A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the last verse of Nehemiah, and today we will be continuing that theme by jumping back to the beginning of the book to consider some important lessons about the nature of prayer. The opening verses of the book of Nehemiah tell us the story of a man receiving dire news of his brethren suffering distress.
Nehemiah 1:1-4 (ESV) “The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the citadel, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, ‘The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.’ As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.”
Nehemiah is one of the Jews living in captivity in the empire of Persia, far from the city of Jerusalem, which some Jews returned to at the decree of king Cyrus generations before. Hearing this report that the city is in ruins, Nehemiah is struck with compassion and grief over the treatment of his people in Judah, and he turns to what every faithful person should turn to in their hour of great need: prayer. In the rest of the chapter, we get to read exactly what it was that Nehemiah prayed before God.
Nehemiah 1:5-11 (ESV) “And I said, ‘O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father’s house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses. Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples, but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen, to make my name dwell there.’ They are your servants and your people, whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand. O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name, and give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.’”
There are many things I like about Nehemiah’s prayer, but there are four ideas in particular that I think are valuable lessons for us to apply to our own prayers today.
First, we see that Nehemiah glorifies God. He does this by quoting from Deuteronomy 7:9, recalling God’s faithfulness and love to those who keep his commandments. This may have been a passage that Nehemiah and the people of his time dwelled on often, since we see him use it again when renewing the covenant in Nehemiah 9:32. Daniel also, not many years before, used the same passage to begin his own fervent prayer in Daniel 9. It makes sense that this part of Scripture would stand out to them, since Nehemiah and Daniel lived in a time where the memory of God’s covenant being passed down in the Law of Moses seemed far in the past. This reminder of God’s faithfulness would be a great encouragement to them, and so both of them use it in their prayers to glorify God.
I think that this is a part of prayer that we sometimes find ourselves neglecting. Looking throughout Scripture, we see that many people spent a great deal of their time in prayer not only thanking God for what he has done and asking for God to bless them, but also praising and honoring God for his divine attributes. Today, we are often eager to get straight to our thanksgiving for God’s blessings or to our list of requests for help. There is nothing wrong with either of those things, of course, but there is also an important part of prayer in not just thanking God, but in magnifying and glorifying his name. These are the reasons that we are coming to God in prayer in the first place, because we know he is the one who can truly solve the problems that we are facing, and I think many of us–myself included–could stand to include more of this in our own prayers.
Second, we see that Nehemiah confesses his sin. In fact, Nehemiah confesses for a great deal of sin, and not just that which he has done himself. Nehemiah is confessing all the sins that Israel has done since it left Egypt, many hundreds of years before. He lays this sin out very plainly before God, admitting that there is little reason for God to remember Israel based solely on their own actions. Even though Nehemiah is far removed from these things by time or by distance, he takes these shortcomings of his people as a personal failure before God.
How often do we take this kind of personal responsibility for the holiness of our own local church? When your congregation, or somebody in your congregation, does something offensive to God, do you bring that to God in prayer, confessing that sin as if it were your own? I would suggest that if you can easily shrug off these things, you may be lacking in the kind of relationship that we are supposed to be cultivating with one another. Nehemiah is demonstrating for us a love for his brethren, a love that extends to the point that he is even willing to share in confessing for sins that he himself was not there for.
Third, we see that Nehemiah recalls God’s promises. This is the turning point in this prayer. Even though Israel has been unfaithful and broken the laws that God gave them, Nehemiah knows enough of God’s words that he remembers God’s promise to help them if they turned back to God. He knows that God is fully capable of doing all these things, and he knows that God does not make these promises lightly, and so he calls on God to remember this promise now, in the hour of his need.
Nehemiah’s prayer is filled with a strong knowledge of God’s word, but here is where I see it being the most important. When we bow before God in prayer, we need to know what it is that God has told us he will do. James berates foolish Christians in James 4 for asking God for things wrongly, calling them wicked and adulterous people. When we ask God for help in our trials, we are asking for God to fulfill the promises that he has made to us, just as Nehemiah asked God to fulfill the promises made to him. Our prayers should not just be a wish list of what we think is best, but instead be based in the promises we know God has already made to us.
Lastly, we see that Nehemiah asks for success in obeying God’s word. Nehemiah does not simply stop at asking God to restore his people and end their suffering. Nehemiah intends to do something about this himself, and he concludes his prayer and fasting by entreating God to give him success as he seeks to follow God’s commandments. In the next chapter, he will go before the king and risk his own life and wellbeing to ask for permission to rescue his people from their distress, setting in motion all the events recorded in the book.
This is the hardest part of prayer for us to accomplish, because it is the part that does not end when we say “Amen”. God expects us to be active in following his commandments. We cannot expect God to listen to us when we want him to do all the work while we wait for the blessings. When we ask God to fix a problem in our lives, we need to be ready to take actions and make sacrifices that demonstrate our trust that he will do so. If we are asking God to make a change in the world around us, we need to be ready to be the ones that God is going to work through.
Conclusion
In James 5, we find a statement urging us to consider the incredible power of prayer.
James 5:16 (NKJV) “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.”
In the next verse, James uses the example of Elijah, who prayed for it not to rain in Israel for three years. We could just as easily swap Nehemiah into that example, or any number of other fervent prayers that we see all throughout the Bible. These men and women brought their fervent and righteous petitions before God, and God rewarded them. If we follow their examples and bring our prayers to God in the same way, we can know that God will also hear and answer us.
