Tucked away in the often overlooked pages of Nehemiah, we find the stories of heroic people whose sacrificial service never made it to the headlines. Their names are unknown to most of us and even hard to pronounce, but

their tireless efforts to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem put them in a special

category of silent heroes. Today on Insight for Living Chuck Wendall continues our

study called Hand Me Another Brick.

If you missed our earlier programs,

we'll begin with helpful highlights.

Chuck titled this message, The Willing Unknowns. Nehemiah wasn't there to win the applause of the people. He was there to do a work for God, so he put up a wall.

The gates were finished.

The locks were put on the gate.

And there were no people.

Why weren't there? Well, a couple of reasons. First of all, the city had had no wall for 160 years. If my calculations are correct, they were 70 years in captivity, 90 more years

before Nehemiah came on the scene. So for over 150 years, a century and a half,

it was nothing but a pile of rubble, and if you lived in it, you were the open prey to all the enemy.

A city without walls would be like today a house without lock and keys. And so the enemy

would plunder the city if you settle there. And so what did people do? They had all settled in the wall,

the beautiful secure homes of the suburbs and nobody was living in urban life.

Another reason is because if you moved into the city you had a lot of rubble to clear out.

And frankly, it's a lot easier to build a home on a plain piece of land

than to push and pull out all the stones of yesterday, the stumps and the charred remains of a destruction

of years ago.

Well, the question in my mind today and in yours is how did they get people into the city?

That bothered the Chamber of Commerce of Nehemiah's Day also and so they made some plans.

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