"Oh, God, Help Me!" - Meditations on Nehemiah 2

Then the king said to me, "What are you requesting?" So I prayed to the God of heaven. (Nehemiah 2:4, ESV)

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      Nehemiah was devoted to prayer. The task consumed him. He prayed for four months. He prayed day and night. There must have been times when he spent hours in prayer pleading his case before God. There must have been other times that he returned to prayer over and over again throughout the day. The intensity is unmistakable.

      Extended, persistent prayer often is the only kind that is answered. But not all prayer needs to be prolonged. Sometimes prayer needs to be short, punctuated, spur of the moment. Again, Nehemiah is our model.

      Nehemiah finally had the opportunity to speak to Artaxerxes about Jerusalem, but the circumstances scared him. Artaxerxes read something in Nehemiah's face that led him to believe that he was sad – and to display sadness in the presence of the emperor was a mortal offense (Neh. 2:2). When Artaxerxes asked him about it, Nehemiah pursued his prayer and spoke plainly (Neh. 2:3). Artaxerxes pressed him further, "What are you requesting?" he said. Hesitating only long enough to pray to the God of heaven, Nehemiah answered (Neh. 2:4-5). Now not only did Nehemiah appear sad in Artaxerxes's presence, but he was also requesting to leave the ruler's service. He was in a dangerous position, indeed; if God did not come through, he was lost.

      What was it that Nehemiah prayed in that moment? We can't be certain, but we do know that it wasn't like the prayers of the past four months. Artaxerxes had asked a question; Nehemiah needed to answer immediately. In that moment, Nehemiah must have recalled the specific request he had spoken to God: "Give me success! Give me mercy!" (Neh. 1:11). It was a quick shot, a rapid glance in God's direction: "God help me to do this!" He wasn't asking God to get him out of the situation. He was asking God to get him through it. He determined to make his request plainly and trust God with the outcome.

      Perhaps the most significant thing about Nehemiah's short prayer has to do, not with the prayer itself, but with the man. He was facing a life or death situation and his first response was to speak with God. There was no effort at manipulation. He did not attempt to excuse or extricate himself. He abandoned himself to God's sovereign mercy. Now what kind of person automatically defaults to God, not for deliverance but for success, in a situation like that? The person who is regularly in communion with God. Nehemiah's spontaneous prayer grew out of his deliberate prayer. And both forms of prayer were the natural dynamics of a man whose life was about relationship with God.

      You may have had people encourage you to pray by noting that you can pray anywhere – you can pray in the shower, you can pray while washing the dishes, you can pray while driving (just don't close your eyes!). This is absolutely true. You have freedom through Christ to approach God boldly – anytime, anywhere. But you will never have spontaneity in prayer until you have developed a discipline of prayer. Our minds just aren't wired to default to God when we aren't busy about "religious" activities. On the other hand, if all the praying you do is during a scheduled quiet time and it never spills over into the activities of your afternoons, then maybe your prayers lack the intimacy that should attend them.

      The point is this: prayer should be both planned and spontaneous. You should be intentional about when and how you pray; you need to make room for it and do it. And you should catch yourself looking and speaking to God throughout the day, unplanned and unorchestrated. These are two elements of any vital relationship: planned and unplanned, scheduled and unscheduled interaction. A life of prayer is, after all, a life of relationship and a life devoted to prayer is a life devoted to knowing and communing with God.