God Moves Us - Nehemiah 1

Nehemiah 1:3-4 The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire." When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.
God uses events to break our hearts and move us. Nehemiah is being moved by God not only to finish a project….but according to some commentaries I was reading….but God, from the beginning, had set His plan of redemption into motion, and Nehemiah was playing his part.
Nehemiah was living the good life. He had trusted people under him that basically did his job for him. As a cupbearer, you are to taste the cup of the king...to make sure it isnt poisoned. But as cupbearer to the king....you basically lived like the king...he was a trusted companion. Nehemiah had all the reason in the world to NOT listen and NOT care about the news he heard about Jerusalem.....yet God broke his heart.
Apparently, 100 years prior to Nehemiah, Daniel had prophesied about the coming of Christ, the Messiah. According to Daniel, Christ would come 483 years after the decree was issued to rebuild the wall. We could do the math, but the commentary I read, stated that it was exactly 483 years between the time Artaxerxes issued the decree and when Christ came into Jerusalem on the donkey, 5 days before his crucifixion.
Think about this now….Satan knows about the wall, he also knows about Daniels prophecy, and he knows about God's plan of redemption through Christ.….so we are about to see some MAJOR spiritual warfare going on.
I think about our own journey to ANC. How God used events and people to break Brandon and Jen’s hearts for the poor, the marginalized and the hurting. Then he used certain people and events in their previous church to move them out. Not only out of the church they were serving in....but out of their comfort zones. It would have been a much simpler process to plant a similar church to where they had been. Similar in style, similar demographic as where they had come from....but God wasn't really interested in simpler...
When I began praying about moving to Austin, God had been working on me for years….and even though it wasn’t an easy decision to leave…it was a fairly overwhelming sense that He was moving us out as well.
Its been amazing to see what God at ANC in the past 9 months. Not only as a church, but in the communities, among our partners, the influence God has given us and especially how God continues to break our hearts for those he originally he called us to minister to.