Prayer and Work
In this episode
Scripture References
Works
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
We are in Nehemiah today talking about I feel like the discipline that none of us feels like we engage in adequately – that is prayer. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who is like, “I really think I pray enough.”
As an elder when we ask, “How’s your prayer and Bible reading?” it’s always, “Could be better,” and it’s said with bleak pale expressions. It’s hard to know if this is everybody’s “could be better” or is this really “it could be a whole lot better,” so it’s hard to know sometimes. They beat us there so it’s kind of rude to push and say, “Well, how much better could it be?” just to get back to the normal that we all fail at. This is hard. Prayer is hard, and yet it is very important. That’s why we’re going to talk about it, and we’re going to talk about it using Nehemiah.
For people who do not know Nehemiah, it falls chronologically after Ezra, and I would argue after Esther as well, because we’re going to see a queen on the throne and the only queen we care about is Esther. She’s the only one who fits into biblical theology remotely and, if it does fall after Ezra, that explains in part the opening, and it goes kind of like this.
By the way, I’m going to recommend cataract surgery right up front, because I can read without my glasses.
It is. I just have to do like they do in TV shows and movies, just move the Bible in and out until I find the sweet spot.
And it came to pass in the month Chisleu, in the twentieth year, as I was in Shushan the palace, that Hanani, one of my brethren, came, he and certain men of Judah; and I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem.
3And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire.
If this is what happened when Nebuchadnezzar took the city, this would hardly count as news and Nehemiah’s reaction would probably be like, “So nothing’s changed, is what you’re telling me,” but he’s terribly upset by this, as we’re about to see, which suggests that this is the result of the war mentioned barely at the end of Esther, when Haman’s plot allowed the Jews’ enemies to legally attack them for a day. This seems to be where they were attacking Jews all over the empire, without a great deal of success.
They also apparently tried to take out Jerusalem, and so word has reached him that things are not going great there. The walls and the gates have been burned, so whatever success had been made since the return had been pushed back again, and Nehemiah is greatly grieved over this.
And it came to pass when I heard these words that I sat down and wept and mourned certain days, and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.
There’s a bunch in there we probably should talk about for a second. First of all, he sits down. That’s not the normal posture for prayer, which is to say that there is no required posture for prayer. Why did he sit down? Because he just got bad news. “Ma’am, you need to sit down right now.” I was just thinking about this for some reason last night. Why do we tell people to sit down? I think I was probably reading an Agatha Christie mystery. “Ma’am, you should sit down to hear this.” “No, I want to stand…” Why do we want to stand when someone tells us… Anyway, he plops down and he weeps and he prays.
He doesn’t get on his knees. He’ll do that on other occasions, but right now he’s just overwhelmed by this really, really bad news, and it doesn’t just strike him then. He sits down and weeps and mourns certain days, that is for quite a while. And he moves it from simply an emotional reaction into religious practice. He fasts. That is, he goes without food and probably certain forms of drink and such for a while.
We’re not told how long. We don’t know how long it takes him to form his plans and such, but he doesn’t just sit there in an emotional mess. He turns his emotional energy into something structured by God’s regulations for worship. Fasting is a biblical thing, common in the Old Testament. Jesus assumes we’ll do it in the New Testament. We have records of Paul doing it, so he’s doing this and he prays before the God of heaven.
“God of heaven” is the Persian name for God. He doesn’t say, “The Lord God of Israel,” although that would be fine, and he evokes covenant language in a bit, but in talking to the world sometimes we use their language.
The word God nowhere appears in either the Hebrew or the Greek text of scripture. You’ve got Elohim and you’ve got theos. You don’t have God. That was an Anglo-Saxon addition, the actual word. There are people who are upset because Jehovah isn’t exactly the right transliteration of the tetragrammaton for YHWH. You know what? When our Lord was on earth, no one ever called him Jesus. They called him Yeshua or something like that.
I think the only important time to know about why it’s Jehovah vs YHWH is when you’re talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses. You can tell them Jehovah is not in the Bible.
Yes, so there is time to adapt to the language of the culture if you can do so without betraying the faith, betraying the Lord himself. It’s one thing to call Jeshua Jesus. It’s another thing to call him Elvis. There are things that don’t work there. He prayed before the God of heaven. Also note the “I” throughout.
We’re going to find out that this is also his prayer journal. There are numerous times throughout where he stops and records his prayers, so there’s something else. Writing down our prayers in advance or after we’ve prayed them or so that we can go on praying the same prayer is a biblical thing. It’s okay. Let me go a little further and this will come back to us, I think.
Now he combines YHWH, Elohim of whatever their word for heaven might have been…
…the great and terrible God, that keepeth covenant and mercy [lovingkindness, covenant mercies] for them that love him and observe his commandments.
Now, he could have said those who trust in him, and that of course would be perfectly true, but he’s focusing in on this connection between God fulfilling his covenant promises and the obedience he works in us.
Tangent – this is something I’ve been dealing with in another context, so I want to kind of throw this out there for a moment. We all believe in justification by faith alone. I’ve been willing to die on that hill any number of times, and got shot at a few times for even being on that hill. Having said that, faith, saving faith, through faith does do things. It works. It repents. It seeks God. It loves.
Faith that works by love, Paul says. It’s not just, “Yeah, I believe that. Now, what’s next?” No, it is a lifechanging thing. The Bible calls it the fear of the Lord. The catechism – Heidelberg in this case – speaks of it as a certain knowledge and a hearty trust.
So we’re not adding things to that, but we’re saying when that conviction that this is real, this is true, Jesus is God, Jesus is my Savior, and I am trusting him, then trust looks like stuff. I trust a chair when I sit down in it. I trust someone writing me a check when I take it and say thank-you. Trust means I’m committing myself to someone in certain actions, repentance among them.
Here he’s drawing out this thing. If God has worked obedience in us, then that’s real faith, and God honors real faith.
I think Jordan Peterson’s onto something when he talks about believing in God being something that you act in terms of, not that he has articulated necessarily a biblical definition of faith, but when someone asks him, “So, do you believe in God?” he says, “Well, I act as though I believe in God,” meaning there are actions associated with this intellectual assent. If we can’t say at least that, I think we’re in trouble.
If our faith is not as great as Jordan Peterson’s, then there are problems there.
A few decades back we had the so-called Lordship controversy. “Isn’t it enough just to say you believe in Jesus, to trust him, but that doesn’t mean you really have to do anything, does it? I mean that would be adding more…”
A number of people wrote on it – Ken Gentry, John MacArthur Jr, two books in fact – but it comes back every now and then because we’re always tempted to go off-base left or right with regard to the truth, to fall on one side or the other.
Someone could take this one verse and run with it and say, “See? God honors people who keep his commandments, so if I want to be blessed I have to keep his commandments.” There’s a sense in which that’s true, but it’s a very narrow sense.
The analogy I’ve used over the years is, “If I want to give my daughter a bicycle, I will first of all be sure that she’s tall enough to sit on it, and I will be sure that she’s careful enough not to ride immediately out into the road and get herself killed. When she grows up in these areas, I will give her the bicycle.” Has she earned it? No. I’m waiting to bless her with this, but sometimes things have to happen before the blessing is going to do what the blessing is aimed at doing.
God does not normally bless us with children until we’re married. There are exceptions – there’s adoption and such – but normally for most people in most times if you want the blessing of children, then go get a spouse. “But that’s requiring me to do something. Can’t I just trust God?” How about, “Can’t I just trust God for the spouse then, and just wait until he shows up?”
You do at some point have to walk down an aisle and say, “I do.” That’s an action you have to take, and there are some other actions that lead up to that ability.
You might even have to walk across the room and say, “Hi, my name is Mary. What’s yours?”
That’s actually a lot harder. Or walk up to your pastor and say, “Is there anyone you can introduce me to?” That’s really hard. Is God being stingy and holding back blessings? Are we having to work for those blessings? No. He wants to bless us. He’s promised to bless us. And when we’ve done all these things we have not earned his blessing.
In this case, many young ladies have walked across the way, spoken to Bob and said, “Hi, I’m Mary,” and have walked down the aisle and gotten married, and then the children don’t come and they worry. “Have we failed God? Have I disobeyed God someplace? Is he not going to bless us? Have we not done enough to earn his blessing?” I can guarantee you that’s not the issue. There may be something going on that God’s cooking up, but it’s not because you didn’t do enough to earn this blessing.
In some ways this was a minor point, but it’s a touchy spot for me right now so I thought I would talk about it.
He’s saying in effect, “I’m one of those, Lord. I’m trusting you. I’m keeping covenant with you. I love you. I’ve been serving your commandments. Let thine ear now be attentive.”
…and thine eyes open, that thou mayest hear the prayer of thy servant, which I pray before thee now, day and night…
Day and night – apparently he’s praying the same prayer, and he’s praying it at least twice a day, which means he has a written prayer that he’s praying. A good part of the Christian family is uncomfortable with that. There are people who will not even pray the Lord’s Prayer because, “It’s repetitive. I didn’t write it, therefore it could not possibly be from the heart and could not be part of true gospel religion.”
Those are serious warnings we need to take to heart, those of us who have on occasion used a prayer book or used the Lord’s Prayer even. There is a danger in simply mouthing words without thinking about them, and yet the Bible is full of examples of people who said/prayed from the heart set prayers, prayers that they had written.
In this case he seems to be using more or less the same prayer day and night for some time, for a few months, in fact, so it’s all right. The question is do you mean it? Are you paying attention?
Sometimes when I’m giving this lecture or one like it to my class, I’ll look over to one side and see usually some girl, because girls actually have pens and pencils, and guys may or may not, and I’ll say, “May I have a pencil, please?” and I’ll keep on talking and she’ll suddenly get flustered and find a pencil. I’ll take it from her and turn to the class and say, “Did I have to say anything special to get this pencil?”
“Did I put it specially? Oh, dear student, will you look upon my need now….?”
“Exactly, and I got it because she knew I meant it. She knew I meant it, she had one, she gave me one. It worked just fine. And if you want to go to the bathroom, you don’t have to come up with new words every single time. Just kind of pointing in that direction probably will do it, usually.”
And we ran out real fast. So the idea that our words have to be new and fresh every single time is not in itself biblical. Sometimes they’re going to be, like if you’re about to fall off a building and you yell, “Lord, save me!” like Peter when he’s about to fall in the water. That’s great. We’re going to see one of those prayers shortly.
But saying the same prayer over and over is fine, as long as you mean it and you’re thinking about it. It doesn’t have to be fancied up, although he may have fancied it up. We’re not told. We’re just told that he himself says, “I’m praying this prayer day and night.”
…which I pray before thee now, day and night, for the children of Israel thy servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against thee: both I and my father's house have sinned. We have dealt very corruptly against thee, and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandedst thy servant Moses.
Wait, he had just listed himself among those who love God and keep his commandments, and now he says, “But you know what? I haven’t. My fathers haven’t. Your people haven’t.” He’s making it personal. “I and my father’s house have sinned. We have dealt corruptly.”
This is not the role that sometimes the prophets get cast in of, “Israel is corrupt. I’m doing what you told me to, but they’re corrupt.” No, he’s taking this on himself too, and presumably he means it. So we have again the certain tension of, “I am among those who love and keep your commandments, and yet that has not stopped me from being someone who breaks your commandments and who needs your mercy.”
In fact, he had spoken upfront of God’s covenant mercies. The word that’s rendered mercy I assume is chesed. It usually is and it means this kind of covenant love that defers or turns away or ignores proper punishment to make way for grace and to provide good things for God’s people. So part of keeping God’s commandments is confessing our sins.
We’re not keeping God’s commandments if we say that we have no sin. We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar. Part of keeping God’s commandments is to turn to God and say, “I have in fact sinned,” and sometimes turning to other people and saying, “I have sinned against you.” This is part of covenant life. He goes on…
Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations: But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there.
He’s appealing to scripture. In fact, he’s praying scripture back at God, and this is always a good move, to tell God, “This is what you’ve said.”
I’ve been doing this with the Lord a lot lately concerning this promise to Abraham, all nations blessed and all that. I’m getting old and I’m looking at our world and saying compared to 2,000 years ago the world is pretty blessed, but things are not going well. “God, where is your promise? You said this, you mean this, you’re going to do something. Could you speed it up a little? Can I please see some of this move a little further before I die?” I’ve got maybe 10-20 years, depending on God’s timing or whatever.
Then there’s the whole Romans 11 thing about the salvation of Israel. I’m not sure I know what God means there, but I keep saying, “God, you know what you mean here. Whatever this is, do this, because I don’t want to fail in my prayers because I don’t understand.” I did that for a long time. I just kind of put that on a back shelf because I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant exegetically and eschatologically. Now I don’t care.
“God, you made a promise of some sort here, and it means something, so would you please do this?” and I believe God honors this. I don’t know if he honors my attitude or not, but he honors his word, most certainly.
He’s quoting from Deuteronomy, and remember he’s already mentioned Moses, so he’s rooting what he’s doing not only in the Davidic covenant, but more so in the Mosaic covenant. God back in Deuteronomy 28 had said, “If you sin, I will scatter you among the nations. If you repent, I will call you back.” That sounds like a really applicable passage.
One of the things about this passage is that Nehemiah is not, strictly speaking, a prophet. He’s not hearing God’s word in his head or in any kind of audible voice, so he’s doing good Bible study. “This is what your word says. It seems totally applicable to this situation, so I’m going to pray it back to you and claim it for this situation,” and yet he’s not dictating to God. He says, “I think this is what you want and I’m going to pray this.”
O Lord, I beseech thee, let now thine ear be attentive to the prayer of thy servant, and to the prayer of thy servants, who desire to fear thy name…
“We are trying to obey you and we want to obey you more, and we want you to hear us.” If it was as simple as name it and claim it, he’s already done that. But he goes beyond that. “We want to get this right. We want to fear you. We want to honor you. We want to do what you want, so please make up the gap here.”
We know that Paul says that when our words fail, the Holy Spirit intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered. He also I think tweaks the prayer. “What they’re saying is this. What they mean, what they want, what they would be deliriously satisfied with is this, so let’s do this.”
…and prosper, I pray thee, thy servant this day, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.
And of course everyone reading this for the first time says, “What man? Who? What? Where did this guy come from? Who is this guy?”
Right at the end, sneaking it in there before the section break. And although the chapter breaks are something we invented, there is a real section break here because next is…
We’ve gone from Chisleu to Nisan, and I forget the exact number but I think that’s four months difference, and it’s important for what follows. He has been sad and he has been weeping and he has been fasting and he has been praying, but the shock of the news wore off a long time ago.
It says that as he prays and considers the ramifications that the tears renew themselves, so this is not him walking in having just heard this. I know growing up I just kind of assumed that, because I wasn’t reading the text, I was just hearing people tell me what was going on. Four months is significant. In four months you can get over being sad, if you want to. The sadness here that we’re about to see is calculated.
And it came to pass in the month Nisan [the first month of the year, Passover month], in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king, that wine was before him: and I took up the wine and gave it unto the king.
He tasted it to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, so he has a high security position. He’s trusted. He’s known. It’s not been uncommon in the ancient and even the medieval world for kings to hire outside their people for security agents. The Swiss Guard, for instance, were in demand everywhere. Vikings were used all over the place because all they cared about is who pays them. They’re not interested in promoting this family’s interest or that clan’s interest. Just pay them well and they’re going to be absolutely loyal to you.
So the Persian emperor has a Jewish cupbearer, figuring “He’s as committed to me as to anybody.”
I took up the wine and gave it unto the king. Now I had not been beforetime sad in his presence.
It was considered such a privilege and joy to be in the presence of the king, who was one step from the gods, that anybody who came there should be elated, excited, smiling, beaming with joy and pleasure in the privilege, although Nehemiah probably didn’t take it that strongly as such. We come before our Lord, the God of heaven, on a regular basis and we often come sad, but he had been careful to play the game. He said, “I had not been sad before in his presence,” which means at this point he goes in deliberately looking sad. He’s playing the odds. He’s trusting God.
“Wait, are you talking chance or are you talking providence?” Yes. This is the time to remind ourselves again, sort of like Esther but perhaps less so, that he has not heard a divine prophecy. He has not heard a voice in his head or out of the sky.
Right. He does not know that he’s the one who’s been chosen to do this, in a sense any more than Esther did. Esther could have been beheaded for entering into the throne room of Ahasuerus, and in my ordering of the chronology this is the same king, so he has a little bit of background. The man is not totally unreasonable. He does regard friendship and loyalties and such. Still, is this a good day? Is this the right time?
Notice, the queen is there. That’s part of his plan here, which again suggests who the queen has to be. As far as the text goes, she doesn’t say anything, and yet we’re told she’s there. It’s unusual for the queen even to be there, but Nehemiah deliberately chose a day when she would be there, so he is doing everything he can to provide a framework in which God may work, and yet he’s got to realize that this may not be it. Maybe he has come to the throne room for a time such as this, and maybe he’s got it all wrong. Or maybe God will use this some other way and it may cost him his life for that way to work its way out.
He does not know, but he does know that as far as human reckoning is concerned, he’s got the best chance. He’s got the ear of the king, and the queen, if it is Esther, apparently has not done anything or maybe has not heard the news, so it’s him. There’s no one else. There’s no other one representing Israel who has as good a shot at this, and he’s thought it out and he’s planned it out. We’re going to see that more clearly as we go.
He's been praying and he says “thy servants.” He’s got other people praying with him. “Oh, if one person prays isn’t that enough?” Well, yes and no. God encourages us to pray as a body and to pray for one another. “Well, if you get more prayers does it work better?” It’s not that.
The more people praying at the same time, the more prayer-y it is. That’s what I’m getting.
I guess we do have to stop and consider this. Why is it that God sometimes responds to the prayer of one and sometimes waits to respond to prayers of the whole church over time? Honestly, I’ve never taught on this before but I think I have an idea, but do you have any suggestions first?
The support that we give to one another when we ask for prayers and when we say, “Yes, I will pray for you” and then pray for that person is a way that God ministers to the body through one another. That’s the first thing that comes to my mind.
We’re all members of a body, and if the head is doing one thing and the body another, it doesn’t work very well.
Exactly. But if you bring in more people essentially and say, “Look, this is something…” and not only that but it’s a way for all of you to rejoice in the goodness of God together.
Because Christ prays for us. I forget which Puritan says it, but he says, “If I could hear Christ praying in the room next to me, I would not fear 1,000 enemies, and yet distance makes no difference and he prays for me.”
Exactly. Your answers were more or less what I was going to say. It’s an opportunity for God to spread the blessing around as we all together learn to support one another in our weaknesses, in our needs, in our fears, and then to rejoice in our successes and our blessings.
God could certainly respond to the prayer of one, and often does, but sometimes he wants to hear a lot of people so that there is this sense of unity, so it is the body praying. As you say, we are imitating our Lord, so thank you. You said what I was going to say, and more beyond that.
Wherefore the king said unto me, Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? This is nothing else but sorrow of heart.
This is exactly what Nehemiah wanted him to notice, and he did, and Nehemiah’s response is,
Because he could hear the tone. The emperor is just seconds away from whistling for the executioner, because this is a capital offense. It is a slap in the face to the emperor not to rejoice in his presence. The emperor has looked at him long enough to say, “This is not sickness. This is something else.”
He would cut him slack for sickness. He likes Nehemiah, apparently, but deliberately being sad? If you couldn’t come in here because your dog just died or, worse, your wife, then you should have sent a note and got an excuse. You should not be here. This is something that is potentially very rude and insulting.
This reminds me of – and maybe this is tangential – but the way that tolerance today doesn’t mean tolerating someone, it means affirming that person’s choices and identity no matter what, with 100% vocal support. “Silence is violence.” It’s not enough to simply accept that a person exists. It’s putting oneself in the role of this emperor. It’s entering into that mindset of, “Excuse me, I am the sun and moon and stars.”
But he does ask. He doesn’t just throw him to the lions or whatever. He actually asks him, so Nehemiah replies.
It’s an honest prayer request, and it’s one that only Christians can make, speaking of resurrection life.
Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire?
Again, this suggests that this is news. This is something recent, because it was seven years ago or more at this point. That would not be justification. He would have been sad every single day, so he has obviously gotten some new report, new information. At our school we would say, “So he’s making an appeal. What is your new information?”
Yeah. Again, this king shows us that although he can at times be naïve, he’s not an idiot and he’s able to read the situation. If this is Darius the Great, then he’s a general with lots of skill and practice, tactics, strategy, all of that. And whoever he is, he’s running an empire. Normally he can pick up on things.
At this point he’s probably saying, “Oh, so you deliberately took a chance here. That was gutsy. And you deliberately offended me. Okay, kudos for that one, I think. So that means you’ve got something really specific.”
If this is the same king, we can think back to his response to Esther. “Okay, Esther, enough is enough. What do you want? Tell me this time.”
“There’s something going on and I don’t know it, and I’m the emperor and think I ought to know it, so what you got? What’s this all about? Lay it out for me,” and Nehemiah said –
He didn’t have time to thumb through a prayer book. At my previous school there was a gentleman who filled in for one of our literature classes. He was a pastor of a church that uses a prayer book, let us say, and he began every session of class with a prayer from the prayer book for that day, which is fine and good and all, but I think there were times when the students would have appreciated a prayer for their grades and for the test they were about to take, but it seems that was the only way he knew how to pray. Maybe I’m misreading the situation, but that’s kind of the impression the kids got, anyway.
But there are times when you don’t have time for that, and running through respective prayers in the book you may not find one that exactly fits this situation. Prayers when velociraptors are poking their nose through the electric fence – there’s something equivalent, I’m sure, but it might take you awhile to process it. He’s got seconds.
By the same token though he does not get down on his knees and raise his hands to heaven, “Oh Lord God, as I kneel here before this man who has great authority, and I know that you love him and you love his people, you have great plans for him – would you please…”
He doesn’t do any of that nonsense, because it would be nonsense right now. He probably doesn’t say anything out loud. If he does, it’s under his breath. Probably it’s just in his heart and his mind. He prays and it’s probably something simple like, “Lord, help me,” which is always a good prayer.
I learned a long time ago that anytime someone comes to me and says, “Mr. Uttinger, I have a question for you,” you know that tone. It’s not a question of fried eggs or scrambled. It’s something bigger, and my first response for years now has been to pray to the God of heaven, to immediately say, “Lord, give me wisdom here.” When I don’t, and the few times I forget, it’s not always great.
And I said unto the king, If it please the king, and if thy servant hath found favour in thy sight, that thou wouldest send me unto Judah, unto the city of my fathers' sepulchres, that I may build it.
For how long shall thy journey be? and when wilt thou return? So it pleased the king to send me; and I set him a time.
In other words, during those last four months he had been planning. He’d learned enough of how bureaucracy works that he had registered for all the appropriate firmans, they would be called in the Middle East today, permits we would call them, vouchers, all the paperwork, all the task maps, all the agendas. Everything is filled out, filed, and ready to go. He’s got a schedule. He’s got it all down.
You can contrast this with Ezra, who really didn’t have much of anything planned. There’s one point in particular we’re going to see where Nehemiah has already learned from Ezra’s mistakes.
Moreover, I said unto the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river, that they may convey me over till I come into Judah.
So he’s planning on how to get there and asking for Imperial support along the way.
And a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king's forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace which appertained to the house, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me.
Then I came to the governors beyond the river and gave them the king's letters. Now the king had sent captains of the army and horsemen with me.
Ezra hadn’t asked for military support, and as they got together and were about to leave he said, “Uh-oh,” and he was afraid to go back because he had already told the king, “You know, God protects his people when they’re doing his will.”
“Oh okay, I guess you don’t need those soldiers. Never mind,” which is not the time to explain the intricacies of human responsibility and divine sovereignty to someone who doesn’t even know your God yet, so had just continued to pray and ask God for protection, and God graciously granted it.
But Nehemiah, having learned from that, decides, “No, we’re asking for a military guard and we’re asking to be able to check in at every place along the way where there’s an Imperial presence, and for letters to make sure they support our mission.”
He’s got everything nailed down. He’s that kind of guy. He’s the kind of guy that you want when you’re undertaking some big enterprise and you’re just kicking it off. I’ve known one or two people like that. They may not be good at everything, but when it comes to getting things going, I don’t want their job but they’re great at it, and Nehemiah was great. Nehemiah though was also great at the long run of it, sustaining the mission, as we’re going to see.
Which is a reflection of his constancy in prayer, I think. There are so many challenges to prayer that boil down to not following through over a long period of time. When at the end of a Bible study someone says, “Any prayer requests?” I personally find it really hard to think of things that are things that I would come back the following week or whatever and have them ask me, “So how is this going?” and it’s like, “Well, I don’t really have an update. This is a long-term thing.”
It's kind of discouraging sometimes to ask for that kind of prayer when you don’t really expect an update, and how much more is it hard to continue myself in those prayers for those things, because I don’t have somebody asking me every single day, “Hey, any prayer requests?”
And there’s the other side, and you mentioned this earlier. People say, “Please pray for me about this,” and we say, “Sure!” and then we don’t. That’s someplace else where I have learned to immediately, at least in my heart and mind, pray at least right then so I’ll have done it at least once. The odds of me remembering if I don’t write it down are not good. I have people I have prayed for for 40 years, but sometimes I can’t remember something that someone asked me about yesterday. Until they become a habit it can be very hard.
We’ve seen that this is Nehemiah’s prayer journal, and it is not amiss to write down prayer requests and to keep track of them. We did that with our kids when they were really little. We didn’t follow through for too long afterward, but at least we started and we kept at it long enough to begin to check off some of the answers, and I think it was an encouragement to them. It was to me, I know.
With this whole prayer thing, we start out by talking about how hard it is to be faithful, and we’ve seen that Nehemiah did two things. First, he had a set prayer time morning and evening, so twice a day. The psalmist speaks of three times a day. It’s nice to pair it perhaps with meals.
And on my bed. There are all kinds of times you can pray, but Nehemiah had it down to a schedule of morning and evening, and yet when the Emperor said, “What do you want?” Nehemiah didn’t think, “Well, I’m glad I prayed this morning. Don’t have to worry about that right now.” No, he jumped right in and he prayed, yet again spontaneous prayer without a prayer book, wow.
Yeah, and God heard all of those prayers. He heard the prayers of everyone praying, he heard Nehemiah’s prayer at the moment.
As an elder visiting people, this is something we hear. In fact, one of the last young families we visited said the normal, “We’re not very good at this. I manage to pray in the morning and to pray in the evening, and most of the rest of my prayers are through the day whenever I need God’s help, which is like a lot.”
It’s sort of like saying, “I wish my gymnastics were better. I only got a 9.9.”
Yeah, I’d be happy with that. I have a prayer schedule but it’s sometimes a little rough to follow through, but I do. When the girls were younger and not gone all the time we always prayed after supper, so we had a set time for prayer requests and Bible reading.
Kate and I have tried to pray before we go to bed and, like everyone else, we do okay. I need to be better at leading that. But throughout the day? That one is easy for me. I talk to the Lord a lot during the day. Sometimes it’s complaining. Sometimes it’s “help!” There needs to be more thankfulness, honestly. There’s thankfulness for some things.
Something that I learned from our Headmaster is to pray for safety, and then to thank God for safety. This is another one of those things like, “Well, you know, safety – it just is.” No, it just isn’t. There are enough weird things in this world that I have learned to be very thankful when God brings everyone home safely. I’m usually the last one to go to bed at night, and part of it is just wanting to make sure that, as my mom would say, all the chickens are home.
That’s definitely something that is a feature of our morning prayers, at least when I pray, to say, “Lord, please grant us safety as we go to and fro today,” because I’m keenly aware, living in a state that has snowy and icy winters, that there’s danger on the roads.
And we live in California, so there you go. There are all kinds of things that can go wrong.
Let us bring this down then to what we see, such a beautiful picture in Nehemiah, the prayer and the work. He does all of the preliminary work, trusting that this is probably what God has in mind, but not knowing for sure. There’s no divine revelation. There’s simply the general promises and commandments of scripture.
Again, this is the big thing about the restoration era. God’s people are learning to walk by faith, and faith means reading the Bible, believing what it says, and then acting on it, which is where we kind of started all of this. So he realizes, “I’m in a unique position. I could be the pivot here, but God hasn’t said so – no voices, no handwriting on the wall. Is it important enough to risk my life? Yes, it is,” so on we go. He does all the work, praying all the time, and getting other people to pray with him.
I think I said upfront that there are two sorts of Christians I think who have a problem with this. The hyper-Calvinist, let us call him, for lack of a better word, says, “Well, you know, prayer doesn’t change anything. It’s just a way of meditating on God and his goodness, because what’s been ordained is ordained and it will happen.”
This is not Calvinism remotely, and it’s certainly not biblical faith. God ordains the means as well as the ends. Nobody applies that to, “So I won’t go to work today because God has promised to feed me. I’m sure a roasted chicken will come flying into my mouth any minute now.”
We know in other areas that if we want B we have to do A. If we want C we need to do A and B.
Exactly. Then the person on the inside has to get up, be willing to open the door, and come and let us in and not shoot us.
Somehow the theology does not get in our way in everything else, but when it comes to asking God for things that we can’t do in our strength – maybe we can begin the process or become a link in the chain, but we can’t do it – we just kind of think, “Well, you know, if God wants it done it’s going to happen. If God wants to save people, he’ll save them. I don’t really need to talk to them. I’ll pray for my co-workers and then it’s kind of in God’s hands. I mean sure, I could walk over to them and say, ‘Hey, you want to hear about Jesus?’ and they would laugh at me and that would be that, but that’s not necessary. If they’re God’s elect, Jesus died for them, they’re going to be saved.”
It’s so interesting how so many things suddenly are not consistently held to when it comes to God.
This is so. Yes, we need at some point to do the systematics and dot all the i’s and cross the t’s, but sometimes it’s just a question of reading the Bible a lot. When you hang out with people like Nehemiah and Ezra, who prayed and God answers, then you kind of learn to do that.
One reason for not just turning to catechism or the confession and saying, “Well look, this is what it says,” is we want to see God’s servants at work as God sees them. God picked out these men as examples, particularly Nehemiah, and shows us what a godly man prays for. He’s not full of himself. He’s not cocksure. He does not know where this is going. He is taking a huge risk, but he’s operating off the information he has.
“I could make a difference – not only I could hypothetically, but I am the best person to make a difference, given what I know, which knowledge may be imperfect and incomplete. So it is incumbent upon me to make the request, even though it means risking my life, because it’s that important.”
Notice all the if’s and the qualifications I just threw in there. There’s a lot of balancing here. What if he was not the king’s cupbearer? What if he was the trash man? Would it have been such a good idea? What if his wife was pregnant with twins? Would this maybe be the time to risk his life? I don’t know. What if he was only the second cupbearer?
All of these what if’s we have to balance. That’s the responsibility of, yes, asking God to open ways and to make things plain and give us opportunities, but it still requires some thinking and some planning and some weighing of options, and then work. He filled out all the forms. He was ready.
When the king says, “How long are you going to be gone?” he has a timetable. He knows exactly who he needs permits for. He basically just needs to spin them around and say, “Please sign this,” even though he wasn’t sure any of it would work. This is great faith.
The Heidelberg catechism says this about the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer and I’d just like to read them. In looking at two of the petitions it says this. This is what these petitions mean:
Grant that we and all men may renounce our own will, and without murmuring obey Thy will, which is only good; that so every one may attend to and perform the duties of his station and calling as willingly and faithfully as the angels do in heaven.
That’s “Thy will be done.” And then this for “Give us this day our daily bread”:
Be pleased to provide us with all things necessary for the body, that we may thereby acknowledge Thee to be the only fountain of all good, and that neither our care nor industry nor even Thy gifts can profit us without Thy blessing; and therefore that we may withdraw our trust from all creatures and place it alone in Thee.
So we ask God for a good will and then we ask him to bless our performance of that will. We want to know what God wants, and then as we do it we ask him to bless it. “But wait! God knows everything!” and here’s the line from Narnia that we mentioned before – “Sometimes he likes to be asked” – because God is not a slot machine.
God is not, “Insert prayer, pull handle, get blessing.” God is a person. He wants us to talk to him. He wants fellowship with his people. He wants us to know our own dependence, not simply in a meditative sense of, “Wow, I’m really a needy creature. I’m coming to understand that,” but in the personal communion, prayer, and conversation with him, as we ourselves in talking to him come to the realization and confession to him, “I am so needy and you have everything.”
So prayer and work – no conflict, no confusion. We just like to make excuses, I think.
Purple vegetables. I’m sure if you’ve been in the market for carrots you’ve gone to any grocery store and found a 5-lb bag of carrots for like $5.
Sure, but I’m just pulling it out of my head. I’m pretty sure that’s vaguely in the ballpark. You probably don’t go through 5 pounds of carrots all that often, but it’s the best price because you buy in bulk and save, right?
I’m going to say do not buy in bulk and save, because if you go to Trader Joe’s you can get the 2-pound bag of carrots and they’re all different colors, and it is so much more fun. You get your money’s worth in fun with these carrots. Same with the rainbow potatoes. Everything you make with these vegetables that have the purple in them is like 300% more fun and you’re more excited to eat it, and they’re vegetables so they’re still healthy, so you’re having fun eating vegetables. Does it get better than that? I don’t think so.
I will second that as well, because last year when we were getting some stuff from the farmer’s market in town, for multiple weeks we got – I don’t think they were officially legally-speaking ube, purple sweet potatoes, but they were sweet potatoes that were purple, and then also multicolored carrots. We made curry with both of them and it was just perfect and so much fun and just aesthetically pleasing in the bowl. It just worked.
For my recommendation, I am 99% certain that I’ve recommended this before, just because it’s me and it’s this group of people who know each other, but we’re watching through it again right now, my wife and I, so I’m going to recommend Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Oh yeah, solid! Maybe we should talk about how we as Christians can recommend something so steeped in pagan mysticism.
We’re out of time, so I’m going to keep mine short. I have two recommendations. One is going back and reading Agatha Christie mysteries that you haven’t read in 20 years, because you probably have forgotten the solution. I mean, there are a couple that you’re not going to forget because they’re so special.
I picked up two Miss Marple mysteries, and one I’m pretty sure I didn’t remember very well, and the other one I thought, “Oh, I know this one,” but I don’t remember it at all. I remember seeing a TV version of it, but not enough to know what’s going on, and I’m reading it with more experience, having read all her other books. It’s like, “Oh, this is making a whole lot more sense,” and the murder just happened.
The other thing I recommend is all of you people out there sending us recommendations like today, because we’re trying to put together an episode based on recommendations from listeners and we want yours. We told our friends at Bible study last night and there was a little bit of confusion. “What kind of recommendations? Yours?”
No, tell us your favorite recommendations that we’ve given you. [laughing]
I wasn’t going to go that way with it, but if there’s something that you liked and would like to elaborate on it, that’s fine. You will have noticed that our interests are rather narrow. You’ve got gardening and books and old movies…
Pretty much, so feel free. Let us know, but soon, so we can make this more than just us filling time with the two or three recommendations we have already. Thank you very much.
This is also sort of the finishing up of this podcast. We’re in Nehemiah, which is close to approaching the 400 silent years which close out the Old Testament, and that’s going to be the end of Halting Toward Zion. We can all say “aww.” We’ll keep you posted. We’ve got other things in the hopper, as it were.
If you’ve been listening to us or are listening right now as a one-off, that’s fine too. You’re still a listener and we would like to bring you into the process and enjoy the community of listeners that we are privileged to share.
Speaking of you, listeners, thank you so much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sending us your recommendations. We appreciate it.
Thank you for your financial support, if you are one of our financial supporters. Thank you so much. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion or become a Patron at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
A big thank you to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our transcriptionist. If you would like to receive the transcripts of our episodes in your email box, you can sign up to our Substack, which is currently the only way to get our transcripts.
I think that’s all of our endnotes and Gretchen is waving goodnight, so I’ll say goodnight, friends.