"'O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name, and give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.' Now I was cupbearer to the king." (Nehemiah 1:11, ESV)
"I said to the king, 'Let the king live forever! Why should not my face be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' graves, lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?'" (Nehemiah 2:3, ESV)
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This lesson is an important one for us to learn. We generally lean in one of two directions. We might pray earnestly and persistently and then expect God to answer our prayers in miraculous ways without us at all being involved. Or we may pray little (or not at all) and then expend ourselves as if the answer depended entirely on our own effort. Nehemiah shows us a better way, a way that I like to call "pursuing your prayers."
We saw last week that Nehemiah claimed God's promise concerning Jerusalem. We saw that he looked to God's character and so was convinced that God would certainly do what he had promised. Being thus convinced, he lived in such a way to obtain the answer that he knew would come, even if he did not know when or how.
When we read in chapter 2 that Artaxerxes asked Nehemiah about his "sadness of heart," we may be inclined to think that it was a chance encounter or that Nehemiah was unprepared for the question. But notice how Nehemiah ended his prayer in chapter 1. He asked God to give him success and mercy in the sight of Artaxerxes. He anticipated that there would come a time when he would be able to address his concern to the king.
The text tells us that four months elapsed between the report from Hanani and Nehemiah's conversation with Artaxerxes, but we don't know how much time elapsed between the recorded prayer and the conversation. I am inclined to believe that it was a relatively short time. Nehemiah had been fasting and praying for many days before he spoke the prayer. It is possible that the "many days" took up most of those four months. In any case, Nehemiah was preparing himself to be used by God to fulfill what he was asking God to do. When the opportunity came, Nehemiah recognized it and acted. He moved forward expecting God to grant the success that he had so earnestly prayed for.
The Bible is filled with stories of men and women who prayed and lived like this. Sometimes God gives clear direction about what people are to do in order to receive the answer to prayer. For example, when the kings of Israel and Judah were conducting a military campaign against Moab, their armies were nearly lost for a lack of water. When they consulted Elisha about the problem, the Lord told them to "make this valley full of trenches" (2 Kings 3:16, NASB). After they had done so, God sent water, without wind or rain, to fill the trenches.
There are other times when God does not give specific directions. He simply encourages the one praying to rely on his character and promise and expects that person to live as if the prayer is already answered. This was the case with the disciples in Jerusalem after the ascension of Jesus. Acts 4:23-30 tells us of the believers' prayer after Peter and John had been threatened by the Jewish high council. Like Nehemiah, they remembered God's character and promise and then asked God to grant them boldness even in the face of persecution. Verse 31 says that after they prayed, they were "filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness." They asked God and then acted on the request that they had made.
How does your life measure up with these examples? Are you praying for God to do something in your life? Does that request carry with it the authority of God's promise and character? If so, are you living like your prayer has been answered, even if you can't see it yet? Perhaps God is waiting for you to dig a trench. Or perhaps he is waiting for you to take a step in the direction of your prayers. That step may be what God uses to part the river between your prayer and its answer (cf., Joshua 3:15-16).
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