobiah's stuff, it is expected to ask, hey, I'm throwing all this junk out of these rooms, get Tobiah out of here, but all the stuff that's supposed to be in these rooms, offerings that are supposed to be brought in by the people of God that the Levites are supposed to be collecting, that the priests are supposed to be overseeing? Where are all of those? Look at verse 10, I also came to know that the portions of the Levites had not been given them. So the Levites and the singers who did the work had fled each to his own field. So I contended against the officials and said, why is the house of God forsaken? Then I gathered them together and had them stand in their posts. All Judah then brought the tithe of the grain, the new wine, and the oil into the storehouses. And in charge of the storehouses, I appointed Shelemiah the priest, Zadok the scribe, Padiah of the Levites. In addition to them was Hanan, the son of Zechur, the son of Mataniah, for they were counted as faithful. And it was their task to apportion everything to their relatives. The answer to this is that the Levites had not been getting their portions that was owed to them. That is what God had decreed was owed to them. This is their wages for temple service, their food, their allotment of oil. This represented all of their livelihood. It was stripped from them. In other words, they weren't getting paid. So what did they do? Well, they did what anybody else would do if they weren't getting paid by their employer. They left their duties because they knew that they had to provide for their families, didn't they? And it's impossible for them to perform their ministry and provide separately for their family. So they took care of their families because there is no way that they could do it otherwise. And notice here, neither Nehemiah nor the Lord faults them for that. And Nehemiah's response to this is, why, after you've made this commitment in chapter 10, all these years ago, why have you forsaken the house of God? Why have you forsaken those who minister for the Lord's people? And so the rulers who refused to give the Levites their portions were forsaking both the house of God and the ministry of God and the people of God. And all of this was threatening to bring the ministry of the house of God, the ministry of the temple itself. complete standstill. So Nehemiah confronted the leaders who were responsible for this and his question is, why have you, why is the house of God forsaken? Compare that to chapter 10 verse 39, turn over a page or two in your Bible where it says this, it says, for the sons, and this is them making their commitment to 15 years earlier, 20 years earlier, however long ago it was, it says, for the sons of Israel, the sons of Levi shall bring the contribution of the grain, the new wine, the oil to the chambers, the utensils of the sanctuary are there, as well as the priests who are ministering and the gatekeepers and the singers, thus we will not forsake the house of our God. That was their covenant that they swore before God. And now the leaders in Jerusalem had emptied out these rooms, moved Tobiah in, and refused to allow them, refused to allow the people of the nation to give their contributions the way that they were supposed to. This isn't a problem of the people of the Levites, it's a problem of the leadership, isn't it? Do we see where this starts? So in this passage, there are two essential problems. First, the leadership in Nehemiah's absence was poor. The leaders neglected to hold God as holy. And that's why the leaders must be committed to holiness, to confronting sin. We must be committed to not compromising. And that is both in doctrine and in practice. Why? Because we've seen over and over again in this book, in the scriptures, in our own personal lives, that what you believe governs how you live. Orthodoxy, what you believe, affects your practice. Orthodoxy begets orthopraxy, right? It does. So it's both doctrine and practice in which we cannot compromise. And the problem extended beyond the leadership as well. Because while this was a problem of leadership, after all they had done, all they had been through, all that the people themselves knew about the law, how? Because it had been read to them every day. You recall from chapters eight and chapter nine that they had been having worship services every day where the law was being read and it was being preached to them for three to six hours a day. None of them could say, oh, we just didn't know. Oh no, they knew. They constantly had the word of God explained to them previously. And when the leadership began to leave the scripture, when they left the standard of what God had commanded, what did Israel do? Nothing. Nothing. They knew because of the confession of chapter 10. They knew their sin of the past. They knew what historically Israel had done in the past. They knew what God desired. And they did not do it. They had forsaken the priority of worship, both corporately and in their private lives. And when you forsake that, it leads directly to disobedience. That's the warning to us. Do not forsake the worship of God in favor of your sin. Don't forsake it publicly, don't forsake it privately, and don't forsake it personally. We'll see the other three points next week. Father, we thank you for the directness of your word. We thank you for the conviction that it brings to us where conviction is needed. And Father, this morning we pray that we would be a people that would not forsake this. That the other elders and I, the leadership of the church, would be a people who are devoted to your worship. That this congregation would always be a people devoted to your worship, that we would not forsake it or compromise it in order that we might have what our sinful flesh craves. Father, in doing that, we would forsake you. And that would be abominable. Help us, Father, to not Make the same mistake that Israel made. Help us to not assume that we are not capable of the same thing that they were capable of. And short, Father, help us to guard that which you've entrusted to us, that we would continue to be a faithful church till Christ returns for us. That's in his name we ask it. Amen.