So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days.
- Nehemiah 6:15

Fifty-two days. That’s all it took to rebuild the wall. The people had lived with a broken-down wall for years and it took less than two months to fix it. Those two months were filled with hard work, to be sure. But they would have flown by.

God can do tremendous things when a community decides to work together. When people commit themselves to God, to his work, and to each other, remarkable things happen. Perhaps you’ve seen this in your own life and experience.

If we were going to draw it into something like a formula, it might look like this: Committed Community + Generous God = Remarkable Results.

A Committed Community still needs a Generous God to achieve truly Remarkable Results. Apart from God’s intervention, communities begin to fracture under the strain of significant work. Resources might run short. To quote Aragorn son of Arathorn: “A day may come when the courage of men fails.” That’s why we need a Generous God.

But if we pay attention we’ll notice that a Generous God almost always prefers to work through a Committed Community. It’s not that he can’t produce Remarkable Results on his own; he’s the Lord and he spun the cosmos into motion without anyone’s help. And yet time and time again we find him pulling together communities and teaching them to love him and each other and, through these communities, bringing remarkable blessings into the world.

Fifty-two days is the blink of an eye in global history. We spent more than twice that trying to get permits for our space in Pittsboro and almost twice that looking for a piece of land to build a building on in North Chatham. Fifty-two days is barely enough time to train for a 5k. And yet Nehemiah and his community rebuilt the gates and walls of Jerusalem in this short time.

What Remarkable Results do you think our Generous God might produce through our Committed Community in the years ahead? Take some time today to dream about what God could do through our church. Talk to him about those dreams and invite him to speak to you.