This article is for anyone who isn't familiar with Nehemiah's prayer found in Nehemiah 1. First, here's some quick background.

The story here is one of the return of two groups of Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem, where they are to rebuild the temple and their community. Nehemiah asks how things are going from some messengers who are just returning from there, and we hear that the condition of the Jews was one of "great affliction and reproach"; the ground of the reproach was probably the still-ruined fortifications (Nehemiah 2:17; Nehemiah 4:2-4).

Now back to the main point of this article: there is so much we can learn from Nehemiah's response. First is his reaction to the news:

⁴When I heard these words, I sat down and wept. I mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.

Now I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I sat and wept, mourning for days, fasting and praying before I brought my prayer requests to God. This is exactly what Nehemiah did though before he even started his actual prayer of supplication.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't make prayers of supplication if they aren't preceded by days of fasting and mourning; rather, I'm calling for us to reflect on how much time or effort we put into showing God our weakness, sorrow, sincerity, and dependence on him before we ask him to hear our prayer requests.

Next, let's look at what Nehemiah then actually says in his prayer.

Nehemiah's Actual Prayer

⁵Then I said: “O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps His covenant of loving devotion with those who love Him and keep His commandments, ⁶let Your eyes be open and Your ears attentive to hear the prayer that I, Your servant, now pray before You day and night for Your servants, the Israelites...

Nehemiah's prayer begins with solemnly laying before God His own great name as the mightiest plea with Him. I never thought too deeply on how the ancients began their prayers, but once I did, it became pretty apparent that this type commencement was no "mere proper", surface level, rote/"right" way of invoking God. Rather, it was really meant to express the effort to lay hold on God’s character as the ground of hope that the prayer will be answered. What do I mean by that?

God’s own revelation of Himself—as keeping covenant and being merciful—shows us that He has bound Himself in solemn, irrefragable compact, to a certain line of action. After all, "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" (Numbers 23:19).

Therefore we can go to God with our prayers knowing he'll hear us in his mercy because that's who he has revealed himself to be. BUT...there's a caveat.

The caveat has to do with understanding this is true so long as we keep our prayers within the ample space of His covenant, and ourselves within its terms, by loving obedience. Nehemiah's acknowledgement that God's loving devotion does not (indeed justly cannot) extend to those who do not love him and keep his commandments should serve as a sign for us to remember the "conditionality" (if I can be permitted to call it that) on the promises God makes.

The next thing I want to draw attention to comes from the next part of his prayer:

⁶...I confess the sins that we Israelites have committed against You. Both I and my father’s house have sinned. ⁷We have behaved corruptly against You and have not kept the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that You gave Your servant Moses.

Notice the humble and contrite confession of sin. I believe if we take serious that Nehemiah's prayer can be a model we ought follow, then we would undoubtedly see it's useless to ask God to repair what is broken if we do not first cast out the sins which did the breaking. This is not to imply that everything that is broken in our individual lives is the direct result of our own individual sins. It is however worth reflecting on how what is broken might be somehow related to our sins and shortcomings, and/or how our sorrow about such brokenness might/ought be treated as an occasion for us to depend more upon God's help.

I also believe there's a lesson here when it comes to praying for the state of the world. I fear noawadays it's far more common to acknoledge and blame other people's sins. Instead of sadness and contrition, we seem to have anger, outrage, and finger-pointing blame, and these types of reactions have usurped the role that sorrow and sadness (should or would?) otherwise play.

To be clear, I'm not saying (righteous) anger and outrage don't have their place, but if you look around, the anger and outrage the so-called most righteous among us express nowadays is often impotent virtue-signaling at best or sinful at worst. It's impotent virtue-signalling when it isn't accompanied by legitimate, well-thought-out action and self-sacrificing devotion we're called to in order to do our part in being the change we want to see in the world to remedy whatever we're outraged about. And it's sinful if/when that anger leads to sin.

In any case, the relevant question for all of us should be, "How much time do we spend in prayers confessing our part in the problems we ask God to fix, as opposed to blaming others?"

One More Insight

Last but not least, I wanted to take a second to link three ideas together:

1) the idea of us being called to look at our part and our sin regarding the role we play in what is broken in our personal lives

2) the idea of us being called to look at our individual role in the current societal collapse we're experiencing

3) what examining Hebrew root words can show us about the failure of someone we're used to seeing as a blameless patriarch: Noah (credit for this insight goes to Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm).

Now you're probably thinking something like, wait—Noah, a failure? Wasn't he the one God chose to save because he was "perfect in his generations"? He was, but we must remember the social aspect of righteousness and salvation, especially as Christians, and that's where Noah's failure comes in. So, when Noah's father names him, he expresses high hopes that Noah will bring relief to the world in the wake of all the punishments humanity had earned since Adam and Eve:

"This one shall comfort (n-h-m) us from our work and from the toil ('-tz-v) of our hands..." ( Genesis 5:29). Notice the social aspect, right?

But while Noah achieves personal virtue (Genesis 6:9)...he doesn't actually do anything to ennoble the society around him. And as we know, God eventually decides to destroy the world in a Flood. Let's pay close attention to how the Bible describes God in that moment (Genesis 6:6).

"And the Lord regretted (n-h-m) that He had made humans on the earth, and it grieved ('-tz-v) Him to His heart" (Genesis 6:6).

That is the same root (n-h-m) used before in Noah's naming. It meant comfort there, but it can also mean "regret". And once we recognize that, we can see that the same root ('-tz-v) meaning "toil" in the context of Noah's name ("the toil of our hands"), is used to mean "grieve" in the context of the Flood ("grieved Him to His heart").

This teaches us that instead of Noah’s lifetime bringing comfort to humanity (n-h-m) from its toil ('-tz-v), it sees God regretting (n-h-m) and grieving ('-tz-v) ever having made humanity in the first place. In other words: Noah fails; he is passive in the face of societal collapse.

So the last insight then is to say our prayer efforts, if/when aimed at asking God to have mercy on us and relent in his judgment upon our society, should be accompanied by confession, contrition, and self-sacrificing devotion to be the change we want to see.

If you found this helpful, then I encourage you to meditate upon the rest of Nehemiah's prayer and see what other insights you can glean from it!