This morning Mike Willis and I met for coffee at White Rock Coffee to just kind of chill and have some deep conversation, and we started talking about what we had read today in the One Year Bible in Nehemiah. The passage was Nehemiah 9:22-10:39. You should seriously stop reading this and go read the passage and then finish reading what I’m saying because what Nehemiah does is pretty sweet.

He talks about how God has remained faithful to the people of Israel even though they repeatedly turned their backs to Him and put other gods before Him. God’s faithfulness to His people absolutely shines in contrast to the way that we can be so unfaithful. Nehemiah outlines the people’s unfaithfulness and how God’s justice and righteousness is shown throughout their history.

So the coolest part comes in verse 9:38 when he says “In view of all this (the people’s unfaithfulness), we are making a binding agreement, putting it in writing, and our leaders, our Levites and our priests are affixing their seals to it.” Then, he lists all the names of the people who signed it. What makes that so awesome to me is that they committed to being intention about holding each other accountable to following God’s commands. They committed themselves to never give their sons or daughters in marriage to other peoples, keep the sabbath holy and set apart for the Lord, tithing, serving in the house of the Lord and sacrifices. I’m doing a terrible job of describing it so you should really just read it for yourself. It just shocked me how awesome it was that they were signing an agreement saying that they would hold each other accountable for these things. All of their names are listed in the Bible and they are there for us to read some thousands of years later. That is ridiculously awesome to me. They committed themselves to carry out the Lord’s work and follow His commands and we should really be doing the same with each other.

Reading that this morning really made me think about the way we keep each other accountable. It would be awesome if the men and women of Scollege would hold each other to the same standards that Nehemiah and the Israelites did back then of committing to follow the Lord’s will. We should really strive for those deep, intentional relationships so that we can spur each other on towards a deeper relationship with Christ as we serve Him together.

Word out. Ball like Nehemiah.