50 Days of Prayer – Day 17
“When I heard this, I sat down and wept. In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven. Then I said, ‘O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps His covenant of unfailing love with those who love Him and obey His commands, listen to my prayer! Look down and see me praying night and day for Your people Israel. I confess that we have sinned against You. Yes, even my own family and I have sinned! We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, decrees, and regulations that You gave us through Your servant Moses. Please remember what You told your servant Moses: ‘If you are unfaithful to Me, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to Me and obey My commands and live by them, then even if you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for My name to be honored.’ ‘The people You rescued by Your great power and strong hand are Your servants. O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring You. Please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.’ In those days I was the king’s cup-bearer.” Nehemiah 1:5-11 (NLT)
Nehemiah is one of my favorite books in the Old Testament. I love the raw emotion and passion of this ordinary man that God used to do an extraordinary work. You get an idea of his character in the first chapter as you listen in on his first of twelve prayers recorded in this book. The one we’re reading today is the longest of them all. Most of his prayers are simple one sentence conversational prayers he throws up to heaven while busy at accomplishing what God called him to do. The book opens and closes with prayer. Nehemiah was a man of faith who depended wholly on God to help him. He unashamedly prayed for success in the task at hand. Nehemiah succeeded because he depended on God. Have you ever prayed for success? Nehemiah knew that to be successful he needed the favor of God. As cupbearer to a foreign King in a foreign land some 800 miles from Jerusalem, there was little he could do to bring change or help the people with the reconstruction of their destroyed city. It’s walls had been destroyed and the city was in ruins. He tells us about it in the first few verses: “… In late autumn, in the month of Kislev, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes’ reign, I was at the fortress of Susa. Hanani, one of my brothers, came to visit me with some other men who had just arrived from Judah. I asked them about the Jews who had returned there from captivity and about how things were going in Jerusalem. They said to me, ‘Things are not going well for those who returned to the province of Judah. They are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down, and the gates have been destroyed by fire.’” Nehemiah 1:1-3 (NLT)
The news was almost more than he could bear. Verse four tells us he sat down and wept, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven! As you read his prayer you can feel his emotion. It’s an amazingly powerful and practical model for how we should pray if we want to make an impact in our broken world today. He begins with praise to God as great and awesome, faithful to His promises. He humbly confesses the sins of the nation with admission of his own guilt. His prayer was dynamic because it was specific! General prayers get general answers. Specific prayers get specific answers! With his confession, Nehemiah claims the great promises of God given long before to Moses with the request for God to hear his prayer and help his people. “O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring You. Please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.’ In those days I was the king’s cup-bearer.”
What could a cup-bearer possibly do to help the situation in Jerusalem? He could pray! What could God do through Nehemiah? He could grant him success as Nehemiah aligned his heart with the heart of God. We need more Nehemiah’s today. Men and women who will humbly come before a holy God confessing their need for Him, for forgiveness in genuine repentance and unashamedly ask for success in their mission. Will you be that person? The Bible says in 2 Chronicles 16:9 (NKJV/NIV), “For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts are fully committed to Him.”