Then it says: but when Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the Ammonite the official, and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they laughed at us and despised us, and said what's this thing you're doing? Will you rebel against the king? Let's just stop there. The moment they tried to build something for God, the Bible tells us the enemies, the enemies of God, the enemies of His work - in your version if it's King James it will say this: They laughed us to scorn. They mocked and ridiculed. They belittled us. In other words they were shaming them. They were saying words to cause them to feel inadequate for the task that was ahead of them; who do you think you are? We think you're going to rebel. Who do you think you are? What do you think you're doing?
They were hurling abuse, and actually mocking and laughing at them, and that is the way that these demonic spirits of shame and fear and so on work together. They mock and ridicule and belittle, they belittle YOU. They try and make you feel small. They try and make you feel inadequate. They try and make the task seem too big, and your efforts absolutely insignificant. They actually use shame to disgrace you to giving up what you've started out to do. That's why it's a powerful weapon, and we have to learn how to defeat this enemy of shame, how to break it off our life, and be unashamed. Now look what Nehemiah did. And Nehemiah remember is a picture of the Holy Spirit. He said then I answered them and I said: the God of heaven Himself will prosper us. We are His servants. You notice how strong he is, in who we are. We serve a great God, and He will prosper us, and we are His servants! You, you've got no place here. Get out of here. [Applause]
Notice the strong, unashamed response to demonic attack, a strength coming out of relationship with God, a strength coming out of knowing who he was, and an absolutely intolerance for any shaming by anyone else. So as we take this journey out of shame to become unashamed, one of the things you have to develop in your life is a great confidence in this God we serve. He is a great God. He is an awesome God! He is a good God! He is a faithful God! He is a mighty God! Oh, and I'm one of His servants! See, you need to know who you are, need to know your value to God, and so we'll see that the journey out of shame involves changing how we see God, changing how we see ourselves, and changing how we relate to others, because most of the shaming that comes, comes through people. So there's partly the shame we have to deal with, the shame of our own sin, our own failure and the demons that come with all of that, but also there is a shaming that comes through people, and that's the other area I want to talk about.
I want you to be able to recognise it. Maybe you'll recognise one or two things here, and then we're going to look at the path out, and I want to break it down into some steps out of shame, just how you actually break the hold of this thing around your life, until you change the way you live your life. It will affect your relationships, because there's some things you're not going to stand for any more. There are some things you won't put up with any more, and it may be that some people that you've hung out with, who keep shaming you, you won't hang out with them any more. You've just got to make a decision - I'm going to be who God called me to be, I'm going to walk with the Lord, and I ain't taking shame from no one. You've got to get that sort of thing inside you, see? So let's have a look then.
I want to just list for you some ways that others shame us. When people shame us, when people deliberately by words, or their actions against us, cause us to feel damaged, or different, or something's wrong with us, initially you feel tremendous pain. I'm going to give you some examples of it, and you may identify with some of them, but what happens is we begin particularly when children are very young - children who are very young are very self-referenced. What they do is whatever's going on around them, they tend to think that I'm somehow the cause of it, so if mum's angry, somehow I'm the cause of it. They tend to blame themselves. Later on as they grow up others tend to shame them in different ways. I want to list for you now a few ways that people can be shamed.