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I want to start today by acknowledging that Evolve Church is part of the larger body of Christ. In our city, there has often been division among churches, sometimes unintentionally. The Bible says, "I'm of Apollos and I'm with Peter and I'm Paul," but Paul corrected this by saying we all belong to Jesus. We need to stop dividing ourselves.
As we begin, I want to pray for my brothers and sisters serving in ministry across this city—Bishop Hines at Christian Faith Fellowship Church, Bishop Bird at Greater New Birth, and Pastor Malone at New Testament Church. I pray for God's grace and protection over all our leaders, their families, and their health. I pray that we would come closer together and put the enemy to open shame, showing that we're not against one another. We're all serving one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Spirit.
As we enter into this word, I pray that God would get the glory and be glorified in our worship and reverence. May we humble ourselves before Him, lay our crowns at the feet of Jesus, and let His Spirit lead.
We're continuing in Nehemiah 7, specifically verses 2-4, picking up from last week's teaching on being "Out of Order."
In Nehemiah 7:2, we read:
"I put in charge of Jerusalem my brother Hanani along with Hananiah the commander of the Citadel because he was a man of integrity and feared God more than most people do."
Notice how Nehemiah described his appointee. He didn't just pick anyone—he described specific qualities. Any great leader, whether male or female, needs two essential qualities: integrity and a heart that fears God.
Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles—moral uprightness. This means living according to God's word, not according to your feelings. Your feelings don't know your future; they don't know God. The Bible tells us that emotions and the heart can be sensual and demonic. If we live by feelings alone, we will be led astray.
The real test of integrity is: Who are you when no one is looking? When you can get away with something, when nobody would know, when you could technically do it—who are you then? Are you still a person of integrity? This is the character God is looking for in leaders.
Secondly, you must have a heart that actually fears God—a reverence for Him. This fear of God determines how you treat people. I can tell if someone truly fears God by whether they can forgive, love, and refrain from walking in offense or picking sides.
Proverbs 9:10 says:
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One of Israel."
This means the more you honor and reverence God, the wiser you become. Any wisdom apart from God is foolishness. When you start to honor God first, you receive a different level of wisdom. It's not about shaking in fear that God will destroy you—it's reverence. It's saying, "God, all of this is Yours. You put it in my hands for a reason. I want to be careful with what You've placed in my possession."
In Nehemiah 7:3, we read:
"I said to them, 'The gates of Jerusalem are not to be opened until the sun is hot. While the gatekeepers are still on duty, have them shut the doors and bar them.'"
When Nehemiah says "the sun is hot," he means at noon—the brightest and hottest part of the day. Why this timing? Because if you open the gate when it's still dark and gloomy, enemies and thieves who've been creeping in during the night can attack you. But at noon, when it's bright and hot, you can see any danger clearly, and the enemy would be uncomfortable.
This teaches us a critical lesson: There is always danger in opening a door prematurely.
God gives us dreams and visions, and we assume that when He gives us the dream, it's for right now. But Habakkuk says to "write the vision and make it plain; though it tarries, wait for it." It's for an appointed time. It will not lie. But when we move ahead of God's timing and nothing manifests, we get mad at God for not bringing resources prematurely.
I'm not saying you shouldn't want certain things. I'm saying: Should you have it now?
Proverbs 20:21 says:
"An inheritance obtained too early in life is not a blessing in the end."
A blessing received prematurely can feel like a curse. Talk to any young mother who became pregnant too early. Yes, babies are a blessing, but if you're not mentally mature enough to raise a child because you're still a child yourself, that blessing becomes heavy and painful.
Psalm 27:14 says:
"Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord."
Notice he says it twice—not being redundant, but emphasizing: Wait for the Lord and be strong. Why? Because it takes courage to wait on God.
Patience is simply waiting a long time. You've probably had patience—you've waited a long time for many things. But courage is believing that if you wait on God, something better is coming. It takes courage to say:
Even though you could claim a blessing right now, you'd rather wait until you're ready to handle what God puts in your hands.
Before we continue with Nehemiah, I want to address something that came up last week—the topic of husbands and wives—because it troubled some of you, and I want to give biblical context.
Let's look at Ephesians 5:22-28. Paul writes to the church at Ephesus about the relationship between husband and wife.
Ephesians 5:22 says:
"Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord."
Now, to the women in the room who are extremely powerful and intelligent: I do not want to take away your prowess. You are strong. The problem is we've made submission a weak term. But Jesus was meek, not weak. He said, "No man takes my life; I lay it down."
Submission means to know you have authority but to know when to put it down.
You can be powerful, anointed, and strong, but if you don't know when to lay down your authority, you can run a man away from God. I've seen this happen repeatedly—strong, anointed women who think that because they're powerful, they're supposed to rule their house. You don't rule your house; you cover it in prayer. You cover it with the presence of God.
When you learn to submit and say, "I know who I am. I'm God's daughter. Heaven hears me. God responds when I pray"—if you truly believe that, you don't need to argue with a man. You can submit, put your authority down, and trust God to move. The Bible says:
"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell in it."
You're talking to the One who rules it. You don't have to argue with a human anymore because He gets it in check for you.
Submission is one of the most powerful things you could ever do. As a man, I love being submitted to Jesus. I could do my own thing, and I have. But doing my own thing always led me into pitfalls I couldn't foresee. I learned to take my authority and lay my crown at the feet of Jesus.
Ephesians 5:23-25 continues:
"The husband is the head of his wife, just as Christ is the head of the church; he is the Savior of his body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."
And then:
"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her."
Let me be transparent: when I read this, I said, "I don't like this verse for me." The wife is told to submit, but the husband is told to love her the way Jesus loved the church—and Jesus died for the church.
Jesus loved a cheating church. A church that sometimes doesn't show up. A church that serves Him when it wants to. A church that isn't always consistent. A church that chooses sin sometimes. A messy, gossiping, backbiting, sinning church. And He said, "I love her so much that I'm going to die for her."
He gave up His life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God's word—to present her to himself as a glorious church without spot, wrinkle, or blemish.
Ephesians 5:28 says:
"In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife actually shows love for himself."
Every time a man doesn't show love to his wife, it's like saying he hates himself.
A man has to be healed. If a man doesn't love himself, he will love you the way he loves himself. If he's damaging his body with drugs, substance, and alcohol, if he won't take care of himself or be healthy, how can he show up for you?
When Eve sinned in the Garden, God didn't come down immediately. But when Adam sinned, God had to show up. Why? Because God gave the instruction to the head. Eve could have sinned and humanity could still have been born in righteousness—but Adam was the head, and when the head turned away from God, everything fell.
The responsibility always falls back on the man. This is why the man is under greater spiritual attack than anyone else. The enemy knows that fighting against the woman doesn't work if the man stays in God. So the enemy has to get the man out of God. He has to get the man out of focus.
Anytime they wanted to bind a house in Scripture, they went for the house of the man—the house of David, the house of Moses, the house of Solomon. Whenever you wanted to bind a family, you had to bind the strong man. If you lock up the man in his sin, in his mind, in his demons, in his issues, the whole house will struggle.
This is why God says the man needs to be submitted to Christ—not kind to be, but submitted to Christ. All the time.
Now, back to Nehemiah 7:4:
"Now the city was large and spacious, but there were few people in it, and the houses had not yet been rebuilt."
When I first read this, I was confused. They had completed building the wall. They had done God's work. They worked hard. But they hadn't built their houses yet. They rebuilt the wall before they rebuilt their individual homes.
This is where the disconnect happens, and it comes from strongholds. A stronghold is a habitual pattern of thought built into one's subconscious thought life. Satan wants to capture the minds of people, and the mind is the Citadel—the center of the soul, the leader of the soul.
These strongholds come from two things:
They put God's business before their own. They put God's house before their own. And now, even if you're a giver, you carry strongholds around money.
Being raised with nothing makes you stingy when you finally get something. I know—I've been there. I slept on the floor until I was a teenager.
Secondly, many of you have seen churches mishandle money so grossly and grotesquely that when money comes up, you freeze. You don't even recognize you're frozen.
Let me give you some true statements. Let's see if you agree:
Did you notice the amens started to hurt? It gets hard to say because you may not even recognize the stronghold in yourself subconsciously. You can say all day, "God's will before mine, God's way before mine," but when we get to "God's house before mine" and "God's money before mine," we struggle.
But look at what happened in Nehemiah. They didn't struggle with this. When they came to rebuild Jerusalem, they said, "No, we're building the wall first, and then we'll get to our house. We believe that if we do what God told us to do, God is going to protect what we're trying to do."
If I put God's business first, He's going to protect my business. If I put God's house first, He's going to protect my house. If I honor God first, then I know God's got me covered.
But when there's been trauma in this area, it's hard to celebrate. Every time you say it, you feel like somebody's taking advantage of you, because there's been so much trauma there. But the enemy is using that trauma to keep you bound.
In Nehemiah 7:3, we also read:
"Appoint residents of Jerusalem as guards, some at their posts and some near their own houses."
Now, notice how Nehemiah set up defense. Even though Nehemiah was the leader, he knew he could not protect Jerusalem or the place of God's peace alone. The inhabitants had to do it. The people who live there had to defend it.
This gives us a lesson for our church: As we are building a place of peace where everyone is welcome, you the people have to defend it.
You want to know why church always has issues? Because we put all responsibility on the person on the stage to stop all the mess in the back that we never even hear about. If this church is going to be a place of peace—a "Jerusalem" of refuge—then I'm asking the inhabitants, the residents, those who have planted their claim here and said, "God called me to be here"—I'm asking you to defend the peace of this place.
There are some things that all of us will have to shut down because we so strongly believe in order:
Because we are the ones who defend the Jerusalem, the peace, the presence of God in this place.
There's one more truth I want to address because I see it happening all the time and I want to offer biblical perspective.
Proverbs 18:22 says:
"The man who finds a wife finds a treasure and he receives favor from the Lord."
Notice—the man has to find. The man has to go looking. The man who finds—not the woman who pursues, not the woman who asks—the man finds.
Here's what I want to tell my sisters: You cannot make a man love you. A man will never commit to something he didn't choose.
I'm telling you how men act. A man might accept something, ride with it, go along with it, be nice about it—but he will not commit to something he didn't choose. For a man to commit, he has to make a choice.
So I say to my sisters: Don't let that man escape life without making a choice. If you want to be with me, make the choice. Let me know what your decision is. Because I'm not sticking with somebody who can't choose what they want.
But here's the deeper issue: when you step outside of God's order, you step outside of divine favor.
When the man doesn't choose, when the woman pursues, when the man avoids commitment—you're outside of order, and you're outside of God's divine favor. If you want divine favor, you have to remain in order.
We're in a season where God is building something intentional. He's establishing order. He's establishing integrity. He's establishing a fear of God. And He's asking us to wait on His timing, to defend the peace of His house, and to live according to His order—not our desires, but His design.
When we do that, we step into divine favor. We step into God's protection. And we become the building—the living temple—that God has always intended.
