8 “Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, 9 but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’ (Nehemiah 1:8-9)

(Note: If you’re just joining us, for this week’s Connect Devotional I’m recapping the daily exercises that I ended the message with this past Sunday. If you missed the message, you can watch and/or listen to it here.)

We’re picking up half-way through Nehemiah’s prayer after months of praying, fasting, and lamenting. Yesterday, we looked at how Nehemiah fully owned the problem. He confesses the sins of his forebearers as if they were his own. 

But here, Nehemiah pivots the exact opposite direction: he disowns the problem. 

Nehemiah is not pretending that he can do something that he can’t possibly do. If God does not show up, the rebuilding project that he wants to undertake will not succeed.

There is a pitfall for doer-types—leaders, activists, organizers, people who just love to get things done, and the pitfall is to think we can generate outcomes beyond our control.  In this step we embrace our limits, release control, and give everything completely up to God.

Very often our rebuilding dreams will put us in a position of desperately needing God to show up and do something that we can’t manufacture or generate. And so at this point in our pre-rebuilding process, we release the problem and those outcomes to God.

Today, see if you can name the outcomes that you long to see happen—and that you’re pretty sure that God wants to see happen, too! Release those outcomes over to God. Confess your inability to manufacture or create the things you want to see happen. Give thanks that God is a faithful and generous God who acts on our behalf.