Building Walls

In continuing my thoughts on Ezra and Nehemiah let's now talk about the walls that Nehemiah built.  It was Nehemiah's contention that even if the temple were built or re-built to it's previous glory, there were still enemies out there whose desire it was to prevent these people from serving their God. 

Can I just stop and tell you that there are people in our world, in our nation, in our state in our towns and yes probably in our own families who want to prevent us from serving God as we should?

Nehemiah felt that even if the temple were built, without strong walls, the enemy would come in and destroy the temple again.  And as important as the temple was to the people, if they didn't build strong walls, the temple would be destroyed and their freedom to serve God would be hindered.

If you are a Christian you have established your temple.  You have accepted Christ as your Savior and are living for Him.  But I'd just bet my tractor against your broken down mule that your enemy is trying his best to destroy your Christian life. 

Troubles, trials, temptations pound you each day.  Someone said recently that there are three types of people, "those who are having problems, those who are coming out of problems, or those who are about to get into problems".  Not very encouraging but it's pretty much true. 

Satan would like nothing better than to smash your temple, extinguish your witness, break up your home and terminate your Christian life.  I Peter 5:8 tells us that he is as "a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour".  So we as Christians need to build strong walls around the things that are valuable to us to prevent his onslaught.   

Yes it is our choice to accept Jesus as our Savior and ask Him to come into our lives and make us His children.  But without building and maintaining walls of protection around our lives the enemy will come in and defeat us. 

I know if you are a history buff or a Bible scholar you will know that the city of Jerusalem had more than four walls.  It wasn't built in a square.  But for my illustration, my city is going to have four walls.  You can take this and expound on it all you'd like. You can build as many walls as you can maintain.  But let me run with this and just show you four walls that I believe need to be established if we are to protect our temple from the devil. 

I believe we must build and maintain the walls of Prayer, Bible study, Praise and Giving and in the next few writings I want to point out to you some thoughts on why I believe these walls are important.