This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome back to Nehemiah Week 3. This is Day 3 and as we start this day we come
to the fifth principle for those who would re-energize or rebuild their lives. A
basic principle for rebuilding is you have to learn from your failures and
organize your successes.

You have to learn from your failures and organize your successes. You
re-energize your life after a failure by learning from that failure and you
re-energize your life after a success by organizing that success. If you don't
learn from your failures you are doomed to repeat them and repeating failures
saps you with the energy that you need for living the life that God wants you to
live.

If you don't learn from your failures you're doomed to repeat them. If you don't
organize your successes you're forced to reproduce them because you didn't
organize them. They're just going to sort of fritter away and you're going to
have to do it again and then do it again.

Having to reproduce a success saps energy for living just as much. So I want to
focus on that part. This principle of organization.

How do you organize your successes? Nehemiah teaches this like nobody else.
Nehemiah had had a great success.

The wall was completed. Let me read again those verses 15 and 16 that we read
yesterday because they are in some ways the pinnacle of the book of Nehemiah. In
verse 15, "So the wall was completed on the 25th of Elul in 52 days when all our
enemies heard about this all the surrounding nations were afraid and they lost
their self-confidence because they realized that this work had been done with
the help of our God.

" I want you to notice some things in chapter 6 for 15 and 16 that we didn't
look at yesterday. First notice the date. How long it took?

52 days. A wall that had been in a rubble for over 70 years is rebuilt in two
months. That's what can happen when you start to rebuild.

That's the kind of miracle that God can work. You think it could never be done
because it's been in rubble for so long. That is simply not true.

The rubble is a lie. If all you look at is the rubble, all you're looking at is
the lie. But you can never rebuild out of the rubble.

You can only rebuild out of God's strength. They could only rebuild out of the
people that God had sent to rebuild. So you look at God instead and you see what
he can do.

So you notice the date. Also notice the result. The enemies who lost their
confidence.

This was a great personal victory for Nehemiah in this day. And then finally, I
want you to notice the reference. Chapter 6 verses 15 and 16.

There are 406 verses in the book of Nehemiah. 119 come before the wall is
completed and 285 come after these verses about the wall being completed. When
the wall is finished, Nehemiah is less than one-third of the way through the
project.

When the wall is finished, he's less than one-third of the way through the
project. He's got his greatest success, but he is not finished. He's got a lot
of work to do.

One of the key questions in life is what are you going to do when your greatest
successes come in life? The breaking of a habit. The restoring of a
relationship.

A fresh start in your relationship with the Lord. A new step of growth as a
believer. Your business finally gets started or gets over the hump.

A project you've been working on for months, for years. It's finally
successfully completed or started. A dream is fulfilled in your life.

What are you going to do when the success comes? You see, you can treat a
success in one of three ways. You can treat it like a trophy, a threat, or a
foundation.

You can treat it like a trophy, put it on the shelf, admire it in a trophy case,
and it dies. Nothing else ever happens out of that success. Or you can treat it
like a threat.

More of us do that than realize it. You can run from that success because you
realize that that success is going to bring some new responsibilities, new
opportunities into your life. You've been praying for years and years to have a
child, and finally God gives you the gift of a child in your life.

Any parent who doesn't admit that sometimes they want to run away from that
responsibility is not an honest parent because it's an overwhelming
responsibility to think, "I've got to raise this human being. " But we don't run
away from it. You don't treat it like a trophy.

No. You take that success that God has given and instead you use it as a
foundation. You build on it.

In one sense, your greatest success is not a pinnacle. It's a foundation. It's
not a pinnacle to stand back and enjoy.

It's a foundation to build on for the rest of your life. That's why God gives
you successes. They're the greatest stewardship of life in many ways.

Nehemiah teaches us to build on your success by organizing your success.
Nehemiah knew what to do when the task was completed. His life had not become
the building of the wall.

He was able to change gears and know what to do after the wall was built to use
the building of the wall. Sometimes in life we have these pinnacle, these
mountaintop experiences in meeting God or in beginning some new ministry or
having some great victory in our lives. And if you're not careful, you try to
live on the mountaintop.

You weren't built, you weren't designed to live on the mountaintop. Mountaintop
experiences can be refreshing. They can be energizing for life.

But you don't stop there. You learn how to live in the valley. You learn how to
organize the success.

Organizing the success is the key to sustaining the success that God gives in
your life. So how do you do that? How do you organize the success?

There's a lot of business books that are written about that. You can learn a lot
from them. But Nehemiah was a pretty good businessman in the way that he
organized the success that God gave him in the rebuilding of the wall.

He's got some things to teach us. We're going to look at him over the next few
days. Let's begin with the first one today.

First thing he does to organize the success that he has is in Nehemiah chapter
seven verse one. Very simple. He set the doors in place.

The first step is protection. If you're going to organize the success that God
gives, the first step is protection. Verse one in chapter seven, first part,
after the wall had been rebuilt, I had set the doors in place.

Now imagine, just for a minute, this wall without any doors. All the work they
had done would have been wasted. To build the wall and not set the doors in
place, enemies could have just as easily have gotten in.

Animals could have just as easily have gotten in at night. They needed doors.
Doors made the walls effective for keeping out and for letting in.

You organize your success by protecting your investment. That's what Nehemiah
was doing here. He was protecting his investment.

I want you to notice something. When it came to this protection of his
investment, Nehemiah took personal responsibility. I set the doors in place.

He didn't build all of the wall. The scripture tells us how he delegated that
all along, but here he sets the doors in place. He makes sure that that happens.

He knew how you could get to this point of, "Hey, we rebuilt the wall," and you
could go months or years without putting the doors in place. He made sure that
that final step happened. Oftentimes we get tired and we have this great
celebration of the victory and then we don't do the one final thing that will
secure the success.

It might be easier than all the rest of the project, but we don't do that one
last thing that could begin to secure the success. And so tomorrow we're going
to begin to look at what else Nehemiah teaches us about how to organize your
successes. But as we end today, I want to pray with you.

I ask you to pray with me that God would allow you to have wisdom about not only
how to gain a success in your life, but how to manage, how to organize that
success once you've gained it. Let's pray together. Our Father, we come to you
and we ask for your wisdom.

We know that our life is not just about having a success where everyone can look
at us and celebrate us and look at what she did, look at what he did. We know
that our life is about building for you, building people, building faith,
building love. And so Lord, those successes that you give into our lives,
whether it be a business success or a family success, a success in our growth, a
ministry success, those successes that you allow, that you give into our lives,
we pray right now that you help us to see them in a different way.

Not as a moment to look back on and enjoy, but as a foundation to build on for
the rest of our lives. You gave it and you gave it for a reason. And you want us
to build on it in a way that glorifies and honors you.

And Lord, I know it can feel wearying to think about how we're going to manage
that success, how we're going to build on it. But just as you gave us the
success and the midst of the opposition, you can give us the strength to build
on the success in a day-to-day way. You can give us the wisdom to do that.

We pray for that. And we pray as we look at this example of Nehemiah, that
through his example, we learn some things, we hear some things about how to
organize, how to manage the successes that you graciously give into our lives.
We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.