Neh No.2 The Gap Man

You will remember that it's one of the books that follows closely on after the historical books of Kings and Chronicles. The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hakaliah, and it came to pass in the month Chislu in the 20th year as I was in Shushan the palace, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came. He and certain men of Judah, and I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which were left to the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem.

They said unto me, the remnant that are left to the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burnt with fire. It came to pass when I heard these words that I sat down and wept and mourned certain days and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven and said, I beseech thee, O Lord God of heaven, the great and terrible God that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love him and observe his commandments, let thine ear now be attentive and thine eyes open that thou mayest hear the prayer of thy servant which I prayed before thee now day and night for the children of Israel, thy servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel which we have sinned against thee, both I and my father's house have sinned.

We have dealt very corruptly against thee and have not kept the commandments nor the statutes nor the judgments which thou commandest thy servant Moses. Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandest thy servant Moses saying, if ye transgress I will scatter you abroad among the nations, but if you turn unto me and keep my commandments and do them, though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there. Now these are thy servants and thy people whom thou hast redeemed by thy great power and by thy strong hand.

O Lord, I beseech thee, let now thine ear be attentive to the prayer of thy servant and to the prayer of thy servants who desire to fear thy name and prosper. I pray thee, thy servant, this day and grant him mercy in the sight of this man, for I was the king's cup bearer. Now perhaps you'll be kind enough to have your Bibles open at the first chapter of the book of Nehemiah.

The last statement in the 11th verse says this, for I was the king's cup bearer. Nehemiah, the Jew, is a man referred to. Artaxerxes is a monarch that is referred to and the place is Shushan, one of the capitals of the Persian empire.

Now to be a cup bearer, as I reminded you last week, was to have a position of importance and influence. Who knew what was in store for Nehemiah? Like Moses, his ancestor, he had an inroad into the royal family. He was in a position of affection.

The horizon was full of scintillating opportunities, but both Moses and Nehemiah, despite their advantages which seemed to be a freak of history on the human level, were unhappy. Moses, because his kith and kin were under the tyranny of the Egyptians, and Nehemiah, because news had reached him that despite the fact the Jews, or some of them, had been back in Jerusalem for nigh on 90 years, the walls of the city and the gates thereof were in ruins, burnt down with fire, as verse 3 intimates. God has a city today.

The city is His church, and around His church, international, and indeed, as we develop the theme metaphorically around every individual citizen of the church of God, there should be walls, a wall that is strong, a bulwark which will resist any of the assaults of the enemy. But you do not need me to emphasize the fact that the city, or rather the wall around the city of our God, is crumbling in certain areas, not just on the national and international scene, though that is true, but also in our personal lives. The fortifications are not what they should be.

Look into your own heart. If you deny that observation, expose yourself to Scripture. Allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate before you those areas where you are defective, and you will have to agree with the pronouncement that I am making.

The faults are obvious. The wall around Jerusalem is in a state of disrepair. So what do you do when you find a local church or the national church in a situation similar to this one historically, where literally the walls of Jerusalem were crumbling? What do you do? Well, don't you get to work? Perhaps you do what one denomination has done as far as its missionary interests are concerned.

You bring in a secular firm who engage in a time and study, time and motion study, and they endeavor to make the missionary department, if you please, more efficient, and to bring up schemes that will excite people to donate more to the cause of Christ, so-called. Or perhaps you engage in street collections, as I was asked to do not so long ago in this town, for some very good philanthropic work. Maybe you bring in someone with a charisma, with an ability to organize, and you feel that with better methods you'll be able to attend to the walls and rebuild them.

I used to feel myself that the way to build a wall of Jerusalem was to immerse myself in a study of Greek and to have a short-lived affair with Hebrew, and to imbibe as much as I possibly could of Puritan literature, to school myself in doctrine, to have a systematic theology, and then prepared like this, I went away and tried to build the wall in my life and in other people's lives. And I was given a rude reminder that that sort of method doesn't work on the individual plane any more than these methods on the more collective scene work in trying to shear up the walls, rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. What did Nehemiah do? When he learned that the wall of Jerusalem was broken down and the gates thereof were burnt with fire, he prayed.

He didn't go to Kux of Shushan, assuming that there was a travel agency, and got himself a ticket on one of the camel parties that were setting off towards Palestine with a shovel in one hand and with plans drawn up by an architect in the other. He went into his closet and for certain days he engaged in the ministry of intercession. I think without being patronizing or engaging in self-congratulations, there was nothing basically wrong with my idea of getting to grips with Hebrew and Greek and going through Calvin's great systematic theology, the Institutes.

Nothing wrong with it in principle, but having done all that and applied myself to the wall in my life and the walls in other people's lives, nothing really seemed to happen of significance. I saw the wall go up a bit and then I saw it fall down. Why was this? Well, I think the explanation is found in a little verse of Scripture tucked away in the 22nd chapter of Ezekiel, and there we find in the 30th verse that there is a search going on in the divine realm for a human agent to do something for God.

I sought for a man among them. To do what? To go and preach? No. To go and evangelize? No.

To go and organize? Not a bit of it. I sought for a man among them that should make up their hedge and stand in the gap before me for the land. Mark this well.

The lesson comes over loud and clear from the character of Nehemiah. Wall builders, the men who build up the walls are first of all gap men. Before they attend to the task of building up the wall, they stand in the gap and they intercede.

Abraham stood before God and had a mighty ministry of intercession. We are told that the Tishbite in days of national apostasy stood before the Lord, and in a delightful reference in the epistle of James, the Holy Spirit writes up the biography of Elijah in two words, the greatest tribute that the Spirit of God ever gave to any one man. He prayed.

Elijah, like Abraham, was a gap man. I learned the hard way that the attraction of actually building the wall often eclipses the prerequisite of standing first in the gap. What does all this boil down to? You argue with my pronouncement from scripture or maybe you haven't followed me.

Well, look at the prayer meeting in most churches. It's the Cinderella of the church program, of the weekly list of activities. Look at the paucity of private intercession amongst most evangelical Christians.

The Puritan writer Richard Sibbes comments like this, speaking about the devil's concern to keep us from prayer. When we go to God by prayer, the devil knows we go to fetch strength against him and therefore he opposes us all he can. It would have been the sensible thing for Nehemiah on hearing of the state of the walls in Jerusalem to have set off with alacrity for the holy city.

After all, he got the vision. The people who'd been in Jerusalem for nigh on 90 odd years, they'd lost it. You remember I informed you last week, despite the fact they'd had the ministries of Zechariah and Haggai and also Ezra, they had not attended to one of the things which God thought to be important, the building of the walls.

So when Nehemiah gets the vision, he would have been excused on the human level for going all haste to Jerusalem. But then you see, he would have been guilty of my folly, attending to the task immediately and having eclipsed that prerequisite which is necessary for anyone who will successfully build a wall. Before you can breach the gap, you've got to stand in the gap.

Mark that well and inwardly digest it. It's a principle from scripture that is latent in the Old Testament and patent in the New Testament, as I shall show you later on. From this chapter, let me put up a question.

How do gap men come before God? Well, there are four or five answers which are given to that particular question in this chapter. And the first one is this, reverently, reverently. Look at verse five.

Here's Nehemiah in his prayer closet. He's heard of the distressing situation in the holy city, so he brings his heart and breaks it before the Lord. But he expresses himself in language which I think could teach us a lot.

I beseech thee, O Lord God of heaven, the great and terrible God that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love him and observe his commandments. That's a vastly different way between the manner in which some of us approach the throne of God. Today, and I've said it before from this pulpit, there is sometimes a confusion between the concept of the Almighty and the Almighty.

Gap men distinguish between two extremes. A familiarity in the presence of God which borders on being repugnant and a refusal to come before the presence of God and to express yourself in an uninhibited way because he's your father. So you get the fanatics on one side who seem to live in something of a fanatical infernus and you get the cold people on the other side who seem to live in a refrigerator.

And gap men recognize that there is a middle road between a repugnant familiarity and a disobedience which prevents men and women from approaching the throne of God in an uninhibited fashion. I think that that 11th hymn, and this is why I was so concerned that we sang it, gives a balance very, very well indeed. O how I fear thee, living God, with deepest, tenderest fears, and worship thee with trembling hope and penitential tears! Yet I may love thee too, O God, almighty as thou art, for thou hast to ask of me the love of my poor heart.

Gap men come before God with reverence and yet with an uninhibited fashion in which they can express their heart's desire to the Lord. What's more, they come penitentially. Penitentially as well as reverently.

Look into the sixth and the seventh verses and there you will find from this piece of intercession, this choice prayer of Nehemiah, several instances where he identifies himself with the sins of the Israelites. We have sinned, he says at the end of the sixth verse, and then he's most more specific. Both I and my father's house have sinned.

We have dealt very corruptly against thee and have not kept thy commandments, nor thy statutes, nor the judgments which thou commandest thy servant Moses. Remember, here's a man who's standing in the gap, who's coming before God. There's a work to be done at Jerusalem, but there's a work that is far, far more important to be done on the spot in Persia.

I can't help thinking that it would be singularly our benefit for each one of us to have eavesdropped on the prayer of Nehemiah. I love to hear men at prayer. Don't you ladies take exception to that? I thank God for the intercessions of women too, and scripture is studded with examples of women who had a new great dimensions in their prayer life with the Lord.

But I love to hear a man who's taken up in prayer, and when the Holy Spirit breaks his heart, not because he's some sentimental sort, not because he works up some emotional condition of apoplexy, that is purely psychological and repugnant. But when a big, tall, strong man before God is broken as he thinks of the sinfulness of men and women, I tell you that it's singularly a blessing to listen to him pray and to react to the impact of his prayer upon your own life. When David Brainard was dying, and this isn't generally known, that great missionary to the American Indians, his deathbed actually was placed in the home of Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all preachers that America turned out.

And listen to this, I'm quoting from the book that impresses me so much, that I promised you last week ultimately I'd let you all have a copy, alas it's been delayed in transit from America, but these copies are on their way. Listen to this writer of this book making reference to Jonathan Edwards at the deathbed of Brainard. Jonathan Edwards watched Brainard while his daughter Jerusha wept.

As the tides of consumption grew greater over Brainard's body, godly Edwards wrote, I praise God that in his providence Brainard should die in my house so that I might hear his prayers, so that I might witness his consecration and be inspired by his example. Edwards' ministry was provoked to the dimensions of faith that it knew because of Brainard's prayer life. Another aspect about the man who stands before God is not just that he comes reverently and penitentially, he also comes intelligently.

When will people realize that evangelicals, or that evangelicals have in no way committed intellectual suicide? We come before our God informed as to what is happening in the world today, and with minds that are impregnated with scripture. Read Nehemiah's prayer most carefully and you will find that loosely he refers to scripture that has already been written, to the experiences of Moses with God and God's promises to Moses. And Nehemiah dips into these Old Testament passages and he brings them up in his prayers, he's got a mind you see that's informed.

There's nothing more wonderful than to listen to someone pray, and without any forcefulness trying to create some impression on the part of the hearers that they know the word of God, they alight upon a scripture and they exploit that promise of scripture in prayer. A letter reached my desk from Bangladesh this last week about a young Muslim who's been converted and is now working in one of the teams in Bangladesh, and the leader of the young workers for Jesus wrote to tell me that this fellow had learnt off by heart prior to his conversion to Christ the whole of the Koran, and now they can't satisfy his desire for the Bible, and they're teaching him and teaching him and teaching him, pouring truths of scripture into his mind. My interpreter in South India, a brother by the name of Chella, had such a knowledge of scripture that it's not an exaggeration to say he was a walking concordance.

I wish that my own knowledge of scripture was akin to his and he's 10 years my junior. I never went to theological college. On something like 100 occasions I must have checked him on verses of scripture in the New Testament as to where they were located, and on 98 out of every 100 occasions he was dead right as to chapter and verse, and when he went wrong it was only that he got a verse higher up or a verse lower down, and sometimes when the reference came twice or three times in the New Testament he quoted a lot, and I remonstrated with him that he wasn't really showing the humility that he should do.

A mind that's informed on scripture. How does a gap man come before God? Reverently, penitentially, intelligently, reflectively, reflectively. Verse 10, now these are thy servants and thy people whom thou hast redeemed by thy great power and by thy strong hand.

What is Nehemiah referring to? The deliverance of God on the part of the of the Hebrews, bringing them from Egypt across the Red Sea through Sinai and ultimately back to the promised land. That eclipsed everything else in the thinking of the Hebrews, that great redemption. So they had the Passover feast, you remember, to commemorate it annually.

Now it was on the basis of that redemptive work centuries ago that Nehemiah intercedes for the Jews at Jerusalem and the work that has yet to be accomplished in the holy city. Nehemiah's prayer has its roots in the past. Are you reflective in your praying? You say, what do you mean? I don't understand you.

Hear me. The church where I was brought up, we used to sing a hymn. I think it's a Sankey hymn actually, and maybe now in the 1970s and with a more sophisticated mind, though not necessarily a more spiritual one, I balk from that hymn.

I react against it, and maybe I should confess my sins to Almighty God. It's a hymn that says there's power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of Calvary. Power in the blood.

Do you know what it is to plead with God on the mercies of the shed blood of Jesus? We enter into the holiest place of all, says the writer of the Hebrew epistle, through the blood of Jesus Christ, the blood of the everlasting covenant. That blood is efficacious. It is that blood that cleanses men and women from their sin.

When we come to our God in prayer, we reflect upon what Jesus has done. We have the cross in front of us, the empty tomb, the concept of the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we come to the Father and we say, Father, because of what you have done historically, because of what you did in the life of your son centuries ago, I want this wall to be rebuilt. I stand in the breach and I bring this situation before you.

My problem, which God had to unscramble and reveal to me, was this, that I attempted to build a wall before I stood in the gap. Nehemiah the king's cupbearer was a gap man, and you've got to be a gap man before you can be a successful wall man. To close the gap, you've got to stand in the gap.

When will we learn this? There was a gaping hole in the righteousness of humankind when Jesus came into this world. It had known the assault of the enemy Satan upon it, and the wall was down. What did Jesus do? He came and stood in the gap before he breached the gap.

A wall will never stand without foundations. No more than an oak tree can stand and resist the tempestuous wind unless it's got roots that go down and down and down into mother earth. And this is why I'm singularly unmoved about the cost of the premises next door.

32,000 pound doesn't lose me one night's sleep. That's the easiest thing in expanding our work. The hardest thing is for you and for me to realize that to build the wall, we've got to stand in the gap first.

I haven't come back from the east with some sort of obsession in prayer about prayer to make some impact here on the south coast, God forbid. I have learned this from the lives of hundreds of people that I've met, not only in the east, but in this country, that no work for God can ever continue until you've got gap men before wall men. You can't build a wall that's going to resist the assaults of the devil.

Unless you've got some who've been laying foundations. I'm going to have to come back to this next week. If I break this open any further then it'll take me another 20 odd minutes.

So let's just take this home with us to reflect upon that God wants in this tabernacle not just 400 or moving up to 450 members. What he wants is 450 gap men and women who will come before him reverently, penitentially, intelligently and reflectively to intercede on behalf of this church and our own lives. Let's make a good foundation and let's get that wall built so that satan, when he tries to attack us, will find that we have a fortification that is invulnerable, that he cannot break through, hop over or tunnel under.

Let's be gap men for Jesus, for he seeks for men and women to stand in the gap. Amen. And I sought for a man to stand in the gap.

Father our heart breaks because we know the conclusion of that scripture and I found none. Oh God may it not be said of this fellowship here, our heart breaks that ever you might reach that conclusion. We would not put one finger toward the wall or lift one chisel or take one spade.

We would not move toward the wall until we stood in the gap and brought before you all the work that needs repairing. Father we've looked into Nehemiah's closet and we've seen there a picture of an intercessor and we want to be like him. So help us because he prefigured the Lord Jesus, the greatest intercessor of all.

May we be like our Saviour, gap men, for his sake. Amen.