O. S. Hawkins - The Nehemiah Code: Its Never Too Late for a New Beginning

Its Never Too Late for a New Beginning

R ebuilding. Who among us is not in need of an occasional new beginning as we journey through different periods of life? Some of us deal with relationships that need to be rebuilt. Some are in the process of rebuilding businesses. Most coaches are continually engaged in the rebuilding process. Other people are seeking to rebuild their integrity after a misstep. Some are seeking to rebuild after divorce. Many who have lost loved ones are rebuilding their own lives. Some are rebuilding self-confidence and hoping for a better future. In one way or another, most of us will spend some or much of the next year trying to rebuild something. The good news is... its never too late for a new beginning.

Nehemiah lived twenty-five hundred years ago, and he wrote the book on rebuilding. God recorded it for us and placed it in the Bible for all posterity. Who was Nehemiah (pronounced Nee-uh-m-uh)? He was neither a preacher nor a prophet. Nehemiah was a civil servant, an ordinary guy, who applied some universal principles that enabled him to rebuild a broken city and, in the process, a lot of broken hopes. He has left us some secrets to his success, a sort of hidden code if you will, which can become a fountain of hope and strength to anyone and everyone who will apply his formula. The journey we are about to make, as we walk with him through the pages of his book, will enable us to apply some marvelous truths to our lives and to step into a new beginning ourselves.

Nehemiahs story unfolds after the reign of King Solomon in Jerusalem. The kingdom was now divided. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had been ruled by a series of wicked kings, not a good one among them. Then, in 722 BC, the Assyrian assault swept them away into a captivity from which they never returned. The Southern Kingdom lasted until 586 BC, when it was finally devastated and destroyed by the Babylonians. Their holy city of Jerusalem was virtually leveled and decimated. The temple was demolished, the wall of the city was broken down, and its gates were burned. The leading Jews were taken away as captives to Babylon, and once there, the psalmist says they hung their harps upon the willow trees in deep despair (Psalm 137:12). After several years, the Persians broke the Babylonian supremacy and allowed some of the Jews to return home, which they did. They began to rebuild their temple and city, but the sheer magnitude of the task caused them to give up. Years passed. The city, still broken and burned, was in dire need of rebuilding.

In stepped Nehemiah, a Jew still in exile, with a cushy civil service job complete with benefits and retirement. But Jerusalem burned in his heart. He left Babylon to return to Jerusalem, armed with a single, focused objective to rally the people, rebuild their hope, and, ultimately, rebuild their Holy City.

Nehemiah had a plan for rebuilding. He saw the end from the beginning. He got started right, he built a team spirit with those around him, and he finished strong. In doing so, he provides us with a code in these following pages that, if applied to our own experience, can enable us to rebuild some broken walls in our own lives and reinforce our own legacies. Nehemiahs message to us across the centuries is plain and powerful: It is never too late for a new beginning!

The longest journey always begins with the first step, so lets turn the page and learn how to get started right.

T hose successful in rebuilding their lives or their legacies have one thing in common: they get started right. If you are a golfer, you are keenly aware that the most important shot in golf is the tee shot, the first shot. Every new hole presents the golfer with a new beginning. At each hole, you step up onto the tee and hit your first shot. That shot generally determines how well you will play the hole. If you drive the ball into the woods, you have to scramble with a second and often a third shot just to get on the green. If your tee shot goes out of bounds, you are penalized additional strokes and the loss of distance. However, if you drive the ball straight down the fairway and into position for the second shot to the green, you are well on your way to achieving your goal of par for the hole. So many players never score well in golf because they spend most of their time trying to make up yardage lost by poor tee shots. Getting a good start is essential, whether we are playing golf or seeking to rebuild a life.

There is a real sense in which rebuilding something is often a bigger challenge than building something from scratch. During my days as a pastor, I was privileged to lead two of the greatest churches in America. Both were in the heart of a city, downtown, in the midst of millions of people. One was in a cosmopolitan, secular, and virtually unchurched area on the south Florida coast. The other was a historic congregation in Texas filled with tradition and deeply held heritage. The challenge in Florida was to build a myriad of ministries without a lot of history and tradition. The task in Texas was not to build, but to