Today we see our fathers renewing covenant with God and so we have occasion to take up the issue of covenants. What does it mean to renew covenant? What is a covenant in the first place? And why does God take covenants so seriously? These are the questions we get to address today. 

The prayer of the Levites in Nehemiah 9 insists that the Lord God is a God who keeps covenant and shows mercy. What does this mean? Through a careful study of the prayer itself we discover what it means and how we as the people of God can call upon God in times of great personal and corporate need even when that need has been the result of past sin and disobedience. Further, we learn what it means for us to be people who keep covenant and show mercy.

All of us know that the presence of garbage in our homes is inevitable. In both clean homes and dirty homes, food is consumed, messes are made, things break. But in dirty, these messes are left where they lie. And soon they fill the house to overflowing; the stench increases; no one pays a visit; neighbors move away. In a clean home, however, these messes are picked up along the way. So, the home remains clean and habitable.

There is an unfortunate tendency among us as God’s people – when we are delivered from the kingdom of darkness and brought into the kingdom of light – to become sour and prunish – to scrunch up our faces and bemoan the sad state of the world. Rather than have faces full of joy and hearts full of gratitude, we look as though we’ve drunk a quart of vinegar. 

Why is this? Why do we respond to the Good News of Jesus Christ not with joy and liberation but with sorrow and acerbity? No doubt the reasons are many – both cultural and psychological. But one, which we see occurring in Nehemiah, is that we can become so overwhelmed with our personal and corporate sin, so overwhelmed with a sense of guilt, that we think it our fundamental duty to mourn and weep rather than to give thanks, to fast rather than to feast. The response of our fathers to this temptation will hopefully help us navigate these waters carefully and to become a thankful people.

Frequently throughout Scripture we are exhorted to “fear” the Lord. What does this mean and how do we manifest appropriate fear? Today we find that the people of God manifest their fear of God by hungering for His Word and tangibly demonstrating their attentiveness both with their bodies and their lips. Fear, in other words, manifests itself in concrete actions that communicate respect and attentiveness. And attentiveness to the Word of God means growing in our understanding of it not simply treating it as a magic talisman.

In our text today, Nehemiah uses a historical rediscovery to encourage our fathers to rise to the occasion and complete the task of making Jerusalem glorious. For while the walls of the city were rebuilt, the city itself was largely empty. And what good is a city with walls that is empty of inhabitants?