A Man of Prayers, Part 2

Hey everyone.

I want to continue to look at Nehemiah and his prayer life, because I think that we can learn a lot from it, not just about prayer, but about our relationship with God.  (The commentary that I have been reading on Nehemiah, Be Determined, by Warren Wiersbe has been particularly helping to me in picking out some useful little from Nehemiah's prayer.  I hope you find the insight useful as well.)  We can really see how Nehemiah views God from his prayer.  Remember, Nehemiah is praying in distress over the state of Jerusalem.

Let's look first at what Nehemiah calls God:

• "Lord" - He addresses God first as his lord and master.  Nehemiah begins by recognizing that God is the one in charge and that he is merely a servant.
• "God of Heaven" - God is holy and is not of this world.  He is greater that the false gods that have been fashioned by human hands and dwell on this Earth
• "Great and awesome God" - Our God is awe-inspiring just to contemplate.  He is great and powerful and we all need his great power at work in us.  
• "Who keeps his covenant" - God's word means something.  If he says something, it is true.  We have to believe it.
• "of love"  God loves.  In fact God is live (I John 4:8).  He keeps his covenant, and his covenant is about love.

In just a few words Nehemiah has expressed a tremendous amount about his God.  He praises God in a number of different ways.  In our prayer, do we recognize the awesome God that we serve?  We should, because He is Lord.  He is awesome.  He is great and powerful.  He is in heaven.  He does keep his promises.  He does love.  In prayer, we have an opportunity to tap into the greatest power in all of existence and we would be foolish to ignore it or fail to recognize it.

As his prayer continues, Nehemiah asks God to answer the prayers that he is lifting up before God both day and night.  Nehemiah makes his requests to God and is consistent in it.  Then he confesses his sin and the sins of his people.  He takes responsibility before God and admits that the Israelites have really only received the scattering that their sins had deserved when they were carried off into captivity.  But Nehemiah is apparently acquainted with God's word because he looks back to Deuteronomy where God promises that He will gather his people back from where they had been scattered if they repent.  He closes his prayer with a request that God would give him success in the "presence of this man."  Nehemiah recognized that the king could make good things happen for him, but that this blessing he sought ultimately came from God, not King Artaxerxes.

Tom