Nehemiah's Prayer in Nehemiah 1

I love the prayers in the Bible - they can teach us how we should pray. Nehemiah, in this prayer, had just found out about the state of Jerusalem. He was the king's cupbearer in a foreign country, but the Holy City of his ancestors was in a mess and it affected him greatly.

Nehemiah 1:5-11

 And I said: “I pray, Lord God of heaven, O great and awesome God, You who keep Your covenant and mercy with those who love You and observe Your commandments, please let Your ear be attentive and Your eyes open, that You may hear the prayer of Your servant which I pray before You now, day and night, for the children of Israel Your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel which we have sinned against You. Both my father’s house and I have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against You, and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, nor the ordinances which You commanded Your servant Moses. Remember, I pray, the word that You commanded Your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations; but if you return to Me, and keep My commandments and do them, though some of you were cast out to the farthest part of the heavens, yet I will gather them from there, and bring them to the place which I have chosen as a dwelling for My name.’ Now these are Your servants and Your people, whom You have redeemed by Your great power, and by Your strong hand. O Lord, I pray, please let Your ear be attentive to the prayer of Your servant, and to the prayer of Your servants who desire to fear Your name; and let Your servant prosper this day, I pray, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.”

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It is a prayer of praise - Jesus' model prayer says that we should praise God first (hallowed be Thy name)

It is a prayer of repentance. True revival in the Church only comes with true heartfelt conviction of sin and repentance. 

It is a prayer of supplication and wrestling with God. I believe that God wants us to wrestle with Him in prayer. Nehemiah reminds God of His promise He made to Moses, not because God has forgotten, but because God wants us to understand Him and His Word, so we wrestle with Him using His promises. 

Above all it's a faithful and reverent prayer. Nehemiah remains respectful and reverent. He knows who he is coming to - his Creator and the only One who can solve this crisis. Nehemiah works for a king who has earthly power, but he knew that the One he was praying to has ultimate power over everything! Kingdoms rise and fall at God's command! 

Let us come to our Creator, Lord, Master, King with reverence, casting all our cares on Him. 

Daniel's Prayer in Daniel 9

 I'm going through the book of Daniel atm and this morning I read his prayer in chapter 9 and as I read it, I thought this could be a prayer for our current world today! 

Daniel 9:3-19

³ Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make request by prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. ⁴ And I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, and said, “O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, ⁵ we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments. ⁶ Neither have we heeded Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land. ⁷ O Lord, righteousness belongs to You, but to us shame of face, as it is this day—to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and those far off in all the countries to which You have driven them, because of the unfaithfulness which they have committed against You.

⁸ “O Lord, to us belongs shame of face, to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, because we have sinned against You. ⁹ To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against Him. ¹⁰ We have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in His laws, which He set before us by His servants the prophets. ¹¹ Yes, all Israel has transgressed Your law, and has departed so as not to obey Your voice; therefore the curse and the oath written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out on us, because we have sinned against Him. ¹² And He has confirmed His words, which He spoke against us and against our judges who judged us, by bringing upon us a great disaster; for under the whole heaven such has never been done as what has been done to Jerusalem.

¹³ “As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us; yet we have not made our prayer before the Lord our God, that we might turn from our iniquities and understand Your truth. ¹⁴ Therefore the Lord has kept the disaster in mind, and brought it upon us; for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works which He does, though we have not obeyed His voice. ¹⁵ And now, O Lord our God, who brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and made Yourself a name, as it is this day—we have sinned, we have done wickedly!

¹⁶ “O Lord, according to all Your righteousness, I pray, let Your anger and Your fury be turned away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people are a reproach to all those around us. ¹⁷ Now therefore, our God, hear the prayer of Your servant, and his supplications, and for the Lord’s sake cause Your face to shine on Your sanctuary, which is desolate. ¹⁸ O my God, incline Your ear and hear; open Your eyes and see our desolations, and the city which is called by Your name; for we do not present our supplications before You because of our righteous deeds, but because of Your great mercies. ¹⁹ O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for Your own sake, my God, for Your city and Your people are called by Your name.”

In Daniel's prayer there serious supplication where Daniel denies himself anything worldly (he fasts and puts on sackcloth and ashes - symbols of mourning, grief and sorrow).
He praises God with reminders that He is great and awesome, One who keeps His covenant. God is full of mercy with the ones He loves and who obey Him.
Daniel repents on behalf of the whole of those in captivity. They have departed from Him - i.e. from His precepts and judgements. They haven't listened to those God had sent to warn them, the prophets. They were a disobedient people.
Daniel asks the Lord to hear him, to shine upon His sanctuary which lays desolate. The supplications weren't presented because of any righteousness in the people of Israel, but because Daniel knew the Lord is merciful - slow to anger, but swift to hear. 

It would do good for all Christians in the West to pray a prayer like this one. Western civilisation is crumbling before our very eyes because we are a disobedient people. 

Let's pray for God to send His Holy Spirit in power and majesty, that many may have their eyes opened and see the glories of the Lord!  

 

Passage copied from: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%209%3A3-19&version=NKJV

At the Cross

I'm going through Job, at the moment, in my quiet times - it's a book about suffering and renewal etc. I was thinking about the Cross. This stems from conversations I used to have with Muslims as they don't understand how God could turn His back on God, as He did with Christ at the cross. 

As I pondered on Job's suffering, I thought about the suffering we can never ever understand. 

Jesus is the Son of God - the One who is beloved of His Father (Matthew 3:17; 17:5)
Jesus is God - the image of His Father - (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:1-3)

All throughout eternity Jesus and His Father have had close communion - we don't understand the Trinity, or not the depths of it, but we do know each person of the Trinity is an individual, but also there is a oneness. Each are in agreement with the other. I'm not here to discuss the Trinity, but wanted to make the point that Jesus always had communion with the Father and Holy Spirit even during His ministry, Jesus still had communion with the Father through prayer -
  
UNTIL the hours between 12:00-15:00. 

The Human Condition:

Humanity is naturally against God - we can say we believe in Him, but do we obey Him? Do we keep ALL of His commandments? Believing and obeying are different things. Even the devil and his demons believe in God, but they are condemned because they don't obey Him. 
In our disobedience we turn our backs/reject/forsake God and the only way back to Him is for that rejection to be taken by someone - well we are too weak and frail to take it on ourselves, we are also fallible, unreliable, mortal, so we can't do it.

Jesus came to earth. He is: 

God: the Father needs to be propitiated. We can never hit God's standards at all. However hard we try, we fail. In and of ourselves we would get disheartened because it's a hopeless thing: sinners trying to reach the perfect 100% standard God expects! Only Jesus could reach that standard, as God! 

Man: only mankind can redeem itself. Mankind sins, so only mankind can make amends, but we can't because we are sinners, weak, fallible, unreliable, double-minded etc. Jesus HAD to become a man so that salvation was complete through humanity as well as God being propitiated! For Him just to remain God would have meant God was placated to some degree, but that would still have left mankind without the sacrifice needed for full redemption! 

Back to the cross:

Up until 12:00 Jesus still was in communion with His Father. He asked for the Lord to forgive [I wonder if He was looking into the future as well as His present, and asking God to forgive those who were going to be His own] (Luke 23:34)

From 12:00-15:00 - darkness covered the land - Jesus' Father had left Him, turned His back on His Son, as Jesus became the sin bearer! God forsook His Son at Calvary. The weight of our sins pressed down on Christ but even more so I would think the Father's rejection of His Son weighed more heavily upon Him! He cried out in despair at the thought of His beloved Father being silent - no angels were sent to His aid, no relief from the awful torment He had from the separation - just silence. Deathly quiet from the One whom He had been in communion with since eternity. BUT in that forsaking, rejection - Jesus was winning a FULL and COMPLETE salvation for His people - if God the Father had just offered His hand of comfort, offered words of encouragement - our salvation would have been null and void, because Jesus was our 100% complete Substitute at Calvary! God turns His back on every sinner who is unrepentant and refuses to accept His Son - who bore the weight of humanity's sins upon His body. THIS is why Jesus is the ONLY way to God. 

Did Mohammed bear the sins of billions of people - of course not, did Buddha bear the sins of billions of people - no, did the gurus bear the sins of billions of people - definitely not, no other 'person' or false god is the way to the true God, Peter, speaking about Jesus in Acts 4:12 says: ..."Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ is the ONLY way to get to God and is the way of LIFE ETERNAL! 

John 14:6 Jesus said to him [Thomas], “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.