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Series Core
This series explores God’s quiet, deliberate work of rebuilding what has been damaged, lost, or abandoned.
Not everything God restores returns in its original form.
Some things are rebuilt stronger.
Some things are rebuilt truer.
Some things are rebuilt smaller, but more honest.
Restoration in Scripture is rarely sudden.
It requires consent.
Presence.
And the willingness to stand among ruins without rushing past them.
This is not a series about fixing life.
It is about partnering with God as He rebuilds it.
Session One: The Ruins of Yesterday
Based on Nehemiah 2:17
I. Seeing What Lies Broken
Restoration begins with seeing.
Not imagining what could be.
Not spiritualizing what was lost.
But naming what stands broken in plain sight.
Nehemiah does not minimize the damage.
He does not soften the language.
He points to the ruins and calls them what they are.
“You see the trouble we are in. Jerusalem lies in ruins.” (Nehemiah 2:17)
Before rebuilding begins, truth must be acknowledged.
Many want restoration without ruins.
They want resurrection language without Good Friday honesty.
But God never asks us to rebuild what we refuse to look at.
Dallas Willard reminds us,
“Reality is what you run into when you are wrong.”
Ruins are reality.
They tell the truth about what was unsustainable.
What was overextended.
What depended on endurance rather than grace.
II. The Courage to Stand Among the Ruins
Standing among ruins is uncomfortable.
It removes the fantasy that things might somehow repair themselves if we wait long enough.
They will not.
Nehemiah does not rush the people past the damage.
He invites them to stand inside it together.
“You see the trouble we are in.”
Restoration is not a solo project.
But it does require personal honesty.
Henri Nouwen wrote,
“The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”
Restoration requires desert knowledge.
It requires familiarity with loss.
It requires leaders and hearts willing to say, “This is where we are.”
III. When Denial Delays Healing
Nehemiah’s clarity exposes something important.
Naming ruins is not failure.
Refusing to name them is.
When collapse is disguised as growth, repair is postponed.
Brennan Manning once said,
“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle.”
In restoration terms, denial delays healing.
When we pretend the walls are intact, we never rebuild them.
When we minimize damage to avoid grief, we postpone repentance and repair.
IV. Ruins as a Place of Reorientation
Ruins have a strange gift.
They remove the option of pretending.
They force familiarity with limits.
They confront us with truth we can no longer outsource.
Thomas Merton observed,
“The truth is that we are not very good at knowing ourselves, and this is why we are often strangers to one another.”
Ruins reduce that distance.
They make us known to ourselves.
They invite humility.
They open the possibility of rebuilding on something truer than before.
V. The Invitation to Begin Again
Nehemiah does not end with despair.
He does not say, “Look how bad this is.”
He says,
“Come, let us rebuild.” (Nehemiah 2:17)
Restoration is not optimism.
It is consent.
Consent to begin again.
Consent to work slowly.
Consent to let God rebuild differently than before.
Practicing the Ruins of Yesterday This Week
❀ Stand before what is broken without rushing to repair it.
Let honesty be enough for now.
❀ Name the loss plainly.
Resist the urge to spiritualize pain too quickly.
❀ Release false responsibility.
Acknowledge what you could not sustain or save.
❀ Invite God into the rebuilding process.
Trust that restoration begins with truth, not speed.
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