Let's turn together to Nehemiah chapter 1. Nehemiah was one of the Jews that remained back in Persia after many of the exiles had returned back to Jerusalem. The Lord had brought them back, but the exiles that returned still faced a lot of trouble. In this chapter, in chapter 1, there was the report that came back to Nehemiah that the walls of Jerusalem were still destroyed. The gates were still broken down. And that news moved Nehemiah to grieve over this. It moved him to pray and to fast. And this is his prayer. Begin in verse 5. I'll be preaching from verses 10 and 11 today, but I'll read beginning in verse 5. And I said, I pray, Lord God of heaven, great and awesome God, you who keep your covenant and mercy with those who love you and observe your commandments, please let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, that you may hear the prayer of your servant, which I pray before you now, day and night, for the children of Israel, your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Both my father's house and I have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, nor the ordinances which you commanded your servant Moses. Remember, I pray, the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though some of you were cast off to the farthest parts of the heavens, yet I will gather them from there and bring them to the place which I have chosen as a dwelling place for my name. Now these are your servants and your people whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand. Oh, Lord, I pray, please let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant and to the prayer of your servants who desire to fear your name. And let your servant prosper this day, I pray, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man. For I was the king's cupbearer. Last two weeks I have been preaching on this prayer of Nehemiah. We found that Nehemiah understood that God is a covenant keeping God. And that he and really all of us pray as covenant breakers. So last week I said that we come before the Lord empty handed. But not uninvited. We're empty-handed because we are covenant breakers, we are sinners. But God knows that, that he invites us to come based on the work of Jesus Christ. We learn that we can pray according to God's promises too. Before we go on, after Nehemiah's prayer though, there is another element of prayer that comes to light from these verses. It's especially highlighted in verses 10 and 11, and that's where I'll be preaching from today. But it runs throughout all of this prayer. It's the prayer of intercession. Nehemiah intercedes in his prayer for the Jews. I'm going to explain what intercession is as I go forward, but I want you to see especially that as Nehemiah does this, He stands as a type of Christ. There's a picture of Christ's work that's given to us as He prays for other people. And that you and I, as we pray for other people, come to participate in that work of Jesus Christ. My hope is then that this message on intercessory prayer would move you to nurture a passion for God's people and for His purpose, and that you would express that passion through your own intercessory prayer. If you want to follow along, in the back of the bulletin I've given you an outline of my message. I'm going to begin with the nature of prayer. The nature of prayer, there are two things I'm going to draw out of this prayer. First is that intercessory prayer is to pray for someone else. That's what intercession means. So, kids, I want you to think of this situation. This happened in our house when I was growing up. There would be some nights when we, all of us kids, there were five of us that were all sleeping as when we were little in one bedroom. And we were all in our bedroom and we could smell downstairs that my parents said were popping popcorn. You know that smell? You know how good that smells? Oh wow, that smells really good. And you just want some of that popcorn, right? So we would choose one of the kids to go downstairs. And that brother or sister would be our representative. And they would go down and say, can we have some popcorn? And if that prayer was accepted, if that request was accepted, then We knew it was safe for us all to come downstairs and we could all enjoy some popcorn that night. That's intercession. When someone goes in between and asks on your behalf. That's what intercession is. And that's what Nehemiah does in this prayer. Well, oftentimes it seems like prayer revolves around ourselves and our own needs. That's not wrong. In fact, God invites us to let Him know what our needs are. He invites us to let Him know what our concerns are. But there's something one-sided about prayer when it's just about your own needs. I like the way that one man has defined prayer. He says that prayer is human speech addressed to God and it springs from our relationship with Him. It springs from our relationship with Him. So in this case, think about how important it is in a relationship for there to be communication about more than just yourself. A relationship will grow stagnant if all you do is tell your wife about your day. Again, it's important for us to recognize that God invites us to do that, to speak of our own needs. But like any relationship, there is a stagnancy to that relationship if that's all we speak about. In prayer, We talk to God about a lot more things than just ourselves. The prayers of the Bible lead us to talk to God about who He is. We have examples of that, where Jesus teaches us to pray, that God is great, He is a Father, His kingdom is wonderful. We express those things to Him in prayer. We thank Him for the ways that He has provided for us. We also pray for ourselves by asking for our daily bread and confessing our sins. But we also pray for others. And this is intercessory prayer, when we pray for others. The second aspect of prayer that comes through in Nehemiah's prayer is that he asks God to remember. He asks God to remember. Oh God, remember your covenant with Moses in days long past. Oh God, remember your servants, your people that you have redeemed. Remember them. Well, that begs a question. Does God forget? Is God forgetful like I am forgetful? I forgot to buy batteries for the microphone this week. I can leave my house and Vicki has set something out for me to take with me and I'll walk right past it and forget it. Is God forgetful like that? Absolutely not. God knows All things. He knows everything. In Hebrews it says, there is no creature hidden from His sight. All things are naked and open to Him. All things He knows. So what does it mean when we pray like this? And Nehemiah is not the only one. Remember, O God, And if God knows all things, why do we pray in the first place? The answer to these questions will help you understand the nature of prayer. We do know that the Bible teaches us that God knows all things. And yet at the same time, He invites us to pray. What that does is it teaches us something about God's purpose for prayer. that God somehow mysteriously has worked it so that the things that He knows and the things that He will do, He does in connection with our prayers. It's not as if God is restrained until we pray. That would limit God's sovereign power. We know that God can do whatever He wills. So that means that that our prayers, and God's purpose for that, has a purpose for us. And that purpose is that God would teach us and bless us by His grace. John Calvin describes it in this way, that when God chooses to act through answered prayer, He blesses us in several ways. He stirs up our love for Him. He purifies our desires so that we come to want more and more what He wants. He makes us grow in thanksgiving to Him. And we grow in our dependence upon His promises. In other words, God uses prayer as a means of grace to bless you. God uses prayer as a means of grace to bless you. Here's that idea of relationship coming through again. In our relationship with God, He uses prayer to strengthen that relationship. We pray to God and He answers. And doesn't that strengthen human relationships? When you're communicating with one another and you know that your friend has heard you and responds, and so it is with God. As He answers prayer, He deepens our dependence upon Him. He blesses us through this means of grace. So let's look more closely then at Nehemiah's prayer of intercession. There are three different aspects to this intercession that I want to point out in this passage. First is a corporate confession of sin. One blessing of praying for others is that we confess our sins corporately. In other words, we confess our sins as a group or as a body. The earlier verses in this prayer, Nehemiah prayed this way very explicitly. He didn't try to excuse himself. He didn't try to distance himself from what had happened in the past. Instead, he very deliberately identifies himself as a member of the children of Israel. And then as a leader for them, he confesses those sins to the Lord. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept your commandments, statutes and rules that you have commanded. We have sinned. This aspect of prayer is much needed. It recognizes that you are a responsible member of a variety of different circles of influence in your life. And as a responsible member of those communities that you have the chance to bow before the Lord and to lift that community up before the Lord in prayer, confessing sins. So, you're a member of a family. You're a member of a church. You're part of a city, you're citizens of a state and of a country. You are a responsible individual in each of those communities. And part of your responsibility is to intercede for each of those communities. To pray that God would forgive the sins of those communities. What a blessed opportunity that is. to ask the Lord to hear, on behalf of this community, our confession of sin. Or would it be that the believers in this country would unite to pray for our country? To intercede on behalf of the United States? There's lots of language in an election year about what our country needs, and what will make our country great again. But believe me, it will not happen unless God is gracious to us, and God forgive our sins, and you and I have a responsibility to intercede for our country, to pray in confession of sins. Secondly, intercession asks God to remember His church. In verse 10 it says, now these are your servants. These are your people whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand. He's essentially asking God to remember His covenant and His covenant people, the Jews. Remember, God doesn't forget anything. God had not forgotten his people or his promises. So, what is the purpose of this prayer? By praying that the Lord would remember, Nehemiah grows in his dependence upon the Lord for his covenant promises. He can see the connection and that relationship between the prayers that He offers and then the Lord's answers. He can ask the Lord, remember, and God can speak and say, I do remember. I have remembered. I will remember. God had sworn an oath that He would remember. He had sworn on the basis of His very own life that He would bring salvation. By that oath, the Lord remembered. By the work of Jesus Christ, He remembered. By Jesus, we have that answer. We have that purpose of redemption and we too grow in our dependence. Nehemiah does something very interesting here. He ties this prayer of deliverance back to previous deliverances of God, especially the deliverance that God brought through Moses. During the time of the Exodus, God brought the Israelites out of Egypt by his strong hand. And Nehemiah can say, Lord, you've done it before. And you have promised to do it again. Remember your promise. In doing so, God blessed Nehemiah with a deepening understanding of that relationship. He deepened his and our dependence upon the Lord. And we too have this experience as believers and as a church. I can draw even from our recent history that we as a church have cried out to the Lord for guidance and provision and deliverance. A year ago, we as a congregation were crying out to the Lord for a mission trip that my family and I would go on. We're praying that the Lord would bless that trip, that God would bless the Stillwater congregation as well. We were appealing to the Lord and depending upon Him. And a year later, we can look back and see how God is answered. We can see how the Lord is building His church in many different places. And He deepens our dependence. He deepens our sense of expectation of what the Lord is doing. And so, as we continue to pray that the Lord would build His church, we do so with a greater faith, knowing that the Lord has done so in Christ, and He has done so in our experience. Thirdly, Nehemiah, like Moses, came to stand in the breach for God's people. Nehemiah, I love the way that he is caught up with the Word of God and his deliverances in history. He's caught up with what God had done through Moses. And Nehemiah does something very similar to what Moses had done. By intercession, Nehemiah stood before God as a representative of the children of Israel. And as a representative, he cries out for forgiveness. Moses had done this. Let me tell you that story just very quickly. You can read about it some more in Exodus chapter 32. The children have studied this recently in their Sunday school class. Because this is the event when the children of Israel made an idol out of gold. They made an idol that looked like a golden calf and they prayed to it instead, to the true God. God said to Moses For this sin I Will destroy all of Israel and I will take you Moses and I will make of you a great nation Tempting offer it would it not be for Moses He already knew that the people were rebellious and stiff-necked and Attempting offer for God to just have done with them. And to start over with Moses. But do you remember what Moses did? Oh God, do not do this. Forgive your people, oh God. If you would forgive them, I would give myself in exchange. You may strike my name out of your book if you will forgive Israel." Oh God, forgive them. He interceded on their behalf. He stood in the breach That's not my term, that's God's term. It comes from Psalm 106. Psalm 106, verse 23, it says, Therefore God said He would destroy them, had not Moses, His chosen one, stood in the breach before Him to turn away His wrath from destroying them. Moses stood in the breach, interceding for the people of God. And in much the same way, Nehemiah follows after Moses. He stands in the breach to pray for God's people. And here we see Christ. I hope that your mind is rushing forward here already. Moses and Nehemiah stood in the breach and and prayed Oh God Take me in exchange for them But in all honesty Moses couldn't do that He didn't have what it took to to offer His life for anyone else. Because Moses, like you and I, Moses was a sinner. His life was already forfeit. Moses could not offer himself in exchange. Nehemiah could not offer himself in exchange. But Jesus could. And Jesus did. That's why He came. Jesus said, My life for the church. My life for you. My life for you. By His intercession, the wrath of God is turned from you and falls completely on Jesus Christ. And that's not all that Jesus does. He is ascended in glory and as our great High Priest, He continues to intercede for you. He lives in the presence of the Holy God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Son's role is to intercede on behalf of the church. And He does that even now. Based on His righteousness, based on His sacrifice, our great High Priest has gone behind the veil. Here comes that language of of the Old Testament in the language of Psalm 150 again. Jesus has gone behind the veil. And where Jesus is, we are too. He is an anchor for your souls. And He intercedes on your behalf. And then, He invites you to participate in this incredible means of grace. He invites you to pray, and to pray for others. And in so doing, He draws you into this wonderful work of intercession. Now, true, you are not the Redeemer, and your life is not laid down for others. You point to Jesus in this case. But at the same time, what Jesus does is He draws you into His work, so that when you pray for others, when you intercede for them, you are participating in this means of grace. And in some mysterious way, the Lord has determined to use that in His purposes. And He uses them to accomplish His will. And so you participate in the work of Jesus Christ. You give a picture of Jesus Christ when you intercede. And at the same time, God's purposes and God's people are more and more on your heart. With that in mind, I would urge you and implore you to intercede for others. Let your passion for Christ and your passion for God's work and His people be expressed through this means of grace, the means of intercessory prayer. Do indeed talk to God about your own needs, but let Christ's kingdom focus also move you to pray for others. as a responsible member of communities, as a responsible member of your family, of your church, of your country, lift them up before the Lord. Lift them up and intercede that God would have mercy, that God would revive His people once more. And in so doing, participate in the work of Christ. Amen. Let's bow before Him in prayer. Lord, thank You that You have blessed us in Jesus Christ. Thank You that You have taken us to Yourself and that You have also blessed us with a ministry of reconciliation. Lord, we do pray for our country, We pray for our church, we pray for our families. Lord, teach us to intercede so earnestly and passionately as Nehemiah did. A desire that would move us to pray in sustained ways for the needs that we see around us. Lord, we pray that in your mystery that you would indeed answer our prayers. That your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. that you would stir up your people to pray and that you would bring revival to our country. But Lord, we pray these things, not in our own strength, but in the name and by the mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. I've chosen to close by singing the psalm that I quoted, Psalm 106. These words express that incredible aspect of Moses standing in the breach It's Psalm 106, Selection C. It is also a confession of sin. It tells the story of the rebellion of God's people. And so we can sing that as well, confessing our sins. But then we can also sing remembering Jesus, who is the one who did stand in the breach and bring us forgiveness. Let's stand and sing Psalm 106, Selection C. Hare Krsna, Hare Krsna, Krsna Krsna, Hare Hare,