September 5: Nehemiah 5:1-8
 
Key Verse: Nehemiah 5:3
Others were saying, ‘We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our homes to get grain during the famine.’
 
Devotion:
Have you ever noticed when things start getting back to normal, you find more things to complain about? I’m not judging here to say the complaints were or were not justified, because they were legitimate complaints! But as things change in our lives, so does the focus of the things we seem to care most about. When things are bad we accept a lot of what comes into our lives as unavoidable to acceptable, but as things do improve, the acceptability line moves too!
 
Nehemiah could see what was happening and it was a class or social standing thing. The people who had thing were protecting what they had and even exploiting the people who did not have; because they were not able to do much about it! Jesus wants us to step back from our self-imposed social standings and step forward to help the people who are closest to us... not closest as in friends or relatives, but our neighbours!
 
The more we step away from social positions and standings the more we are able to see the real need of the people around us instead of our greed taking over and imposing greater restrictions on those same people. We do need to think more about our neighbours and more about how we can make our communities better places to live, not just for us but for everyone!
 
Nehemiah did not mince his words and he aimed what he said directly at the people who were responsible for the suffering of their neighbours. Unfortunately, social standing breeds social positions and the more people look at their social positions, the more they work against others who are not in the same social positions. It is a sad fact of life, but one which desperately needs to change!
 
Points to Ponder:
Do you stick to your social clicks?
 
Will you step back and reach out to someone from a different social position to you?