If we pray

In our church staff bible study this morning, I was forcefully struck by the impassioned and powerful prayer of Nehemiah on receiving the news that God's people were in great trouble and that the city of Jerusalem was defenceless and humiliated.  Nehemiah's immediate response to this bad news, brought to him by Hanani, is to weep and pray.  Here, in the very opening sentences of a book that will chronicle the work of rebuilding and reformation, serious and prolonged prayer is given the most important place, up front and centre stage.  That is not a coincidence.  It is for our present good.

Faced with difficulties and troubles, our first reaction is often to set to work on new approaches and tactics.  We re-double our efforts as we try to reverse the trends.  For Nehemiah, there was a time for careful thought and action, but not before he had been considerably prayerful.

But it is not just that he prayed as a very first course of action that makes its impact on my thinking.  It is the quality and seriousness of his prayer that impresses and challenges me so much. I think it should challenge all of us, too.  Nehemiah deliberately 'sat down', and so we see him stopping for the sole purpose of turning to the one who alone can change the unchangeable.  And he weeps.  His heart is not indignant or angry, as far as we can tell. Our own hearts probably would have been.  Instead, he grieves and mourns for the people of God and for the name of God, held up to derision through the disaster that has befallen Jerusalem.

When I think about problems that beset the church, I am sure that many of us have spent a great deal of time sharing our indignation and even our hurt with others.  We discuss possibilities and potential courses of action.  Nehemiah's example challenges us to pray with considerable fervency in the very first place, long before we do or try anything else.

Talking is easy.  Prayer is harder.  It involves putting aside the natural instinct to hide from God and to try working out our own salvation, and just to be still before Him.  It calls for a recognition that we have our own part to play in the way things are, and a consequent need to repent for sins of commission as well as omission.

In advance of the General Assembly of 2011, ahead of regular meetings of Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions; before we ever set out to try and change our circumstances so that they better reflect God's glory, I am sure Nehemiah teaches us that fervent prayer as well as fasting are the essential prerequisites for a movement of God's Spirit.

I would love to see evangelicals all over Scotland meeting in every corner of the land to pray in that utterly abandoned way which says "Lord, you are our only hope. Unless you intervene, we are completely undone."

Let the talking dry up and the praying well up.  Let prayer gatherings spring up and faith rise up in every place.

Nehemiah prayed and God made the king favourable to him.  It may be so for us, if we pray.

Soli Deo Gloria