and turn with me to the book of Nehemiah chapter 1. We have just recently launched into the study of Nehemiah, which is, in essence, Ezra part 2, which we concluded sometime last year, so we're moving on in the study of post-exilic Israel. And I want us to read this entire first chapter tonight. Nehemiah chapter one and verse one. The words of Nehemiah the son of Hakaliah. Now it happened in the month of Kislev in the 20th year as I was in Susa the capital that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates are destroyed by fire. As soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days. And I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said, oh Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I in my Father's house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses. Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, if you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples. But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, From there I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen to make my name dwell there. They are your servants and your people, whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand. O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servants. I'm 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. Let's again pray and ask the Lord for his help as we come to his word. Our Father, we bow before you this evening and we thank you that you are our God. And even this reminder from Nehemiah's prayer that you are a covenant-keeping God, that you have bound yourself to your people. How we bless you for your grace and your mercy that you have lavished upon us. Our Father, we were reminded this evening already from reading Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount, that if we come and ask you for good things, you will not give us a stone or a serpent. And so, our God, we ask that you would feed us tonight out of your word, and that you would be working in our lives and transforming us and making us more like our Lord Jesus Christ. Heavenly Father, we ask especially that you would be working in our lives, helping us to grow in our prayer life, helping us to grow in our communion with you, that Father, we would be prizing that as one of the greatest privileges we've ever been given. Oh, gracious Father, come and do your work. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. J.C. Ryle has a little booklet that I have in my library that I've read several times called A Call to Prayer. It's just a little book. It's easy to read. I think 60 some odd pages, but the pages are small. You could probably read through a page in 15 seconds. And so just that whole little book, he's challenging us to pray. almost at the beginning of the book, and then repeatedly through the course of the book, section after section, he ends with this question, do you pray? Do you pray? So over and over again, this challenge, do you pray? It's really convicting to read that and be reminded of a lot of prayer examples from scripture. And then to be challenged yourself, do you pray? Do you have this kind of prayer life? His point throughout the entire little book is that Christians are people who pray. That's one of the most important things that we do in the course of our life. We're people who talk to God, who commune with God, who pray. Well, I want to ask you that same question tonight as we consider the Word of God. Do you pray? Do you know what it is to get alone with God? and to block out everything else, everyone else, and spend time talking to God. This is one of the great lessons that we learn from Nehemiah. He was a man committed to prayer. Though this book is a small book, only 13 chapters, 12 times in the course of this book, prayer is brought before us. It's either Nehemiah praying, or the people in Jerusalem praying, or actually some of his prayers that are recorded for us like here in chapter 1. Clearly, one of the great themes of Nehemiah is prayer. And so, If we are to study Nehemiah, if we are to read Nehemiah, one of the things that we should be praying is that God would use his word to make us, as men and women and young people, given to prayer. The specific focus of Nehemiah's prayer is also a great challenge. It leads me to ask a further question tonight. Not only do you pray, but do you pray for God's kingdom? Because that's the specific focus of the prayers in this little book of Nehemiah. So we have to ask ourselves, Do you pray for this church? Do you pray for the ministry of this church? Do you pray for your fellow believers and the great needs of this church? Now, I'm not asking you, on Saturday night, do you give a quick prayer, Lord, bless the services tomorrow. Now, that's a good thing to do, and I wouldn't discourage any of you from that kind of a prayer. But this is what I mean. Do you spend concentrated times before the Lord in which you wrestle with God for the spiritual life and well-being of this church? Does our Father in Heaven hear you coming again and again and again and saying, Father, I'm here asking again for grace, Baptist Church in Canton, asking for the ministry of the Word of God, asking for my fellow believers that you would be pleased to rain down grace and mercy and make this church to be alive to the glory of God. Do you spend concentrated times in prayer to God with that focus? That's clearly what Nehemiah was doing and it serves as a good example and a prod for us to take up this work of prayer with this particular focus. Now, as you study through the book and get to know Nehemiah better, you discover that he was a man of great action. He made decisions, important decisions, and he took action. But before he did anything, he gave himself to prayer. He knew that prayer was always the foundation for accomplishing anything good in the work of God's kingdom. Amazingly, we find that same principle worked out in the life and ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. If there was anyone that we might think didn't need to pray for the success of his ministry, it would be the Lord Jesus. We would think, well, he's the eternal son of God, and so he comes into this world, and of course he can do everything. And his teaching, how could it be any better? And the effect of his ministry on people? We might think that. He knows all things. Now, we may not be able to understand the theology behind our Savior's need to pray. But when you read through the Gospels, you cannot but be impressed by this fact that our Savior was driven to prayer again and again, that the work that his father had sent him to perform in this world would succeed and accomplish all that God had planned for it. Jesus knew that his work to build up the kingdom of God would be in vain apart from prayer. If that was true for our Lord Jesus, how much more is it true for us? Something else that is important for us to recognize as we think about Nehemiah and prayer, he had what we would call a secular job. In other words, he wasn't paid to be in the Lord's ministry. He wasn't what people often called a religious professional, even though I don't really like that term, but you know what I mean. He wasn't being paid to serve the Lord. If we use New Covenant terms, we would say he wasn't a pastor. While in Persia, he was the king's cupbearer. That means he was in charge of security in the royal palace. Probably not only handing the king his cup of wine after he had tasted it himself to make sure it was okay, but he would have been in charge of the security throughout the palace, even in the king's bedchamber. And because of that position, He had political clout. In fact, many think that his position gave him what we would call the status of a prime minister. He had access to the king, and he controlled the access of other people to the king. So his was a position of great importance and power. When he got the transfer to the land of Israel, there he was the governor, responsible to represent the emperor and rule on his behalf. Now these jobs, as you can imagine, would have been high stress and a lot of hours. Nehemiah didn't work a nice 40-hour work week, and maybe a little overtime here or there. He was basically on call 24-7 around the clock. He was a busy man. Still, he prayed, and he was committed to prayer. His prayer was his daily involvement with God. He even mentions in this prayer that we read tonight, praying day and night. So he didn't have a job that was tied specifically to God's kingdom, and he didn't have all kinds of free time to give himself to God, but he was a man of prayer. It sweeps aside all of our excuses and confronts us with the question, do you pray? Don't tell Nehemiah, you're too busy to pray. He'll tell you, I prayed. And my job is busier and more high stress than yours. He was committed to prayer. Now, what I want us to do tonight is begin to consider the marks of true godly prayer. When I began to prepare this sermon, I thought, well, you know, these are the points I want to make, and I only got through one. So that's where we're going to be tonight, just this first mark of prayer that we see in Nehemiah's prayer, and it's good for us to be challenged with. So here's what we're going to look at. tonight, prayer should be marked by reverence. Prayer should be marked by reverence. Whenever we pray, it's important for us to remember that spiritually we are standing before the God of heaven. We have come to stand before that great throne, the God who is absolutely holy and who rules over heaven and earth. Look at how Nehemiah addressed God in verse 5. And I said, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. even though we couldn't be there, we can't hear his voice, when you read these words, you get this sense of awe that overwhelmed Nehemiah as he prayed to God. Now, I want to draw your attention to one word in this address. He describes God as the great and awesome God. So, he is the awesome God that we are praying to. Translation, awesome, is the same in almost all the modern translations. But when you check the King James, the translation there is the great and terrible God. That's shocking to our ears. Shocking to a modern way of thinking about God. We might even feel somewhat uncomfortable with that. Can we pray to the terrible God? But then I think it's also right for us to ask the question, have our modern translations watered down, softened our view of God? Just a question. The root word that underscores what is translated here as awesome or terrible in Hebrew is the word fear. Now that should be familiar to us because throughout the scriptures we read about the fear of God or the fear of the Lord. It's something that marks God's people, Old Testament, New Testament as well. And that word fear has two basic meanings. It can mean to be afraid or terrified of something. It would be the situation where if you woke up in the middle of the night and your house was ablaze with fire, and you didn't even know if you'd be able to get out and live, you'd be terrified. That's one way to understand the word. But then it can also have this meaning of awe or reverence for something. So with your family, maybe you're taking a trip to the southwest. You've never been there before, but you've heard all about it. You're going to see the Grand Canyon. And so you finish the long trip. You get there. You go into the parking lot with the family. You rush up as close as you can get to the edge. And you stand there, and you think, I wasn't even told the half of it. You know, and your jaw is dropping to the ground as you just stare at the immensity and beauty of this place. That's this sense of awe or reverence. Now both of these meanings of fear are used throughout the scripture with reference to God. There are clearly passages where people are terrified of God. You think of that description in the book of Revelation, where at the approach of the Lord Jesus at His second coming, people are running to the caves and crying to the mountains, fall on us and crush us. They're afraid of the wrath of God and the wrath of the Lamb. But then there are also many of these passages that speak of awe and reverence. Sometimes it's people simply overwhelmed by the grace of God. That God would love me, an unworthy sinner. And so in a sense, spiritually, our jaws are dropping to the ground as we look at this God so holy and so just, and yet He loves me. and gave his Son for me, overwhelmed with awe." The challenge for the student of the Bible is to determine in any given passage, how are we to understand this word with reference to God? So here in Nehemiah 1.5, as he addresses God as the great and awesome God or the great and terrible God, which meaning is he referring to? Well, as I sat and pondered that question, seeking to take in the context of Nehemiah and the context of Ezra and thinking about this post-exilic period, my answer is, I think it's both. I think both senses of fear and awe are included as Nehemiah addresses God here, the great and awesome or the great and terrible God. On the one hand, he's praying to the God who has been angry with his people, who sent them into exile to suffer greatly, many of them being killed, the land devastated. And even though he's brought some of those people back, they continue to sin. They continued to do the very things that they had done before the exile that stirred the wrath of God. And both in Ezra and in Nehemiah, you get the sense that these leaders are pleading with the people, if you don't repent and turn to the Lord, it's going to happen all over again. They had great reason to fear God. But on the other hand, we also see in this verse that he's praying to the God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. So here is a God of grace who is full of mercy and loving kindness. This is a God who has bound himself to his people and is determined to do them good again and again and again. So in many ways we could say that though Nehemiah prayed fearing God, he also is amazed at a God willing to forgive his people. Overawed by this thought that Yahweh, the covenant God, continues to care for his people through times of distress. So we could say that as he prays, his jaw drops, to think that he has the privilege to pray to such a God and expect an answer. Now I want us to stop here and examine our own prayers. Does anything like this reverence mark your praying? When we go to God in prayer, does the consciousness that we are praying to a God who is great and awesome, or we could say great and terrible. Does that impact how you pray? If another Christian was listening to you, as we're sort of eavesdropping on Nehemiah's prayer here, would they say one of the marks of your praying like Nehemiah's praying is reverence? I think that we're living in a generation that promotes a casual approach to God. How often are new converts to Christianity told, well, just talk to God like he's your best bud. That's not what the Bible tells us. Not to talk to God like he's your best bud. You know, like you're sitting down in a bar and you're just having a casual conversation together. That's not what the Bible brings to us. The kind of language which is integral to Nehemiah's prayers is largely missing in modern praying. And if we would learn to pray like Nehemiah, then we must give careful attention to the reverence which pulsed through his praying. There's an important question that we need to consider as we ponder this matter. How does this emphasis on reverence square with the gospel? How does what I'm saying here tonight agree with the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ? Well, we believe that the gospel teaches us that God has a great heart for sinners. That both in Old and New Testament, we see God extending His grace to people who don't deserve it. And the height of the Gospel message is God sending His Son, the Lord Jesus, in the world to accomplish that plan of salvation, to bring salvation to us, the forgiveness of sins, and the gift of eternal life. We believe that the Lord Jesus lived a life of perfect obedience and died on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. And the gospel calls us to turn from our sins and come to the Lord Jesus Christ and trust him to rescue us from our sin and from hell and all that we deserve. The gospel assures us that when we do this, God will wipe away our sins. He'll forgive us and receive us as his dearly loved children. Now, if we entered into that favored position, is it according to the gospel to say that we should pray in the fear of God? Especially as we remember that having responded to the gospel and come to Christ to save us, God has made us his dearly loved children. That's our status before that glorious throne in heaven. Children that God loves deeply. So if we have such a favored position, is it according to the gospel to pray in the fear of God? After all, didn't Paul teach us in Romans 8 that when we're converted and we're indwelt by the Spirit of God, the Spirit is going to move us to pray, Abba, Father. That term, Abba, something like our very tender, intimate title, Daddy. Well, it is true that the new covenant has opened up for us in a new and refreshing way, this truth of adoption, that we are the children of God. You remember how John in writing to the church says, this is what we are. God has made us his children. We are now the children of God. And there are glories in this gospel position that were not understood fully during the days of the Old Testament. But when you compare the prayers of the Old Testament and the prayers of the New Testament, there's not a substantial difference in terms of reverence. We know that we're coming to our Father. We know that we've been given a glorious and intimate relationship, but He's still the God of majesty and glory before whom we are called to bow in worship. Think of Jesus' teaching even as we were reminded tonight from the Sermon on the Mount. This is how you're to pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. And so there you have these two wonderful truths together. There's gospel intimacy. We can approach him and say, you're my father. By grace, I have become your child. And to enter into that glorious, wonderful relationship. But he's also in heaven. He's seated on His glorious throne. He's ruling over all that He has created. He's working out His eternal plan. And all the created beings in heaven, including Christians who have already gone there, are bowing down before Him and singing His praises. And the Christian living this world, according to how Jesus teaches us to pray, has a burden that his father's name would be hallowed. That it would be lifted up out of the dunghill of human blasphemy and exalted and honored as it ought to be. That's to pulse through our prayers. The Apostle Peter gives us this exhortation in 1 Peter 1 17. And if you call on him as father, who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile. As Christians, Peter describes us as people who call on God as our father. That's part of our makeup. It's part of our spiritual DNA. We pray. But how do we pray to our Father? Well, at least sometimes, Peter would remind us, we need to pray to Him as the God who's going to call us to stand before Him in judgment. And that will be an awesome thing. Now the Christian knows that when he's called to stand before God in judgment, he can never be condemned. He can never be refused entrance into heaven. He comes with that confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ. But that doesn't mean that it won't be still an overwhelming event to come and stand before God and answer for the things that you have done. I remember when I was in the early years of elementary school, my sister was three grades ahead of me, and one day going home from lunch, some bullies attacked her. And so this came to the notice of the principal, and he was going to deal with it. He was not a man that you would want to have to deal with. You know, this was a long time ago, so here's a no-nonsense man. He's a strict disciplinarian. They still use the strap in school in those days. And he was known to be a Christian. He was very a kind man, but you didn't want to be on his bad side. I got called to the principal's office. Not because I had done anything wrong, but I was being brought as a witness because I had seen what happened. And I can still remember in my mind, maybe 55 to 60 years ago, walking down the hall of that elementary school, walking on the line and just trembling. What's it going to be like for you and me to stand before God? if you call on the Father, the one who's going to judge you for all that you've done. Live your life here in fear, Peter says. It's true that as we're trusting in Christ, we can never be condemned, but it doesn't mean it's going to be a cakewalk to have God examine you. The writer to the Hebrews says something very similar. At the end of Hebrews 12, he writes, therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe or fear, for our God is a consuming fire. It's an amazing passage to read through. The writer is reminding us of all of our glorious privileges that we have in Christ, of the groups that we have been brought to be included in, along with being brought to the Lord Jesus, and the blood of the covenant that has been shed for us. And so we ought to serve God with gratitude, humble worship, but remembering all the time that our God is a consuming fire. Brethren, one of the problems that we face in church life, I think all the time, is the problem of the pendulum. We have this tendency to swing to one extreme or then go to the other extreme. Instead of seeking the balanced biblical middle, We want to jump on the bandwagon of gospel freedom and promote intimacy with God, a casual approach to the Lord, or we want to run to the other side and promote an imbalanced fear of God. But we need both. He's our Father. Enjoy all of the blessings that come with that relationship. But remember that He is the Lord God, the Most High God, the Holy One of Israel, exalted and enthroned in heaven. He is the glorious God before whom all the inhabitants of heaven, the angels, the redeemed, who've gone, their other created beings, they're continually falling before Him, crying out, Holy, Holy, Holy, just like they did in Isaiah's vision in the Old Testament. We need to be praying with reverence. If you're not a Christian here tonight, you probably don't really grasp what we're thinking about here. If you've never come to salvation, you need to know this. You have every reason to fear. You have every reason to be afraid of God. For one day He will summon you to stand before Him, He will identify all of your sins, and He will hand you over to everlasting punishment for your sins against Him. That will be the worst day of your life. We can't even imagine how awful that will be. But the Bible also tells us this God who could be so terrifying to people, is also gracious and merciful. And if you come to Him through Jesus Christ, He will forgive all of your sins. He will wipe out that account which is against you, an account you've built up on your own because of your rebellion and going your own way. He'll forgive you. He'll cleanse you. and He'll make you His dearly loved child. And then you will experience this glorious privilege of being able to come and pray before Him, and know that He is the great and awesome God, and be able to pray to that God with these wonderful words, Father in Heaven. Let's bow in prayer. Our Father, help us to approach you as you have shown us in your Word. Help us to come, our God, with a godly fear, godly reverence. Help us to come to you with Love and faith and thanksgiving, because you have been so gracious to us. Help us to come to you, having your words echo in our ears from the gospel, how much you love us. Oh, Father. We need you to grow us. We need you to improve our understanding. We need you to work in our hearts that prayer will be a work that we'll gladly take up. Because in prayer, we get to be in your presence in a special way. Thank you, our Father, for this incredible privilege. May we be people who pray in this world seeking your glory in the Church of Jesus Christ. We ask these things in our Savior's name. Amen.