Repentance

I wanted to start by doing a bit of a straw poll and asking you to raise your hand if you've ever been guilty of forgetting one of the following things. Letting a hot cup of coffee or tea go cold. Forgetting where you left your keys or your wallet or your purse. Man, that's a bad one. If you ever have, especially in Queensland this is bad, if you've left washing in the washing machine and it turns all gross and bad smelling, yes.

If you've forgotten where you've parked your car. This is also a big one. If you've forgotten some a loved one's birthday. Well, how about this one? And this is a terrible one for a pastor to admit, but if you've forgotten someone's name ten seconds after you've asked them.

That's a bad one. Well, how about forgetting who God is in your day to day life? It is good to know that I'm not the only one that has a bad memory. It's good to know that I'm not the only one forgetting things sometimes because I have been guilty of all of these things. But I think there is such a thing as a severe memory loss or a spiritual amnesia that exists in us as Christians.

And it can be a terminal illness because it robs the Christian of incredible peace and joy in their life. Robs them of life itself. When they go through life, whether it's good or bad stuff, they forget God and therefore lose out on the joy, the source of joy and peace itself. This morning, we're looking at Nehemiah nine. And again, if you're new, we've been working through a series on the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament.

And we were up to chapter nine this morning. And it's, I'm not a rocket scientist by explaining this to you, but Nehemiah chapter nine comes after chapter eight. I got an A in maths. No, I didn't. And last week we saw in chapter eight this amazing moment where it was a massive celebration, a massive church service where God's people came together and they read the word of God.

Some of them hearing these words, the law of God for the first time. And it's an incredible moment because the Bible says that they are there in the temple courts from the break of day, five or six in the morning till noon, listening to God's word being read. And they are broken by it. They mourn and they weep as they realise with shocking clarity their imperfection in front of a holy God. They weep at this realisation, but we see that they are told by Nehemiah and the priests sort of ministering to them, this great crowd of people, they are told, stop crying.

This is a sacred day. This is a glorious, beautiful day, a day of joy. Go and have the best food, have the best wines. Go and celebrate today because you have realised the love of God for you. They realise on that day that it is a joyful day because God has been kind to them by forgiving them and bringing them back from exile, from their punishment for rebellion against Him.

And it is a glorious moment because they realised for the first time they haven't even been able to fully repent of all the sins that they had done because they didn't know the extent of their sin. They didn't know the extent of their rebellion and here they hear it for the first time and they say, God has forgiven us before we could even ask for an apology, before we could even ask for forgiveness. They're told to celebrate instead of mourn, and they did. And they were so thankful, the Bible says, that the whole week of celebration was full of joy and feasting and festivals. And I'm reminded of those words from the great hymn Amazing Grace.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. That was the atmosphere. How sweet was God's love. But now we come to the next natural step in this moment. After realising how far they've fallen short of God's requirements for their lives, the people of God sense the urgency now to make it right.

This is called repentance according to the Bible. To turn away from how they were living and to say, God, I'm following you now. I forsake, I give up what I have been and I'm going to live the way that you have told me to. And so they organised, we see here again in that, roughly that time, in the same month, this big festival or this big meeting again, where they say we are going to pray to God as a spiritual family and we're going to talk to Him about this situation. They organise a massive ripsnorter of a church service and they come together in chapter eight, and that's where we pick it up.

And I want us to read this entire chapter because it is so profound, it is so beautiful, this prayer that is prayed on behalf of them, that I could almost just read this prayer and say amen and we go home. But I get paid by the hour, so I won't do that. So we're going to read Nehemiah chapter nine. Starting at verse one. On the twenty fourth day of the same month, the Israelites gathered together fasting and wearing sackcloth and having dust on their heads, a sign of grief and mourning.

Those of Israelite descent had separated themselves from all the foreigners, from all the non-Christians that didn't know God. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the wickedness of their fathers. They stood where they were and read from the book of the law of the Lord their God for a quarter of the day, and spent another quarter in confession and in worshipping the Lord their God. Standing on the stairs with the Levites, Jeshua, Bani, Kadmiel, Shebaniah, Bunni, it's an unfortunate name, Cherubiah, Bani, Kannani, who called with loud voices to the Lord their God. And the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmiel, Bani, Hashbaniah, Cherubiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah, and Pethithiah said, stand up and praise the Lord your God, who is from everlasting to everlasting.

And this is the beginning of the prayer. Blessed be your glorious name, and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all the starry host. The earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.

You gave life to everything and the multitudes of heaven worship you. You are the Lord God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and named him Abraham. You found his heart faithful to you and you made a covenant with him to give his descendants the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Jebusites, and Girgashites. You have kept your promise because you are righteous. You saw the suffering of our forefathers in Egypt.

You heard their cry at the Red Sea. You sent miraculous signs and wonders against Pharaoh, against all his officials and all the people of his land, for you knew how arrogantly the Egyptians treated them. You made a name for yourself which remains to this day. You divided the sea before them so that they passed through it on dry ground, but you hurled their pursuers into the depths like a stone into mighty waters. By day you led them with a pillar of cloud, and by night with a pillar of fire to give them light on the way they were to take.

You came down on Mount Sinai, you spoke to them from heaven, you gave them regulations and laws that are just and right, and decrees and commands that are good. You made known to them your holy Sabbath and gave them commands, decrees, and laws through your servant Moses. In their hunger, you gave them bread from heaven, and in their thirst, you brought them water from the rock. You told them to go in and take possession of the land you had sworn with uplifted hand to give them. But they, our forefathers, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and did not obey your commands.

They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked in their rebellion, and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in love. Therefore, you did not desert them, even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, this is your God who brought you up out of Egypt, or when they committed awful blasphemies. Because of your great compassion, you did not abandon them in the desert.

By day, the pillar of cloud did not cease to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take. You gave your good spirit to instruct them. You did not withhold your manna from their mouths and gave them water for their thirst. For forty years you sustained them in the desert, they lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet become swollen.

You gave them kingdoms and nations, allotting to them even the remotest frontiers. They took over the country of Sihon, king of Heshbon, and the country of Og, king of Bashan. You made their sons as numerous as the stars in the sky, and you brought them into the land that you told their fathers to enter and possess. Their sons went in and took possession of the land. You subdued before them the Canaanites who lived in the land.

You handed the Canaanites over to them along with their kings and the peoples of the land to deal with them as they pleased. They captured fortified cities and fertile land. They took possession of houses filled with all kinds of good things, wells already dug, vineyards, olive groves, and fruit trees in abundance. They ate to the full and were well nourished. They revelled in your great goodness.

But they were disobedient and rebelled against you. They put your law behind their backs. They killed your prophets who had admonished them in order to turn them back to you. They committed awful blasphemies. So you handed them over to their enemies who oppressed them.

But when they were oppressed, they cried out to you. From heaven you heard them, and in your great compassion you gave them deliverers, who rescued them from the hand of their enemies. But as soon as they were at rest, they again did what was evil in your sight. Then you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies so that they ruled over them, and when they cried out to you again, you heard from heaven, and in your compassion, you delivered them time after time. You warned them to return to your law, they became arrogant and disobeyed your commands.

They sinned against your ordinances by which a man will live if he obeys them. Stubbornly, they turned their backs on you, became stiff-necked and refused to listen. For many years, you were patient with them. By your spirit, you admonished them through your prophets, yet they paid no attention, so you handed them over to their neighbouring peoples. But in your great mercy, you did not put an end to them or abandon them, for you are a gracious and merciful God.

Now therefore, oh our God, the great, mighty and awesome God who keeps His covenant of love. Do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes, the hardship that has come upon us, upon our kings and leaders, upon our priests and prophets, upon our fathers and all your people from the days of the kings of Assyria until today. In all that has happened to us, you have been just. You have acted faithfully while we did wrong. Our kings, our leaders, our priests, and our fathers did not follow your law.

They did not pay attention to your commands or the warnings you gave them. Even while they were in their kingdom, enjoying your great goodness to them in the spacious and fertile land you gave them, they did not serve you or turn from their evil ways. But see, we are slaves today. Slaves in the land you gave our forefathers so that they could eat its fruit and the other good things it produces. Because of our sins, its abundant harvest goes to the kings you have placed over us.

They rule over our bodies and our cattle as they please. We are in great distress. In view of all of this, we are making a binding agreement, putting it in writing. And our leaders, our Levites, our priests are affixing their seals to it. So far our reading.

That's a good ten to fifteen minute long prayer. But it tells the whole story, doesn't it? Of the Old Testament and of God's people. There are four things I wanted to share with you today from this prayer that will hopefully influence us and encourage us in our prayer lives because I think this is an excellent example of true biblically inspired prayer. The first thing is to pray according to God's character.

To pray with radical biblical understanding of who He is. When we pray, we need to pray with a radical deep understanding of the Bible. I cannot tell you how important this is. As a pastor, I pray with people a lot, and people tell me that I feel very uncomfortable praying. I get nervous about praying.

I don't know how to pray out loud with people around me and I don't know what to say when I pray. Well, I think part of the situation or the problem here is we don't know enough about God. If we don't know how to pray, it's because we don't know enough about God. We don't know what we can ask for. We don't know how we can ask for it.

We may not even know why we can ask. We see someone leading this communal prayer. We don't know if it was Ezra the priest, the scribe, or whether this is Nehemiah, or simply one of the priests or the Levites. Someone leads it. It's not important for us to know who it is because it's the content of the prayer that is important.

Someone leads this amazing prayer. But we see that this prayer is so steeped in a rich deep understanding of who God is and everything flows from that. He knows exactly what God has done for his ancestors, for his forefathers. Look at verse seven, you are the Lord God who chose Abraham, brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, out of ancient Babylon. Verse nine, you saw the suffering of our forefathers in Egypt.

This prayer is marked with a knowledge about what God has promised, what God has done, what God has done for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the forefathers of the nation, the spiritual nation or the physical nation of Israel. He, this prayer knew the covenant God who had made a promise to Abraham from the beginning. I mean, he starts not even at Abraham, he starts that you are the creator of heaven and earth. You created everything there is. But then he says, but you promised yourself specifically to Abraham, and he draws that right through.

If you read through the chapter, he drives, he draws that right through to the end to King David, to the kings. This prayer is a prayer that knows who God is. It knows that God is righteous. It knows that God does what is right all the time in every situation. It knows that He is merciful.

It remembers the story of Israel sinning and rebelling and God forgiving. And then they do it again and God forgives again and you see it. He says, because you are compassionate God, because you are forgiving God. Because you so love us God. He knows who this God is.

The prayer knows who God is because he knows the God of the Bible. And so this is really really important for us. As we think about prayer, as we challenge ourselves in our own prayer life, remembering and appealing to the character of God is biblical prayer. Remembering and appealing to the character of God is biblical prayer. If you've ever struggled to pray, if you feel your prayer life is dull, if you can't express yourself in the way that you want, if you get nervous about praying, here is a very practical tip.

Know your Bible. Know the story of the Bible. Know how God has acted and reacted and intervened with His people. Some of the longest and the most profound prayers in the Old Testament, like Daniel's prayer in Daniel 9, or Ezra's prayer, which was very similar in Ezra 9, and then Nehemiah 9. So it's Daniel 9, Nehemiah 9, Ezra 9.

All have this deep significant understanding of God, what He has done, who He is, and any request that comes from that is grounded in who God is. Why could the people of God trust that He would come through for them in this difficult situation? Because at one time, Israel was rescued from Egypt by a mighty hand of God and He can do it again. Why is it that God will forgive our sins against Him? Because He is merciful and just and forgave Israel when they crafted this golden idol, a calf, and worshipped an idol in the wilderness and God forgave them still.

Why will God do what is right? Because He is absolutely fair. He's absolutely fair. He said, He warned us that He was going to punish us, and when we kept disobeying, He punished us. Absolutely fair.

He is faithful to what He says He will do. He will do it. And if God says He will forgive, then He will forgive. If God says He will restore, He will restore. This is who God is.

Can you see how rich your prayer life will be if you understand the God of the Bible? An intimate prayer life, a life of prayer that is effective and in line with God's will is a prayer life that knows God's character. When we pray, we bring forth memories of God and who He is and who He's shown Himself to be. And so we know we can pray for our non-Christian friends. We can pray for our non-Christian family members.

Why? Because God is the missionary God who reached out to Abram in Ur of the Chaldeans when Abraham was a pagan. Did not know God, did not want to know God and God reached him before he even knew the existence of God and said, I want to build a nation out of you. Come, live in this land. Why can we pray for our non-Christian friend?

Because we know that God is a missionary God from the beginning. We can ask these things because we know God's character. The second thing we see is praying according to who you are before Him, knowing your place before this awesome God. This is a prayer that understands the brokenness of the people praying. It understands imperfection of human beings when compared to a majestically holy God.

This prayer is marked with a very honest acknowledgement of this situation. In particular, it isn't shy to call a spade a spade, it is very brutally honest about things. It says it was sin that caused this. It's not a mistake. It's not a poor decision when I was young.

It is sin that has caused this. It is what has brought us to this place of separation from God's blessings. Verse 16, our fathers became arrogant and stiff-necked, have a look at that, and did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and they failed to remember. Verse 26, but they, our forefathers, were disobedient and they rebelled against you and they put your law behind their backs.

They killed your prophets. They committed awful blasphemies. Verse 29, you warned them to return to your law, but they became arrogant and disobeyed your commands. They sinned against your ordinances by which a man will live if he obeys them. It's amazing how honest this prayer is, isn't it?

How do we pray? Do we pray like that? Are we honest with God like this? The blame is never shifted. Do you see that?

The blame is never shifted. It's not my wife's fault. It's not the guy at work's fault. It was us. In verse 33, in all that has happened to us, God, you have been just, you have acted faithfully, and we have done wrong.

A prayer life that understands that we are broken and rely fully and wholly on God's grace will be a prayer life that is grounded in grace. It will lead to a prayer life that is overwhelmingly thankful and humble because we realise it's nothing that we have done. It is nothing that we have earned. We can be so arrogant in our life. We can be so arrogant in our life thinking, well, this is a really bad situation.

I'm so frustrated about what's going on here. I should have gotten this job because I've done so and so and so and I deserve this. Look at how much I do for God, I deserve it. No, you don't. Everything you have is a gift purely from the grace of God.

I deserve better health. I think I can ask for that. I have done lots of work for the church. I deserve it. I don't think so.

No, you don't. Not really. And in fact, God may have a very good reason for your bad health. The very fact that you are sitting here living and breathing is already a blessing from God. Who here can tell their heart to beat one more beat?

No one. If your heart stops, you stop. And friends, when we understand that everything is a grace gift from a gracious God, our prayer life will not be unaffected. It cannot be unaffected. So we need to know our place before a holy God, knowing how undeserving we are of everything that He has given us and that will influence our prayer life big time.

The third thing is to pray according to what grace means. This prayer we see here understands the concept of grace. Grace is receiving something for which you totally and completely do not deserve. It is something received that can never be claimed, that can never be demanded, that cannot be earned. Grace, in its truest form, will never go unnoticed either.

If you receive grace, you receive an extravagant gift, you cannot ignore that. You will notice that every single time. It will move you. It will astound you. The person who prayed this prayer had the eyes to perceive God's grace and he knew that grace is something that has come to us in spite of who we are.

That is why they were so joyful a few weeks before. That is why they were so overwhelmed. Look at how he recognises God's grace. Look at verse 17, sort of the last half there. It's a long verse.

It says, but you are a forgiving God. In spite of our rebellion our father's rebellions, you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to become angry, and abounding in love. Verse 27b, from heaven you heard them and in your great compassion you gave them deliverers who rescued them from the hands of their enemies. Lord, despite all that we did and our shortcomings, you still loved, you still delivered, you still rescued. Understanding and realising the grace of God will impact your life forever.

You will not remain unchanged. And by extension, it will influence your prayer life to something very similar to this prayer in Nehemiah 9. Tim Keller, who's a pastor and author, writes in his book, The Prodigal God, about the fact that the Bible often shows that it is the humble that are the ones that enter the kingdom of God. It is the humble that come close to God and it is the proud that are out, the proud that miss out. He says the people who confess that they aren't particularly good, that confess that they aren't particularly open-minded, they are the ones moving toward God because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know that you need it.

The prerequisite for understanding or receiving the grace of God is to know that you need it. The people who think, I'm just fine, thank you very much. I'm okay. They're the ones that are moving away from God in the Bible. And then Keller says, and he quotes this story, when a newspaper posed a question, what is wrong with the world?

Sort of a in Britain I think it was. What is wrong with the world? The Christian writer GK Chesterton reputedly wrote a letter in response, one of the shortest letters of all time. Dear sirs, I am. Yours sincerely, GK Chesterton.

What is wrong with the world? Me. For someone who has grasped the message of God's grace in the gospel, the message that says that despite you being very unlovable, that despite you being radically corrupted by sin, God in His mercy has reached out to you, that He has come to you with life, that He has paid for your life by His life, taking on the penalty of sin by dying on the cross. Christian, friend, if you understand this truth, your prayer life will be changed forever. And this leads us to our final point, that we are to pray according to a new freedom.

We see this great prayer ending in verse 36 and it talks, yes, and it mentions their situation now. It says, but see, God, we are slaves today. We are slaves in this land that you gave our forefathers so they could eat its fruit and other good things it produces. Because of our sins, its abundant harvest goes to the kings you have placed over us. They rule over our bodies and our cattle as they please.

We are in great distress. And then they say amen. And although it's not actually technically true here, the Jews living under the Persian Empire were not slaves. They had opportunity to come and go as they pleased. They could start businesses.

They could have farms. They could have land. They were just taxed heavily because they were a vassal of the empire. They belonged to the empire, but they weren't slaves, not. They would have known what real slaves were and they weren't slaves. But they sensed a very heavy burden and felt to them like slavery.

Why? Because slavery is an inescapable reality. In slavery, it's not your house or your car or your wealth that belongs to someone, it is your very life that belongs to someone and they may do as they see fit. That he says that here, they rule over our bodies and our cattle as they please. They can do whatever they want.

And the reality is even though the people of God saw their existence then as slavery, serving under these Persian overlords, there existed an even greater slavery that they hint at throughout this whole prayer. A slavery, a captivity to sin. And over and over again we see that the people here could not obey God perfectly. There was good times where they were close to God and then they fell. And then God had to forgive and God had to rescue.

And then it was good times and then they fell and God had to go and rescue them over and over again. And in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul picks this up. And in the book of Romans, he writes about the effect of sin being like existence of a slave. It holds complete power over your life. It dictates what you do and when you do it, you cannot escape it.

Sin is your master. It is what made the Israelites keep from obeying God and getting into trouble. It is a hopeless situation to be in. Paul says that all of humanity is controlled by this terrible master, and it owns you. It owns every part of you and it does with you what it sees fit.

Romans 6:19 says that we have offered parts of our body in slavery to impurity and ever increasing wickedness. Verse 20, when we were slaves to sin, we were free from the control of righteousness. We could not do the right thing. We were away from that. And the sad reality of this slavery is that the only way to escape slavery, this spiritual slavery is the same as physical slavery.

The only way to get out of it is to die. They own your life. And when you die, they don't own you anymore. Your contract is ended when your usefulness to the master is ended, and that only happens when your life is ended. Paul says that the wages of sin in the same way is death.

What is the payment for slavery to sin? Well, the master sin always pays with death. But sometimes slavery could be worked around, we also know that. There wasn't one escape clause and that would exist when a very wealthy, very kind man or woman would pay a vast amount of money. When someone would put a dollar sign on your life and say this is what their life is worth.

And a rich benefactor with a kind heart would come and buy the life of a slave and set them free. And it is no surprise that the apostle Paul, when speaking about the reality of sin, speaks about it in terms of slavery. He also speaks of a solution similar to this transaction. Jesus was a payment for our slavery. A life for a life.

And we escaped slavery by having someone pay for it. It had to be a life. It had to be paid by a life. It had to be in exchange, my slave life for His free life. Paul says in Romans 6, thanks be to God that though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching, the gospel of Jesus.

You have now been set free from sin and you have become slaves to righteousness. You have become slaves to God. And friend, the great news is that this God is a good master. A master who doesn't abuse, a master who doesn't misuse, who doesn't bring death, He offers life. You will always serve a master.

The prayer in Nehemiah 9 finishes by saying that it's their Persian overlords that were their masters, but here is a bigger master at work in humanity and that is this issue of sin. So our prayer and our prayer life should be gripped in this understanding. Don't fall into the trap of spiritual amnesia and forget. Prayer should be deeply embedded in reminding ourselves of God's character as revealed in Scripture. Prayer should know the character of God, ask in accordance to that character.

It should know our place before this awesome God and honestly deal with the effects of our previous life. But know the power, friend, ultimately. Know the power of the One who has set you free. You do not belong to that old master. There is joy in this new life.

Hold onto it as the source of peace and joy in your life. Let's pray. Thank you for your grace, oh Lord Jesus. Thank you that we may know it. Thank you that we may have tasted it and celebrated even today, this morning.

Lord, our lives are messy. There's all sorts of stuff going on in it. There's all sorts of distractions and destructions and pain and anger, and bitterness. But Father, help us not to forget ever who you are and what you have done for us in Jesus. Lord, we are so prone to wander.

We are so prone to walk away from the God who loves us. And we see our lives and we see our character and our essence come through in some of these words here that we stuff up so many times. But Lord, we know that ultimately and forever we will never be lost to you. Our life is now with you. Our life has been set free to be with you.

We will never be as broken as we were. We will never be as sinful as we were. We will never be as lost as we were. Once we found you, our lives changed forever. We pray, Lord, that we may continue serving you in our prayer life.

Father, we may grow closer to you. We may intercede. We may speak and pray on behalf of others who need your intervention and help. But Father, we may also thank you and have joy-filled lives remembering all the great things and blessings you have given us. Father, make this church, make our church a praying church that loves to pray, loves to speak to you, loves to draw close to you because we love you.

We pray it in the name, by the enabling, by the power of Jesus Christ who set us free. Amen.