What are the reasons for decline of worship, of witness, of piety, of obedience to God? The first one that you see in this chapter is the neglect of biblical separation. We are a separate people. Not separate in every sense, because we are also a soul winning people, an evangelising people. We are tender-hearted people by the work of the Spirit of God, and we long for souls, and we have pity and sympathy for lost souls. We pray for them, and we send out the missionaries, and we visit the homes and gather in the children. But as far as our lifestyle, and culture, and worship is concerned, we are a separate people. We are separate from sin in our personal lives: we strive to put it to death. We are separate from false teaching in all its forms, that will bring down the gospel and deny the work of Christ. We are also separate in our churches from those that have swerved from the truth and abandoned it.
Another cause of the decline, of backsliding, is to be hospitable to nominalism. We know all about nominalism in Britain. We have had several waves of it in our history. We have had waves of awakening and great blessing that have gradually run down, and then another generation has arisen and there have been nominal believers, and the cycle has then repeated. Our most recent long period of nominalism was the end of the Victorian and the Edwardian period. In the 1920s and 1930s the majority of people in this country would still have described themselves as Christians. They actually believed in Christ, and there was still widespread belief in the doctrines of the faith, but many of those people wouldn't attend church anymore. Now we've passed that mantle over to the USA. In the USA there are millions of nominal believers who think they believe in the Bible as inspired, in Christ as having come and died on Calvary for sinners. The elements of the gospel are in their minds, and many of them may go to church, just once on Sunday. They will select the church that is the most pleasing to the flesh, which has the best programme and the best choirs and the best performances. The number of people who will attend in the evening service, if they even have one, is a tiny proportion of the people who would be there on Sunday morning. What is the quality of such a church? The people may have cleaned up their lives a little, by comparison with many worldlings, but they will be often living very affluent, comfortable, entertainment-rich lives, focused very much on family fun and recreations. It is nominalism. Decline accommodates that and doesn't challenge it. So you will get preachers who actually preach the truth, but they won't lay a finger on nominal Christians, because they are frightened they'd lose them and the revenues would drop.
A third reason for decline is that worship and instruction are decreased. Here in Nehemiah we see the closure of the temple for worship. That is what happens in a lot of churches. The sermons are shortened, the worship is lightened up, the gospel is not preached, and the Prayer Meeting and the Bible Study are combined. There is a reduction of worship and prayer and teaching.
Another problem was that the leaders were pretty hopeless, apart from Nehemiah and one or two others. They were not watching, looking out for troubles. We are a positive people usually. We are about the gospel and soul winning, and bringing people on the pathway to heaven, but you've got to defend the gospel also. We are in a warfare and we have got to be vigilant.
Beware also of the drying up of the word. The preaching can become concerned only with a few technicalities, turning it into history and geography and interesting facts, so that nominal people get out their notebooks and say, ‘I'm learning; I’ll write this down.’ You are not learning anything spiritually. There is no challenge, no message.
The loss of active service goes hand in hand with decline. Every church should try to be a working church, encouraging those who are free to be engaged for the Lord in some way.
Nehemiah particularly warns them that they have forgotten all the troubles they have been through, and this is a key reason for decline. They had forgotten Babylon and the captivity, so they were about to repeat the very sins that took them there. It is the same with us. One of the great causes of personal decline in our lives is that we have forgotten the old sins that used to drive us and rule us, which would take us all the way to hell. We have stopped being concerned about staying out of the old life. John Newton had a text on his wall which he saw from his desk every day, ‘You were a slave in the land of Egypt’.