I thought of this story the other day and decided to share it again.

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Q: What captivated you about the book of Nehemiah?

The more I slowed down and looked at the text to see what was going on, the more excited I got about everything I had missed by skimming. Probably the first really exciting moment, the one that showed me that other people could get excited about Nehemiah, was in teaching about chapter 3 for a Bible study.

It’s a list of names. Like many other lists of names in the Bible. This one was a list of people working on the wall around Jerusalem. When friend filled in for me the first time I taught this book in 2012, he focused on the linguistic roots of the names. It was a great study, kind of a cultural analysis. The next time I taught it that year, I was looking at that list of names and I noticed it started and ended talking about the Sheep Gate. And suddenly I realized that this was a description of a circle, the geography of the walls of Jerusalem.

So I went into the conference room and adjusted the tables so that there were gaps everywhere there was a gate in Nehemiah 3. I made up little tentcards for people to write the names of the people who worked on the gates or who worked on the section of wall. When everyone showed up for class, I assigned a friend to get the wall built. He had people start writing the names on the cards that corresponded to where they were sitting.

It took some time. It felt a little like third-grade Sunday school for this group of adult men. But we suddenly realized that we could look around the room and see the walls of Jerusalem, and see ordinary guys like the ordinary people who did the work.

We spend a whole hour talking about this list that I had always skimmed. And I heard later that people were talking about it over lunch.

And I knew that I wanted to understand this book of Nehemiah better.
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A Great Work: A Conversation with Nehemiah for People (who want to be) Doing Great Works.