Under construction The Sanballat Spirit
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There is an attitude in this world that divides people because it does not seek the truth but only to strengthen it's own position.
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Under construction The Sanballat Spirit
- 2. Nehemiah 1:11 O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you. Please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.” In those days I was the king’s cup-bearer.
- 3. Nehemiah 2:1 Early the following spring, in the month of Nisan, during the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes’ reign, I was serving the king his wine. I had never before appeared sad in his presence. 2 So the king asked me, “Why are you looking so sad? You don’t look sick to me. You must be deeply troubled.”
- 4. Two Sides of Life • Life is a journey in discovering God • Life is a campaign to build the Kingdom
- 5. Nehemiah 2:7 I also said to the king, “If it please the king, let me have letters addressed to the governors of the province west of the Euphrates River, instructing them to let me travel safely through their territories on my way to Judah.
- 6. Nehemiah 2:9-10 9 When I came to the governors of the province west of the Euphrates River, I delivered the king’s letters to them. The king, I should add, had sent along army officers and horsemen to protect me. 10 But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard of my arrival, they were very displeased that someone had come to help the people of Israel.
- 7. The Sanballat Spirit • Partisan - prejudiced in favor of a particular cause. – Proper Passion – Party Position – Poisoned Prison – Provoked Punishment
- 8. Prince of Peace • Abundant Provision • Peace and Patience • Truth and Love
Editor's Notes
- God is taking your mess and changing it into your message. This guy pushed his motorcycle from the patio into his living room, where he began to clean the engine with some rags and a bowl of gasoline, all in the comfort of his own home. When he finished, he sat on the motorcycle and decided to give his bike a quick start and make sure everything was still OK. Unfortunately, the bike started in gear, and crashed through the glass patio door with him still clinging to the handlebars. His wife had been working in the kitchen. She came running at the fearful sound, and found him crumpled on the patio, badly cut from the shards of broken glass. She called 911, and the paramedics carried the unfortunate man to the Emergency Room. Later that afternoon, after many stitches had pulled her husband back together, the wife brought him home and put him to bed. She cleaned up the mess in the living room, and dumped the bowl of gasoline in the toilet. Shortly thereafter, her husband woke up, lit a cigarette, and went into the bathroom for a much-needed relief break. He sat down and tossed the cigarette into the toilet, which promptly exploded because the wife had not flushed the gasoline away. The explosion blew the man through the bathroom door. The wife heard a loud explosion and the terrible sound of her husband's screams. She ran into the hall and found her husband lying on the floor with his trousers blown away and burns on his buttocks. The wife again ran to the phone and called for an ambulance. The same two paramedics were dispatched to the scene. They loaded the husband on the stretcher and began carrying him to the street. One of them asked the wife how the injury had occurred. When she told them, they began laughing so hard that they dropped the stretcher, and broke the guy's collarbone.
- To see God’s kingdom come requires us to live our daily lives intentionally looking to play our part in this all encompassing campaign.
- A phrase that refers to the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia. From the perspective of those living in Palestine, “beyond the river” meant on the east side of the Euphrates River. The expression is often used when speaking of the ancestral home of the patriarchs (Joshua 24:3, Joshua 24:3,24:14-15; KJV has “on the other side of the flood”). From the perspective of those living in Persia, “beyond the river” meant on the west side of the Euphrates River. Darius I, the great organizer of the Persian empire, named his fifth satraphy “Beyond the River” (Ebir-nari). This satrapy included Syria and Palestine. The official Persian usage is reflected in the Books of Ezra (Ezekiel 4:10-20; Ezekiel 5:3 ,Ezekiel 5:3,5:6; Ezekiel 6:6 ,Ezekiel 6:6,6:8 ,Ezekiel 6:8,6:13; Ezekiel 7:21 ,Ezekiel 7:21,7:25; Ezekiel 8:36 ) and Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2:7 ,Nehemiah 2:7,2:9; Nehemiah 3:7 ).
- The Sanballat Spirit is the win loose Spirit that is born in a world of scarcity. We first saw it active in the story of Cain and Able. You must clearly understand, to begin with, that Samaria was already, even in that early day, the deadly rival of Jerusalem; and also that Sanballat was the governor of Samaria. And Sanballat was a man of this kind, that he was not content with doing his very best to make Samaria both prosperous and powerful, but he must also do his very best to keep Jerusalem downtrodden and destroyed. And thus it was that, when Sanballat heard that Nehemiah had come from Shushan with a commission from Artaxerxes to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, the exasperating news drove Sanballat absolutely beside himself. And thus it is that such a large part of Nehemiah's autobiography is taken up with Sanballat's diabolical plots and conspiracies both to murder Nehemiah and to destroy the new Jerusalem. We see in Sanballat an outstanding instance of the sleepless malice of all unprincipled party spirit. (http://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/whyte/sanballat_a_study_in_party_spirit.htm) Proper Passion - 1. Now, in the first place, diabolically wicked as party spirit too often becomes, this must be clearly understood about party spirit, that, after all, it is but the excess, and the perversion, and the depravity of an originally natural and a perfectly proper principle in our hearts. It was of God, and it was of human nature as God had made it, that Sanballat should love and serve Samaria best; and that Nehemiah should love and serve Jerusalem best. And all party spirit among ourselves also, at its beginning, is but our natural and dutiful love for our own land, and for our own city, and for our own Church, and for those who think with us, and work with us, and love us. Party Position 2. But then, when it comes to its worst, as it too often does come, party spirit is the complete destruction both of truth and of love. The truth is hateful to the out-and-out partisan. We all know that in ourselves. As many lies as you like, but not the truth. It exasperates us to hear it. You are henceforth our enemy if you will insist on speaking it. It is not truth that divides us up into such opposed parties as we see all around us in Church and State, it is far more lies. It is not principle once in ten times. Nine times out of ten it is pure party spirit. And I cling to that bad spirit, and to all its works, as if it were my life. I feel unhappy when you tell me the truth, if it is good truth, about my rival. And where truth is hated in that way love can have no possible home. Truth is love in the mind, just as love is truth in the heart. Trample on the one and you crush the other to death. Now the full-blown party spirit is utter poison to the spirit of love as well as to the spirit of truth. Love suffereth long, and is kind; love rejoiceth not in iniquity, etc. But party spirit is the clean contradiction of an that. Poisoned Prison 3. By the just and righteous ordination of Almighty God all our sins carry their own punishment immediately and inseparably with them. And party spirit, being such a wicked spirit, it infallibly inflicts a very swift and a very severe punishment on the man who entertains it. You know yourselves how party spirit hardens your heart, and narrows, and imprisons, and impoverishes your mind. You must all know how party spirit poisons your feelings, and fills you with antipathy at men you never saw, as well as at men all around you who never hurt a hair of your head, and would not if they could. Provoked Punishment 4. Another Divine punishment of party spirit is seen in the way that it provokes retaliation, and thus reproduces and perpetuates itself till the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate the truth and murder love. The partisan spirit introduces a cycle of violence into the society where it is found. And, inheriting no little good from our contending forefathers, we have inherited too many of their injuries, and retaliations, and antipathies, and alienations also. And the worst of it is that we look on it as true patriotism, and the perfection of religious principle, to keep up and perpetuate all those ancient misunderstandings, and injuries, and recriminations, and alienations. (A. Whyte) Prof Jansen’s article Theatre of the Immature http://www.ufs.ac.za/docs/default-source/timeslive-documents/2015-05-08-the-big-read---theatre-of-the-immature.pdf?sfvrsn=2 Having taught young people in different parts of the world, this is my most striking observation about South African students - their inarticulateness in public. They cannot reason or sustain an argument. They find it difficult to hold a position on a sensitive subject without becoming angry. They find their confidence not in the satisfaction of a powerful argument but in the applause of the similarly shallow. When university authorities yield not to argument but to anger, they unwittingly reinforce this anti-intellectual and non-progressive student behaviour on their campuses.
- We must remember "that we differ as much from other men as they differ from us." What a lamp to our feet is that sentence as we go through this world! And then, when at any time, and towards any party, or towards any person whatsoever, you find in yourself that you are growing in love, and in peace, and in patience, and in toleration, and in goodwill, and in good wishes, acknowledge it to yourself; see it, understand it, and confess it. Do not be afraid to admit it, for that is God within your heart. That is the Divine Nature — that is the Holy Ghost. Just go on in that Spirit, and ere ever you are aware you will be caught up and taken home to that Holy Land where there is neither Jerusalem nor Samaria. There will be no party spirit there. There will be no controversy there.