Harbor Church - Mid City

Building a Great City—Through Confession

Neh. 9: 1-37 Oct. 31, 2010

RECAP: We’re in the book of Nehemiah, and if you haven’t been here, or took a little siesta, then I’ll catch you up to speed. Here is the story of Nehemiah. In 587BC the Babylonians invade Jerusalem, exile almost everyone. Nehemiah is one of those exiles and, as a slave, he works his way up to be the King’s wine-taster. Ordinary dude—drinks wine. His boss had given protection to a group trying to rebuild the city of Jerusalem, but then he pulled the plug, and the rebuilding effort was crushed. Nehemiah is devastated, fasts, prays, gets a crazy idea that he should go and tell his boss to reverse his foreign policy, appoint him to lead the rebuilding effort in Jerusalem, and that his boss should pay for it. He agrees. Nehemiah then rallies the Jewish people in Jerusalem, they start rebuilding the city, he faces all sorts of opposition from Sanballat & the boys, he cleans up the corruption in the city, and in 52 days he does what nobody had been able to do in 141 years. The wall is completed, the basic infra-structure is in place and he gathers the people and reads through a little section from the historical archives, then they have a worship service, which Bill went over last week.

Ch. 9: Case Study on Prayer: This week we pick up in chapter 9. And in chapter 9 is this fascinating little case study on prayer. Here is why I think all of you will find it interesting. All of you are here because something has been awakened in you spiritually. Some of you are checking this God-thing out and others are in relationship with Jesus. Regardless of where you sit, you have an inkling that prayer is how you connect with God. Prayer is what builds intimacy. Let me show you why this is the case.

Why this is the case: marriage. Think of a marriage. What is the most important thing in a marriage? Guys were thinking sex (but they wouldn’t say it, because we’re in church). But guys, as you either know, or will find out, communication is actually much more important. Communicate well, intimacy follows, and you get all the sex you can handle. No communication, no sex. That is the way it works. So, where I am going with this. Well, the God of the Bible is relational and the Bible actually says we get married to him. And prayer is the way we communicate. Prayer is what builds that intimacy with the God of the Bible.

So, let’s look at this case study on prayer. We printed the whole thing, but we’re not going to make it very far today—just 3 verses. We’re going to set the prayer up and get into the substance of the prayer next week. Here is what we’re going to focus in on. 2 words. If you want to communicate with God in such a way that leads to intimacy, you need to practice 2 things:

(1) Listening, (2) Confessing

(1) Listening

V1 “ On the twenty-fourth day of the same month, the Israelites gathered together, fasting and wearing sackcloth and having dust on their heads.” 16 days after this massive Feast of Tabernacles that Bill covered for you last week, they begin fasting. Sackcloth, ashes—the whole deal. Those of Israelite descent had separated themselves from all foreigners.” More on that, and why they did that, when we get to chapter 10. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the wickedness of their fathers. 3 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 worshiping the LORD their God.

Did you hear that? A quarter of the day they spent reading the Bible. That is approximately 3 hours reading the Bible. See you think some of my sermons are long. Hope you packed a lunch for today because after I read this text I thought, “A 3 hour sermon. Ahh. It’s Biblical—if you complain, I’ll just quote Neh. 9 on you.” But 3 hours wasn’t enough.

Then they spent 3 more hours confessing their sin and worshipping. This is like the precursor to Woodstock, only they are getting high on God and, well, they are actually clothed. They were in church for 6 hours and loved it.

LISTEN FIRST: Here is what I want you to see. Before they actually talked to God which is coming up in verses 5-37, they listened to God. Listening comes first. See most of us don’t think their prayer actually begins until verse 5 when they start speaking.

And that is the problem with most of our prayer lives. We don’t listen to Jesus speak to us. See prayer is a conversation, and if you do all of the talking, well then you’ll be that guy. You know, the guy who just won’t shut up? Really enjoys hearing himself talk. Never ask you anything about yourself. Never listens. Just talks. And just talks about what he needs (Uncle Ricky’s cough). Such is the problem with so many of our prayer lives. We just talk. We don’t listen to God or what he has to say. We just talk. Consequently, we don’t know the God that we are talking to.

Both Christians and non-Christians do this. Let me give you an example of someone who isn’t a Christian doing this. Let’s go back to Eat, Pray,Love. I know, I know—2 weeks in a row on chick-flicks, and not even a particularly good one. Julia Roberts is a writer who’s beginning to feel increasingly unhappy in her marriage. While her husband is sweet, he does not enjoy traveling as much as she does, and he still hasn’t made up his mind on which direction his life should take and that annoys her.

Seeing her marriage at a crossroad, Julia Roberts tearfully prays to God and I am going to paraphrase this because it was a few months ago that we saw this and it isn’t out yet (as far as I know) on DVD or I would have gotten the exact line But she says something like this, “God, I don’t ever do this, but I need you to guide me.” Upon returning to bed, her husband turns to her and states that he doesn’t want to go with her on her latest trip. Taking this as a sign, Liz leaves him, begins an affair with a young actor, and eventually goes on this journey of self-discovery.

Now here is a classic example of how people treat prayer. Julia Roberts hadn’t listened to God or what he has to say about marriage. She doesn’t know God and what he thinks on the subject. If she did listen to him, she would find out that God wouldn’t have advised her to divorce her husband b/c he doesn’t like to travel. That isn’t a Biblical ground for divorce. Moreover, God wouldn’t counsel her to have an affair.

See if you don’t listen to God, if you just talk, then you need to be honest with yourself: you aren’t in relationship with God. You are your god. It shouldn’t surprise you when you feel like your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling and you’re getting nothing back

We have just the opposite going on here in Nehemiah. The people listen to God speak for 3 straight hours as the Bible is read. This wasn’t abnormal. Remember, last week Bill talked about they had a worship service and they read from the Bible for 6 straight hours. Then, in Ch 8, we see they broke up into small groups or community groups (have I ever mentioned to you the importance of commuity groups) and applied the Bible to their lives. Then, here in our text, 3 straight hours of listening to God.

Bottom line: Learning to pray=1^st learning to listen (primarily reading the Bible) So here is what this means for you. If you want to learn to pray, first you must learn to listen, and one of the primary ways that we listen to God is through reading the Bible. Not the only way—I know we have a group exploring listening prayer right now and I love that. Lots of ways to do it. But the primary, the mainstay, of listening prayer is through reading the Bible.

Ford came into my office this week and he saw me reading my Bible and he said, “Are you spending time with Jesus.” And I said, “Yes, Ford, Daddy is listening to Jesus. He is speaking to me.”

Bored in Prayer: See people complain to me that they get bored in prayer and that their mind drifts. Here is my first question: are you listening to Jesus? And often they don’t understand me, so I say, “So I rephrase the question—does your Bible reading shape your prayers?

And here is what I will tell people struggling with prayer. Imagine having dinner with the recognized expert in your field. This is the guy or gal who, in your mind, really “gets it.” You’ve read their books, been to their conferences, and you get a few hours with them one-on-one. So you pepper them with questions. You’re drinking it in.

Well, Jesus is a guy who “gets it.” His words are recorded here from Genesis to Revelation. These aren’t dead words. Heb. 4:12 says, “For the word of God is living and active.” And Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Jesus—will do what theologians call illuminating your heart and mind and bring you into His presence. See the resurrected Jesus appeared to His disciples and said, “Come and have breakfast with me. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He invites you, his disciple, to breakfast. Are you listening?

Prayer Walks: So here is what I do. This is my adapation of Nehemiah 9 where they stand for 3 hours and listen to the Bible. I have written down lots of Scripture onto prayer cards and I walk around my neighborhood listening to Jesus. I read the verses over and over and meditate on them and then Jesus starts leading me in adoration, confession, thanksgiving, how I can pray this verse for people.

Or another way that Bradford and I do this is together. We read through Scripture together. We listen to Jesus together and then we pray through each verse, often letting the Psalms be our prayer language. I love praying this way with my wife.

Or here is a Neh. 9 application for kids. My kids are learning to listen to Jesus in so many different ways. We have all these little Bible verses put to songs that we drive around in the car and they sing. Jesus is singing to them. They are getting to know Him. Or we have started to act out the Bible stories together as a family in the morning so they can hear Jesus speak to them.

(2) Confessing

Now, I want to emphasize one other part of the text we read. V2 said “they stood in their places and confessed their sins.” Then they read the Bible for 3 hours, then confessed and worshipped for 3 more hours. Here is what happens: The more you listen to Jesus, the more you read the Bible & see how glorious and gracious and true and beautiful He is, the more obvious the contrast will be with yourself. And confession will just happen naturally.

I remember when I was in high school I used to think I was pretty smart. Small school in Alabama, and well, you know Alabama right. Nobody has shoes, no running water, all pig farming (that is, what many Californians think). So it was easy to think of yourself as pretty smart in this environment. Then I went to the university of Virginia and encountered some really smart people. It only escalated in law school—my professors and fellow students. Smart took on a whole new definition. The way I began to view myself changed by virtue of who I was hanging around.

Or let me say the same thing from a slightly different vantage point. Some of you are not followers of Jesus. Often your objection to Christianity goes something like this, “Me and God—we’re good--because, well, I am a pretty good person.” Now, typically, I concede that point because I know that for most of us the scale of how we determine our own goodness is often a bit skewed. We have an image of a bad person and it is a hybrid of the unibomber, the 9/11 terrorists, and Jeffrey Dahmer. As long as we aren’t that, we’re good. So rather than arguing this point, I would rather have whoever I am talking to meet Jesus, the beautiful one. The Bright Morning Star. The Lily of the Valley. Because if you are in His presence, the definition of goodness will be reshaped for you.

Paul: It happened to Paul. Paul was not a follower of Jesus and thought he was a really good guy. Hebrew of Hebrews, a religious leader, all the right training. In fact, he was so good that he wanted to exterminate the bad guys—all the heretical Christians doing harm to people. But then everything changed one day on the Damascus road. He met Jesus and his view of himself totally changed when he was in the presence of true greatness.

So much so that in Philippians 3 Paul lays out all the things by which he formerly measured himself as good and he says, “I consider all these things rubbish, that I may gain Christ.” Paul goes from boasting about his goodness to boasting about his weakness. He goes from persecuting bad people to saying, in I Tim. 1:15 that he is the worst of all sinners. Do you see how Jesus changes your perspective of yourself.

Isaiah, one of the great prophets, was ushered into the presence of Jesus and here is what he said, “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Is. 6:5).

Is confession routine? Why do I emphasize this point? My hope is not to make you feel bad about yourself or to lower your self-esteem. My point is this: is confession normal? Regular? Routine? Or do you spend most of your time defending yourself to your spouse, to your friends? If confession is normal, then that means you are on the right track. It means you are hanging around Jesus, that you are in His presence.

In Jesus Christ, you have a man who did exactly what I asked you to do in the first point: he listened to His Father as if no one else’s voice was even there. The best analogy I can give you for how Jesus listened to His Father is that of a quarterback and his coach. In college and NFL games, they will have over 100,000 screaming fans. The noise is deafening. But what they have done is they have developed a microphone system and put a receiver in the quarterbacks helmet, so that despite all the voices, despite all the noise, that is the one voice that the quarterback hears.

Well, such was the case with Jesus. His coach, His Dad, was the one voice that He heard, despite all the noise around Him. It was the one voice he followed.

John 12:49 49For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. But it isn’t just that he has listened. In Jesus you see one who was finally able to be in the presence of God and not have to confess his sin like Paul or Isaiah. John 3:32, “The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard.” He listened, but John 3:32 is amazing because it also says Jesus had seen the Father. He had been with Him. That, my friends, is what is so amazing about Jesus Christ. Every other man who came into the presence of God in the Old Testament said like Isaiah did, “Woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips.” Finally, there was one who had no need of confession. He wasn’t a man of unclean lips. Instead, the word became flesh, the glory of God dwelt among us. He showed up—ahh the wonder of the incarnation.

But the incarnation pales in comparison to the glory of the cross. That this sinless, perfect man, the God-man, would become unclean for us. That Jesus Christ would hear the blackness of my confession, of your confession, that he would listen to me and say, “Yes, I know you, and you’re worth it. I love you, enough to die for you. But 3 days later, the stone was rolled back, the gates of hell were shattered, and the cosmos crowned its rightful king, and the longing of our heart, to be in the presence of God without being utterly destroyed, is now possible. But you must first listen to the story, confess your sin, and put your trust in Jesus.

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