We might pray in this way today: the object always is that Christ will be glorified, souls will be saved. ‘Lord help me in my illness.’ Why do you want to be helped in your illness? Oh I just want to be healed. I just want to be cured. No, you've got to be able to say, ‘Help me in my illness so that I can witness and serve, and bring honour and glory to the name of Christ.’ There has got to be a purpose and objective if we want God to hear and answer the prayer. That is the way in which Nehemiah is speaking. He qualifies everything he says. ‘Hear the prayers of the servants; hear the prayers that are prayed night and day.’ He is going on to say, ‘Hear the prayers of those who obey.’ He knows there are conditions attached to prayer. The subject is reformation: to see more churches planted, more souls won, and we need to be praying like this.
Now I read an article in a Christian magazine that was lamenting the state of Christianity in the country. It is an evangelical publication, and this magazine says, You know, things are awful; things are bad. Only so many percent of people even profess to have any connection with Christianity. There is lots of lament and shock at the state of affairs, but one thing that is not present is that there is not one word of accepting responsibility for this. ‘It’s just happened. It's Darwin's fault. He started it all. Or it's the fault of the rationalists and humanists. It's the fault of the apathy of the people. It’s the fault of the times. It isn’t our fault.’ When you read Nehemiah and he analyses the condition of Jerusalem, and the poor state of things for the Jews, and the witness and the testimony, he immediately says, it has got to be our fault, because God promised that if we went about things as we should, we would be blessed. It our fault, so he immediately goes to repentance, and that's what we should be doing. As a church when things languish, as churches throughout the country, it shouldn't be a matter of: it’s society's fault; it's our enemies’ fault. It’s our fault, because it would be different. We would have God with us and great power if people got down to things, and people were spiritually minded. But because the churches have adopted worldly things, God has withdrawn. They get little blessings here and there, and they clutch at these, and instead of saying, ‘God is so patient with us, he should judge us all together’, they say, ‘We have had one or two blessing, so God is with us.’ Whereas the great diminution of blessing and all the troubles should tell them that they need to repent and get rid of all that worldly music and all the rest of it. That is what we see in the Nehemiah. Immediately he is speaking about it being their fault, and he deals with it entirely along those lines.