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Do you ever feel like you are drifting in life?

Like life is more happening to you instead of you happening to life?

No one wakes up and decides to let their marriage go cold. Nobody schedules the credit card debt. No one puts “become a stranger to my kids” on the calendar.

Drifting doesn’t just happen. It happens in the whirlwind of life. It happens while we’re busy with work, homework, doctor’s appointments, caring for aging parents, the season that was supposed to slow down and never did.

Then one day you look up and ask a question you didn’t see coming. How did I get here?

If you made goals in January, you already know the feeling. It’s almost October. Most of us are nowhere near where we hoped we’d be. Not because we quit or gave up, but because we never decided, and the whirlwind decided for us.

So how do you take hold of your life instead of letting life happen to you?

One of the things I love about preaching through books of the bible is how you begin to see the details in the verses. 

In Nehemiah 10, we often skim this chapter in our Bible reading plans because it opens with 84 names. It includes the governor, priests, Levites, and heads of families. Then it lists a set of commitments that sound impossibly specific. Wood for the altar. A tenth of the produce. An eighth of an ounce of silver.

If you take a step back and look at what came before this, we see in chapter 8 that the book of the law was read aloud, and they saw who God is and who they were. In chapter 9, they confessed. And at the end of chapter 9, having just rehearsed that God is gracious, compassionate, abounding in faithful love, and that he will never leave them. They respond by making a vow. 

I define a vow as A choice to live intentionally in a direction, no matter what.

Their commitments came down to three areas. These are the ones that we drift in the most: relationships, pace, and money. And as we’ll see, they revolve around our trust in God. 

Relationships. They committed to marrying within the faith. 

We underestimate the power of the person we marry, but marrying someone is the most important human decision you will make. It determines not only your faith, but where you live, who you spend time with, how you will spend your money, and the person who will help you raise your kids and what their faith looks like. It shapes everything else that follows. 

Not only that, whoever is closest to you shapes what you believe about God. If the person closest to you is so passionate and on fire for God, that will impact you. If the person closest to you is indifferent or lacks interest in their faith, that will impact you. And you do the same for others. 

Rest. They committed to shut their businesses down on the Sabbath and let their fields lie fallow every seventh year. This isn’t simply about schedules but is ultimately about trust. When we rest, we are affirming that we are not God, that we have limits. That God is at work while we sleep and ultimately, he will provide and care for us. 

Money. They committed to give back to God. The way we talk about this at our church is that giving should be done regularly, sacrificially, proportionally, and worshipfully. Not what was left over. What was first. Too many times, we give back to God at the end of all things, instead of at the beginning. And this is an act of worship, no matter when we give. We show what matters if we give to God first or if we give to God last. 

They decided before the moment came.

Before the feelings showed up, they’d settled who they’d marry. Before the week filled in, they’d settled when they’d stop. Before the purchase, they’d settled what they’d give.

That’s the whole thing. One decision made ahead of time makes the next hundred for you. Willpower in the moment is a terrible strategy, and the whirlwind will beat it every time. A commitment made in advance helps you at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday when you’re tired.

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When you read through Scripture, it is important to notice the number of times a word or an idea appears. 

Throughout the Bible, the word or idea “remember” appears 150-200 times. God consistently tells his people to look back, to remember, not to forget. It is what happened at passover, what takes place in communion. 

Why?

Because we forget. 

This happened in Nehemiah 8. When the people opened the law and read it, they wept and worshiped. And then, they responded by participating in the Feast of Booths (Nehemiah 8:16 – 17).

What is the Feast of Booths? It’s a reminder of God’s faithfulness. For seven days, no one worked. The people lived in makeshift shelters — booths — just as their ancestors had lived in temporary shelters after God delivered them out of 400 years of slavery in Egypt, on their journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land.

Why does God command his people to remember? Why build practices around remembering?

Because we forget, our present drowns out the work of God in our past. We start to believe our best days — maybe even God’s best days — are behind us.

As Eric Mason has said, “God wants us to remember the days of hardship because when he finally makes our lives fruitful, he doesn’t want us thinking we did it on our own. He wants us pointing back to the source.”

The booths reminded Israel that moving forward requires looking back — remembering how God provided in the past.

Here’s our problem: we hate looking back, because the past holds so much pain. We’ve been abandoned. Rejected. Unloved. We’ve walked away believing we’re worthless. So we avoid looking backward — it hurts; it’s not where we want to live. And yet it’s exactly there, in that place, that we find God’s grace.

Brennan Manning wrote that the false self — the imposter — begins the moment we first felt rejected, worthless, or unlovable. Have you ever felt like you were faking it? Like you didn’t belong? We all have, at some point.

Many of us don’t struggle to trust God with eternity or with the future. We struggle to trust him with the present. And the way we learn to trust God today is by looking back and remembering how he answered us yesterday. That’s precisely why God gave Israel a calendar full of festivals, monuments, and altars — so that every time they passed by, they’d ask: Do you remember what God did in this place?

Looking back helps us move forward.

Consider God’s patience in this story. Decades — centuries — had passed since Israel celebrated this feast, and yet God still extended grace. The moment you think grace has run out for you, God has more.

This is why, in John’s Gospel, John writes that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” — literally, tabernacled among us. John is deliberately connecting the coming of Jesus to this very feast.

The booths were a reminder to Israel of God’s grace and power — and a witness, a better story, to the watching world.

A church thrives when it’s built on Jesus — on his life, death, and resurrection. That’s why we take communion every week: we need a weekly reminder of grace. That’s why we baptize people: it’s not just a public announcement of change; it’s a marker — a moment you look back on for the rest of your life and say, ” This happened here.” We do this with anniversaries and birthdays too.

Why? Because we forget. Things grow stale. Grace is hard to remember. The mountain in front of you always feels bigger than the last one you climbed. And it’s not just that we forget — we often feel forgotten. Our prayers feel lifeless. We feel aimless. We wonder if God notices the details: the ache in our body, the weight on our heart, the stress we’re carrying.

It is in the remembering that we find our way forward. 

This week, take a moment to look back and reflect on the faithfulness of God in your life. Where have you seen God move in your life? Answer prayer? Provide for you in big and small ways? Then, take time to thank God for that and share that with someone else as a way to encourage them. 

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When we hear the word thriving — whether we’re talking about a person’s life or a church — we tend to picture people who have it all together. No problems. No regrets. People who got it right the first time.

But that’s not how thriving actually works.

To get where God wants us to be — as individuals and as a church — requires something we rarely think of but all desperately need: a second chance. A chance to start new. And all of us need a second chance more than once!

If we’re honest, all of us have conversations we wish we could take back. Words others said that left marks on our hearts. Mistakes we’ve made, people we’ve hurt, decisions — financial, relational, moral — we wish we could undo. We carry shame and guilt for a long list of things.

So is it possible to go back?

Yes and no. You can’t unsay something. You can’t unhear something. Here’s the hard truth: your life is where it is because of your choices and the choices of others.

But what happens next is what determines where your life ends up.

This was exactly the situation for the people of God in the book of Nehemiah. They lived in a broken-down city — a city without walls — because of their own choices and the choices of the generations before them. At some point, someone decided not to rebuild the wall. And then the next generation made the same decision. And the one after that.

And for many of our families, schools, organizations, and churches, this is our story. 

We’ve spent the last several weeks in the book of Nehemiah, and we’ve arrived at chapter 8 — a pivotal turning point. The walls have been rebuilt. People are moving back into the city, returning to normal life. They are starting over. This is their second chance.

Remember the shape of this book: the first half is about God building the city through his people. The second half is about God building his people.

It’s easy to read a couple of pages in the Bible and gloss over how hard this actually was. The city had lain in ruins — stone, wood, all of it burned and destroyed. What happened here is what so many of us long for in our own lives but wonder if it’s really possible. That’s what this whole series is about: how to rebuild something and thrive.

And as they move back into the city to start over, they lay their foundation the same way every time: by opening up the Word of God.

At the start of chapter 8, we meet Ezra the priest, sent back to Jerusalem by the king, just as Nehemiah was. Ezra stands before the people and reads the Book of the Law of Moses — for five hours (8:5 – 6).

When we read Scripture, the Holy Spirit speaks to us and changes us — and we respond in worship. We’re not meant to experience the Bible like any other book. It’s the living Word of God. It shows us who God is and who we are. When we truly encounter God through his Word, it moves us to worship and to follow him.

How do they respond to the reading of God’s word? They weep (8:9). 

Why were they weeping? Partly because of their own sin, confronted by God’s holiness. But also — as we saw last week — because even the critics of Nehemiah’s building project had recognized that God had shown up and worked on their behalf. Finally, the people themselves saw it too.

Sometimes we’re just slow.

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to see God at work in someone else’s life than in your own? But now, finally, they see it. They see God’s hand.

So the leaders tell them: “Do not grieve, because the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

When Scripture says the Lord is your strength, it means you’re hiding in something bigger than yourself. You’re satisfied in the one who can cover you, care for you, and forgive your sin.

It’s often after the fact — after we get home, after the dust settles — that we recognize the impact of what God has done. These people had just watched a wall be rebuilt in 52 days after it had sat in ruins for decades. And it was only in looking back that they understood the weight of it.

And often, the way for us to move forward and start over is to look back to see how God has moved in the past.