Talk—Craig Hayhoe
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All right.
What's our heads? And ask the Lord for his help.
Our God and our loving Father.
Thank you for this day that we've had together, to have fellowship together and to spend time over Thy word of God. We thank thee for it. We thank thee most of all for work on the cross. We thank Thee for redemption.
We thank thee for all here that are saved. No, Lord, we trust each one is saved.
But now, Lord, for the journey of life, we all need practical help. We ask you that if we opened our work for a few minutes.
That that would speak to us from it.
Give us something that would be a blessing in our lives and notice the individual struggles that we all have.
We face a mighty foe, oh Lord.
And we ask you that that would help us to learn a few things today that we can apply to our lives. We thank this for so much. We've already taken in.
Just a little bit more, Lord, we pray that we could feed on.
In the coming week ahead and further out than that, that would be a blessing in our Christian lives, we committed to the United event.
All right. Not going to talk very long. I know you guys got skating ahead of you and you want to get out and play hockey and that sort of thing. So I want to talk very short here tonight. I want to talk about a subject that's a little bit odd in Sunday school at home. We've been doing the 12 or 1210 gates of the city of Jerusalem. There's actually 12 and we've been taking up the 10 gates.
In the book of Nehemiah, Nehemiah chapter 3, there are 10 gates mentioned and I want to talk about one of those particular gates.
And that gate is the dung gate.
That down gates.
Anybody want to tell me what do you think the dung gate was for in the city of Israel? Anybody want to go on a limb and tell me what that gate might have been used for?
Deportation, yes.
Done. That's a nasty subject, isn't it? #2, maybe, we might call it, but you know what else went out of that gate? And it's rubbish.
And garbage. And dung. Excrement. Manure. Gross. Osity. Disgusting stuff.
But you know what? The city.
At Jerusalem had to have that particular gate, the double gate.
Why do you think they had to have that gate? Why do you think it had to be rebuilt with all the other nice gates like the water gates?
The fountain gates.
The nice skates, the sheep gate, The fish gate.
I'll tell you why I need to be rebuilt, because.
You don't want to live around dung. It's gross. It stinks. It smells.
It breeds flies, rats. It's disgusting.
And so in the city of Jerusalem, they needed to rebuild that game. I'm just going to read where it says that in Nehemiah chapter 3.
It says.
Verse 13. The Valley Gate repair Hannon and the inhabitants of Zenoa. They built it and set up the doors thereof. The locks are of and the bars thereof, and 1000 cubits on the wall unto the Dung Gate.
But the dung gate repaired Melchizedek, the son of Rekha.
The ruler of part of Beth Sharon.
He built it and set up the bar, the doors thereof, and the locks are of.
And the bars that are all.
Dung gate.
This fella here, he built it and repaired it. You know, if you go, when you go through all the gates here in this Nehemiah Chapter 3, you'll find that the gates in the walls, there are all kinds of people helping rebuild those gates and walls.
But when it comes to the dung gate, it only mentions one person rebuilding that wall that that individual gate.
00:05:03
Wonder why that is? And it mentions him as a ruler too.
Wonder why only one person rebuilding it?
You know, in our own lives.
It's only we are ourselves that can get rid of.
That garbage and waste in their own lives. Our parents can't do it for us.
Our brothers and sisters can't do it for us.
People in the meeting can't do it for us.
Got to do it ourselves. People can help us build other aspects of our life.
But if you and I want to clean up our life.
We need to do it ourselves.
You know, if you go around these gates in the city of Jerusalem, it starts with the sheep gate.
I'm not going to go through them all.
But just before the dunk gate we just read is the Valley gates.
And the Valley Gate would remind us.
Of loneliness, difficult times, yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
Hard times.
Things that that so we get into that low times, perhaps the Lord puts us in, in times of our life where things are tough.
Or things are going not the way we want it to.
You know, in order to get through that valley after the valley gate, they had to go to the dung gate.
You know, there are times in all of our lives and to be very honest with you, with one another, that we need to use the Dome gate in our life.
We need to get rid of the excrement, the disgusting, smelly, stinky sin that is in our life and get it out of the city.
If you and your house.
Don't have a toilet?
Or you don't have a place to take your garbage out, or your septic system is broken down, or your sewer system isn't working. What's going to happen to your house?
It's going to stink and it's going to smell.
How many of your friends I want to go over to your house? Not very many.
We want to live there very long.
You won't want to live there very long.
And nobody want to come over, nobody want to be with you.
Because of rotten.
It's bad. It's no good.
And it breeds problems to disease and becomes contagious.
Relieve sin in our life and don't judge it. That's what happens to.
Becomes contagious. It stinks. It defiles others. It smells.
The Dome gate is not something that we like to think about.
Like to talk about? Perhaps?
But we all need to use it in our life. We all need to get rid of things.
That we know shouldn't be there. Things we think about.
Things we say.
Things that are there that nobody knows about.
We need to flush it out of our life.
You can flush it out of our life. You know what I'm talking about, you guys all know.
There's stuff that shouldn't, shouldn't be there.
And we need to use the done gig to get it out.
You know there's a verse that I'm going to read in Philippians chapter 3.
What game is 3?
I got the placement before I turn this up. Philippians 3.
And.
Verse 8.
It says I count Paul saying this. I count all things, all things. All things.
But loss.
What he likes to lose, do you?
Especially in sports, Paul says. I count all things but loss.
For the Excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus.
00:10:03
For whom I have suffered the loss of.
All things there's a word loss.
Of all things.
And you count them but dung.
That I may win Christ.