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Don't Grow Weary In Doing Good

Brian Messerli
03/30/25 - Praise and Preaching Service

Galatians 6:9-10 - One of the things I love most about God’s word is that it displays an intricate understanding of human psychology.  God understands our thoughts and feelings perfectly, and it can be surprising how well He knows us.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Paul said, “Don’t lose heart in your struggle against sin or don’t lose heart if people aren’t obeying the gospel.”  But here he says, “Don’t lose heart in doing good.”  Some translations read, “Don’t grow weary in doing good.”  So on the one hand, God calls us to do good works, in fact He says to do good right there in v. 10.  But at the same time, He acknowledges doing good can be exhausting and even discouraging at times!

And if we were to survey the Bible, we could piece together some of the reasons why we might grow weary in doing good.  For instance, maybe you feel all alone, like you’re the only one doing good and everyone else around you is distracted with other things or has a more nefarious agenda.  Maybe you’re being persecuted and people are calling you a “Goody-two shoes,” for doing good.  It could be that you’re doing good, but you can’t see immediate results, or you can’t see any of the results you hoped for, causing you to question whether the good you’re doing is doing any good at all!  Maybe when you do good, it’s thankless and goes unappreciated, and people take your good deeds for granted.

There’s a story from ancient Greek mythology about a king of Corinth named Sisyphus who angered the gods through his lies and deception, and was sentenced to eternal punishment.  His punishment was to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill, and every time he would almost reach the top, the boulder would roll back down the hill and he’d have to start all over again.  He was doomed to repeat this for all eternity with no hope of success.

Now that’s pretty depressing, but if you’ve ever grown weary in doing good, that’s how it can feel.  You do all this good to push the boulder up the hill, but then you don’t get the results you want and it rolls back down again and it can feel like you’re on this continuous loop of futility.  And when we’re feeling that way, we’ve got to come back to the truths in God’s word because just as surely as God understands our problems, He also understands the solutions to our problems, and so this morning if we’ve grown weary in doing good, I want us to look to Nehemiah, a Godly leader from the Old Testament, to help us keep doing good no matter the obstacles and to assure us, we’re not like Sisyphus at all.

Nehemiah 4:6, 10 [The year is 445 BC, and many of the Jews have returned home to Jerusalem after being set free from Babylonian captivity by the Persians.  They’ve rebuilt the temple, but after 140 years since its destruction, the wall of Jerusalem is still in ruins, so Nehemiah sets out to lead the Jews as their governor in an effort to rebuild the wall.  Without a wall, Jerusalem is just a village, not a legitimate city.  And this is GOD’S city, so it’s an abomination for the city wall of the One true God to be left in a heap of rubble.] - Wait a second, what happened here?  First the people had a mind to work and they were doing great on the wall!  But then all the sudden, they’re saying, “There’s no way we can go on!  We have no strength left and there’s still so much rubble there’s no way we’ll ever finish this project!”  They grew weary in doing good and they’re ready to throw in the towel.

Why?  It’s because they let their enemies discourage them.  There were people living in the land who didn’t like that the Jews were back home, and certainly didn’t like that they were rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls.

Nehemiah 4:1-3 - Think about the way Sanballat and Tobiah got in their head.  First, he calls them weak and feeble.  In other words, “This project is too much for you to handle!”  Second, he insults their God.  “Can they offer sacrifices to God as if He’ll actually help them complete this task?”  Third, he asks, “Can they finish in a day?”  In other words, “Even if you COULD build the wall, it would take you absolutely forever!"  But fourth, “You CAN’T do it!  It’s impossible to reverse this situation and revive these stones!  In fact, what’s left of this wall is so fragile, if a fox were to jump on it, the whole thing would crumble!”

Now, we’ve already seen that in v. 6, despite these taunts, they still had a mind to work, but now watch what happens…

Nehemiah 4:7-8 - Now they aren’t just being mocked, they have enemies from all sides, North, South, East, and West, conspiring to go to war with them and physically stop them from rebuilding.  So once you add fear onto their discouragement, it’s the perfect storm and they say in v. 10, “We can’t do this Nehemiah.”

Nehemiah 4:11 - But here’s the amazing thing.  The people grew weary in doing good and lost heart, but Nehemiah never did, and for the rest of the lesson I want to point out 5 ways Nehemiah shows us how to not grow weary in doing good.

1. Stay Connected to God

• All throughout this book, Nehemiah is constantly in prayer.  It started in chapter 1 when he first heard about the walls being in ruin.
  • Nehemiah 1:11 - Right up front, Nehemiah knows it’s impossible for him to be successful in taking on this good project without God’s help.  When he says, “before this man,” he’s talking about the King of Persia, because Nehemiah is his cupbearer and can’t go without his permission!  Think about how absurd his request is!  He’s a cupbearer, and he’s about to ask the king to leave his service and go be governor over his people to help rebuild their city!  The king could kill him just for asking something like that!
    • Nehemiah 2:4 - Nehemiah prayed to God again, this time in the moment right before asking the King to let him go because it’s incredibly risky just to ask!  And  God answers Nehemiah’s prayer, and when the king lets him go, listen to what he tells the enemies after they tell him they’ve got a problem with him building this wall.
    • Nehemiah 2:20 - And then after the Jews grew weary in doing good and were ready to quit out of fear and discouragement, notice what Nehemiah says to them!
      • Nehemiah 4:14 - Nehemiah shows us the way to not grow weary in doing good is to stay connected to God in prayer, because when we do that, it reminds us how great and awesome God is and that HE will give us the strength to keep going when we’re not feeling very great and awesome at all and we just feel like giving up!
      • Illustration:  When the last hurricane came through, I was so grateful to Larry Van Cleef for lending me his generator, and for Terry Petty who set up my garage outlet to handle it.  But the only problem with the generator was that it ran on gasoline and so it was limited in how long it would run.  Now Larry’s was great because it went a long time, like over 12 hours, but eventually the generator would grow weary and run out of gas, and sometimes at the most annoying times like 4 in the morning.  Well, I recently learned that though it’s much more expensive, you can buy generators that hook directly up to your natural gas line if have you one, which means I would never have to go out there and put gas in it again, it never runs out of fuel!
        • Sometimes the reason we grow in doing good is because we’re relying on our own fuel.  As human beings, we’re gasoline powered and we get tired and run down, but when we stay connected to God like Nehemiah did, it’s like we’re hooking ourselves up to the natural gas line and instead of trying to run on our own limited supply of goodness, we’re constantly being fueled by God’s unlimited supply of goodness.
          • Any good work we do is ultimately the goodness of Christ flowing out from us, and prayer connects us to the source of all goodness so that the well of goodness within us never runs dry!
        • John 7:38 - By this, He was speaking of the Holy Spirit, which is like a never ending well of goodness, out of which we bear fruit for Him.
        • John 15:4-5 - If we want to not grow weary in doing good, we have to stay connected to the Vine, to the source of all power, strength, and goodness so that He can continue to do good works through us!

2.   Remember We’re in this Together!

• Nehemiah 4:12-13, 15-20 - Instead of letting discouragement and fear win, Nehemiah had everyone team up and work together so no one felt alone.  And if anyone got overwhelmed or attacked, everyone else would rally to them and help.  Everyone had a role to play, everyone did their part contributing to the work in their own way.
  • If there’s ever a time when we feel like we’re the only ones doing good works and making sacrifices, remember there’s a church full of people here at PSD who are all doing good right along with you!  You’re never the only one doing good works and making sacrifices.  You may not be working on the same project with your brethren, but you ARE all serving the same Lord and reflecting His goodness in the world in your own unique way.
    • Some are taking care of aging parents, others are reaching out to shut ins, preparing meals, writing cards, making hospital visits, mailing bulletins to people who can’t be here, painting new lines in the parking lot, helping people in the community clean their apartments, working at the Christian sharing center, raising Godly kids in an ungodly world, making sacrifices for their spouses to build stronger marriages, inviting neighbors to come to worship here, working hard in their careers to provide for their families and shine the light of Christ in the workplace, and there are so many others doing good works here that none of us will ever see or know about.  So if you ever get to a place where you feel like the only one doing good, it’s just NOT true.  You’ve got brothers and sisters in the Lord fighting the battle for good right alongside you.
      • And if there’s a particular good work you’re doing that’s overwhelming to you and making you weary, it may actually BE too much for one person.  So grab another brother or sister in Christ, or maybe a whole team of them, and see if they’ll come rally around you like Nehemiah encouraged the Jews to do!
        • Galatians 6:2 - Usually we think of burdens as sins weighing us down, or as really bad situations in our life.  But actually doing good can be a burden we need each other’s help with too.  I cannot express to you all how grateful I am that I could send an email out and get two teams of brethren to help with the project we worked on this past Friday and Saturday.  There’s no way in a million years I could have handled that myself, I would have grown weary and felt like Sisyphus within 2 minutes.  The same thing would be true if Nehemiah tried to build the wall by himself!  That’s because some good works are simply too much to bear alone, and God never intended us to.  He gave us the church to know we’re all in this together!

3.  Remember There is No Greater Work than Doing God’s Work

• Nehemiah 6:3 - [Later, Sanballat and his crew try to trick Nehemiah into meeting them so they can ambush and kill him.  But Nehemiah refuses, and notice his reason.] - Nehemiah saw this work on God’s city wall as a GREAT work, well worthy of all his attention and care, and he says, “Look I can’t be distracted and take a break because this is just too important.”
  • Sometimes we grow weary in doing good because we question whether our good deeds really matter.  Especially if they’re just small acts and they aren’t grand gestures worthy of local news coverage.  But remember Jesus said this…
    • Matthew 10:42 - Here Jesus is talking about people welcoming His disciples, because if you show kindness to a disciple, you’re showing kindness to Jesus and are more likely to obey the gospel.  And here, the good work Jesus is praising isn’t very big at all.  It’s just a cup of cold water.  But to Jesus, this is considered a great work because it pleases and honors God.
    • Acts 10:38 - Now, some of Jesus’ good works WERE grand gestures.  He healed a blind man, something that had never been done before.  He saved His disciples from a storm by controlling the weather, and of course He sacrificed His life to save the entire world!  Those are good works that absolutely deserved local news coverage.  That’s front page material.  But other good works Jesus did were much smaller, like speaking with a Samaritan woman and offering her living water.  Or stopping to play with children, or washing people’s feet.  But no matter where Jesus’ good works were on the spectrum from small to big, it was all EXTREMELY important work because it was His Father’s work!  It was His purpose in life to do good.  And Nehemiah had the same attitude that working on that wall was a GREAT work, NOT because of the publicity or grandeur of the project, but because it was God’s work and Nehemiah’s purpose in life.  And the same is true for us!
      • Ephesians 2:10 - When we’re feeling weary of doing good, we need to remind ourselves this is what we were created for and it’s what Jesus died on the cross so we could be RE-created for, so that our lives would be filled with GREAT works just like His, no matter how big or small.

4.  God Appreciates your Good Deeds, Even if No One Else Does

• Nehemiah did something interesting.  Even though he was governor and had the right to tax the people to pay for his food, he knew they were in rough shape financially, and so for 12 years he refused to take the governor’s food allowance.
  • Nehemiah 5:18 - Now, as far as we know, none of the people ever thanked Nehemiah for this.  They may not have even known it was the policy under the Persian empire.  So Nehemiah may have been making this sacrifice for them and the people had no idea.  Yet listen to what He says…
    • Nehemiah 5:19 - Here he is again, praying to God.  And he asks God to remember him for this.  Nehemiah did this for God, not to get praise for himself.
    • Nehemiah 5:15 - He wasn’t doing this so people would come up and pat him on the back and tell him he’s the best governor ever and how they could never thank him enough.  No, all he cared about was that God appreciated and remembered this good deed.
      • Matthew 6:2-4 - It can be hard when our good deeds go unnoticed and unappreciated.  It’s even worse when we feel like people take us for granted and take advantage of our kindness.  But Jesus and Nehemiah remind us that’s not why we’re doing good.  We’re not doing good to be noticed and appreciated by people.  We’re doing good to be noticed and appreciated by God, not in the sense that we’re trying to earn Heaven with our goodness, but just that we’re trying to please our Heavenly Father.  So the good news is, if we hand a cup of cold water to someone and they scowl and say, “What took you so long?” Or “This isn’t cold enough, where’s the ice?”  God isn’t scowling and criticizing us, He’s smiling because His child is reflecting His image in the world.

5.  We May Not See Results Now, but We’ll See them Later in this Life and/or the Next

• Nehemiah 6:15-16 - Their enemies were right, this wall could NOT be finished in a day.  It took 52 days, almost two months.  If they were looking for immediate results they would have continued to grow weary in doing good, but they kept going, trusting God that one day they’d finish and have something to show for the good they had done.  And gratefully, they were blessed by God to see the results of their good labor in this life.
  • But did you know when Nehemiah said to God, “Remember me for good,” he actually says that on 4 separate occasions in the book?  In fact, that’s the last line of the book!  By it, I don’t think Nehemiah meant, “Make sure everything goes well for me in this life God.”  I think he was asking God, “No matter what happens in this life, remember me in eternity.”  It’s a request to see the eternal results of his good works.
    • In fact, at the end of this book, the people had become very evil.  They weren’t paying tithes, the priesthood was corrupt, they weren’t keeping the Sabbath day, and they intermarried with pagans!  And while Nehemiah did more good works and helped them make good changes in their behavior, I’m not sure how confident he was in the long term results of his good work in this life.  Because the people could just go right back to their old ways once he was gone.  That’s what Israel had always done throughout their history, so Nehemiah would have to be pretty naive to think the good work he did would last.  In fact, praying, “Remember me Oh God” is something you pray when you aren’t sure anyone else in life is going to remember you.  He may have pushed the boulder up the hill in his generation, but he knows the chances are, the boulder’s probably coming right back down in the next.  So rather than worrying about the long-term results in this life, he’s concerned about God remembering him for these things in the next life.
    • Galatians 6:7-8 [This brings us back full circle to where we started] - I love how Paul uses gardening imagery, because gardening takes time, and when we sow seeds of goodness from the Spirit of God, it’s rare to reap that harvest right away.  But…
      • Galatians 6:9 - Paul says we WILL reap the harvest of our good deeds in due time, either in this life, or we’ll reap eternal life in the end and God will remember us just like He remembered Nehemiah!
        • We may be doing good works, but not seeing the results or even expecting the results to last.  We may be doing good to help our kids be more disciplined, but we don’t feel like we’re making much progress.  Or we may be trying to help our friend come to the Lord, but no matter how many times we’ve talked to them or how many good deeds we’ve done for them, they still aren’t budging.  We may have even helped someone become a Christian, then they went right back into the world and it seems like the good we did was like Sisyphus and was totally useless in the end.
          • God says in due time, we WILL reap if we do not grow weary.  It helps me here to think about Jesus, who died all alone.  His disciples with whom He spent the previous 3 years fled from Him.  John didn’t, but he still didn’t really understand what was happening.  Jesus was the son of God who went around doing good for 3 years, yet there weren’t thousands of disciples wanting to follow Him in the end while He hung on that cross.  He couldn’t see many visible results of the good He did in this life at all.  But in due time, He reaped the harvest of the good he sowed, and in the resurrection, God remembered Him and now thousands of followers came flooding to Jesus, and thousands became tens of thousands, and over the centuries tens of thousands became millions, and millions became hundreds of millions, to the point where even now in 2025, we’re here worshipping Him for the good that He did for us 2,000 years before.  He did NOT see immediate results in this life, but He DID see eternal results in the next.

There are two ways to look at the story of Sisyphus.  One way is to see it as a representation of the futility of life, and how it does feel sometimes like despite our best efforts, we’re not really making any difference.  And while it absolutely CAN feel that way, another way to look at it is an inspiring example of a man who never quits trying.  The boulder makes him weary, but he never loses heart.  He keeps going back down that hill to push it back up once again.

If we’ll be like Nehemiah and Paul and Jesus, we can have a Siphysus-like grit and determination to keep doing good, even when it makes us weary.  And the good news is, because Christ didn’t grow weary and lose heart in doing good, we’re not like trapped like Sisyphus at all.  We’re not trapped in an endless cycle of futility, because in Christ we actually CAN push that boulder to the top of the mountain without it rolling back down because GOD and our brethren are pushing it with us and because of Christ’s resurrection, there actually IS a top to the mountain.  We can get that boulder over the final ledge, and when we get there to the top at the end of our lives, we’ll find our Heavenly Father waiting for us there, who is SO pleased that we never lost heart and gave up on Him, because He never lost heart or gave up on us.

Invitation:  That’s the good news of the gospel!  That Jesus did not grow weary or lose heart in the good work of saving our souls.  As He carried the cross beam up the hill to the crucifixion site, He could have said, “The strength of the burden bearers has failed, and I cannot go on.”  Instead, He relied on Simon of Cyrene to help Him bear the burden, and He continued up the hill to the top and hung there for 6 hours so He could save our souls.