An Informed Prayer Life

I wanna begin this morning by making the very obvious statement that Christians are meant to pray. Christians are meant to pray. That is what we've been doing this morning. That's how we started this morning, and that is the theme of this morning's service. Christians are meant to pray.

Now, it's true that in the church of God, we can be an absolute hodgepodge of different personalities, different traditions, different cultures, different ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. But the one thing that all Christians do is pray. All Christians have a prayer life. Why? Because prayer is our most intimate way of relating to the God we've come to know through Jesus Christ.

If we don't pray, you can put it this way: we don't allow ourselves to experience the most fundamental aspect of our faith. In fact, if a professing Christian doesn't pray, if those two things can be linked, a professing Christian who never prays, if those things can exist, if you find someone like that, you find someone who has an indication of how far their thought life and frankly, their soul is from God. If a thoughtful, honest, deep talking relationship with God isn't a daily part of our lives, in other words, I wanna tell you this morning that you need to take notice of that and do something about it. But this morning, if you come and you are concerned about your prayer life, and perhaps it's a truism to say that all of us can tidy things up, then I also wanna tell you that there's hope this morning for us. Because if you feel at all guilty about the state of your prayer life, consider the situation that a bunch of Israelites found themselves in one particular day.

A moment when they realised that though they thought they knew God, they realised that they didn't know God at all. We're going to look at a moment soon when an entire generation heard God's word amazingly, perhaps for the first time. Can you think about an entire generation hearing God's word perhaps for the first time in their lives? And what had been a vague notion of a God out there somewhere became a crystal clear picture of who He is and it shook them to the core. It literally brought them to their knees in prayer.

And it's this event in the history of the Bible that will help us to help inform us on how we can sharpen our desire for prayer. So we're gonna turn to the story of Nehemiah this morning and we're going to go to chapter nine in Nehemiah. Nehemiah chapter nine. And although it's a long sort of passage, we're going to read the entire chapter so that we can understand the entire flow of this incredible prayer that is prayed. Nehemiah 9:1.

Now, on the twenty-fourth day of this month, the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth and with earth on their heads. And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. And they stood up in their place and read from the book of the law of the Lord their God for a quarter of the day. For another quarter of it, they made confession and worshiped the Lord their God. On the stairs of the Levites stood Jeshua, Bani, Kadmiel, Shebaniah, Bunni, Sherebiah, Bani and Kenani.

And they cried with a loud voice to the Lord their God. Then the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmiel, Bani, Hashabneiah, Sherebiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah and Pethahiah, said, stand up and bless the Lord your God from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise. You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heavens, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, 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 the Lord, 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 and 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 Girgashite. 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 in the night to light for them the way in which they should go. You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments.

And you made known to them your holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and the law by Moses your servant. You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and 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 them. But they and their 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 had 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 and abounding in steadfast love. And you did not forsake them, even when they had made for themselves a golden calf and said, this is your God who brought you up out of Egypt and had committed great blasphemies. You, in 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 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 mouth and gave them water for their thirst.

Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness and they lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not 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 Og, king of Bashan. You multiplied their children as the stars of heaven, and you brought them into the land that you had told their forefather 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 gave them into their hand with their kings and the peoples of the land that they might do with them as they would. And they captured fortified cities and a rich land and took possession of houses full of all good things, cisterns already hewn, vineyards, olive orchards, and fruit trees in abundance. So they ate and were filled and became fat and delighted themselves in your great goodness. Nevertheless, they were disobedient and 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.

And 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 saviours who saved them from the hand of their enemies. But after they had rest, they did evil again before you and you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies so that they had dominion over them. Yet, when they turn and cry 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 neck and would not obey. Many years you bore with them and warned them by your spirit through your prophets, yet they would not give ear. Therefore, you gave them into the hand of the people of the lands. Nevertheless, in your great mercies, you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God. Now, therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and 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, and 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 the large and rich land that you have 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 and its good gifts.

Behold, we are slaves. And its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have 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 this, we make a firm covenant in writing. On the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests.

This is God's word. We pick up the story in chapter nine of Nehemiah after the people of God have returned from the exile back to Jerusalem. You may know the story of Nehemiah, a servant, a close adviser to the Persian king or Persian emperor, who asked to go back to Jerusalem to rebuild its crumbling broken walls so that it can be restored as a fortified city, a safe city, and that raiders and the enemies of God's people can't come in and keep plundering the capital of God's people. Nehemiah is not only a builder or an architect, he leads a spiritual reformation within the people, and this is part of that story. With him is Ezra the scribe, who comes in and recategorises, reteaches, the people what God's law is and what the covenant means for them.

And so, we hear that in chapter eight, as they read the law, they are broken. They realise why they've been in exile seventy years. And they mourn, the Bible says, they grieve. And in that context, Nehemiah says to them that famous Bible verse that we love quoting, do not be grieved for the joy of the Lord is your strength. The grieving is not in relation to everyday sort of grief.

This is a grief about sin. And the strength that the Israelites will have is that the joy of God is with them. That His covenant love is with them. That is their strength. After this, the people are strengthened.

They go home and a few days later perhaps, they organise another opportunity to do what is now sort of the natural thing to do for someone marked by the realisation of God's faithfulness and grace. They come together to repent. To say, we were that, but now we want to follow you. And again, they organise this real ripper of a service, hundreds of people together in one place. They spend a quarter of the day listening to the word of God read to them.

We complain about a twenty-five minute sermon. And they spend another quarter of the day discussing and repenting and praying and making sort of covenants back to God saying, we will be faithful. But chapter nine is marked by this prayer. And from this prayer, there are four points that I think we can take away to inform our prayer life, to reform perhaps a wavering prayer life. And the first point is that we should pray according to God's revealed character.

When we pray, we need to pray with an understanding of the Bible. Prayerful Christians are Christians who know the God of the Bible, not a vague notion of a power that's out there that gives us things. We pray to the God of the Bible. And I cannot tell you how important this is for your daily spiritual life. People often say to me, I don't know how to pray.

I get nervous to pray out loud with other people because I don't know what to say. I don't know how to say it. Well, apart perhaps from having to overcome shyness, part of the problem probably is that you don't know God enough. We don't know what we are allowed to ask for. We don't know how to ask it.

And we don't know why we can ask it. We don't know how to pray because we don't know well enough the God of the Bible. In chapter nine, we find someone leading corporate prayer. In our church, just as happened with Rick before, we have an elder pray for us, and we enter into that prayer with him. We say amen to those things at the end.

He prays on behalf of us, and here we find someone praying on behalf of God's people. We don't actually know who prayed this prayer. It could have been Nehemiah, but we're told that there were Levites and priests around. There was Ezra in the background as well. We don't know exactly who this was.

But for God, it's not important for us to know who prayed this prayer. The content is what is important. So what we know is that this person leading this prayer prayed with a profound knowledge of God, a profound biblical theological understanding of God. And we need to ask ourselves, how did they know? The answer is obvious.

They knew their Bible. They knew their scriptures. As you read the prayer, you see that this person knew exactly what God had done for their ancestors. Have a look at verse seven. You are the Lord God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans.

Verse nine, you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt, the story of the Exodus. In other words, this person knows the history of the Israelite people, the people of God. He knows the history of the Bible. But what is more important than knowing what God has done, this person knows why God has done it. And all throughout that passage, you see the explanation given of why God did it.

You did this, Lord, because you are, verse eight, righteous. The prayer says that after leading Israel out of Egypt, when the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt, starting to worship a false god, God spares them from His wrath. Why? Verse 17, because you are a God ready to forgive, gracious, merciful. You are a God slow to anger and abounding in love.

This is a prayer based on the knowledge of what God has done, but more importantly, why God has done it. The prayer knows that God is righteous. Meaning, He does what is right all the time. This prayer knows God is merciful and forgiving. It knows God is powerful, that He's able to bring an entire nation out of slavery to the greatest superpower of the time.

God is able to pluck people away from that. That is how powerful He is. And so His prayer can ask for bold things. Why? Because God is powerful.

Remembering and appealing to the character of God is biblical praying. And that is what we, as Christians, must do. If you've ever found yourself struggling to pray, or if you feel your prayer life is dull, or that you can't express yourself in the way that you want, here is a very important lesson. Read your Bible. Come to church every week and listen to sermons.

Read good Christian books. And knowing the character of God will lead you to a better prayer life. The second thing that will empower our prayer life is to know our place before an awesome God. We find a prayer that understands the brokenness and the imperfection of the human heart as this person is praying. This prayer is marked with a very honest acknowledgment of sin.

It isn't shy to call a spade a spade. It labels this brokenness a sin. It was our sin, he says, that brought us to this place where we have been separated from God's blessing. Verse 16, our fathers acted presumptuously. They stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments.

Verse 26, our fathers were disobedient and 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 rather great blasphemies. Perhaps it's shocking for us to reread how honest this prayer is. But we would do well to pray honestly like this as well. Let me ask you, are you honest in your prayer life? Do you pray about specific sins honestly to God?

See how the blame, however, is never shifted. It was us who committed these sins. Even as the prayer talks about our fathers, our forefathers having done so and so and so, this is where it finishes. Have a look at verse 33 at the end of the prayer rather. Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us.

For you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly. Here, we find a corporate acknowledgement of personal individual sin. We are the ones who have been wicked. In other words, our forefathers did this and it is just so terrible to think about what they could have done, and we are no different. We have committed great blasphemies.

A prayer life that understands that we are broken and that we rely fully and wholly on God's good character is a prayer that hungers and thirsts for His good character to save and restore us. This, in turn, leads to a prayer life that is wonderfully thankful and humble. That is why Paul can say in Philippians 4, in all things, rejoice. Bring your petitions, your prayers, your intercessions to God with thanksgiving. If we understand who we are and we understand who God is and what God has done for us, we cannot help but be thankful in all circumstances for what He has done.

Knowing our place before an awesome God deepens our prayer life. A shallow prayer life will be something like this. God, please give me this job. God, please give me the car that I want. God, please let my life work out in this particular way.

Why does someone pray like that? Because we somehow think we deserve that. But knowing our place before a holy and righteous God and knowing who we truly are, we actually know we don't deserve anything. And that is truly liberating. We don't deserve anything.

If you truly understand the Gospel, you understand that everything you have is a gift purely given to you by God. Everything you have. So when I pray for better health, I believe I deserve better health. But it's not really true. You don't deserve better health.

I deserve a better work life balance. No, you don't. And in fact, God may have very good reasons for your health or your work situation to be hard. But the very fact that we are sitting here this morning, living and breathing even through the arthritis or the back pain, that is a pure blessing. It is a gift that you did nothing to earn.

None of us can tell our hearts to keep beating. No amount of willpower can drum up enough momentum for your heart to keep going. If your heart stops, nothing in you can kick it back into action. And friends, when we understand that everything we have is a gift from an awesome God, despite our rebellion and our sin, our prayer life to Him can't help but be affected. So it's good to remind ourselves of our place before an awesome God.

It helps to guard what we ask for and how we ask it. The third point: another thing we see from this prayer is that we have to come to grips with what grace has meant for our life. Wrestling with our sin, understanding our brokenness with God is one thing, but there can be a danger also that we get too down on ourselves about that brokenness. And we don't feel worthy to ask anything of this good and gracious God. But we see how understanding God's character and God's grace better helps us to pray better.

If you were to do a quick scan, you would find that nine times in this prayer, God's graciousness or His mercy is mentioned. That's a significant amount of times that that aspect of God's character is referred to. This prayer, in other words, understands the concept of grace. Grace is receiving something that you completely do not deserve. It is something received that can never be claimed.

It can never be demanded. It can never be earned. Grace in its truest form can therefore never go unnoticed. Every single time when you receive something that is truly grace, you cannot help but be stunned by it, astounded that somehow you have received this. The person who prays this prayer had the eyes to perceive God's grace, and they knew that grace is something that comes to us in spite of who we are.

Look at how he recognises God's grace. Verse 17, the second half, he says, but you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore, you did not desert them. Verse 19, in your great mercies, you did not forsake them, the Israelites, in the wilderness. Second half of verse 27, you heard them from heaven.

And according to your great mercies, you gave them saviours who saved them from the hand of their enemies. In other words, understanding and realising that God is gracious impacts your prayer life forever. In his sort of classic book, The Prodigal God, Tim Keller talks about the fact that the Bible often surprises us by the concept of grace. And that is essentially the method by which God brings us into the kingdom. Grace comes to people profoundly humbled, and they become the real winners in a surprising way.

So he writes, for example, the Bible often shows that the humble are in while the proud are out. The people who confess that they aren't particularly good or open-minded are moving toward God because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it. The people who think they are just fine, thank you, are the ones moving away from God. So for someone who has grasped the message of God's grace in the Gospel, the message that says that despite you not being very lovable at all, despite being radically corrupted, God in His mercy and grace reached out and with the life of His son paid the penalty of your sin by going to the cross.

And so whether you are a Christian this morning or whether you're still sceptical, all of us can understand this concept that a radical display of grace can change your life forever. When you come to realise just what God has done for you in Jesus Christ, your life and by extension your prayer life will never be the same again. And that is what our fourth and final point says.

Let grace enable you to pray like you've never been able to pray before. Turning towards the end of this prayer in verses 36 and 37, the prayer ends on this note. God, behold, we are slaves this day in the land that you gave to our fathers to enjoy its fruit, to enjoy its good gifts. Behold, we are slaves and its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have 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.

Commentators point out that although the Jews at this point were never under bond slavery, you know, they weren't slaves in the way that we understand slavery, they were, however, a vassal kingdom. They were owned by the Persian empire, and that meant that the Persians could ask for exorbitant taxes from this independent kingdom. And obviously, the people here felt this burden. They call it a form of slavery.

Now, slavery is an incredible burden because it feels so inescapable. What can be done about this situation? If you were a carpenter, if you were a builder, if you were a doctor or whatever, what could you do about this situation? In slavery, it's not simply your house or your car that belongs to someone. It is your very life that belongs to them.

In slavery, your owner, your lord, may do with your life whatever they please. And even though the prayer of God's people in Nehemiah chapter nine appeals to God's help to release them from another form of slavery, it calls back to mind their time in Egypt as a people, that they were slaves back then. But if you read the prayer carefully, you will notice that the story of the people here is a story of a people held captive to a greater slavery. See that repeated pattern of you rescued us, we rebelled. You rescued us, we rebelled.

You see that over and over again, they are in a slavery, a captivity to sin. The apostle Paul in the New Testament in places like Romans 6 later writes that the effect of sin is like being a slave. It holds absolute power over your life. It dictates what you will do, when you will do it, and how you will do it. Sin and Satan, Paul says, is your master.

And the reality of slavery is there are only two ways to escape it. Paul says, one way is through death. The contract is ended when you die. The other way, which in Paul's day was an incredible phenomenon, is that you could pay a vast amount of money, sometimes astronomical amounts, to release yourself or to release someone from that slavery. Now, the value of that person, the value of that slave was set by the master depending on the usefulness or the indebtedness of the slave.

And when speaking about the reality of sin in terms of slavery, Paul then speaks about the astonishing solution of God in terms of a transaction. Jesus would come to exchange His priceless life, His perfect life for my imperfect life. While sin and Satan was our master, one man with incredible worth would exchange His life with mine. And the prayer of Nehemiah 9, I think prophetically finishes with this request, free us from our slavery again. And we will know again just how God's people falls into the same habits.

God will set them free from this. But for Nehemiah and for the Jews, an ultimate escape is still four hundred years away when Jesus comes. And our prayer, our life of prayer should be so gripped by this understanding that God has exchanged the priceless cost of His Son's life. That we should be so swept up in that transaction that we will never know how not to pray. Prayer should firstly be deeply embedded in reminding ourselves of God's character as has been revealed in Scripture.

We therefore pray according to that character. Secondly, we should know our place before an awesome God. We honestly deal with our sin in light of His character. And thirdly, we keep returning to His grace. In our prayer life, we take captive.

We take ownership of the knowledge of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. With the result that, fourthly, we let God's grace drive us to pray like we've never prayed before. The world is ours because an awesome infinite God is ours through Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Lord, what else is there for us to do than to come to you in prayer?

In light of what you have done for your people in the Old Testament again and again, in light of the foreshadowing of those events of your character revealed so often that you are a God of grace and mercy, slow to anger, patient, abounding in love, seen, Lord, most fully in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on our behalf. And so, as we grow in that knowledge, as we wrestle and come to grips with just what it has meant for us, eternal life, freedom from sin, a life away from the master of Satan. And Lord, help us to have our hearts, our souls, our consciences be set free.

To pray, to ask, to speak with our God with freedom and liberty. To try and to desire rather to dwell, to engage, to speak with our God who has been so kind. And so God, we pray even as we desire a better prayer life to know you better. Lord, may we be a church that prays well regularly, intentionally for all the good reasons we can. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.