"Six-Hour Prayer" Nehemiah 9:6-38 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Nehemiah 9 is the longest prayer in the Bible.

Psalm 18 is more verses, but Nehemiah 9 has almost twice as many words.

And I say because I'm going to read the whole prayer.

I'm going to start in Nehemiah.

Second part of verse 5 is where the prayer begins and goes all the way to the end of the chapter.

It'll take me about five minutes to read the song.

It took first hour.

I'm letting you know, just so like halfway through, I know the tendency in our thinking is to go, is he really going to read the whole thing?

And the answer is yes, I will.

It'll take about five minutes.

So just listen and try to keep your mind engaged to it and listen to this prayer that God has captured for us in his words.

It's prayed by Nehemiah and the Levites, who are named for us in verse five.

And the prayer begins halfway through verse five.

Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise.

You are Yahweh, you alone.

You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve all of them, and the host of heaven worships you.

You are Yahweh, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and gave him the name Abraham.

You found his heart faithful before you.

You made with him the covenant to give to his offspring, the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Gergeshite.

And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous.

And you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt, and heard their cry at the Red Sea, and performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of his land, for you knew that they acted arrogantly against our fathers, and you made a name for yourself, as it is to this day.

And you divided the sea before them, so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land, and you cast their pursuers into the depths as a stone into mighty waters.

By a pillar of cloud you led them in the day, and by a pillar of fire you led them in the night as a light for them for the way that they should go.

You came down on Mount Sinai, and spoke with them from heaven, and gave them right rules and true laws and good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your holy Sabbath, and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant.

You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger.

You brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give to them.

But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments.

They refused to obey, and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them.

But they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.

But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.

Even when they had made for themselves the golden calf, and said, This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt, and had committed great blasphemies.

You and your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness.

The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way, did not depart from them by the day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go.

You gave your good spirit to instruct them, and did not withhold your manna from their mouths, or gave them water for their thirst.

Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness, and they lacked nothing.

Their clothes didn't wear out, their feet didn't swell, and you gave them kingdoms and peoples, and allotted to them every corner.

So they took possession of the land of Sihon, king of Heshbon, and the land of Ag, King of Bashan.

You multiplied their children, as the stars of the heaven.

You brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess.

So the descendants went in and possessed the land, and you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and you gave them into their hand, with their kings and the peoples of the land, that they might do to them as they would.

They captured fortified cities in a rich land, and took possession of houses full of good things, cisterns already hewn, vineyards, olive orchards, and fruit trees in abundance.

So they ate, and they were filled, and became fat, and delighted themselves in your great goodness.

Nevertheless, they were disobedient, and they rebelled against you, and cast your law behind their back, and killed your prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies.

Therefore you gave them into the hand of their enemies, who made them suffer.

In the time of their suffering, they cried out to you, and you heard them from heaven, and according to your great mercies, you gave them saviors who saved them from the hand of their enemies.

But after they had rest, they did evil again before you.

And you abandoned them into the hand of their enemies, so they had dominion over them.

Yet when they turned and cried to you, you heard from heaven, and many times you delivered them according to your mercies.

And you warned them in order to turn them back to your law.

Yet they acted presumptuously and did not obey your commandments, but sinned against your rules, which, if a person does them, he shall live by them.

And they turned a stubborn shoulder and stiffened their necks, and they would not obey.

Many years you bore with them, and you warned them by your spirit through your prophets, yet they would not give ear.

Therefore you gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands.

Nevertheless, in your great mercies, you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are gracious and merciful, God.

Now therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, the awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love, let not all the hardship seem little to you that has come upon us, upon our kings, our princes, our priests, our prophets, our fathers, and all your people, since the time of the kings of Assyria until this day.

Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully, and we have acted wickedly.

Our kings, our princes, our priests, our fathers have not kept your law, or paid attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave them, even in their own kingdom, and amid your great goodness that you gave them, and in large and rich land that you set before them, they did not serve you or turn from their wicked works.

Behold, we are slaves this day.

In the land that you gave to our fathers to enjoy its fruit, its good gifts, behold, we are slaves.

And its rich yield goes to the kings who you set over us because of our sins.

They rule over our bodies and over our livestock as they please, and we are in great distress.

Because of all of this we make a firm covenant in writing on the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests.

Amen.

My first semester at seminary, I was required to take a prayer class.

I've shared the story with some of you before.

And a basic assignment of this prayer class is that we had to pray for an hour a day, every day, all semester long.

Making bricks out of straw or something like that.

We had to write down in outline form our prayers and turn them in.

We didn't have to, you know, write a transcript of all of our prayers because that would be, you know, an hour of writing and an hour of praying and too much.

We had to write an out-down outline form of what we prayed for an hour a day, every day.

We had to turn in our outline every single week to our professor who graded it.

I know.

So I start this class and I have all of the attitude, all of the attitude is mine to possess at this point.

Like, how, how, first of all, how dare you grade my prayers?

You're gonna grade it's my relationship with the Lord is sacrosanct, and I'm supposed to turn it in for a grade, which was not helped by when I got my first paper back.

That paper bled, it had so much red ink on it.

You're praying for that question mark?

Why that?

What about this verse?

Wouldn't this verse mean not to pray for this or to pray for this and that one?

I'm like, yikes, back off.

And I realized I'm paying for this.

But the other problem I had with this is how are you supposed to pray for an hour a day?

At that point in my life, I could think of two categories of people that could pray for an hour a day.

The first are the people that would have no problem talking for an hour about any subject.

They would talk the ear right off the Lord if they could, and they were trying to.

So I had that category of person in my mind.

And the other category of person I had in my mind was those that were speaking in tongues.

So kind of like the just the rambling and then the tongue speaking.

And then I recognized that they're basically the same category.

I'm gonna regret that comment later.

How do you pray for an hour?

And I learned a very valuable lesson in this class, a very practical lesson from my professor.

The best way to pray for an hour he taught is to structure your prayers.

Get a structure going, get some headings going, fill in the content under the headings, and you'll find that the hour flies by faster than you know what to do with it.

And he was exactly right.

That is exactly what happened.

Once I thought started breaking up my prayer life into different headings and different topics and had some kind of progression to it, it was actually quite easy to pray for an hour.

And that's when I realized that the grading of my papers was actually effective.

It taught me to approach prayer in a more proactive way, a more effective way, to think through what exactly is it that I'm praying for?

How am I structuring these prayers?

How am I moving between the desires that are in my mind and what is in my heart and uh on my heart and in my head, how am I moving from that up to the throne room of God, up to the Lord and bringing these requests before him in a way that has an effect on me.

My wife, when she prays, she uses a prayer journal and she has different headings in her prayer journal.

She knows she'll pray for our family and she'll pray for the church and uh different different categories, our kids and their long-term future and more immediate goals with them, and her own relationship with the Lord.

She moves to those kind of headings, and I think that's a very helpful way to pray.

Perhaps you've heard of the acronym ACE, uh, ACTS.

I know it's probably the most common one, and I'm I know many of you heard it.

I'm sharing with with you again just because I think it is so effective to structure your prayer life this way.

Axe, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, where you go before the Lord and you begin by adoring him, adoration.

You're just bringing before him uh praises about um who he is and what he's done uh in this world.

And then confession.

You confess your sin before him in light of who he is.

You confess all the ways you've sinned against him.

Then you give him thanks for, you thank the Lord, the tea, adoration, confession, tea, thanksgiving.

You thank him for hearing your prayer, you thank him for forgiving your sins, you thank him for things he's done in your life and answering prayers since the last time you prayed.

And then supplication, you bring him new requests at the end.

Just that little structure right there.

ACTS has a way of bracketing your prayer and giving it momentum and cohesion to it.

We see a similar kind of structure this morning in this long prayer.

As I mentioned earlier, Nehemiah 9 is the longest prayer in the Bible.

But as you look in it, you very much see a structure to it.

The structure, it follows, Acts, really.

You see adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.

It comes right from this, and so we're gonna work through that as you're heading this morning.

Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.

But the first part is adoration.

Before we get to the different ways we're gonna see adoration expressed in this prayer, understand that this longest prayer, it's because it's more words in the Hebrew than any other prayer in the Bible, but not just that, if you draw your eyes back up to chapter 9, verse 3, you see that they read from the book of the law of Yahweh their God for a quarter of the day.

So they spent six hours reading the Bible.

And then after that, in light of that, and we looked at the Bible reading last week, in light of that, they spent another six hours, another quarter of the day, they made confession and worshipped Yahweh their God.

So when I say this is the longest prayer in the Bible, that's kind of what I'm getting at.

Yes, it's more words in the Hebrew than any other prayer, but more than that, they spent six hours praying.

And it wasn't just one person praying, it was Nehemiah leading this, of course, but for six hours there were others who were kind of rotating through.

You see, they're named in verse five, and it was all the Levites had a role to play as they'd spread out and people were praying this.

And so what we find here in Nehemiah 9 is not a transcript of six hours of prayer.

It took five minutes to read it.

We find here in Nehemiah 9 is kind of the headings, the the structure of this prayer.

This is the content that they prayed through that day.

And the most substantial part of that content is adoration, which is fitting.

They're praying for six hours after reading the word for six hours.

That's because when you fill your mind with the word, it's going to come out of you in prayer.

When God reaches down to us through his word, we reach back to him through prayer.

It's important to understand because it teaches us that coming to God is based on his initiative.

It's not based on human eloquence or on man's effort, but on God who gave us his word.

So we fill our mind with his word and then we turn our hearts to him in prayer.

So I hope as we go through adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication this morning that will be helpful for you.

Uh we'll begin with adoration.

Adoration is the biggest part of this prayer.

And so I've broken down the adoration heading into seven different uh little subheadings.

So if you're taking notes, it's the ACT acronym, but underneath the adoration part, seven different subheadings.

These will be the only subheadings for for the morning if you're pacing your sermon notepaper right here.

These seven set subheadings are only under the adoration, and we'll go through them one at a time.

First, the adoration begins with the recognizing that God is a creator.

That God is the creator.

And as I mentioned, this whole prayer is based on adoring God for who he is, and certainly God is the creator.

We adore him for who he is, which is manifested in what he has done.

Well, you know who he is because of what he's done.

You understand what kind of God he is by what he has done in the world, and the most, the first of all of his acts in the world is creation.

And so that's where this prayer begins in verse 6.

You are Yahweh, you alone.

And when you see the Bible describe as God being God alone, it means, first of all, that he's not a God like the other nations have gods.

You know, there's Baal and the Asheroth and all the gods of the other nations.

It doesn't mean that God is, you know, one among many.

It means that God is not like those other gods.

In the category of real gods, he is the only one on the list.

Yes, the other nations have gods, but they don't even count.

They don't even make the top ten of God's list of gods.

There's only one on that list, and that is God.

God is God alone.

But it also means something almost more even metaphysical than that.

It means that God before he created the world is the only one that existed.

So everything that exists in the world is outside of God.

And before any of that existed, there was only God.

So before God made the world, there wasn't God and other things.

There was only God.

And so everything that exists was made by God.

That's where this prayer begins.

You are God alone.

Just because God is God alone doesn't mean he is God who is lonely, because God exists in trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit.

So the three persons of the Trinity are in relation with one another.

They have fellowship with one another.

So God is not lonely before he creates the world, but he is alone.

You have made heaven, verse 6 says.

The heaven of heavens.

In other words, the highest heaven where God dwells.

We don't know what that is like.

We don't know what is going on in the throne room of God.

We don't know if, in that sense, if he really even has a throne room, we're just imagining him in a place.

That's the way our minds work.

We have to put God in a place.

Well, wherever you've put God in your mind, know that everything that's around him is not him.

That whatever you have him in was not in existence before he created the universe.

God is God alone.

Everything you imagine around him is created by him.

He is over, another way of saying it is, he is over everything.

And that's why he says that.

In fact, back in verse 5, blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessings in praise.

Even your praise.

God exists before and above your praise.

And then Nehemiah and the Levites go into categories, realms of existence, spheres of existence here.

He is over the heaven of heavens.

He's over the earth.

He's over the seas, it says.

And that's showing you that every category, every realm, every sphere that God has made, he's over.

He's over all the life on the earth.

He's over all the life in the seas.

He's over all the life in heaven.

And Nehemiah gives you that, over the heaven of heavens with their host.

Yahweh's exalted above angels.

On the earth, all that's alive on the earth, God's above them.

In the seas, all that's swimming in them.

He's above all of them.

And all the host of heaven, it says in verse 6, worships God.

The angels worship him.

And you think, of course, God is above all the animals and is above all the people.

Why is he beginning his prayer with that?

This isn't, it's echoing Moses.

It's echoing David.

Remember, Moses said, if I go down to the bottom of the sea to look for you, you know, I can't get to you down there and yet you're there.

I can't climb high enough to heaven to find you, and yet you're there.

David takes that phrase and says, If I'm running from you, can I hide from you at the bottom of the ocean or can I hide from you in heaven?

No, you're everywhere.

God made all of those places.

He's over all of them.

And so that's helpful when you're praying.

Do you understand why?

God made you.

And so he wants to hear your prayers.

He made you.

God is omniscient, he knows all things, and his ear is especially drawn towards you because you're made in his image.

God knows the prayers of your hearts, he knows the prayers of your mind, because he made the whole universe.

So you might think there's too many people in the world for God to hear my prayers.

Seven billion people, and they got thoughts in their minds and thoughts in their hearts.

How can God be aware of all of them?

Because God made all of them.

So God didn't overwork himself.

He didn't make more people than he could keep up with.

No, he made all of you.

You think it'd be hard for God to hear all of your prayers at one time?

Okay, not as hard as creating the universe in six days, which he did, so he can keep up with your prayers.

He made you.

That's important to remember when you're praying.

That's uh I love how this prayer begins with that.

It's just a reminder that God made the universe so he can hear your prayers.

And you're praying to the one who made you, and so he's inclined to listen to you.

Colossians 1, verse 17 says it this way He's before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Colossians 1:17

He created all things, and so he's in control of all of them, in control of all them.

Secondly, God's not only the creator, but he's also the chooser.

And God is the chooser.

Verse 7, you're Yahweh who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur the land of the Chaldeans, and you found his heart faithful before you.

And we understand this that not only did God make the universe, but he then chose people to have a relationship with in that universe.

That's why the prayer moves from God as creator of all things, to now God in a special relationship with those whom he has chosen.

Abram did not sign up to be the one who would receive the covenant, the covenant from God.

There was no booth in the mall of the Chaldeans where, you know, wanted somebody to be in a covenant with Yahweh, and Abram filled out one of a hundred applications, and God had a committee that sorted through all the applications and settled on Abram.

No, Abram didn't apply.

He didn't sign up.

God chose him.

God initiated.

God came to Abram and said, I will be in a relationship, a covenant relationship with you.

And he chose Abram because he was going to make Abram faithful.

And he says in verse 8, You found his heart faithful before you, and so you might be prone to think, oh, God looked around the world and found Abram who was faithful and then chose him.

No, Abram was faithful.

God found his heart faithful, which is the way of saying God molded it into faithfulness because of what you see at the end of verse 8.

You have kept your promise, for you are righteous.

Abram is faithful because of God's righteousness.

Abram puts his faith in God's righteousness.

God imputes his righteousness to Abram.

Abram is now faithful.

Abram has faith in God, which of course is given to him by God.

God chooses Abram, gives him faith.

Abram exercises his faith in God and God's righteousness.

God then counts Abram as righteous because of his faith.

That's the great exchange there.

Abram places his faith in God.

God gives his righteousness to Abram.

That makes Abram faithful.

Do you remember when Abraham went up to the mountain to offer his son Isaac, and he lifts the knife and God stops him and says, I'm going to provide a sacrifice for you instead.

And then he says, I knew that you would obey.

I knew that you would believe.

I knew that you were faithful.

That's another way of saying it's not God saying, I predicted this would happen.

I knew it all along.

No, God is the author of all things.

God made Abraham faithful.

That was a lesson more for Abraham than for Yahweh.

You know that, right?

It's not like Yahweh learned something new about Abraham from that.

Like, oh, what a plot twist.

No, this was done to demonstrate God's faithfulness to Abraham.

This is so evident when God made the covenant with Abraham.

Remember, he put Abraham to sleep.

Normally a covenant both sides would shake hands or something.

It came time for Abraham to shake his hand and he fell asleep.

God is actually.

Exercising the commitments to the covenant unilaterally.

God is doing this Himself, and that is what is going to make Abram faithful and righteous.

This is very practical for you.

You will persevere in your faith, not because you are strong enough, big enough, or bold enough to persevere in your faith.

You will persevere in your faith because God is faithful and he is righteous.

Now, if you are strong enough, big enough, and bold enough to persevere in your faith, that's great.

But know that you are those things as a gift of God.

God made you that way.

God gave you your perseverance.

If you think there's no way I'm going to lose my salvation because I'm nobody can prime.

When I commit to something, I'm all in.

I grab with both all my hands and okay, if that's true about you, great, but know that it's God who gave you that gift.

And for others of us who are like, oh, I don't know if I can hold on to my salvation.

I'm so weak.

It's okay.

It's God who will do it through you.

It is God who is righteous.

This is important to know when you're praying.

Because God is the one who chooses.

When you're praying to God, you are praying to the one who chose you to be in a relationship with Him.

He chose you.

He chose you.

He chose you by name.

He gave you His Spirit.

This is the lesson of the Old Testament.

This prayer doesn't go through all the heroes of the Old Testament.

This prayer does not go through everyone in Hebrews 11, although your own prayer could, and you as you think through these people, you recognize they all teach the same lesson.

Abraham taught that it is God who chooses and calls you into covenant.

Isaac taught that God's promise is what counts, not human innovation, because they had some pretty neat ideas about it.

Jacob taught, the lesson of Jacob's life is that it is God who chooses election.

It does not depend upon man.

Jacob was a twin, same mother, even.

Jacob was the younger brother, too, that rascal.

And yet the covenant was his, so that we learned that God's election doesn't depend upon man.

David wasn't even strong enough or bold enough or mighty enough to be counted among the sons of Jesse to begin with, and yet God chose him to teach us that lesson.

Esther, God chooses some practical orphan, really, to rescue his people from destruction.

God will never neglect his people.

He will give them saviors to rescue them at every turn.

That's the lesson that God is the one who chooses.

And so when you come to God with your own, with your own problems, you come to God with your own concerns in life, recognize you're coming to the God who chose you to be in a relationship with him.

Yes, God can hear all things in the world.

Yes, God knows everybody's heart, but your heart particularly, he chose you to be in a relationship with him.

Nehemiah understands this.

The Levites understand this.

That's why for them they're praising God that He is the one who chooses.

They're praising God for election.

If you're a Christian, it's because God chose you to be a Christian.

I know sometimes Americans have a problem with the doctrine of election, not the political election.

Theological.

Americans have a problem with the theological concept of election sometimes because we say, you know what, that's not right.

My free will, I should get to choose.

What about my free will?

What about me?

Well, okay, what about your free will?

Free from what?

Is your will free from God's plan for your life?

No, it's not.

If you think your will is free from God's plan for your life, I have a book I'd like you to read.

God is sovereign over your life.

And so you are in a relationship with Him based upon His will, His initiation.

Now, for Americans, that causes us problems because we like human independence and, you know, all that kind of stuff, one person, one vote kind of thing.

But the Levites aren't coming from a democracy background.

The Levites receive the doctrine of election as good news for prayer.

Oh, how liberating it is to pray to a God that chose me.

How liberating is it to pray to a God that wants to be in a relationship with me and that he initiated it?

We love God because he first I mean that should fuel your prayer life.

I hear people say, you know, if God is sovereign, why bother praying?

Have you heard that?

I flip that around.

If God's not sovereign, why bother praying?

I mean, if God's not in charge, why bring him your requests?

What do you want him to do about it?

I mentioned the presidential election earlier.

I have a seven-year-old daughter.

You don't need to persuade her who the right candidate is.

She can't vote.

She's seven.

Okay, all of your energy sent to persuade her.

At the end of the conversation, she'll ask me, wait, which side are we on again?

She doesn't know the political parties.

She can't even vote.

So don't persuade her to which candidate, okay?

You get that?

She can't help you when it comes to the election.

If God is not sovereign over the affairs of men, why would you bring your prayer request to him?

What do you want him to do about it?

Can he hear your prayers?

Can he do something about it?

Can he act on them?

Well, if he's sovereign, yes, he can.

That's why we pray to a sovereign God.

So just appreciate that Nehemiah's prayer is the foundation of his prayer, is that God is indeed the chooser.

God is indeed the one who is in charge.

That fuels prayer.

It doesn't silence prayer.

Thirdly, God is the savior.

God is the savior.

You see this in verses 9 through 12.

You saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt.

You heard their cry at the Red Sea.

You did the signs and wonders in verse 10.

It's going to describe, we're not going to read all these verses, but it describes the Red Sea parting.

It describes the plagues.

It describes the provision of manna and water in the wilderness.

It describes the fire that guides them.

God brought them out of slavery and then carried them all the way home.

He has the power to save.

It does no good if God just leads them out of slavery and then leaves them in the wilderness.

No, they need somebody to care for them and provide for them all the way to the promised land.

A good pilot is not one who can just take the, you know, take off well.

A good pilot has to actually land the plane well too.

That's the key part of your flight.

That's the way God is.

He doesn't just get them out of Egypt, he carries them all the way to the promised land safely.

He's described here as sending them, he is the savior, and he sends them saviors.

He is the one who provides for them and he takes them to where he wants them to dwell.

This event described in verses 9 through 12 is the most commonly cited event in the Old Testament.

There are more Old Testament references about God delivering Israel from Egypt than any other events, even more than creation, more than the flood, more than the Tower of Babel.

And those other events you think have more global scope.

Yes, but when the Jews go and think about how God is faithful to them, their mind goes back to the Red Sea crossing.

All their holidays celebrate this.

Passover, instituted before God led them into slavery.

Yom Kippur, instituted in the law, given to them in the wilderness, the uh the Sukkot or the Feast of the Tabernacles, the tents, and you can see the stars through the roof of it to remind them when they were in the wilderness.

I mean, it is so often described in the Old Testament.

Their minds keep going back to this event that God knows how to save them.

They're hungry, he gives them food.

They're thirsty, he gives them water.

If he needs to give food just magically appearing from the ground, so to speak, manna, there it is.

He will provide for them.

Water from the rock, there it is.

He will provide for them to teach them the lesson.

If he can save them physically, that means he will be able to save them spiritually.

He will save them spiritually.

That's why we pray to God, recognizing that he is the one who saves us.

He is the one who chooses us.

This all fuels each other.

So God appears to Moses in the wilderness.

Before the Exodus, when Moses was in hiding, God appears in the burning bush and calls Moses and tells Moses, I'm Yahweh, gives him his name.

He's introducing, God's initiating here.

So God chooses Moses.

Moses was not looking for Yahweh.

Yahweh chose him, reveals himself to him, and then calls him to lead the people to slavery.

Moses says, No, not gonna do it.

I can't do it well.

I can't stand up to Pharaoh.

I'm too weak.

I cannot do it.

And God does not say, okay, I'll find someone else.

He says, Moses, maybe you're not listening.

The burning bush, my name is Yahweh, I made the universe.

I'm telling you, I made you for this.

Now go and do it.

And yet it's clear when Moses goes and does it that it is God who is working through him.

So when Moses is praying to the Lord throughout this time, his prayer is bringing all these strands together that God made Moses.

Remember, God tells Moses, Who made your mouth?

You think you stutter?

Who made your tongue, Moses?

I did.

So Moses, as he's praying to God, is praying with a stuttering tongue that God gave him, knowing that God chose him, and ultimately knowing that it will be God who is the one who will save them.

That fuels your prayer, which makes Moses look forward to the day that he'll send the ultimate Savior.

Next, God is the ruler, not just the Savior, but God is the ruler.

You see this in verses 13 and 14.

Now that God has led them in the wilderness and saved them, you came down on Mount Sinai and you spoke with them from heaven, and you gave them right rules and true laws and good statutes and commandments.

God, because he made them, God, because he owns them, God, because he will save them, can tell them how to live their life.

Do you notice how God's commands are predicated on who he is?

I can't give you commands on how to live your life because I didn't make you.

With three exceptions.

I can command my daughters all day long.

God can tell you how to live because he made you.

And he made you for his glory.

He made you for your good and his glory.

So as he reveals himself to you, he can tell you how to lead your life.

And you respond to that believing that his commands to you are good.

Do you notice the language here in verse 13?

They're right rules, they're true laws, they're good commandments.

Do you see the descriptors on them?

You can tell when a heart is getting hard towards the Lord when those descriptors go away.

Remember Eve, as she was tempted by the serpent?

She didn't describe God's command as good and right.

She said, Yeah, God told us not to eat or even touch the fruit.

You see the hardening already in her heart.

She's already adding to the word of God.

She did not receive God's commands for her good.

No, a heart that is filled with faith receives God's commands and his laws and his ordinances as a blessing, as the Levites do here.

They're good commands.

So when God tells you how to live, you realize those commands are for your good.

And God has the authority to give them over your life.

He has the authority to tell you how to live your life because you belong to him.

He sets the terms.

Now, the flip side of that is his laws actually do give life.

The blessing about him being the Lord of life is that his laws do give you life.

His laws do chart out a good way for you to live.

You know, if you're leading a life of unconfessed sin right now, it's not gonna work out well for you.

Your sin will be exposed.

If you're contemplating an unbiblical divorce from your spouse, that's not gonna be for your good.

That's gonna burn down your house.

It's gonna devastate your family.

So that's a good reason not to do it.

A good reason not to commit adultery is because it will have devastating effects in your life.

That's a good reason not to it.

That's not the main reason not to do it.

That's not the main reason to get an unbiblical divorce or to pursue sexual immorality or to be a thief or insert whatever sin you want to insert there.

The main reason not to do it is nothing to do with it being bad for you.

The main reason not to do it is it goes against God's commands.

But the secondary reason is that God's commands are, in fact, actually good for you.

When you model your life off of his word, it goes well for you.

When you disobey his word, it goes poorly for you.

And on top of all that, he's your creator and owns you.

So when you're praying to God and his prayers are being channeled through that pipe, your prayers are being channeled to him through the surrounding pipe of his goodness and the fact that he is in authority over you, your prayers will have power and they'll have efficacy.

You can't pray to God if you have unconfessed sin in your life.

And God doesn't hear those prayers.

I mean, God will actually hear those prayers.

His omniscience is still in, you know, active.

You have unconfessed sin in your life, you're praying to him.

He does hear the prayers.

They reach his ears, so to speak.

He's aware of what you're praying.

But he's not gonna act on your prayers if you're living in unconfessed sin because you're not recognizing that he's your ruler.

You're in revolt against him, you're rebelling against him by living in unconfessed sin, and yet you're praying to him.

You're not in a position to negotiate with God.

If you're rebelling against him, he's not gonna hear your prayers.

You can't sue for peace when you're fighting against him.

You have to first submit yourself to him, confess your sin to the Lord, humble yourself before him, confess your sin, and be in a right relationship with him.

So this starts with you recognizing and confessing that God's word is true, that he has the right to tell you how to live, that his word is holy, his word is just, and he has the right to tell you how to live it out in your life.

Do you believe that?

Do you believe that God's word is for your good and that he has the right to tell you what to do?

Because it's very easy to say, God, you better back off.

Your commands are cutting a little close to the cotton here.

I want to live my life my way.

I don't want you interfering with my happiness or my goals or my desires.

So you do your thing, I'll do my thing.

Maybe we'll meet in the middle sometimes.

No.

To be in a right relationship with God, you recognize that He is the rule giver.

He is the one who rules this world through his law.

He is the standard of holiness, which means, next, that he is also the enforcer.

Verses 16 through 17.

He has the right to enforce his covenant.

They and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck.

They didn't obey your commandments, they refused to obey.

They were mindful of all the wonders.

They weren't mindful of all the wonders you performed, they stiffened their neck again.

That phrase is repeated over and over and over again.

But God is the enforcer.

Perhaps when you read it, it's a it's an unusual idiom for our ears, isn't it?

Stiffened their neck.

Uh it's an animal phrase, you know.

It's a an animal who's being obstinate stiffens his neck.

It's hard to see with like a cat or a dog.

Like you're trying to lead a cat or a dog, you know, into their crate or into the car to go to the vet or whatever, and they might push against you, but it's hard, they have such short necks, you don't get the full experience of it.

But a camel, on the other hand, has a long neck.

And you try to lead a camel where it doesn't want to go.

I mean, its feet may be pointing this way, but its neck is like all stretched out the other direction, spitting at you.

But it's that's where the expression goes, the stiff neck.

It comes from that.

The camel's neck is stiffened against the way you want it to go.

That's what people are like.

When we're rejecting God and his word, we're stiffening our necks against him.

We know God wants us to do this, but we've stiffened up against him and we're pulling away.

And what the Levites are saying is this is what our ancestors did.

They stiffened their necks against you.

And it was against God.

And God has the right to judge people for their sin.

That's the state of sinful people.

The Bible says we will all die and stand before God for judgment.

Just as appointed Hebrews 9 27, for man to die once, after that comes judgment.

2 Corinthians 5, we all stand before God to give an account for the deeds done in the flesh, both good and evil, both good and empty.

We will give an account before God because all of our sin is against him.

The Jews may have sinned against the Hittites or the Amalekites, but their sin, any sin they had, was ultimately against Yahweh and him alone.

Specifically, the Jews sinned against the Gibeonites.

They sinned against the Gibeonites all the time, and yet they had to make amends with God first.

All sin is ultimately against God.

He has the right to enforce his covenant.

Remember, Abraham went to sleep for the covenant?

The Jews, when they re-entered the covenant in the promised land, Mount Horeb.

That was the whole point of that covenant, it was that God will execute it.

He will bless them if they're faithful, and he will curse them if they are unfaithful.

But it is God who is decides.

It's God who runs the verdict.

Are they being faithful or are they disobeying?

God is the judge, not us.

We don't get to decide if we've been faithful to the Lord.

He decides because he is the judge.

You go to court after you present your case, it might go to the jury or it might go to the judge, but it will not go to the defendant.

No judge is gonna say, after listening to all the evidence on both sides, this is too close to tell.

Defendant, what say you?

Guilty or innocent?

No, no.

The judge or the jury decides, but not the defendant.

In our relationship with the Lord, we are the defendant when it comes to our sin.

We stand accused.

He is the judge.

He enforces his covenant.

But because he's the enforcer, that means that he can also be the forgiver.

God is also the forgiver.

We see this in the middle of verse 17, for example.

17B down there.

But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in chesed, covenant love, abounding in that steadfast love is how the ESV renders it.

And you didn't forsake them.

God is eager to forgive.

Because he's the one who enforces his laws, he's the one who can often who can forgive people for breaking them.

Only the one who has sinned against can forgive.

So again, I'm using three daughters as an illustration here.

If the middle one punches the oldest one, the younger one cannot forgive the middle one.

Does that make sense?

If let me get outside of daughters to your neighbors, if your neighbor on your left punches you, your neighbor on the right cannot forgive the neighbor on the left.

So hey, it's all it's all squared away.

I forgive you.

What about me?

I'm the one who got punched.

Maybe I don't want to forgive.

But if I do want to forgive, it's got to be me that forgives because I'm the one that was punched.

Only God can forgive people for sin.

Because sin is against him.

And history is a litany of God's forgivenesses.

That's why this whole chapter repeats over and over and over again.

Our ancestors sinned against God all the time.

All the time they sinned against him.

And yet God always forgave.

I love verse 17, the last part of it, because it describes a God who is eager to forgive.

He's ready, it says, to forgive.

It doesn't say he's ready to judge.

It says he's ready to forgive.

In fact, judgment is a tool that leads people to forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not a tool that necessarily leads people to judgment.

God describes himself as ready to forgive, and if it takes judgment to break you to the point where you ask for forgiveness, that's great.

But the Bible does not describe God as a God ready to judge, who might use forgiveness to bring you to the point of judgment.

This is not a the two streets aren't equal here.

God uses judgment to bring you to where you repent and you are forgiven.

He judges people to lead them to forgiveness.

He doesn't forgive people to lead them to judgment.

That's why the Lord's Prayer does not say, hey, when you pray this way, say, Father, judge quickly.

And you say, Father, forgive me.

Father, forgive us as we forgive those who sinned against us.

When you pray to God for forgiveness, you're praying to him, asking for something that he is re ready and willing to do.

He is slow to anger.

He is merciful, verse 17 says, abounding in that kind of steadfast and covenant love.

Do you remember the lay man lowered to the roof in Matthew chapter 9?

Matthew 9 · chapter mention

Jesus tells him, I forgive you of your sins.

And the Pharisees are indignant about this, so upset.

How dare he forgive them of their sins?

And so Jesus says, All right, so you know the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins.

I command you to pick up your mat and walk.

The miracle of walking was designed to attest that he has the authority to forgive sins.

Notice how those kind of miracles are always tied to forgiveness, not judgment.

It's not, so you know the Son of Man has authority to judge your sin, I'll have him pick up his mat and walk.

No, it's he's building people towards forgiveness.

The Pharisees were so angry at that.

Do you remember what they said?

Who can forgive sin except God alone?

To which I say, Amen.

I love it when the Pharisees get something right.

Who can forgive sins except God alone?

Nobody.

Nobody.

Note down in verse 20.

You gave your good spirit to instruct them.

I love this.

A rare term in the Old Testament.

It's a Trinitarian concept that God gave Himself.

And when you give your spirit, you're giving yourself, aren't you?

We don't even have a human way to give your spirit.

Because it's so essential to who we are.

But God sends his spirit, it's his own spirit, his good spirit.

No one is good except God alone.

The Holy Spirit, of course, having the nature of God.

God gives his good spirit to instruct us.

He doesn't withhold the manna or the water, it says in verse 20.

These are from sinful people because God is so eager to provide his light.

In his direction and his nourishment, even in the middle of their sin.

Which leads us to God as the fulfiller.

God is the fulfiller.

Verse 23 through 25 repeats all of this covenantal language.

We don't have time to go through it, but God is using, Nehemiah and the Levites are using language that God used towards Abraham, towards Joshua, towards Moses and the Israelites in the covenants.

He told Abraham, I'll make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky.

And that's what you see in this section here.

He told Joshua, You'll dispossess the land from the nations around you.

You'll take it over.

In verse 24, our descendants did.

They possessed the land and subdued them.

They captured the cities.

So all of God's covenantal language is being fulfilled by God.

God made promises of his people and he fulfills those promises.

Again, I hope you see how this helps your prayer life.

When you understand that if God has promised something, it will be God who fulfills that thing.

If God is the one who said, I will never leave you or forsake you, then you pray to God that he won't leave you or forsake you because it's God who will answer that prayer.

If God has said, with every temptation, He'll give you a way of escape, you pray to God in light of that promise to give you a way to escape temptation.

And he will do it because he's the one who promised it.

So you pray to him in light of his promises because he has a track record of fulfilling his promises.

He says, if you lack wisdom, pray, I'll give you wisdom.

So you pray to God for that wisdom in light of all of these things.

You see how they're all progressing?

It doesn't make sense to pray to God for wisdom if you're living in an unconfessed sin.

I really don't know what to do about this sin.

Okay, repent.

That's what the Bible says.

But if you're in a right relationship with the Lord, then you work through and you pray to God in light of his promises and he hears and he answers.

He answers in these covenantal terms, responding to people based upon his own promises to them.

In other words, when you pray to God for mercy or forgiveness or grace or wisdom, you're not praying to him for something that he's reluctant to give.

You're praying to him for something that he has actually promised he would give.

He said so himself.

Well, that's the adoration part of this psalm.

That moves kind of into the confession part, and we'll uh go somewhat quickly through these to the confession part.

Whoa.

You just go to the title slide.

I don't want you singing the song yet.

Uh to the confession part here.

Verses 26 to 31 starts to rehearse all the sins the people did.

Verse 26, nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against you.

They cast your law from behind their back.

They killed your prophets.

They kept sinning against God.

They kept running from Him.

This is the story of the Old Testament.

This whole chapter, Nehemiah 9, is kind of Old Testament 101, isn't it?

It brings you through a survey of the Old Testament.

And the Old Testament is a survey of the Israelites' unrighteousness and their sinfulness, and yet God's propensity to keep forgiving them.

This is what is remarkable.

Verse 28 is probably my favorite verse in this here.

After they had rest, they did evil again before you.

So God forgave them and they sinned again.

God forgave them and they sinned again.

God put them in exile, they sinned again.

I mean, they they God keeps helping them and they keep sinning.

And after one of those cycles, you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies, so they had dominion over them.

Yet when they turned and cried to you, you heard from heaven.

And many times you delivered them from according to your mercies.

He doesn't even say which event he's talking about here.

That's the Old Testament story right there.

That goes so much against our human nature how we think about God because as we think about God, we're like, I spent five years running from him.

It should take at least one or two years of me working really hard to be a good boy for to be back in a right relationship with him.

You know what I mean by that?

Like I spent so long in this sin that I would imagine it would take a long time for me to work my way back into God's good graces.

That's not how God works.

God gives grace to you and forgiveness to you when you ask.

You could have been running from him for five or ten years.

I talked to somebody after first service who said they'd been running from the Lord for 10 years.

They used to go to church regularly.

For 10 years they've been running.

How encouraging is it to know it takes one moment to be back on the right road.

If you're running away from the Lord, it's not the kind of wrong turn you have to trace back all of your steps to go back.

Where did things go wrong 10 years ago?

Man, you would end back up in the garden if you did that trick.

You don't have to go back and figure out what went wrong the first time.

No, you just repent right now.

No matter how far away you've run from the Lord, you're always right there.

Forgiveness is right behind you.

So just stop.

Stop.

Confess your sin and turn to him, and he will forgive.

He will forgive.

This doesn't mean you gain a good life by obeying God's commandments.

It just means you get back into a right relationship with him by turning to him and asking for forgiveness.

Thanksgiving, I'll skip this because of time, but we've basically already covered it.

So much of the psalm is giving thanksgiving to God.

But what about supplication?

What is Nehemiah and the Levites actually asking for in here?

Because this is, I think, is so convicting.

It's in verse 32.

Therefore, our God.

This all building this request.

Therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, the awesome God, repeating what they said at the beginning.

In case we forgot, it was five hours ago, reminding ourselves.

Here's the request.

Let not all the hardship seem little to you.

That's the request.

God, we want you to know what we've been through.

We've been through so much.

And there's even a wrestling in their mind how they described it in verse 29 down to that verse.

I mean, is this God's fault?

They're not blaming him, but he's the one who exiled them.

And they're saying this.

You hear their, if you were to read this on your own sometime, you would feel their pathos here as they say, we're in trouble, God, because you sent us into exile.

Not that we're blaming you.

But it was you.

Our ancestors were sinning and they totally deserved it.

But you're the one who did it.

But we're not accusing you of wrongdoing.

At the end of all this, God, just know this is hard.

That's what we want you to know, God.

Where we are right now is hard.

Can you understand that?

How different that is in the way Americans often pray.

Because we like to pray, this is my problem, Lord.

Here it is, spelled out.

I have come up with a solution.

There's three solutions, there's three logical solutions.

I have sought counsel from all of my friends.

I've charted out the pros and cons of all three of these, and we and my multitude of wise counselors have settled on option B.

And option B is best implemented in these four ways.

Here you go.

You're like, why isn't God answering my prayer?

That's isn't that the way we pray?

I know I'm so so tempted to pray that way for things.

Like, this is the problem, and here's the best solution, God.

I've thought a lot about this and got a lot of wisdom from a lot of wise people, God, so this is the best answer.

That's not how the Levites are praying here.

They're saying, God, this is the problem.

And it hurts, and you need to know about it.

There you go.

It doesn't make sense for both of us to stay up all night worrying about this, God, and you don't sleep, so it's on you now.

Take care of it.

That's their supplication.

That's what they're building for.

They see the effects of sin in their life, they see their own kingdom, that they're suppressed and oppressed in their own kingdom.

They want God to know and they want to ask God, what are you going to do about it?

And they're going to respond to this by making a covenant with God again, and we'll look at that tonight.

So in my family, there are people, my extended family, there are people that I only see occasionally, regularly, but occasionally.

Perhaps on holidays, perhaps at funerals, honestly, is where I'm mostly seeing these people is funerals.

They're part of my family, you know, aunts or cousins or something.

They're certainly part of my family, and I see them somewhat regularly at those events.

But we don't communicate between those events.

There's no, like if I got a phone call from one of them and I saw their name on caller ID, I would be surprised.

I would think something's probably wrong.

I better take this.

What's wrong?

Or a text message would just be unusual.

I'm not saying they're not my family.

They are certainly my family.

But we're not really friends.

And I'm not blaming them for this.

I recognize a phone is a two-way street.

I could call them as easily as they can call me.

I could text them just as easily as they could text me.

It's just, you know, we'll see each other regularly, and that's just what it's like.

Now I wonder if some of you have a relationship with the Lord like that.

Where you come to church regularly and you'll see the Lord next Sunday.

You know, here we are at the end of one Lord's Day, you'll be back next Lord's Day, you'll see the Lord here next Sunday.

But you don't have any communication with him throughout the week.

It shouldn't be like that.

You develop a friendship with people by spending time with them.

Maybe you have coworkers like that.

You'll see them at the, you know, the monthly staff meeting, you'll see them at that monthly staff meeting, and then you'll see them again next month at that staff meeting, or you're on some team together, and at those team meetings you'll see each other, but you don't have a relationship with that person.

You don't text or call outside of work.

You're not really friends.

The Lord designed you to be in a relationship with him.

He designed you for you to pray and communicate with him.

He communicates to you through his word.

You communicate back to him through prayer.

You can't go Sunday to Sunday without communicating to him.

He wants to be in a relationship with you.

Maybe some of you are in a situation where if you did pray to God, he would be like, oh, God does have my number.

Sees your name on call already.

He does know how to get hold of me.

I wonder what's going on.

You need to be in a more regular relationship with the Lord because he designs you to be in a relationship with him.

That relationship begins by you confessing your sins, and he's faithful and just to forgive us of our sins.

Lord, we're grateful for your word.

We know that you are faithful and just to forgive us of our sins.

I pray for anyone here this morning who's been running from you, no matter how long, years perhaps, a decade perhaps.

I pray this morning they would stop running and turn and confess their sins to you and would find themselves restored because you are eager to forgive.

We know we are weak.

If our salvation depended upon us, we would fail.

If we had to keep it and guard it and hold it, we would fail.

But you are eager to forgive.

You share your forgiveness with us.

And so we're thankful for that.

Lord, give us the courage and the boldness and the humility to pray this week.

Humility to recognize we need you in our lives, courage to know that we can approach you with boldness before the throne of grace.

We know our salvation depends not on us, but on you.

That when we falter, when we stumble, you hold us fast.

And so we pray to you, in light of the fact that it is your firm hand that holds us, we're in your grip, and so we pray to you as if we were.

It's the name of Christ we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to meet you personally at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and other church information is on our website at ibc.church.

If you want information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been an encouragement to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.