A Mission Born in Prayer
Nehemiah 2:1-10
19th Sunday after Pentecost
Shiloh Lutheran Church
The sermon this morning is a follow up on last week’s sermon on the power of prayer. That’s why we’re looking at Nehemiah 2 rather than one of the lectionary readings. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, four children are visiting their uncle during their holiday from school. It’s a large old house, full of great places to explore. At one point, visitors come to the house and the children hide in a wardrobe to avoid having to talk to them. But once they enter the wardrobe, they find themselves in another world, the land of Narnia, where they experience many adventures and where the whole course of their lives is changed. They enter the wardrobe to hide, and the things that happen affect them for the rest of their lives. Surprising things happen to them, things they never could have anticipated.
Prayer is like that. When we come before God in prayer, we never know what is going to happen. When we pray, we come into the presence of the One who claims absolute lordship over our lives. We need to know that our prayers may set in motion things that will change the entire direction of our lives. This may not be our intention at all; it may be the last thing that enters our minds at the time. But because we’re dealing with God, our Creator and Redeemer, we never know what might happen when we begin to pray.
Prayer is not a safe, tame activity. When we begin praying, we’re not the ones in control. We’re not in charge. After the children enter the land of Narnia, they begin hearing about Aslan, the King, and learn that He is a lion. So Susan asks, “Is he–quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” And the conversation continues: “‘That you will, dearie, and no mistake,’ said Mrs. Beaver, ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.’ ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, pp. 75-76). God is good, but He is not safe. He’s the King, and He claims absolute lordship over our lives. When we come into His presence, we never know what is going to happen.
And, when we begin crying out to God about a situation that concerns us, we never know when He is going to call us to become part of the answer. That’s what happened to Nehemiah. He began praying to God about the situation in Jerusalem, and then God called him to leave his home and become part of the solution. He had a very good position in the king’s court. Things were going well for him professionally. He had a stable, prestigious job. But when he started praying, God called him to leave all that behind and travel to Jerusalem, a place that was in ruin and disarray. Let’s look at how this all happened in Nehemiah’s life.
The first thing to notice is that it did not happen immediately. He had heard about the problems in Jerusalem late in the fall, and chapter two begins “Early the following spring” (NLT). The events Nehemiah is describing in chapter two came after several months of prayer and waiting on God (you can read about that in chapter 1). Nehemiah didn’t make a hasty decision. He didn’t rush off in foolish zeal. When we were working on the ship Logos, an American pastor and his wife visited for about two weeks, teaching, preaching and ministering to the people on the ship, then they returned home. Several weeks later, they showed up at the bottom of the gangway with their suitcases. They had resigned from their church, sold their home, and traveled to the ship without consulting anyone. No one knew they were coming, and the leaders weren’t quite sure what to do with them. They had been stirred spiritually on their first visit, and when they got home they made a hasty decision to leave everything behind and join permanently. Nehemiah’s decision was not made in haste. He waited for the right moment.
We need to know that God is not in a hurry. He’s not in a hurry in answering our prayers, and He’s not in a hurry about showing us what our part is going to be in the answer. He calls us to continue going about our duties right where we are, to cry out to Him and submit to His lordship. And as we do that, He makes His will clear in His own time. In the late fall, when Nehemiah started praying and fasting, he had a strong concern but it’s unlikely that he had any sense of direction about what he would be doing about the problem. But as he prayed and waited on God, an idea started forming in his mind. As he continued praying, that idea became so clear and unshakable that he just couldn’t get away from it. When the time came to take a definite step, God had prepared him. Those months of waiting and prayer were an important part of the process.
The second thing is that when the right moment did come, Nehemiah needed a great deal of courage to act on his plan. In verse 2, Nehemiah says, “I was very much afraid.” He’s been confronted by the king about his sadness: “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” Why does this frighten him? First of all, because his personal sadness doesn’t belong in the king’s court. He’s supposed to be cheerful in the king’s presence; he’s not supposed to be there dragging everyone else down with his personal struggles. In those days when kings exercised absolute power, Nehemiah could have been put to death for allowing himself to show sadness while he was serving the king.
But that’s not the only thing. The king’s question opens the door for Nehemiah to make his request, the thing that’s been weighing on his mind. He’s been waiting for the right moment, and now it’s arrived. It’s not just a private idea any more; Nehemiah is at a point where he needs to step out and act on the things God’s been showing him. There are two opposite dangers when we’re confronted with a situation like this. The first danger is to rush ahead without seeking God’s direction. Nehemiah hasn’t fallen into that danger. But the opposite danger is that we endlessly form ideas that we never act on. We wait on the Lord, like we’re called to do, but then when the time comes to act, we lose our nerve and back down. We get used to waiting and never get out of that mode.
T.S. Eliot has a poem that describes a person like that, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At the beginning of the poem, Prufrock sounds very bold. In the first section of the poem he’s calling for action: “Let us go then, you and I.” He repeats that line a few times early on, then the key phrase in the next section is “and indeed there will be time.” He’s hesitating now; he can’t seem to get over his sense of inertia. In Nehemiah’s place, he would have let the moment pass: “I’ll bring this up another time, not right now.” Later in the poem, he’s looking back, saying “And would it have been worth it, after all” (T.S. Eliot: The Collected Poems and Plays, pp. 3-7). The longer he waited, the more paralyzed he became, and finally he just gave up. He lost his courage. His bold intentions became fantasies in the end.
Nehemiah doesn’t do that. When the moment comes, he speaks tactfully but honestly to the king: “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” He doesn’t make his request yet. He answers the king’s question tactfully and wisely. The burial place of one’s ancestors was an important thing to people during this time, so the king would likely feel sympathy. And Nehemiah doesn’t immediately name Jerusalem; sometime earlier, the king had ruled against the rebuilding of the city (you can read about that in Ezra 4), so what Nehemiah is asking for is a reversal of the king’s earlier decision. On the whole, this is a very touchy situation, but Nehemiah doesn’t back down, like J. Alfred Prufrock does. He moves ahead cautiously, but he does move ahead.
His initial response opens the way for a further question from the king: “What is it you want?” Then notice what he does next: “Then I prayed to the God of heaven.” Before he responds to the king’s question, he turns his heart to God looking for help. But this isn’t the first time he’s prayed about the situation. He’s spent the past four months or so crying out to God on behalf of Jerusalem, so this brief prayer when he’s in the presence of the king is rooted in months of unhurried time in God’s presence. He prays briefly, then he goes ahead: “and I answered the king, ‘If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.” It took great courage for Nehemiah to bring this to the king. Those months that he spent praying brought him finally to this point where he had to step out of his comfort zone. It wasn’t easy for him. He was very much afraid, as he tells us. But he did it, looking to God for help.
The third thing is this: while he was waiting all those months in prayer, Nehemiah made good use of his time. He’s been thinking through the details of a plan. He’s been waiting, but he hasn’t been idle. He’s made good use of his time during this waiting period, so when the time comes he is ready. The king says yes to the initial request, and then notice what Nehemiah does next: “I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters... so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?”
We make a serious mistake when we set spirituality and practicality at odds with each other. There was no conflict between Nehemiah’s intense prayer and his practical planning. His awareness of these practical needs that he brings to the king here is part of the way God has equipped him for the work. The time Nehemiah has spent planning out these details is not less pleasing to God than the time he’s spent in prayer and fasting. He’s doing it all in obedience to God’s lordship; it’s all part of the same work.
God calls us to pray, but He doesn’t call us only to pray. He calls us to bring every area of our lives under His lordship, to offer everything we do as an act of worship. For Nehemiah, this meant long hours planning out the details of what he was going to do. I’ve known many people who assume that the leading of the Spirit always happens spontaneously, when we act on the spur of the moment. In this view, Nehemiah would have been better off not planning, simply trusting God to put the right ideas into his mind when he needed them.
Some years ago, I was in a church service and when the pastor stood up to give the sermon he said, “I don’t have a sermon for you this morning; I have a word from the Lord.” We were supposed to be impressed that he was subject to the immediate inspiration of the Spirit in this way; he wasn’t giving us a sermon, he was giving us something better. But it wasn’t better. His “word from the Lord” sounded like the unfocused rambling of someone who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say. If he had a “word from the Lord” he’d lost track of it sometime before he got into the pulpit. He was relying on God to give him a word right then, while he was standing in the pulpit, but God had given him a whole week to pray and seek a message from Scripture. He was deceived by a false view of spirituality. There’s nothing unspiritual about planning and preparation. It’s part of what God calls us to do. God had given that preacher the gift of a whole week to come up with a message for the church; but he squandered that gift and was hoping to be bailed out by the immediate inspiration of the Spirit.
As Nehemiah has been crying out to God all these months, God has been preparing him for this moment. He responds well. He acts with courage; when he gains the king’s favor he presses further to get the things he needs to carry out the job. He’s not jumping out into the dark. He knows what he’s doing and what it will take to carry out the task. And he also knows why everything is going so well. Listen to what he says: “And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests.” He attributes it all to God. God has been preparing Nehemiah for this moment.
Prayer is not a safe activity. We never know what God is going to do when we come into His presence. As Nehemiah prays, God leads him out of his secure position into the insecurity of trying to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem. Everything falls into place when Nehemiah is with the king, but as soon as he arrives in Trans-Jordan, he encounters the beginnings of the opposition which will plague him throughout this book. The life God calls him to in Jerusalem is filled with hardship, sacrifice, difficulty and opposition. His life, in many ways, was easier as cupbearer to the king. But as he prayed, God called him to leave that behind.
Prayer is not a safe activity, because we follow One who perfectly modeled the sort of thing we see in Nehemiah: “Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death–and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion. Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever” (Philippians 2, The Message). Knowing all that He’s done for us, let’s come before Him in prayer acknowledging His right to do whatever He wants with our lives. And then, having prayed, let’s seek to order every area of our lives in obedience to Him, no matter what He calls us to do, no matter what He calls us to give up, no matter where He calls us to go in His name. God is not safe, but He is good and He has good things planned for His people in the future. In the meantime, let’s offer ourselves in gratitude to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and follow Him wherever He leads.
