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. (Nehemiah 1:6)
It is one thing, beloved, for
us to get a kind of public concern about things and then begin to make a great
noise about it amongst men; to advertise, to demonstrate, and to give it a
public form in utterance and effort and organization; to join ourselves to some
cause, or to join some cause to ourselves, and then in that cause to make a
great big affair of it: that is one thing. And that may have all manner of
elements which just fall short of that which is essential and necessary from the
Lord's standpoint. It is one thing to come to a situation from the outside, and
link ourselves on with it, and take it up, and make it our work for life, our
life-interest; it is quite another thing for the Lord to put into our hearts, in
secret, an almost unbearable, intolerable burden which is His own heart-burden,
and for us first of all to bear that thing secretly in the presence of God upon
our hearts in a deep out-pouring of travailing prayer; quite another thing to
come to the Lord's interests in that way.
There are plenty of people whom
you could get interested in a cause; whom you could get to take up a piece of
work requiring help, but it is another thing to have that spiritual fellowship
with God which results in God putting His travail into your own soul. The
difference is that in the one instance the thing is something objective; we come
along and interest ourselves in it, take it up; but it is apart from us. It has
our interest, it has our energy, it has our resources, but it is something
objective to ourselves. It is a piece of work, a movement, a testimony – using
that word in a technical sense. The other thing is this: before the Lord we take
responsibility. Do you notice that "we" in chapter 1, verse 6? Nehemiah
is a part of this and this is a part of him. You notice how, all the way
through, in dealing with this matter he uses the word "we." He is apart
from the whole thing, that is, he has not accepted the conditions; he is not
responsible for the state of things; he certainly repudiates the whole thing,
and does not for one moment agree with it, and yet he is in this thing as though
he were responsible for it; as though God could lay it all at his own door. The
thing has come so near to his own heart that he does not stand here and the
situation there, but he finds himself as one with it. It is his own burden, and
he takes the thing in responsibility upon his own shoulders before God in
prayer, and prays vicarious prayer over this situation.