And it came to pass in the month Nisan, the 20th year of Artaxerxes the king, that wine was before him, and I took up the wine and gave it unto the king. Now, I had not been before time sad in his presence. Wherefore, the king said unto me, why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? This is nothing else but sorrow of heart. Then was I very sore afraid, and said unto the king, Let the king live for ever. Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my father's sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire? Then the king said unto me, For what dost thou make request? So I prayed, to the God of heaven. And I said unto the king, if it please the king, and if thy servant have found favor in thy sight, that thou would send me unto Judah, unto the city of my father's sepulchers, that I may rebuild it. And the king said unto me, the queen also sitting by him, for how long shall thy journey be? When wilt thou return? So it pleased the king to send me, and I set him a time. Moreover, I said unto the king, if it pleased the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river, that they may convey me over till I come into Judah. And the letter unto Asaph, the keeper of the king's forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace, which appertained to the house, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. And the king granted me according to the good hand of my God upon me." We finish the reading at verse 8. The Lord will add His own blessing to the reading of His Word for His namesake. The last time we looked at this, I emphasized the sudden emergency prayer that Nehemiah offered to the Lord. Actually, I emphasized it a bit toward the end. That's where I'd meant to start, but knowing me, I went through a few things before we got there. If you were in the homiletics class here in the seminary, you'd find that Mr. Wagner carries on something that I started way back in 1982. in that homiletics class. We deal with about seven, six or seven different styles of preaching, different ways of treating a text. Some people imagine there's only one. The thing that's in vogue in Reformed churches now is you start in the morning in Genesis at the beginning of a year or whatever, start the evening in the New Testament, and you read and make Fairly banal comments. You'd get more just out of the plain reading than some of the services I've been in, and that's called preaching. We live in a day, actually, when the preaching of Spurgeon's kind is despised. Spurgeon wasn't much of a preacher, we're told. He didn't know anything about it, because he didn't go down the text Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Genesis 4, right through and bore the socks off everybody. He simply preached a message from God and saw thousands and tens of thousands converted to God. Poor old fool. According to these characters. The truth is they know nothing about preaching. But that's by the way. I don't know why I'm even going there. You're not in the seminary. If you were in the seminary, I'd have a whole lot more to say. When I say there are six or seven different kinds and styles, you might well don't. But you might well come to me and say, if you know all those styles, why do you not use them all? Well, actually, over the last 30 years, I have used them all. There are just some that are much more difficult than others. And when you're as limited as I am, you've got to be very careful about what you undertake. In one particular style of preaching, there's a text that I set the students to preach on. And every generation of students coming after has told it to the others to expect this. And it's Nehemiah 2, verse 4, just that one statement at the end, so I prayed to the God of heaven. And I'm not going into the style of preaching and all that they have to work it into, a particular manner in which They've got to learn to deal with it. But that has caused some wonderful efforts. It has caused some abysmal efforts. It has caused us some laughs and I think a few people some tears. It's a great text. You can take it as emergency praying. You can take it as just that instantaneous prayer in a crisis. Sooner or later, we all get there, you know. We're in a crisis. And if you don't get through to God in that crisis, you're done. Sooner or later, we are all going to be there. If you haven't been there, you will. One of the saddest things that I've ever had to deal with is to deal with Christians And when they're in the crisis, it's as if God had died. They can't get through to him. Or it's as if he had shut up the heavens and they can't penetrate. They may as well be idolaters because there is none to hear and there is none to answer. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. or being like that, and there is a difference. Sometimes you feel like it when you're not that at all. The crisis comes just to get through to God. The man who can get through to God in a crisis is a man who constantly prays. Nehemiah was not a man who prayed in a crisis, and that was it. You read this book, and you'll find that Nehemiah didn't do anything without interlarding it with prayer. Everything he did, it's brought up right, butting alongside of prayer. Whatever he did, he did prayerfully. You start off the book with one of the great prayers of the Old Testament, where Nehemiah is seeking God. And this is showing you what is the heart of the man. This man lived and breathed in the atmosphere of prayer. He lived his life at the throne of God. And since he lived his life at the throne of God, When the crisis came, he could shoot a prayer like an arrow straight to the mark and it got through to God and he got an answer. That's the secret. Constancy in prayer. That's going to be true of you and of me individually. That's going to be true of us as a church. When I talk about constancy in prayer, I'm reminded, I think Spurgeon actually quoted this, but the first one that I know who said this was, or something like it, was Billy Bray. You all know who Billy Bray is, don't you? Anybody not know who Billy Bray is? Or was? Now I'm tempted to ask all the rest. Stand up and give me a life of Billy Bray. Billy Bray was a holiness Methodist preacher. He had no education, but he knew the Lord. He was a converted drunkard, a wild, bad sinner, a Cornish miner, Cornish comes from the county of Cornwall in England, in case you don't get that. Some of you have heard of Cornish hens, and that's the only Cornish thing you know. Well, they come from there as well, actually. But Billy Bray was a real rough and tumble, hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-swearing sinner. And God saved him. He built more churches than most denominations. He was a mighty man of prayer. And somebody asked him about, you know, confessing his sins. Well, Billy was almost a sinless perfectionist. He believed in perfect love. And I have to say, though I don't believe he was sinlessly perfect, I believe he had such an experience of the love of Christ that you might have well thought he was perfect. Though, mind you, when he came visiting in your pulpit, you might have liked to a little less exuberance. Actually, it would have been quite nice if he had come to my pulpit or John Wagner's pulpit. I'd like to see him try this. Because Billy would get so full of the joy of the Lord, he would actually put his hands, turn around, lift the preacher off the seat, lift him up, and dance around the platform with him. I'd love to see him do that with Wagner or me. He might end up in St. Francis for a while. But that was Billy Bray. And he said, you know, when a woman has a brass ornament. Anybody who's ever had brass, you know how it tarnishes. He says, if she polishes it every day, it doesn't take much time to polish it. And the message was clear. If you're coming into God's presence constantly, Doesn't take much time to get in. Spurgeon used to say that he never prayed for more than 10 minutes. But he rarely ever went 10 minutes without praying. This was Nehemiah, breathing the atmosphere of prayer. Always seeking God. Whatever he was doing, relating it to the Lord. Whatever was happening, turning to the Lord. And then when the big crisis came, he had been praying for this day. He had been praying about this opportunity. He had been pleading that God would prepare the way and prepare the king. He was dead scared. He was scared for his life. I think he was much more scared of blowing the situation, losing the opportunity. So he prayed to God of heaven. Look at it for your own life. Look at it for this church. When the work of God is in a sad state, what do you do? You pray the God of Heaven. When you feel a great weight of responsibility that you think you really can hardly bear, what do you do? You pray the God of Heaven. When you're in a situation that you can't control, and there's something like this king, and I described him to you last time, this man of almost absolute power indeed in the human sense. What do you do when you're faced with those situations? You pray the God of heaven. Feeling your weakness is not an excuse not to do the work of God. As I pointed out last time, Nehemiah was a cup bearer. Not a thing in his resume to say that he was a builder, never mind a city planner. He had a burden for God's work. The lack of training, the lack of ability, the lack of strength, the lack of anything is not an excuse for not doing God's work. The answer is to pray the God of heaven. And you'll see the answer he got. The answer he got was everything that he desired and then some. But here's the key. Join the end of verse 4 with the end of verse 8. So I prayed the God of heaven and the King granted me according to the good hand of my God upon me. That was it. Nehemiah believed it. Now he proved it. Artaxerxes was in the hand of Jehovah. The Lord could turn the mind of that heathen king and turn the heart of that man, make him favorable to every request. He could use the ungodly, many of whom were going to be ripping mad against Nehemiah. But he could use them to prepare the way to do the work of God. What I want us to do tonight is just to look at that and take courage. We tend to look at the human situation and say, now, isn't that terrible? It's awful. And then we throw up our hands in horror and give up. I know I personally like to do that. Well, whether I like to do it or not, I tend to do it. The situation is black, so what's our conclusion? Now this shows where we are spiritually. Our conclusion usually is the situation is black, therefore we can't expect much. I know a school where it's drummed into the students for the ministry. You're going out. and you're going to be building churches, you're opening churches, you're not going to build any churches, and you must not expect to see people saved, and you must not expect to see a strong work built, and you must not expect to see any moving of God, because this is a day of latter-time apostasy. That's the orthodoxy that drives them. Now, they're sincere people. They're good people. They're upright people. They're Bible-believing people. But that's the honest conviction they've come to. My opinion is completely wrong-headed, but they believe that. Look at the blackness. What can we expect? Nehemiah looked Jerusalem in ruins. He was a servant. He was serving an autocrat who was a heathen and a pagan and who had no particular reason to want to rebuild Jerusalem. So, what do we do? Everything's bleak. No, I prayed the God of heaven. Because of the good hand of God, I got all I asked. I've often been struck by the words of the psalmist. It is time for thee, Lord, to work. Why? Why? What gave David the conviction, now is the time for God to work? People are praying everywhere. They're on their knees. There's revival prayer meetings. Not a bit of it. It's time for thee to work because they have made void thy law. The day is dark. The day is bleak. It's black. There's nothing we can do about it. Therefore, we're looking to God to work. In other words, the language of the psalmist is very akin to that of Nehemiah. The darker the day, the more we should expect our God to work. Why? Because His honor is at stake. After all, Jerusalem is the city of the great king. Jerusalem is the holy city. Jerusalem is the place. It's compactly joined together. It's the place of God's special dwelling. It's the place of God's temple. God connected His honor with Jerusalem more than with any other spot on God's earth. So Nehemiah, at every cost, to turn to God. This is not the last word. I owe that we would get that. What we're seeing today is not the last word. Sure, this is a day of apostasy. It's very discouraging when you're God. I'm, at the minute, and I'm not going to bore you with this, but at the minute I'm taking the theology class through one of the most heart-rending soul-destroying movements in modern Christianity, where you've got a bunch of evangelicals, many of them Presbyterians, following the lead of ranked liberals into developing a whole new way of interpreting Paul and the Gospel, that ends up going back basically to the counsel of Trump and repudiating the gospel of Jesus Christ. You look at this, this is a dark day. You've got to wonder. I was talking to the guys today. These fellows are scholars. They're brain boxes. Where I have dandruff, they have brains. But they have not Two cents worth of spiritual common sense? Talk the greatest load of childish nonsense. You know, I told the fellas that, you know, when I was a grown-up, it was always said there was only a hairline between... It was never said of me anyway. Just, well, maybe one side of it was said of me. There's only a hairline between genius and lunacy. So if you're a genius, be careful. These characters, geniuses. But they virgin lunacy. What's being said? The gospel is under attack, not only from potpourri, but from Protestantism. Luther made a great mistake. Calvin made a great mistake. They didn't understand what the gospel was all about. Justification, according to these guys, has nothing to do with getting right with God. Nothing to do with a guilty soul being made right and brought into a standing of acceptance with God. How much crazier can you get? It's a dark day. I want to tell you something. Seeing all those churches where they're going down that road, I can guarantee one thing. They haven't had a real prayer meeting where they've ever got through to God in living memory. They know nothing about it. So when we look out and see that happening, it's time for us to get in our faces before God and say, Lord, Your glory's at stake. Your gospel's at stake. The name of Your Son is at stake. The whole promises of God are being held up to ridicule. It is time for God to work. I can't work unless God works. Nehemiah was stuck there unless God worked. Nehemiah couldn't cut down trees. He couldn't gather gold and silver. He couldn't organize a journey. Nehemiah couldn't build a city. He couldn't do anything unless God did something. But once God did something, Nehemiah could do it all. So Nehemiah prayed and God answered. Men and women, that's where we are tonight. That's exactly where we are tonight, as a church and as individuals. Dark days. I'm going to close the book because if I go down those, it's time's moving. I get into those verses. I'll just take away the time for prayer. It wouldn't be a good idea. But when you get dark days, and I want to warn you about this. There are only two ways to deal with them. You look at the darkness from standing in the light, or you deny the light because you're standing in the darkness. Those are the only two ways of dealing with it. And an awful lot of Christians, when dark days are happening in the church, they jump on the dark black bandwagon and they keep crying, it's dark, it's dark, it's dark, it's dark, it's dark. Oh, woe, woe, woe and more woe. And they cause gloom, doom, and discouragement everywhere they go. And they become part of the problem and not part of the answer. We're in the light. I grew up listening to the slogan, we're not fighting for the victory. We're fighting in the victory. There's a world of difference. David said, In thy light we shall see light. You stand in God's light. What's one of the great properties of light? Remember when I read Law's Gospel in Genesis as a young fellow, and his first devotional message was on, Let there be light. I think I still have the copy of that little Banner of Truth paper back Come on, every paragraph's underlined. I could have preached that stuff. I thought I could, of course. When I tried to, I found it was very different. It's very simple for him. He was a great preacher. I was just a kid. But bless me, one of the things he said, light always dispels darkness. Always. You flip the light switch on, the darkness flees. The sun rises, the darkness flees. In God's light, we will see light. Let us face the dark days, standing and fighting and serving in the light. If we walk in the light, as He, that is God, is in the light, what happens? We have fellowship with God. Isn't that the key? We have fellowship with God. Now it can be as black and dark as you want out there. If you have fellowship with God, you can face it. If we as a people are walking in fellowship with God, we can face whatever life is going to throw at us as a church. You can face anything walking in the light. That's where Nehemiah was. He prayed. And though Artaxerxes couldn't see it, the good hand of God was on Nehemiah. God's hand was on him. You know, Artaxerxes that day couldn't have killed Nehemiah if he had brought an army. God's hand was on him. Artaxerxes couldn't deny Nehemiah, even if he'd wanted to. God's hand was on him. protecting, providing, guiding. The King granted my request according to the good hand of my God upon me. Tonight, let us come to pray. We're coming to know our taxerces. I'm reminded of the words of the Lord Jesus, if ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give good things to them that ask? If an evil king can do a good thing for God's work, how much more will the king of kings? So let us come and ask. Let us pray. Let us expect. Ask the God of heaven. What are you facing in your family? Ask the God of Heaven. What are you facing in your business? Ask the God of Heaven. What are we facing as a church? Ask the God of Heaven. Just leave it to Him. And that doesn't mean you sit back and say, oh, it's just all up to God. No, that's submitting my will to God's will. That's laying down my prejudices at God's feet, saying, not my will, but thine be done. Ask the God of heaven. The good hand of our God will be upon us.