Nehemiah 3

One of the good things about regular, consistent engagement with Scripture is it allows God to sneak up on us and surprise us: “Wow, I’ve never seen that before, I’ve not thought about it like that, it had never crossed my mind until now that …”

The Book of Nehemiah is about many things: rebuilding; leadership; community; prayer; dealing with opposition; dealing with God.

Nehemiah is a book about priorities.

Does it really matter that much that the walls of Jerusalem are rebuilt?  “After all, they’ve been in ruins for a century and a half.  Life has gone on okay without them.  If God really wanted them rebuilt, somebody would have brought it up.  Hey, I’m not a prophet, or a king, and I’m not handy with masonry work anyway.  And it would cost a ton.”

All those statements contain some truth!  And all kind of miss the point.

Priority is about task and timing, a what (the walls of Jerusalem need to be rebuilt) and a when (Uh, Nehemiah says it needs to happen now”), and also a how (“OK, you and your crew go to work on this section, we’ll work next to you, and they will work next to us”).  And a why.  The why matters most—without the right why … nothing changes, nothing happens.  Priority puts the why first.

The why for us is relational; it is about God, about knowing our God, recognizing God’s voice, responding to God’s initiatives towards us, walking with him.  We’re big on doing-for the Lord, often less comfortable with being-with the Lord.  The why comes from the being-with.

What powers the Book of Nehemiah is the seemingly simple statement, “what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem” (2:12).  We aren’t given many specifics about the process by which God put things into Nehemiah’s heart, only that God did so.  As we read between the lines, it’s clear that the process wasn’t instantaneous—“God, what should I do?  REBUILD THE WALLS OF JERUSALEM!  OK, got it”—but grew out of Nehemiah’s personal priority of attending to the Lord.

The Virus has created a lot of rubble around us, hasn’t it?  And it’s barely been six months of pandemic time, with who knows how much more rubble to come.

The priority for us may not be “Let’s do __ and let’s get started today!”  Perhaps the question that will clarify our priorities, not for the next ninety days or six months, but for the next, say, five years, is “How can our hearts become the kinds of hearts that God can put something into?”

Yes, there are things we need to do now, and keep doing.  Of course, we cannot drop everything and spend the next six months in prayer.  Still …

How can our hearts become the kinds of hearts that God can put something into?

For as God puts pieces of his heart into our hearts, amazing and wonderful things begin to happen.

How’s your heart?  No, really: how—where—is your heart these days?