Prayer is the Work

Nehemiah 1:1–11 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. 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.” Now I was cupbearer to the king.

Introduction: Anyone here like to put jigsaw puzzles together? My grandmother loved working jigsaw puzzles. I can remember many days going over to her house and finding a 1000 piece puzzle on the kitchen table that she would work on for hours. Sometimes I would try to help but I didn't have as much patience as she did.

When you put a puzzle together, where do you normally start? You start with the border. You search and search until you find every piece of that border and then you assemble the border so you can have a reference point for assembling all the other pieces.

The border is the easiest part of the puzzle and it gives us parameters for the rest of the picture. Vision is like a jigsaw puzzle. First you must find each piece and carefully bring it together with all the others to form the boundary, which is the vision. Then, with work and commitment, the whole picture will eventually come together, framed by the borders of the vision.

Today, we are looking at the story of Nehemiah, the cupbearer for the Persian King Artaxerxes. David Guzik wrote: “Any great work of God begins with God doing a great work in somebody.”

That was the case with Nehemiah, this visionary leader that led his people to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile.

There is much we can learn from his story that applies to the church today - in particular when it comes to discovering and implementing God’s vision for His church. Any church that is in a time of transition really needs to invest time in discovering the fresh vision that God has for it as they move toward a new beginning.

Let’s get some background here before we jump into the passage that will help us understand better what is happening here.

The Book of Nehemiah and Ezra are closely related. In fact, they are one book in the Hebrew version of the OT. The book of Nehemiah is considered part 2 of the book Ezra.

When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, the deported nearly every person there leaving Jerusalem as a ghost town. When the Jews departed from Jerusalem, many of them settled down in Babylon and built new homes and lives for themselves. Many still worshipped the God of their Fathers but had no desire to return to the land.

After 70 years of Exile, some Jews returned to Jerusalem under the leadership of Zerubabel and Ezra and worked to rebuild the temple. Even then, out of the 2-3 million Jews in Exile, about 50k returned to the land or about 2%. But this small contingent laid a spiritual foundation for the nation to return to the land.

The book of Nehemiah starts about 15 years after the book of Ezra ends or about 100 years after the first exiles left Babylon to repatriate Jerusalem. After all this time, the walls of Jerusalem lay in ruins which left the city vulnerable to enemy attacks. This brings us up to where our story begins.

A Providential Request (vv. 1-2)

Even though Nehemiah held an important position in the Persian government as the Cupbearer to the King, he still had a burden for his homeland. So when his brother Hanani and some other men returned to the palace, He was anxious to hear news from home.

This desire to know about Jerusalem was more than just patriotism. I believe that God had placed the burden upon Nehemiah’s heart to prepare Him for the task of leading the people to rebuild the walls. His body was in Persia, but his heart was in Jerusalem.

I say this question that nehemiah asked was providential for several reasons.

Nehemiah had demonstrated leadership capabilities as shown by the fact that he was the Cupbearer to the King. The cupbearer did more than taste the King’s wine and food before giving it to the king. The cupbearer was a trusted person who had the ear of the king and would often be consulted whenever the king had a hard decision to make - he was like a sounding board. Nehemiah was a man upon whom the favor of the king rested.

Nehemiah was a man of deep prayer. You will see in a few moments that the bad news he heard fro Jerusalem would immediately drive him to his knees to seek the Lord.

Nehemiah was a man of resources. He knew how to get things done. When the King asked him about his sadness in chapter two, he was open about the burden of his heart. And when the king offered to help, Nehemiah didn’t hesitate to utilize the King’s resources to accomplish the vision.

Nehemiah was a vision-caster. He knew how to communicate the vision that he received from God, first to the King, then to the key leaders in Jerusalem.

God knew the heart of this man and had placed him in a position that he could work through him when the time came.

Are you a person that God can work through to cast and carry out the vision he has for your church? God is looking for such people to meet the need of the hour.

Nehemiah was the kind of person who saw God working through him to correct a problem that had been around for 150 years or so. Nehemiah was going to be used of God to do something that had been attempted before but failed.

In all honesty friends, I believe that the future of your church is up for consideration this morning. Will you be a person that God uses to ensure that this church has a future? Or, at the very least, will you not be a hinderance to what God wants to do with your church? And by the way, you are to seek God’s vision, not your vision.

A Pathetic Report (vv. 3-4)

The Men from Jerusalem shared the bad news with Nehemiah. Jerusalem was in trouble. Notice how they described it...

The people there were considered mere survivors. When you are a survivor, you are not a thriver. You are barely hanging on - clinging to life. You are in survival mode, just hoping and praying that you can make it through the day to see another. Not very hopeful.

How many churches are like that?

I remember asking a church committee once, where do you see your church in 10 years. Their first answer, “We hope we are still here.” Does that sound like a victorious church to you? (God says we are more than conquerors by the way!)

There was great trouble and shame there. A city without walls would have been very vulnerable to attack. They must have had to sleep with one eye open. And the shame was heavy. Even after all these years, the news of their exile still lingered.

The walls of the city were nothing more than decaying rubble and the gates were burnt wreckage.

At the same time, a truthful assessment was necessary in order to understand where they stood. It was painful for Nehemiah to hear this bad news but necessary.

When it comes to the state of the church today, we would do well to take a truthful assessment of our spiritual condition.

Recently, statistics have been released on the state of Southern Baptist Churches and the number of baptisms conducted by those churches.

2021 Statistics:

13,680,493 million members on the rolls of SBC Churches

3,607,530 million in weekly worship attendance

154,701 baptisms

When you break that down, our baptism to membership ratio is 1:88. i.e. It takes 88 Southern Baptists to Baptize one person.

This news hit hard with Nehemiah. It says that as soon as he heard this news, he sat down and wept and mourned for days. In other words, he didn’t even have the strength to stand.

Do we care enough about the spiritual condition of our nation, our community, and the church to sit down, weep, and mourn for days?

Within three miles radius of this church, there are 12,792 people living in about 5,000 households. If the statistics for this part of the state holds true here…roughly 60% of the people here are unchurched. That means about 7,675 people are unchurched. Who will reach them?

Illus: Leonard Ravenhill said, “The world has lost the power to blush over its vice. The Church has lost her power to weep over it.”

Joel 2:17 ESV

Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and make not your heritage a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’ ”

A Prayerful Response (vv. 4-11)

Nehemiah was moved emotionally but he didn’t stop there. He began to pray and fast to seek God’s guidance for the situation. And we know judging by the Jewish calendar that he prayed for about 4 months before he even thought about approaching the King to ask for help.

During that time, God was shaping Nehemiah and forming the vision in his heart.

Let’s first look at this prayer that Nehemiah prayed because there is a pattern here that we need to adopt when praying for Vision:

He approaches God in Prayer with Humility (vv. 5-6)

He approaches God with Confession of corporate sin. (vv. 6-7)

He appeals to God’s promises (vv. 8-10)

He requests God’s help and favor (v. 11)

And then when we pray, let’s make sure we are praying for a God sized vision.

Illus. David Guzik wrote: “If your vision is so big that only God can accomplish it, then you obviously must pray. If prayer isn’t absolutely necessary to accomplish your vision, your goal isn’t big enough.”

Do you know what God’s vision is for your church? It’s not good enough just to drift around aimlessly, Sunday after Sunday with no direction or vision from God. Too many churches do that.

What is vision? Vision and mission are closely related. Mission is what you do and how you get there. Vision is what it will look like after you get there. Vision is knowing what it will look like once you arrive.

Vision is a target to aim for.

Illus. I love to shoot. I love to shoot my 9 mm and my AR-15. Although I have not been able to afford it lately. When I go shooting, I set up a target in a safe place with a backstop to catch the bullets. My goal is to group my shots as close to the center of the target as possible. It would be silly, and frankly, dangerous, just to go out and aim at nothing. But, many churches do that all the time. The aim at nothing and they hit it every time.

CLOSING: Lynn Anderson shares this story about vision: “About 350 years ago a shipload of travelers landed on the northeast coast of America. The first year they established a town site. The next year they elected a town government. The third year the town government planned to build a road five miles westward into the wilderness.

In the fourth year the people tried to impeach their town government because they thought it was a waste of public funds to build a road five miles westward into a wilderness. Who needed to go there anyway?

Here were people who had the vision to see three thousand miles across an ocean and overcome great hardships to get there. But in just a few years they were not able to see even five miles out of town. They had lost their pioneering vision.

With a clear vision of what we can become in Christ, no ocean of difficulty is too great. Without it, we rarely move beyond our current boundaries.”