Teaching Text

Nehemiah 1:1-11

The words of Nehemiah son of Hakaliah: In the month of Kislev in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem. They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.” When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. Then I said: “LORD, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you … day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father's family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses. Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’ … “They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand. Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.” I was cupbearer to the king.

Sermon Recap

This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued our Missional Formation series with a teaching on the first of nine distinctives and corresponding disciplines of Church of the City’s radical minimum standard for discipleship. We believe compelling missional disciples are marked by three things — tangible presence, counter formation, and sacrificial mission — and the distinctives and disciplines we will be diving into this season make up how to practically live these out in our day to day lives. The first distinctive, sitting under tangible presence, is Revival and Awakening, and the discipline is contending prayer. 

When we think about prayer, we typically think of three main categories: comforting prayer, venting prayer, and wishful prayer. However, there is a deeper level of prayer very few people reach in the Western Church today called contending prayer. Throughout the Scriptures and Church history, we have seen the doors of heaven open and close due to the prayers of righteous people, and Pastor Jon called us to consider the life of Nehemiah as a mentor in this kind of prayer. He was not a priest or a prophet, but a government official in a time of Israel’s exile and spiritual decline that God used to bring restoration to His people. 

The first thing we can learn from Nehemiah’s life is to expand our vision beyond our own concerns. Pastor Jon pointed out that you can tell what’s in someone's heart by the questions they ask, and Nehemiah inquires about the state of God’s people at his moment in history. He has a Kingdom vision, but one of Satan’s greatest plans is to limit our dreams to personal, secular dreams until we never consider what God wants for the world around us. The typical Christian struggles to pray beyond the personal stresses of their life, and they never actually access the burdens of God’s heart in their prayers. To see revival and awakening, we must lift our eyes to see the reality of decline we find ourselves in, and move from personal petition to intercession, expanding our circles of prayer to encompass more of God’s heart. 

In line with this, Nehemiah’s story also calls us to embrace an irreparably broken heart. We often move on from praying for something before it really gets into our hearts, but Nehemiah wept, mourned, fasted, and prayed before God for months after he heard about the state of Jerusalem. Many of us are waiting to develop a heart for something before we begin to pray, but oftentimes God’s heart is only accessed through prayer. We have to move beyond sympathy, and even empathy, and ask God to bring us to a place of agony in prayer. Our culture is designed to distract, numb, or comfort us from agonizing over the brokenness we experience in the world, but Jesus openly wept over death, idolatry, and the lost, and we need Him to restore His kind of prayer in the Church. 

In Nehemiah’s story we also see the power of contending prayer. Nehemiah did not casually approach God, but came to Him as the God of covenant promises. He also identified himself as part of the problem of Israel’s unfaithfulness, and repented on behalf of the whole nation. In the same way, we must identify and repent as we contend, acknowledging that what we are praying for may not have been our fault, but it is our responsibility. Ownership gives us authority in prayer, and allows us to pull on God’s responsibility to uphold His Word. 

Finally, Nehemiah’s story shows us that contending prayer can form us into the kind of people that can be the solution to our prayers. Nehemiah experienced God’s divine acceleration, seeing more restoration in Jerusalem in 52 days than had been restored in 52 years. Contending prayer has shaped not only history and the city we live in, but likely our personal stories. Both as individual and a community of compelling missional disciples, we must commit to consistently contending in prayer for God to come and move in our time. 

For additional information and resources about “Revival + Awakening” you can check out the guide here.