Neh No.5 Instant in Prayer

Go and cut your grass to feed your buffalos and your cows and your goats. Come back about four o'clock this afternoon. And you've got your corpee and your belt for cutting the grass, cutting the leaves off the trees.

Okay? Right. Now I showed you this because I want to tell you about a boy called Tech, who's about twenty-two and he lives about two hours' walk from our hospital in Ampeepo. And Tech had one of these, and one day Tech went up to the jungle to cut the grass for his cows and his buffalos.

Tech lived in a village, in a little village house, he didn't have a mum and dad, his mum and dad had died, he lived with his brother, but he had quite a lot of animals, and every day he had to go to the jungle to cut the grass to feed the animals. And he went off this day, and there wasn't much grass left, so he had to climb the tree to cut the leaves off the tree. And he climbed up the tree, and he took his corpee out, and he lopped off the leaves off the tree and made a good bundle down below.

He did this for about five, ten minutes, and then he started feeling funny. He started feeling all dizzy, and then he started to shake, and he fell. Now he fell out of that tree, it was a good high tree, he fell about fifty, eighty, maybe even a hundred feet down onto the ground below.

He fell there, and he laid there, because he was on his own, and nobody else was around. And some hours later, a friend of his from the same village came by, and saw Teck, saw what had happened, Teck wasn't unconscious, but he couldn't move. And he ran to the village very fast, because Nepalis are strong and they can run fast, and he called for some men, and he said, bring the hammock, and they brought this big, longer hammock out on a big bamboo pole, and some big strong men came up, about four men, so that they could take it in turns, and they put Teck in the hammock, and one man went in front, and one man went behind, and they carried him to the hospital.

When those two men got tired, the other two men carried on. They took him down to the hospital, and they put him in bed, and the doctor came to see him. Now a week later, Teck was still in hospital, of course, and he was in the critical ward, down in the hospital, and there was one big thing that was worrying Teck.

He'd fallen from the tree, and what he'd done was to fracture his spine, and he'd injured his spinal cord, for any of you who know what that is. And the serious thing was that Teck couldn't move his legs, and he was very worried about this, because if a Nepali can't walk, he may as well be dead, because he couldn't get around any other way, except to walk or to be carried, and he was very worried, because he didn't know if he'd ever be able to walk again, and this went on for some days, but Teck started to meet some people in this little hospital, and he started to talk to them and ask them questions. Now Teck was a Hindu.

His religion was Hinduism. He wore a red mark on his forehead to show he was a Hindu, to show he was a good member of Nepal. Sometimes he went to the temple, big festival days he went and joined in.

He knew a little bit about the Hindu gods, he had pictures of them in his house, and they had little gods in his house too, but he didn't know them very well, and all that Teck could remember of his Hindu gods were that he was very afraid of them, and he just did things in case nothing bad happened to him, because he was a bit superstitious. But there in the hospital, Teck talked to the people that worked there, and found that they were talking about a different god, and this god's name was Jesus. And Teck had never heard about Jesus before, even though he'd lived very near to what was a Christian hospital.

So he started asking questions, because he wanted to find out what they were talking about. And he asked Jagat, and Jagat was the man who worked in the cashier's office and took the money, and Jagat told him lots of things about Jesus. And he asked Manmaya, a girl he knew very well, because she lived quite near to his village, and she was a nurse, and she told him about Jesus.

And he asked Anima, she was a girl that came from India, and she helped Teck a lot. Later on she was to help Teck to get a wheelchair, so he could get around the hospital. And later on still she was to help to build him a room, so that he didn't have to be in the ward all the time, so that he could have his own place to live.

He also asked Dr. Tom, who was the doctor who was looking after him, who was very kind to him and very good to him. He asked Dr. Tom too. He was an American, but he told him about Jesus, just like the Nepalese had.

And this went on for some months, because Teck was in hospital a long time. In fact, Teck is still in hospital, because he can't go home. And many months later, Teck came to believe that Jesus Christ was his savior, as he was the savior of Jagat and Anima and Dr. Tom and all these others.

And it meant something very special to Teck, that here was a God who had died for him, who had risen again, and that Jesus was alive today, and that Jesus cared for him at a time when he had felt that really there wasn't anything worth living for. He'd fallen from a tree, he couldn't walk, nobody cared about him, nobody thought it was worth him living, but Jesus cared about him. And Teck came to love Jesus.

And Teck is still in Am People, but I had a letter just two months ago to say that this boy Teck, who was feeling a bit, just a bit depressed when I left Am People, he was feeling a bit fed up, because he was a young person and he couldn't get up, and he couldn't go and walk, and he couldn't go and play football, and he couldn't go with his friends to Kathmandu, which is what he'd like to have done. But somebody came to Teck just a few months ago, and God gave to them a special word of encouragement for Teck, and Teck's heart was very much encouraged. And then a few weeks later, Teck went to Kathmandu.

Wasn't easy for him to go to Kathmandu, but somebody carried him down on their back, a very strong man carried Teck, plus his wheelchair, they carried him down to the airport. Three hours walk it was down to the airport, and then he went on the plane to Kathmandu. He went to Kathmandu to join in the Youth for Christ meetings, and he also went to get some physiotherapy, to see if maybe we can help him to stand up, to help him to get moving again.

So, will you pray for Teck? He's a very special person, somebody who loves the Lord Jesus. And you know, one day, when you grow up, if you ever come to Nepal, maybe you'll meet Teck, he's worth meeting, but if you don't come to Nepal, you'll have a nice surprise one day. If you believe in the Lord Jesus, you're going to meet people like Teck when you get to heaven.

You're going to meet lots of people you haven't met in this country, because they love the Lord Jesus too. The book of Nehemiah and the second chapter, we have been engaged in a series of studies and indeed are continuing to push our way through this historical book of Nehemiah, and it's replete, it's chock-a-block full with lessons that are applicable to us as a community of people here in the tabernacle. Nehemiah was nothing if he was not a man of prayer.

I've been thinking during these last few days, not only of the prayer life of Nehemiah, but that of the Apostle Paul. Paul was a very busy man. I reckon if we were able to have, if we had been able to have lived during the period of Paul's ministry and had close contact with him, we would have marveled that he got so much done.

And yet, although he was busily engaged in stomping the Roman Empire, going from place to place, there was one thing that was paramount in his ministry, and that was intercession on behalf of those who were brought to know the Lord Jesus as their Saviour through his evangelism. So in Romans 1, verse 9, he says to the Christians at the centre of the Roman Empire, You get the same sort of thing in Thessalonians chapter 1, the first epistle. The third verse, we give thanks to God always for you.

The second verse, making mention of you in our prayers, remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and so on. And in that reading that I brought to you fresh from J.B. Philip's translation, you discover the apostle there enjoining the Roman Christians, and by extension each one of us, to maintain the prayer habit. Be instant in prayer.

Now Paul's not latching on to something that's novel to him. He's reproducing the very ministry of Jesus, who in Luke's Gospel tells his disciples, I think it's the 11th or 12th chapter, to retain an attitude of prayer, to be in prayer always. I often used to think as a young fellow in the Christian faith, well, this is physically, mentally asking for something that is beyond my grasp, beyond my reach.

How can you constantly be in prayer? Now that's the question that I reckon we will find an answer to as we look into these first seven or eight verses of Nehemiah 2. For Nehemiah gives us in his own lifestyle, in his own attitude, an illustration of a man who knows what it is to be constant in the ministry of intercession. In fact, we've touched upon this as we've pushed our way through the first 11 verses of the opening chapter. But here is Nehemiah standing in front of Artaxerxes.

You remember the latter is the king of Persia. In him is invested all power, the most mighty man in the world in his day. Nehemiah has a rather unique function.

He is cupbearer to Artaxerxes. That means to say that as a Jew he has, or the king Artaxerxes, has great confidence in him. But one thing troubles Artaxerxes as he looks upon his Jewish servant on this particular occasion, and it is the sad expression on the face of Nehemiah.

Thus in verse 2 the question crops up. Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? Nehemiah's reaction is also included. Then I was very sore afraid.

And well might Nehemiah be afraid. As the book of Esther will tell you if you sift through the fourth chapter, to go into the presence of an oriental monarch looking despondent or distressed was not allowed. It seemed to suggest to the superstitious mind of the eastern king that maybe you were engaged in a plot to overthrow him.

So the Jew Nehemiah might well be afraid as he confronts Artaxerxes, as this perceptive king sees his mental agitation written upon his face is worry and distress. So the king questions him about his condition. Now we know very well what it was that was causing the state of depression in Nehemiah.

He had heard of the disrepair of Jerusalem's walls. You remember the gates had been burnt and they had not been rehung. And Nehemiah when he hears that the Jewish people have been back in Palestine for 90 odd years and more and have not attended to this task which should have been at the top of their list of priorities, he is so upset he goes into his prayer closet and for 16 to 20 weeks he brings this before God with praying, with fasting, with mourning, with weeping.

All that you know. But Artaxerxes doesn't know. But what becomes clear to the king when Nehemiah stands in front of him is that his Jewish servant is despondent.

And Nehemiah for reasons I've explained trembles. And in verse 3 we find him responding to what the king has had to declare, has had to expose. Let the king live forever.

Why should not my countenance be sad when the city, the place of my father's sepulchres lieth waste and the gates thereof are consumed with fire? Now listen. Then the king said unto me, for what dost thou make request? And here our pivotal text which has been typed out in the note sheet for you in case you haven't got an A-V copy of the Bible comes into its own. So I prayed to the God of heaven.

So I prayed to the God of heaven. Now what I want to argue is this. That the timing of this prayer merits attention.

The timing of this prayer merits attention. Here is the king. You've got the scene well in front of you.

I've been at pains to describe it. Here's the king interrogating his Jewish courtier, his servant. And you would expect there would be an immediate response to what the king is inquiring about.

And there was. But sandwiched between the response, the answer that left the lips of Nehemiah, there was a prayer arrow which was sent from Nehemiah's heart to the God of heaven. I say the timing of his particular piece of intercession merits our attention on these grounds that if ever a man might have been excused of prayerlessness, Nehemiah was that man on this occasion.

The king is talking to him. This man whom I have explained has all power invested in him is inquiring into the welfare of his Jewish servant. Now, on such an occasion as that, one could have been excused on the human level for not bringing God into it at all.

After all, let's update this and apply the principles of this incident to ourselves. How many times have you and I said, you know, I just don't have time for prayer, for intercession. So many people have said to me here in the tabernacle, I don't have time to read the Bible.

I'm a housewife. I run my own business. I'm not like you.

I don't just have a job that commands something to do one day a week. The other six days a week I have to work. No time for prayer.

No time for Bible study. But when did anyone tell you that prayer was of necessity a prolonged period of intercession? Has it not been told you that there is prayer that can summon up all the sentiments of your own heart and can be compressed into a few words and sent into the very throne room of God itself? Nehemiah might well have excused his prayerlessness on this occasion, and none in the tabernacle here would have indicted, would have criticized him. And what's more, why did he need to pray? Because he knew what his response was to the question of the king.

For what dost thou make request? Well, it was obvious. He wanted to contact Thomas Cooks, as I told you before, and get a ticket on a mule train to go to Jerusalem to do what the Jews there should have been doing but hadn't for 90-odd years. He knew so well as to what his desire was.

And yet, even though he is convinced he will not respond without first interceding before his heavenly Father, Nehemiah has a holy caution. Peter, the disciple, is known because he was impetuous, and that condition had to be treated by the Holy Spirit in his life. Now, Nehemiah does not follow the Galilean fisherman in this respect.

He's not a man who's presumptuous. He's not a man who's impetuous. When confronted with this question, he sends an arrow up to heaven to ask for God still to confirm his will.

Another reason I argue why Nehemiah could be excused for not praying is this. He'd been doing just that for 16 to 20 weeks. We've worked this out, a piece of arithmetic that I gave you a week or four last.

He's been engaged in prayer before God about the state of the ruin at Jerusalem for a long period of time. So why pray now? Well, you see, those who frequent the throne room of heaven find that the prayer room or the attitude of prayer is irresistible. And they want more and more to be there and to ask for God's underlining of all that they think that he should do, that they should do in his service.

One more thing, why Nehemiah could have been forgiven for not praying, and why therefore the timing of this prayer is significant. The very environment was not conducive to praying. Do you ever feel like that? There you are, a schoolteacher with 30 or 40 children in front of you, or maybe a housewife and your own children at home are somewhat tiresome, or maybe a businessman and you're perplexed by the accounts that the accountant has just brought in, and you think, well, if any circumstance in my life lacked inducement to prayer, it's this.

But don't excuse yourself, because there is no place on God's earth which prohibits prayer being made. You can pray, and Nehemiah testifies to this in the environment of a godless king and queen, with all the unbelieving servants of the Persian monarch surrounding him. When will we get beyond the idea of having to be conditioned to pray? When will prayer be as natural to us as what it was to Charles Spurgeon, who said that he could not think of a half hour that had gone by in years when he had not consciously prayed before God? The evangelist Henry Morehouse used to be said of him that he would actually pray in his sleep.

And if you think that's psychologically impossible, then read the Song of Solomon, where it speaks of being on your bed at night, yet your heart is awakened to your beloved. Here is Nehemiah sending up an arrow of prayer to the God of heaven, and I say that the timing of this particular prayer is very important indeed. The king said unto me, For what dost thou make request? So I prayed to the God of heaven.

But not only is the timing of this piece of intercession important, but the fashion of his prayer commands our interest. Now, I mention this because we all need instruction in this holy art. There is hardly anything that I need to be more tutored in in spiritual disciplines than the mechanics, if one can use that word, of prayer and how to pray.

Well, what's the fashion of Nehemiah's praying here? The first thing that strikes me as being so obvious I'm almost insulting your intelligence by pointing it out is this. It was an ejaculatory prayer. I mean, it was spontaneous, unpremeditated.

There was something natural, delightfully natural about Nehemiah in the presence of this king and yet praying to the Lord. And may God grant to us this delightful ability always to sense his presence so that wherever you are, frustrated in driving your motor car with every light at red as you're trying to make your way through London or even worthy, to feel, to sense the presence of God, this ejaculatory nature of prayer. It comes out so often in the Bible.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not arguing against prolonged intercession. You know my heart along that line.

But there's this delightful aspect of prayer that we might lose out of, that prayer can be ejaculatory, spontaneous. The Lord Jesus puts down teaching on prayer, doesn't he? He talks about the importunate man. You know, the fellow who has to give hospitality to someone who's turned up unexpectedly and he goes to the pantry and he's got no food.

And so Jesus said, and he must have had a smile on the face of those who were listening to him. He goes next door to his neighbor and he starts to knock at 12 o'clock at night and the neighbor just doesn't want to know. So he carries on knocking.

And Jesus said that the neighbor, not because he likes his friend, but because of his importunity will get up, go downstairs and give him what he wants so he gets some peace. Prolonged intercession. But there can be a time in prayer when all the knocks are concentrated into one.

When all the verbosity, all the words are distilled into a sentence of just a few words and that arrow can be put in the shaft and shot to the throne room. And this is what happened in this prayer. It was ejaculatory.

What's more, it was hidden. I mean, by that it wasn't observable. The king didn't know that Nehemiah was praying.

Do you ever wonder what's going on in somebody's mind when you're talking to them? Well, the king, if he'd have had an insight into the mind of Nehemiah here would have been astonished. It was a silent prayer. But Hannah's prayer was silent.

Yet it was obvious to Eli that she was praying because her lips were moving. But now in the case of Nehemiah, he's there before the king and it's a silent, a hidden prayer. He doesn't move his lips, but in the innermost shrine of the temple, in the holy of holies of his own secret soul, there he did pray.

Nehemiah, Paul. Many of the greats of history, Calvin, Luther, jump back a little, Augustine, Wesley, Whitfield, Spurgeon, they all know this type of prayer. Now I quote the great names and perhaps I shouldn't have done that because it may make you think that you can come track out and say, well, this couldn't be part of my style of life that I can spontaneously burst into prayer in any situation.

Oh, yes, it can. Believe me, while I'm not exaggerating, if I asked people in this church to give testimony at this moment to this habit and its benefits in their life. When I say that two or three hundred people would be able to give testimony along this line, this was a short and silent prayer.

It was a holy telegram which Nehemiah sent up to God. And notice this. It was uttered by someone who knew the addressee.

You know what the addressee is? The person that you're sending the telegram to. I prayed to the God of heaven. This wasn't a sort of cry, oh God, that I sometimes used to hear in my pagan staff room in Tottenham when some distressed teacher with hair all over the place and tie and shirt disheveled indicated that the fourth had really played him up that morning.

And so he slumps back in his armchair and cries for a cup of tea and invests the help of some unknown divine being. This is Nehemiah, the man who knows his God, the man who knows where God is, the man who's been in touch with God for sixteen to twenty odd weeks, crying to him, compressing, concentrating his prayer. So I prayed to the God of heaven.

See then, and it's an amazing sight, I hope you've got it in your mind. Nehemiah, questioned by Atazaxes, the Persian monarch. And between that fraction of time that elapsed, twixt the question and the answer, there was a little bit of prayer pushed in edgeways, a mere fraction of devotion, yet so important was that prayer that it is included in the annals, the historical document that tells of the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.

Did you hear that? That is incredible. Look, this is a very significant thing that Nehemiah is going to engage in. These walls are going up, the gates are going to be rehung and so on and so forth.

It's exciting. But when Nehemiah writes up the record, or whoever wrote it up, they put emphasis upon this fact that there was a moment, a split second, when Nehemiah confronting Atazaxes breaks off and sends a prayer to the God of heaven. So much is achieved by prayer.

The prolonged intercessory prayer, the ejaculatory, spontaneous peace of intercession, more than this world will ever realize until the king comes back. Here then, I say, is a prayer which warrants attention as to its timing, a prayer which demands study because of its fashion, its content. And just to close down, to make the homiletics tidy, here is a response to a prayer which demands our consideration.

It moved God. Do you think I've made a mistake in making that observation? You're wrong, I haven't. If you think I've made a mistake, actually the boot's on the other foot.

You have. It's not so much as seems to be obvious that it moved the king, but it moved the Lord. Oh yes, Nehemiah responds to the king's question and he says in verse 5, One could argue from that that the prayer has moved the king, that Nehemiah's response has moved the king.

But no, when Nehemiah works it out, he's got his theology dead right. In the last part of the eighth verse, he says, You see, Nehemiah realizes this, that the power of Artaxerxes is a power that has devolved from God himself. It is by God that kings reign.

Did some of you who perhaps are new in the tabernacle feel that I was straining things 20 minutes ago when I was praying for the outcome of the engineering ballot for their union? Not a bit. When the Bible says, By me kings reign, it means that anyone who's got any authority at all is ultimately answerable to God. And directly or indirectly, God can influence these people.

So we pray and need to pray more and more for trade union officials in our country. God was moved by Nehemiah's prayer. God is always moved when a man's heart has faith in it.

And that was the state of Nehemiah's spiritual disposition. God responds to what his servant has to say. And this prayer, it changed history.

Listen to the compilers of the Whitfield commentary. This brief, silent prayer, backed up by weeks of silent fasting and petition, brought about one of the most astounding reversals of foreign policy in the whole of human history. Prayer changes things.

And again, it commenced a cycle of events. The 6th chapter and the 15th verse, we'll not go to that at the moment because we're making our way through and we'll be studying it in detail. But in that verse, you find this, that within 52 short days, the wall was finished.

In other words, Nehemiah successfully attended to his God-given task. So between this prayer and Nehemiah getting to Jerusalem and staying there for just over a month, the wall was erected, the gates were rehung, the intercession was realized. And notice this, that the very materials that Nehemiah required for the rebuilding of the wall, the rehanging of the gates, was granted by Atazerxes.

I pray that more and more we in the tabernacle may come to understand the full orb of scriptural teaching on this subject of prayer. Now let me stop for a moment. I'm through with my study.

But it may be that somebody will go out of the church and they will say it right. It means, because we have heard from the pulpit and it's been backed up by scripture, that a small time in prayer is equal to a long time in prayer and therefore I need not spend hours in intercession at all myself. I'll be a sort of Nehemiah in front of the king.

You know, the one minute arrow that goes up. That's all right. That just fits in with my lifestyle.

And then all these things are going to happen that I've worked out from this second chapter. Now, Nehemiah's ejaculatory prayer was pointed and reached God because of what? The foundation that he'd laid before in his prayer closet. Eight weeks, twelve weeks was it? Sixteen weeks.

What you see in chapter two, if one can use the metaphor, is the tip of the iceberg. But underneath, there's a lot that Artaxerxes never saw. But we see it because we've read into the first chapter.

There are times in the history of the life of Paul when he too utters an ejaculatory prayer and it seems as though all heaven is set in motion and the answers of prayer, of the apostle's prayer are granted. But you see, for a man to be powerful in ejaculatory prayer, he must know those weeks of intercession, the fasting and the mourning, and the tearing of one's heart before God in private. I believe that more and more in the tabernacle, we need to see this.

People in their private room, people coming together sometimes collectively for prolonged periods of prayer. And then on a Monday, do you know what will happen? Our own time of praise and prayer will light up. And we'll not so much be hearing the prolonged intercession, that's impossible when 130, 40-odd people are coming to a prayer meeting.

But we will hear, as our brother Lance Lambert was reminding us last week, of people who together in the Spirit are praying corporately, one adding to a prolonged prayer, their own sentence, ejaculatory prayer coming from this area and this area and the other area. And it'll be prayer that's sharp and powerful because behind it, on the part of the prayer, is hours of intercession offered before God in private. May God then continue to teach us from Scripture the power and the place of prayer in the life of the Christian as an individual and of the church as a whole.

Amen.