Grace Community Church Clarksville, TN
Nehemiah “Foundations" July 7, 2024
In Nehemiah, the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem serves as the main way God introduces redemption and renewal to his people. When things don’t turn out as we had hoped, we are called towards God through adoration and confession. We can appeal to God with the confidence that he will intercede and use our willingness to act for his purposes. Key Verses: Nehemiah 1:1-11
(upbeat music) - The following is a production of Grace Community Church. Check us out at graceclarksville.com. - Today's scripture is from Nehemiah 1, verses one through 11. In late autumn, in the month of Kislev, in the 20th year of King Art of Xerxes reign, I was at the fortress of Susa. Hanani, one of my brothers, came to visit me with some other men who had just arrived from Judah. I asked them about the Jews who had returned there from captivity and about how things were going in Jerusalem. They said to me, "Things are not going well "for those who return to the province of Judah. "They are in great trouble and disgrace. "The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down "and the gates have been destroyed by fire. "When I heard this, I sat down and wept. "In fact, for days, I mourned, fasted, "and prayed to the God of heaven. "Then I said, 'O Lord, God of heaven, "the great and awesome God, "who keeps his covenant of unfailing love "with those who love him and obey his commands. "Listen to my prayer. "Look down and see me praying night and day "for your people, Israel. "I confess that we have sinned against you. "Yes, even my own family and I have sinned. "We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, "decrees, and regulations that you gave us "through your servant Moses. "Please remember what you told your servant Moses. "If you are unfaithful to me, "I will scatter you among the nations. "But if you return to me and obey my commands "and live by them, "then even if you are exiled to the ends of the earth, "I will bring you back to the place I've chosen "for my name to be honored. "The people you rescued by your great power "and strong hands are your servants. "O Lord, please hear my prayer. "Listen to the prayers of those of us "who delight in honoring you. "Please grant me success today "by making the King favorable to me. "Put it into his heart to be kind to me. "In those days, I was the King's cup bearer." - Good morning. Hey, today we get to begin a brand new series of looking at this memoir from the Bible. Says at the beginning that it's not just a book, these are the memoirs of Nehemiah. And I love a good memoir. They're usually our great stories. And Nehemiah is hands down one of the greatest stories in the Old Testament. There's a few stories like Esther, maybe the Israelites leaving Egypt and Nehemiah that they just feel like they'd make really great movies. We know they won't if you've ever seen the Noah movie. Like some things just don't work out that well, but the story itself is still really, really tremendous. And Nehemiah's story is really a story that begins with heartbreak. It begins with him feeling something deeply, this urgent need, this heartbreak inside of him. I was thinking about this heartbreak this week as I saw a picture with someone to take in that kind of showed a directional sign. It was in Zegriva, Croatia. And it was kind of showing where all the locations are. And one of the locations was the Museum of Broken Relationships, the Museum of Broken Hearts. And as I'm prone to do, I took a little bit of a deep dive because I was just so incredibly curious out of all the beautiful things you could see in Europe of paintings and sculptures that someone would want to go to a museum of broken hearts. Like what in the world is that about? And so I read about it. Apparently it's incredibly popular and it is one of the biggest, most visited museums in the city in Croatia. And it's actually had pop-ups all over the world where people come and do the same thing that the people who started it did. You see, the people who started had been in a relationship for about four or five years. They separated, they were no longer in a relationship. They were civil enough, I guess, with each other to kind of bring you up to each other. What do you want me to do with this thing that I have that I have no interest in having that really marks our relationship? But since we're not in a relationship, I don't really know what to do with this thing. And they decided that wouldn't it be interesting because they're artists, because of course they're artists. They decided that they would create this exhibit. Why don't you bring the things from our relationship? And I'll bring the things from our relationship. And we'll tell the story of our broken relationship through these things. It's completely absurd, right? And yet it like really struck a chord with people. People begin to go to the museum just to see these two people. But they overall begin to say, "I got something that I want to bring." And so people begin to donate all these items to the Museum of Broken Hearts. And it would be things like a ticket stub, if you even remember what a ticket stub is. Back in the days you'd have a piece of paper and you'd get to keep half of it. Or like a coffee cup or pictures from vacations. Things that really told the story about a relationship that was no longer a relationship. My absolute favorite item in the Museum of Broken Hearts is an axe. Now, I know what you're thinking, it's not a murderous thing, okay? Nobody was injured with this axe. But the story goes that a guy goes back to his apartment to retrieve the furniture that they had agreed was his that he would come back to get. And instead of finding his furniture, what he found was his furniture destroyed with an axe laid neatly in all the places that it was in the living room. I mean, she had the last word, I guess. So he throws away the trash, but he kept the axe. 'Cause he just felt like this is a good symbol of what this relationship was like. And he donated it to the Museum and you can go see this axe. Now, why is it that the Museum of Broken Hearts kind of like had this cultural thing where it's still going on today. They've been in San Francisco, LA, New York, even in different cities in the South. This museum has popped up and different things have happened. It's because I think we all generally relate to what it means to have a broken heart. We all know what it means to have be one side of a broken relationship. And there's something kind of sweet and endearing about how that even though the relationship is broken, here's this thing that tells the story of the relationship we did have. I'm gonna ask you a question right here and it's the question that Nehemiah is wrestling with. What are the things that break your heart? What are the things that create urgent need in your life in the moment? In Nehemiah's case, the thing that broke his heart was to discover what was going on back in Jerusalem with the walls. You see the big image behind me. Nehemiah is really the story of him being used to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. You need to know a couple of things that have gone on in the story so that it makes sense and know why he would need to go back somewhere. But you should know that Nehemiah is Hebrew, he's Jewish. He's a part of this group of people that God has set aside both with Jacob, remember Jacob, and eventually in captivity in Egypt and the Moses brings them out of Egypt. They have the 40 days in the wilderness. They go into the Promised Land. They got good king, good king, good king. And eventually it becomes bad king, bad king, bad king. And they are taken captive by the Babylonians. Babylonians come into Jerusalem and they destroy the city. They tear the walls down, they destroy the tabernacle, they steal anything of value, and they take all the inhabitants and they take them in exile back to Babylon. This is where you get things like the prophet Jeremiah speaking about the punishment that God is putting on these people by putting them in exile. The story of Daniel in the lion's den. Daniel was a servant of the Babylonian king. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These are servants of the Babylonian king. And it can be a little misleading if you did open your Bible to Nehemiah today. And I cannot encourage you enough to do that 'cause we're gonna spend a lot of time here in chapter one is that the story of Nehemiah sits in the middle of your Old Testament. And yet chronologically the story of Nehemiah should be at the very end of your Old Testament. Because the story is coming at the end of this age before the Redeemer is to come. Nehemiah is a part of this story because he asked a really important question about what's going on. Now, the story of Nehemiah is no doubt an incredible story that includes a wall. I know that many of you maybe have seen or heard these kind of topics come out of this story. Leadership, there's such great leadership in Nehemiah and the way that he organizes to build the wall. Teamwork, how to get people on the same page to do something really tremendous. Determination, Nehemiah never gives up no matter what. He sticks to what is happening. There's all these really great life lessons that can be pulled from Nehemiah. I have gone to many a pastor conference where somebody has talked about Nehemiah and used it to try to encourage us to know how to lead people. I am not saying today that Nehemiah is not about that, but I am saying to relegate Nehemiah to a leadership lesson is really to hit the shallow parts only. There's something going on in Nehemiah that is way, way deeper than just being a good leader, than showing teamwork and then being determined with the task that you have. One of the things I'm grateful for here at Grace is that we take the time, every time we open God's word, whether this is a character study in the Old Testament or looking at things in Romans or epistles, is that we're trying to see where the story of redemption is in that story. Where do we see God showing up through his son Jesus or a promise of his son Jesus in that story? And it requires us to kind of take a different view of the Bible. I want to start off today by reading something from Kathy Keller who wrote a wonderful essay on Nehemiah 1 and 2 and she kind of wrestled with this at the very beginning. Like if I'm going to tell a story about a man who builds the wall, I want us to be paying attention to something a little more. Let me read it, see if you even agree with some of what she's saying. She says that the Bible is not primarily about wisdom for living, promises for comfort or guidance for the perplexed. All those things can be found in the Bible, it's true. But they are as shiny pebbles that distract our attention from the great highways running from ruin to renewal. If we read scripture stories, the Psalms, the prophets or the law disconnected from the primary narrative arc of redemption, we will find them distracting or confusing and hard to apply properly to life today. The story of Nehemiah is a story of renewal. Yes, there's a wall in there, but there's a story of redemption that's being told. There's a couple of ways in Nehemiah that we see actually this arc of redemption show up. First of all, by him going back and building the wall, he's going to be securing the bloodline that Jesus was promised to come through. Think about that, that we know from Isaiah that the Messiah was going to come through the roots of the stems of Jesse. That means David's father was Jesse. He's going to come through King David through that line of the tribe of Judah, promised Jesus. But if the wall is down and Jerusalem is destroyed and the people are in exile, then that genealogical line is at risk of not happening. So Nehemiah actually is a really specific part of this arc of redemption because he's going to do a work that's going to make it a way for us actually to get a Mary and a Joseph and a Jesus. But there's another arc of redemption present here is that Nehemiah becomes a type of Messiah himself. He is not there to set the people free. He's not the one who has all the answers. He's not perfect. And yet you see that God uses Nehemiah to bring redemption, restoration, renewal, all the same things that he would bring Jesus to our lives to do. He becomes a type of those things. I think here's what I'm really trying to say. Although there is a great image of a wall on the screen behind me and there is no doubt that Nehemiah is about a wall. What I'm trying to say is it's really not about the wall. The wall is just a thing that gets us to the more important thing. I think maybe it's better put like this. There's way more at stake in this story than whether the wall gets built. Way more at stake. It's way more important that God's people have their hearts rebuilt than that the wall be rebuilt. This isn't just a geographical concern so they can be protected from enemies. There's so much that's gonna go on in this story that has to do what is going on in the people's hearts. I can kind of prove it to you. Nehemiah's 13 chapters long, only the first seven chapters have to do with the wall. The whole rest of it is about the dedication of the wall and what God is doing in the people's hearts is they live in this restored city of Jerusalem. Now, I said earlier that Nehemiah is a memoir. No doubt about it. It's written like a tremendous story. And in this first chapter, which we had all the verses of chapter one read, you see that he kind of starts off with a really strong premise, a heartbreak, an urgent need. And then towards the end of it, he has a finish where there's kind of this action statement that says, it kind of stands out of nowhere where it says, in those days I was the king's cup bearer, which really doesn't have anything to do with what he's about to pray, but it sets up what's about to happen. But in between that start and finish, Nehemiah presents for us this really beautiful foundation of what it means for us to connect to God. Now, let's go back to the heartache. The thing that Nehemiah is heartache about is when he asked what is going on in Jerusalem, he has told that the people there are living in disgrace and the walls have been torn down. You see in Nehemiah a real deep concern for what is happening with the people. You can, I can prove it to you because he was surprised. Now, why is he surprised? I mean, he's grown up in captivity. We're talking about 150, 200 years that God's people have been living in Babylonia and in Persia. Why is he surprised? Well, he's surprised because Ezra and Zerubbabel had gone back like two decades earlier to rebuild the temple and write God's law and they've run into some problems and they've not been able to complete the work that is there. Now, let's not move too quickly fast this idea that Nehemiah is actually asking out of concern. I don't know if you like me ever feel like people are asking about you, but they're not really asking out of concern so much as they are out of curiosity, right? Those are the people that you tend to want to respond with, why do you care what's going on? Or how does this involve you, right? That is not what Nehemiah is doing here. He's deeply concerned and the proof is that he actually weeps and prays when he gets the news. His response to heartbreak is to pray. All the rest that we have to talk about today has to do with a Nehemiah's prayer. Nehemiah's prayer is how he's going to align his will with what God would be. Nehemiah's prayer is how he's going to submit himself to the sovereignty of God and the providence of God and the things that may be happening in Jerusalem. You see, in Nehemiah, this real genuineness. I mean, he gets this news in his first responses to weep. He is brokenhearted. You see this sacrificial part of his prayer. The Nehemiah hears what's happening and he begins to fast and said he doesn't eat food instead pursuing God towards this like pain that he feels and turning his heart towards God. His prayers persistent, if you go to chapter two, you'll see that months pass between when he prays and when he actually goes in front of the king and begins to start the process or rebuild the wall. He is really building for you and I a foundation of what it looks like for us to be confronted with a broken heart. Remember, hold onto that idea of what are the things that really break your heart. What are the things that really, really move you? If you had your Bible today on your phone or in the old fashioned paper book, whichever way you do, I cannot encourage you enough to just open the Nehemiah chapter one. I'm not gonna stop at every single verse and read every single thing, but we're gonna walk just right through this looking at the three foundations that Nehemiah gives us in his prayer. The very first thing that he does in verse five is he really has to remind himself of who God is. It says in verse five that he comes to God and he says, oh Lord God of heaven. The great and awesome God who keeps his promises is covenant to love and this unfailing love. I read somewhere of this week that what Nehemiah does at the beginning of his prayer, it's like he takes a chair and he sits down and he turns his face towards who's God is and he just stares at God. He doesn't get into what is heartbroken him. He doesn't get into what may come next. He doesn't make it about himself. He stops in that moment and he just looks at who God is. Now, what does he see when he looks at God? He sees that God is a God of heaven. It's actually the second time he said it and he gets there only in verse five. By the end of the God of heaven means that he is God, but he lives eternal, like kind of above the earth that he's in. He says that God is great. This is not like Tony the Tiger great, okay? Like, I can't roll my G's right now, but you know Tony the Tiger. He's actually using the word great here to say like, this speaks of strength, this power, his mind, his ability to do things, his greatness. He speaks, he says that this God is awesome. All of you, 80s babies grew up saying that things were totally awesome, right? This is not just a throwaway word, this word awesome. It means that God is holy, that there are things about him that are not like anyone else, that he is awesome, he is grand in that way. And then he says to God that he knows the God is one who keeps his promises, he is covenantal. He knows what he has said and he's gonna keep to what he has said. And then he says that this God has unfailing love towards those who obey him. And I don't often like to break downwards to like what the Hebrew means of a certain word, but this feels too important to not tell you. This word here unfailing love is the Hebrew word has seed. And has seed is a really important Hebrew word 'cause it's the same word that's used back when he's making a covenant with Abraham when God describes himself. And it's important because there's not really one word that translates perfectly to English because it means a whole lot of things at the whole time. The has seed of God references the steadfast love of God, the unfailing love, the loyal love, the gracious love, the forgiving love, the faithful love, the goodness of his love. I would say that the love that is referenced here is he looks at God as like a transcendent love, that he looks at God and he sees in him one who is great and awesome and faithful to the promises and rules in heaven. And yet he sees that he is a love that, oh no, that Nehemiah is never going to be able to match. There's an unfailing steadfast forever transcendent love. This is who Nehemiah turns toward in his moment of heartbreak. Now make no mistake about it, you and I, we will turn toward something in our heartbreak. Maybe you'll turn towards yourself. Things will go wrong, you will feel an urgent need and you will think, well, this is up to me to solve. And usually what happens when you do that is you figure out really quickly that you do not have what it takes to solve the problem and you will become disappointed and discouraged in yourself or what will happen if you turn to yourself is you'll put too much on yourself and the situation is actually made worse because instead of turning to a great and awesome, unfailing love of a God, you turn to somebody who has a trouble keeping their promises sometimes. Where we, what I really want to do, even betrays the things that I actually do, turning towards ourselves as a mistake. Or maybe you turn towards other people. There is no problem within the moment of heartbreak and crisis to call people around you to be with. There's no doubt about it. But you know what a real friend does in those situations? They redirect your gaze to who God is. Your hope is not going to be found in a relationship. If you put your hope in a husband or a wife, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a best friend, a roommate, they're going to let you down eventually. Why? Because they're a human being just like you are. You can't turn to them for the hope of everything. Maybe you turn to a substance. Maybe you turn to a thing. Maybe you turn to something that will just keep you busy enough that you don't have to pay attention to the heartbreak that's happening right in front of you. In Nehemiah's case, he actually turns directly to God. In weeping and in tears without eating any food, coming before God and reminding him who God is and reminding Nehemiah who God is. But to do that also creates another thing, and it's kind of the second part of the foundation of this prayer, is he exposes his own sinful proclivity or his own unworthiness. You see, you can't spend very much time adoring God without eventually finding yourself down here in the lowliness. In other words, if you spend time concentrating on who God is, you were going to realize you ain't God, right? You don't have those same qualities. You may have some of them in spades and other of them you're lacking, but you are not all the things that God is. And so you're gonna have to come to grips like Nehemiah did with your culpability in the situation that you find yourself in. If for no other reason, then to simply come to God to say, I'm empty handed God. There's nothing that I have that will fix or solve this issue. There's nothing that I have that's gonna necessarily make this better. I need you, God, to come do something with me. And how do we come empty handed? We confess. We come to him with the things in our lives that are not working. We come to him and we do what Nehemiah does here. He says that we have sinned and fallen short of what you have God. We have not obeyed your law. He uses that word we. He's referencing his father, his grandfather, the people who've come before him. It's like even the things that he's not directly responsible for, he feels intensely the breakup of the relationship between God and God's people. It's like, I don't know, maybe Nehemiah benefited somehow from the sins of his ancestors. Maybe there was something about his ancestors that Nehemiah went along with because that was the way it had always been. But Nehemiah doesn't even end there. He then twists and says, "Not only have we sinned God, but I have sinned. Me and my family, we have not kept your commands." This is a really brutal confession that Nehemiah has. I feel like sometimes, I don't wanna read too much in the words of the Bible and try to add a motion that's not there. I really don't, but when I read this confession of Nehemiah, this willingness to ask for forgiveness for sins of which it happened so long ago, these are not even a part of. You get the idea that he deeply feels the divorce that has happened between God and God's people. In that moment, he is deeply impacted by the fact that the Israelites have found themselves in a place of despair and terrible ruin because of what they have done. He's owning what has happened to God's people. Now, it's a good reminder for us to know that God is always more eager to forgive us than we are eager to confess. We know over and over in both the Abrahamic covenant and what Jesus tells us in the New Testament that he stands ready to forgive. Think of the story of the prodigal son. He runs to the wayward son. We know that forgiveness comes. And so this confession is actually a way that he builds even his confidence in this moment because finally, for the very first time in this prayer, now that we've gone all the way through verse seven. So seven of the first 11 verses, and we still don't know what Nehemiah is going to ask for. And I think that runs different than the way most of us normally pray, right? I just this morning, I asked somebody, "Hey, would you pray for me? "I feel like I'm losing my voice a little bit this morning." And he prayed for me. It was a need, I went to him, he's going to God, I'm going to God, so far so good, right? We're praying for this need. But yet Nehemiah has spent a lot of time praying and fasting and weeping and adoring God and confessing. And he's not even asked a question yet. He's not made one single appeal to God, but he begins to build that appeal here at the end. And verse eight and nine, he kind of goes back to this idea of reminding himself of who God is, and he tells God, "Hey, I know your promise was, "that if God's people turn from you, "that they disobeyed your laws, "that you would send them into exile "and the Jerusalem will be destroyed." But then he says, "But you also said, God, "that if your people will obey your commands, "if they would humble themselves, "that you would return them to their land, "even if they were in exile." These are the words of Jeremiah, the words of Isaiah, the promises that the prophets gave, that if God's people would turn back to him, he would actually restore them. So see, he's building his case, he's building his appeal, "Hey God, I know the kind of God you are, "you are a promise keeper. "You have said that you are in deep covenant "with your people, and you have said, "yourself God, that if the people would come together, "and they would obey and follow you, "that you would restore them, those things that have lost." And verse 10, he begins to build this again, and he look at the confidence that he speaks with, he says, "God, you can rescue your people, "you can rescue your servants "because of your great power and your great strength." We still haven't really got to a question yet, really haven't got to an appeal yet, to the supplication, to the thing that he's even gonna ask of God. All of this building up to this point to where he's going to get specific with God, I actually do have this verse up on the screens for you because I want us to look at Nehemiah's appeal. It becomes the thing that really motivates the rest of Nehemiah's story, and tells us kind of where this story is gonna go in the weeks to come. In Nehemiah chapter one, in verse 11, the very last verse of this prayer, "Oh, Lord, please hear my prayer. "Listen to the prayers of those of us "to delight in honoring you. "Please grant me success today "by making the king favorable to me. "Put it in his heart to be kind to me." Nehemiah, in his prayer of ask, he doesn't even get into the specifics of what the plan to rebuild the wall will be. He gets right to the simple ask. The God, give me success today in the eyes of the king. Let him show favor to me. Now, here at Grace, we read from a translation called "The New Living Translation," and it's wonderful for reading. It's a great read out loud version of the Bible. We use it on Sunday mornings when we read. We try to reference it. But I love even my Bible, this new living translation, there's a little asterisk by that last prayer. And now at the very bottom of my Bible actually tells me what the word is in Hebrew and no offense to the translators, but I really love the thing that he says in Hebrew because there's something we can take from that. He says in the original Hebrew that give me success today in the sight of this man. Now, I feel like it's important that he says this man because after all that he has had to say about God, all the adoration, all the confession, all the thankfulness, he then reminds God, I just need favor from a man. A man that is not anything like you are God. He's not as great as you use, not as awesome as you use. He doesn't keep his promises like you. He doesn't have a steadfast love towards his people like you. On this day, God, give me success in the sight of this man. You know that Nehemiah is asking a question that is followed by his ability to actually do something because you kind of get the sense that he's like, if you'll give me favor with this man, God, I will be your servant. I will be able to do the thing that is able to protect and bring Israel back. There's a couple of important questions for us when we read Nehemiah's prayer. I think one of them right away to go back to the beginning is what are the things that break your heart? What are the things that break your heart? I have spent a lot of time this week trying to think through this for myself. And I've realized I have two tendencies when I'm confronted with things like this, things of an urgent need, things that really break my heart. And one of them is to believe that well, everything breaks my heart. And usually the response to that kind of thing is outrage. I think we definitely live in a world that is kind of addicted to outrage, right? This is an injustice. It's not fair, it's not right, it's not God's best. It makes me angry and we love to throw words at that, we love to argue and defend things. And yet none of those words are backed up with our ability to actually do anything to deal with the heartbreak. They just stir up an anger in us or in me. But there's this other way that the pendulum swings in my heart that when I'm confronted with something that breaks my heart, I just don't let it break my heart. I put a wall up and I defend myself against that thing. And I know that if I spend too much time thinking about it or looking at it or investigating or thinking or meditating on it, that it's gonna require something to me that quite simply I'm not willing to give right now. And so I create busyness. I find other things I can do that can kind of drown out the need for something to be fixed that has broken my heart before. And what I know happens there is that eventually my heart just gets so hard that nothing really moves my heart anymore. See this whole premise that we have a way that we turn to God if our heart is broken, none of it works if we're people who live with a hard heart. We have to be willing to let God speak to our heart through the things that happen in the world. The things that are just wrong that need our work to make them right. How many of us when we pray and turn to God are willing to come to him confessing and say, "God, I am empty handed before you. "I may have even been a part of making the problem happen, "but God, I come and I have nothing to bring but just myself. "Let me be a part of that. "Are we willing to confess the things that are wrong, "believing that there's God who is actually eager to forgive us?" How many of us have even been brave enough to pray a prayer that is followed by our willingness to be the one to fulfill the answer? This is Nehemiah, give me favor in the sight of this man because Nehemiah is gonna be the one to actually do something. Now, there's so many things in Nehemiah's story that point us back to Jesus. You see so far, Nehemiah is asking for renewal for God's people. He's asking for rescue from God. He's asking for favor in the eyes of this man. There's these things that kind of point to the same thing that Jesus would come when he would come, that he would be fought against by men, who would fight against them, but Jesus was coming to create a new kingdom. Nehemiah's prayer, I don't know that we can talk about Nehemiah's prayer, but that actually going back and looking at what Jesus himself had to say about prayer. So many years later, after Nehemiah's story, you've got Jesus in Matthew chapter six, and he's teaching all through Matthew five, six, seven, and eight, the Sermon on the Mount. It's this beautiful writing of like, if you wanted to know, what is it that Jesus actually came to do on earth, read the Sermon on the Mount? He's like laying out the rules for his kingdom. And one of the things that he begins to talk about is about prayer. Look what Jesus says about prayer. These are the red letters in my Bible, you guys. It's straight from Jesus, spoken to us. He says, when you pray, don't be like the hypocrites, who love to pray publicly on street corners, and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth. That is all the reward that they will ever get. But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you and pray to your father in private, then your father who sees everything will reward you. When you pray, don't babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words over and over again. Don't be like them. For your father knows exactly what you need even before you ask them. I see Jesus' instructions on prayer, and then I look at Nehemiah and I'm like, Jesus is really just kind of affirming the things that we see in the Nehemiah story. Don't just use words to use words. Pull yourself away from the thing so that you can go and adore God and be in front of Him just alone. And then Jesus even makes it clear, hey, when you go to pray, you should know that the Father in heaven, he already knows what you want. Therefore making the greatest impact of prayer, the impact that happens on us as we do it. Now, it kind of begs the next question. If you heard Jesus say that and he answers it, which is, well, then how are we supposed to pray, Jesus? Remembering, too, that when Jesus has these words about prayers, he's talking to religious people. He's not talking to people far from wanting to pray. He's talking to the people who are praying wrong. And then he talks about these things of let us then pray like this. I want us to do something today in closing. I want us to read this Lord's prayer together. I'm gonna ask you, if you could, here at the end, just go ahead and stand where you are. I think there's something significant about being on our feet, standing before God, as you read this Lord's prayer. But then I'm gonna pull a homework assignment in your head as we read it. As we read Jesus' instructions on prayer, let's also hold what we've just heard about Nehemiah. The way that Nehemiah came before him with adoration, the way that Nehemiah asked for rescue, the way that he was willing to confess the things that he had done wrong, the way that he was making it clear that he wants what God wants to happen in this situation. I'm gonna start us, but I'm gonna ask that you guys read this with me, okay? It's not a repeat after me, but you can catch up. I'll read really slow, we can do this, okay? It says Jesus' words is pray like this. "Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy, "may your kingdom come soon, "may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, "give us today the food we need, "and rescue us our sins, "as we have forgiven those who sin against us. "And don't let us yield the temptation, "but rescue us from the evil one." - Father, thank you for the promise that you give Nehemiah that when he turns towards you, he'll find one with unfailing love. Thank you for the prayer that Jesus gives us in his Sermon on the Mount that when we turn towards you, we find one whose kingdom has come to be on earth. Holy Spirit, we ask that you be in our hearts and minds and keep our hearts soft to the things that are going on in our world, to the things that are unfair, that demand attention. Father, let your Holy Spirit also build a confidence within us, that when we come to you to adore and confess that we can also come with a confidence that we could be a part of seeing this come to be. In Jesus' name, Amen. Guys, I hope you'll join us next week as we get to the chapter two. Have a great day. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening. For more about Grace Community Church, check out GraceClarksville.com. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)