Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks.

Where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Tanya Wilmoth.

Have you ever felt like a spiritual or religious or moral failure? I use all of those words because I think we experience these things in different ways and at different times and different extremes.

It can be a Bible reading plan and intention to pray every day that only lasts so long and maybe it makes you feel like

God is disappointed in you. It can be a lapse in church. It can be a broken

relationship in your faith community that taunts you about going back to worship with your church

family. It can be a moral failure, maybe even a repeated one that makes you feel

unworthy of God's presence. A feeling of disconnect with God and a lack of desire to be with

God our experiences believers have all the time. In the language of our day, let's

normalize feeling out of sorts with God, while also completely not normalizing it.

Instead of letting it discourage us and tell us we aren't good enough, let's bring it into the truth of his word which tells us we do need a

rescuer time and again. The last chapter of Nehemiah is a narrative that

invites us to place our experiences with failure into a bigger story, where people fail time and

again, and God rescues time and again.

It's a story about our lack of faith and God's inexhaustible faithfulness. It's not a try-hard story, but a love story. Today, we're talking

about the last chapter in Nehemiah. And this is a book that started really with Ezra and a very special time for the Jewish people.

They had been living in exile for a long time, but they returned to the city of Jerusalem.

They were equipped with resources from the King of Persia

to rebuild the city walls and shore up the gates.

When the hard work was finished,

they had a worship service called a covenant renewal and they thanked God for bringing them back and

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