Last week,
we looked at the first step to reconstruction…That included hearing,
understanding and implementing God's Word.
We hear what God has for us, we begin to understand what He is trying to
tell us, and we put what He says into practice.
That is an important first step if we are going to reconstruct our
lives, our churches and our world for Him.
Today, we
will look at step 2. Step two includes
confession and commitment.
Now,
remember that the people of Jerusalem have just finished celebrating the
Festival of the Booths. Now, the
festival has ended.
Nehemiah
9:1-3 – First, we see that this is a time of preparation for prayer. They are getting ready to come before the
Lord as a community…as His people. They
begin with fasting and in humbleness.
They are coming before the Lord as people who have done wrong…they have
sinned…they have been disobedient and they are showing the signs of it. The Israelites have a special history and
confession because they are the chosen people.
They confess their sins and the sins of those before them that led them
to this point. They are getting ready to
pray.
Nehemiah
9:6- end of chapter 9
Notice that
Ezra begins this prayer with an acknowledgement of who God is and what He has
done. Praising and remembering is
important. After it is acknowledged who
God is and His great power, then they recounted what God had done, where their
people had sinned, and where they were today.
They end this prayer with a commitment to God. What was the commitment?
Nehemiah 10:28-29
They commit
to do as God's Word has instructed. It
goes on to explain what God's Word is telling them and how they will obey.
Here is what
I hear from this scripture for us today:
1 - We need
to prepare ourselves when we come before Him.
We do not have the rituals and ways of preparation to show our
humility. In that, I think we can lose
some of our respect and awe of the One who is listening and the One we
serve. We should prepare our hearts to
come before the King. When we realize
who He is, we realize who we are not. We
also realize our sins and shortcomings.
2 – When
come before Him, we should acknowledge His great power and His great love for
us. We tend to instantly go right into
asking what we want without thanking Him and acknowledging this great
power. We are praying to the creator
God…we are praying in the name of the One who gave His life for you and me.
3 – We
should take time to think back and remember how good God has been to us. That is often difficult to do if we are in a
trial. We can easily find ourselves in
difficult situations and we don't know where God is. When we are in the midst of the storm, we are
calling out for Him and may not see Him.
But when we look back, we are comforted because we see His hands taking
care of us every step of the way even though we didn't even notice it
then. We can become so consumed with
what is going on that we don't realize that God has it taken care of. God's got this.
We also have
to admit where we have gone wrong. We do
so many things in haste and disobedience.
We go our own way, do our own thing, ignore the warning signs and then
wonder where God is. When we look back
we see the hand of God, but we also see where we have strayed. The praise in that is that although we
strayed, God helped us. The reminder is
that we stray and we need to focus on Him.
4 – Lastly,
they made a commitment that they would be obedient to God and His Word. There is a reason we still have the
scriptures. It isn't because it was a
really good book. There have been lots
of really good books written over the years.
It is because this book isn't a book, but the Word of God for us, the
people of God. What if God's people made
a commitment to follow the Word? While
it will not look like it did in Nehemiah's time, it will look like what God
wants it to be if we are obedient.
Do we want
to reconstruction? Maybe it is time for
confession and commitment so that we become more like what He has called us to
be and less like what the world would have us to be.
