From Failure to Success (Part 2 of 2)

When Nehemiah asked for news about Jerusalem, he was troubled to learn of ruin rather than progress, but he didn't get stuck in his grief.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn the crucial steps he took before he initiated any action to rebuild the city. Alistair Begg is teaching from Nehemiah chapter 1. We're focusing today on verse 4. Back to Nehemiah. His reaction is described for us in one poignant sentence.

When I heard these things I sat down and I wept. This reveals to us the depth of his devotion, the extent of his compassion. I find myself greatly challenged by the fact that it is very difficult to identify with Nehemiah 1.4 and far too easy to identify with Luke chapter 18 and the description that is provided there. You may want to turn to it with me.

I'll read it for you. Luke chapter 18. Jesus is moving through the crowd. He's on the outskirts of Jericho and a blind man was sitting by the roadside and he was begging. And given the fact that he couldn't see, any kind of commotion caused by a crowd would be a matter of intrigue to him. And so verse 36 of Luke 18, when he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening and they told him, Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. And so he called out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

That's the honest cry of someone's heart. Now look at the response. Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet.

Far from the response of the crowd to the predicament of the man producing tears in them, it produced rebukes. Jesus, can you do anything for me, an old blind beggar? Jesus, would you shut up? You know that we're going to Jericho? Do you know how long we've been walking here? Do you know how busy Jesus is? You know that we've been in the front of this line for ages?

Jesus! See, half the time we don't hear the cries of the crowd, because we're so caught up in the march. We got our church thing down so good, we can't hear people shouting in the streets. We can't hear the cries in the music of our day.

We don't hear the cries in the young people's voices. We're missing the cries of the things that made Christ weep. See, reaction reveals it all. And when Jesus saw the crowd, he was what? Moved with compassion. For when he saw them, he saw them as sheep without a shepherd.

He didn't just simply see a crowd. And when the people in Jerusalem had been living there all that time, looked at the walls, all these solar walls. Hey, what's going on in Jerusalem? How are the walls doing? Oh, man, they're all falling down.

Picture the scene. They've all broken down. Weeds have begun to grow up in them. Part of them have actually started to form lawns in them. And the walls have been broken for so long that they're all filled in with grass and with shrubbery, and they actually started to plant flowers in them. And what they were saying was, they're broken and they're broken for good, so we may as well join it.

And the people had grown accustomed to it. But when Nehemiah heard about it, he hadn't even saw it yet, he started to cry. I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip on you or induce a guilt trip on myself, but I can't get past the question. How much of the spirit of Nehemiah is in me for the glory of God and for his purposes, and how much of the spirit of the guys that led the charge at the beginning of Luke 18 pervades my heart? And what about our church? What about our church? Do you think that we exist simply to listen to sermons, gather in groups to study the Bible, scratch each other's backs, and turn us all into wonderful little families? Did God put you in the face of the earth to become a good dad? You're saying, well, we're not supposed to be good dads. Of course we're supposed to be good dads, but that's not an end.

That's only a means to an end. That's in order to give us a stabilized credibility so that when we speak to others who are wrestling with the predicaments of family life, we may be able to speak to them concerning Jesus. You want to talk about a youth ministry? What do you want in your youth ministry?

A bunch of nice little guys with nice little haircuts and nice little girls that you would always be glad to have home to your house? You want it safe? Or do you want to really go and reach some of the kids that are shouting out Jesus? Now they may not be using his name anything other than in vain, but they are using his name. You want to go get him?

And what about the business guys? Jesus, can you do anything for me? Shut up. The reaction reveals the heart. Nehemiah, it's all bust up.

And he sat down, and he went. He didn't say, I wonder who the clowns are running the thing up in Jerusalem. That would have been a reaction. There's no sense of self-assertiveness on the part of Nehemiah here either. He doesn't say, you know, they got a bunch of yo-yos up there in Jerusalem.

I'm going to have to get up there, sort that thing out. No, he weeps. Now that's his reaction. Let's go to his counteraction. His counteraction. What about his reaction following his reaction?

What do you do with it after you've reacted in that way? What is the picture for us this morning? Well, what we learned from the pastor this morning is you're supposed to go home, find a chair, and see if you can burst into tears because seemingly this is the key to spirituality. It is only if you're crying, you're moving. So I'm going to go home.

I'm going to try and think of something really sad and then I'll be getting going from there. No, that's acting. That's acting. His counteraction is that he fasted and he prayed.

In other words, first of all, in fasting, he set aside his normal intake of food and the routine attached to taking in that food for the express purpose of seeking God. Now, for some people, that is a spiritual discipline that is totally absent in our lives. Others of us, it is an infrequent involvement. For some of us, it is a regular element of our Christian experience. There's no fuss or bother about it. We're not making a big deal of it. But there is an element in our lives that is directly related to this.

And for some, it is an account of express conditions that are apparently peculiarly significant. But he did that. And the Bible has a lot to say about fasting.

We can talk about it on another occasion. His prayer, then, before the God of heaven, lasted for a number of days. Why did he pray? Why would anybody pray? Why do you pray if you pray? Do you pray? Why would we pray? Some of us pray out of a sense of, well, I don't know what you're supposed to do, but I believe if you close your eyes and say things, something happens.

There's no concept. But others of us pray because we're supposed to pray. We got in this deal here, and you pray. I mean, before we never prayed. And now we got involved with this nice group of people, and they pray, so we pray.

So it's purely as a result of external constraints. The way we know that is, as soon as you remove the external constraints, we don't pray anymore. As soon as you take the group away, we don't pray. We're away by ourselves. We go in a hotel.

We're here, there, wherever it is. We just don't pray. The person who really prays, prays because they understand that if I don't pray, God won't work. Prayer is not manipulating God to give us something that he doesn't want to give. It is actually recognizing that God is very willing to give us stuff. It is a means, said Luther, of obtaining blessings God is already willing to bestow, not of manipulating him to do things he doesn't really want to do. It is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of God's willingness. And Nehemiah understood that. He knew that nothing could happen unless God did it. After all, these blooming walls have been broken down forever, haven't they?

I mean, this was status quo. Broken the jury, said Jerusalem, said broken down walls. Said Jerusalem, said the people are gone. And he's 800 miles away from it, and he has a full-time job. There's no way in the world he's ever going to get there. And frankly, if he got there, what would he do? Because he has no power in and of himself. So the prospect of doing anything worthwhile in seeing God's glory restored, the kingdom re-established, is absolutely incredible.

I mean, it's totally unrealistic. Unless God does it. And how would God do it? Well, that would bring him into the realm of prayer.

If the city of Jerusalem was going to rise again, Nehemiah knew that it would rise again as a result of God's intervention. If the Spirit of God would pour out in revival upon America again, as in the 18th century, it will only come as a result of God doing what he gets. We can do more than pray after, but not until. The reason we don't pray is because of one of three things. Either, as Barber said, we are self-sufficient, and therefore we don't pray, we just talk to ourselves.

Or we are self-satisfied, and consequently we have no knowledge of our need. Or thirdly, we are self-righteous, and we don't pray, we can't pray, because we have no basis upon which to approach God. Now, don't get hung up here about times of prayer and all that kind of thing. The issue is not about when we're praying or how we're praying.

The issue is about whether we're praying. This past week in Canada I was with a lot of severely old people. I mean, these people were ancient. And they're lovely people, but they were ancient. And in conversation with them, a lot of the time they would talk about the glory days of the past, you know, we remember Jerusalem where the wall was up, that kind of stuff.

And bemoaning the situation, and not in an unkind way, but basically bellyaching about the absence of the next generation to step up to the plate. And not least of all in relationship to prayer. But if you heard their conversations, they're so funny. You know, like, one man is eating the meal, and he says, you know, I went to this new church, and they have their prayer meeting—this is fact.

I mean, they have their prayer meeting on Tuesday night. So I'm just eating. I said, what is this? I mean, is this significant in any way?

I don't know. I said, mm-hmm. And someone else said, oh, really?

Then I said, man, I'm missing something here. And he goes, yeah, whoever heard of a church praying on Tuesday night? I mean, churches pray on Wednesday nights, for goodness sake. Then we had this big thing about whether you pray on Wednesday or Tuesday or whatever it was. Then it went on from there about how you pray. You know, young people, they don't pray with reverence anymore. Now, what they mean by that is young people don't pray like Polonius anymore.

You know, Polonius from Hamlet, you know, who's a complete flannel merchant. They don't pray like from Genesis through Revelation, flip back through the book of Isaiah, a little touch of Romans chapter 6. You know, they don't, they don't do that. They go, oh God, this is a really bad week. My homework stinks. I hate my brother.

Please help me. Amen. And the, and the, and the people and the elderly people, we're not, we don't want this kind of praying in our church. I mean, you know, and so, and so the young people come in and they said, well, I know I can't do that. You know, yeah.

I mean, it's just, it's just like disconnect, major disconnect. We had a, we had a prayer meeting on a, on a Monday night, which I should have told them about because it really freaked them out. We had a prayer meeting on a Monday night in Scotland and, and we had, we had some real guys in there that could pray up a storm.

You know, they, they pray, pray the thing all the way through all the books of the Bible and all the names of the kings and everything else. You know, you didn't know where you were. And we had a lady called Martha who had a major battle with the bottle, if we might put it that way. I mean, I think it was Martha who coined the phrase, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy, but she, she was, she, she was a piece of work was Martha.

And she had a tremendous capacity to cut through anything that was bogus. And so when the prayer, some old brother was going on, he was, he was just coming through the minor profits, you know, we weren't, we weren't even in, we hadn't even reached the intertestamental period with this guy. And Martha had this deal where she would go, she'd wait for him just to take a breath and she'd go, Amen. And, and when she said, Amen, everyone else thought he was over. They said, Amen, shut the guy up, man. He's just down like a shot, bam, history. It wasn't that she didn't want to pray.

It was that through her, you know, when the, when the, when the, the alcohol content began to dissipate enough for her, she realized, I don't know what these guys are doing in here. So the thing is this, you're a boy at school, do you pray? Do you have any plan to pray? Do you pray once a day, none so day, once a week, none so week? I mean, do you pray? Are you going to pray? You call yourself a Christian, do you pray? Do you have a prayer diary?

Do you have any kind of diary? Do you have a plan? Some of our shelves are lined with E.M. Bounds and Mr. So-and-so and old brother this and Mary Slessor that who did this, and we think if we just kind of rub up against these things every so often, that'll be enough, but we don't pray. Can you think what would happen if a group of this and a group of this got really serious about praying for this church, praying for the immediate community around here, praying for actual streets, praying for the people in the houses that we've never met, praying for complete sectors of our environment, praying the Spirit of God to be at work within the lives of people, asking God to lay within as a burden for those who do not know him? If we ever got serious about that, who knows? But God wouldn't just open the windows of heaven and pour us out a blessing that there isn't room enough to contain. But until we get serious to that kind of level, God presumably recognizes that he should do something some other place, because we are either self-righteous, self-satisfied, or self-contented. His prayer will be considered next time.

But let me tell you this. From Nehemiah 1-1 to Nehemiah 2-1 is a space of between ninety and a hundred and twenty days. It's a gap of between three or four months. So when he says, For some days I sat down, I wept, I fasted, and I prayed, he's talking here about a gap between hearing what was going on in Jerusalem and taking action.

There is a gap of four months between reaction and interaction. When he goes into action, you'll find when we get to chapter 6 and verse 15 that they completed the actual building project in fifty-two days. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to work out that it took them less than fifty percent of the time to actually do the building that they actually spent in praying. They spent three or four months praying and fifty-two days building. There's got to be a lesson in that somewhere.

And what about all of our future plans? You want a little story to read in the afternoon? Read Luke chapter 11, verses 1-10. The disciples come to Jesus, and they say, Teach us how to pray. Jesus gives them a model prayer, and then he gives them a story.

It's a great story. The fellow shows up at his friend's house at midnight, says, Hey, I need some bread. My friend came over on a journey, and I don't have anything. His friend gives him a real nice reaction. He says, Take off, buddy. Don't bother me. The door's locked. My children are all in bed.

Luke chapter 11, and verse 7, And I can't get up and give you anything. That's the kind of reaction you get from a friend, isn't it? I mean, think it out. I mean, if somebody you don't know embarrassed you at midnight—you know, some lady, seven houses away or two streets away—she comes and says, Excuse me, I got a bit of a problem, whatever. Your sense of sort of middle-class orthodoxy would respond to that. But one of your close friends bugs you in the middle of the night when you've already shut the whole place down, you've gone to sleep. There's a more than even chance you're going to tell them, Hey, you've got to have rocks in your head. You think I'm getting up to start going looking for bread at this time of night?

Take off! You say, I don't understand you. Friends wouldn't do that. Well, you just never had a friend like me. You come, try that on me. I'll tell you straight up. You say, Well, that's not very nice.

Well, maybe not very nice. Then you come back five minutes later, try it again. I'll tell you the same thing—ten minutes, fifteen minutes, increments of five minutes. Eventually, you just wear me down.

I get up, give you the bread, you take off. But it wasn't because of a great warmth in my heart. It was because of your importunity or because of your boldness or because you wouldn't quit. Jesus says that's the point.

It is not that God is unwilling. The lesson he's teaching is don't quit. Don't quit. Remember the other Sunday night, I read you the story from Australia of the guy who was divorced, not divorced, separated from his wife for seven years? And today they're happily married and he's a pastor in a church, and they have two children in medical school about to become missionaries and two other wee boys that are going on with Christ. Well, what was that about?

It was about importunity. It was about praying and not quitting. How many people have we been praying for that we quit on? Circumstances that we gave up on? Oh, the walls will always be like that. Might as well just plant flowers in them.

It's history. Then God puts it in the heart of someone, and they pray. I often say my prayers. But do I ever pray?

And do the feelings of my heart go with the words I say? I might as well bow down and worship gods of stone as offer to the living God a prayer of words alone. And we say with the disciples, Lord, teach us how to pray. There's a lot we can learn from Nehemiah about the place and power of prayer. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.

Alistair is back in just a few minutes with some closing thoughts. Prayer is a consistent and significant theme in the Bible, and Alistair has written a book about prayer called Pray Big, where he examines the prayers of the Apostle Paul in the book of Ephesians. Today, we want to invite you to download Pray Big as an audiobook free of charge, and it's read by Alistair.

As you listen, you'll learn that the Apostle Paul prayed for God to be glorified and to move in big, bold ways to grow his church. There are many examples in the book Pray Big to help you pattern your prayers in a similar manner. Download your free audiobook of Pray Big today at truthforlife.org slash pray big. And to help you apply the lessons from Pray Big in your own prayer life, we have a corresponding study guide. It presents helpful questions from each of the book's eight chapters.

The print booklet is available for our cost of just two dollars, or you can download the booklet for free. You can find the Pray Big study guide online at truthforlife.org slash store. Now, the month of October is Pastor Appreciation Month, and there is a documentary that we think every pastor, every church leader, for that matter, every Christian will benefit from watching. The film is called Revival, the Work of God.

It's a two-hour documentary divided into eight parts. Each part covers a major period of revival in the history of the church beginning all the way back at Pentecost. There's a section on the Reformation.

There's one on the Puritan era, one on the evangelical awakening that took place in Wales in the early 1900s. This is a terrific video that will encourage all of us to pray expectantly for God to stir our hearts for revival today. Ask for your copy of Revival, the Work of God when you give a donation to Truth for Life at truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884.

The Revival film comes on DVD or there's a streaming option for viewing so you can watch it however you choose. Now, here's Alistair to close with prayer. Gracious God, we thank you for your Word and for your servant. Thank you for the intense practicality of it as it forces us to think in serious terms about our reaction to people and to circumstances, as it reminds us of the important part that we play in leading our home or in leading others in whatever endeavor in life, for we all lead in some degree by the influence we bring to bear. It reminds us that there are fundamental principles and that it is fixed with you, that there really can be no lasting work of God without that we seek you in prayer. Save us from going overboard on this now and planning to get up at two o'clock in the morning and doing this major prayer thing that won't last the length of ourselves. Give us realistic goals, sensible plans, so that we don't try and go from totally skinny to completely bulked out in about fifteen or twenty minutes, but that we just try and make steady gains on spiritual maturity. Help us to help each other in this, to be willing to learn from one another. Save us from the spirit of those who led the crowd when they heard the cry, and give us the spirit of Nehemiah, who sat down and wept and got up and prayed and took off and did. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit watch over and protect and provide for us in the hours of this day and in the days of this week to the glory of Christ's great name we ask it. Amen.