He Prayed Four Months and Then He Asked for the Lumber

There was a man who worked in a room where nobody raised their voice.

His job was to taste the wine before the king drank it. That was the whole job. Come in, taste, hand the cup over, keep your face pleasant. A man in that room learned early that the face is the job. You do not bring your problems into the wine room. You bring a steady hand and a mouth that says nothing.

And for four months that man carried a piece of news that was breaking him in half. His city was down. Not struggling. Down. Walls in the dirt, gates burned, his people living inside a ruin and calling it home because there was nothing else to call it. He heard about it in the winter. He sat down and he wept and he fasted and he prayed, and he kept going to work, and he kept his face pleasant, and he said nothing.

Four months.

Then one day in the spring his face slipped. Just for a second. The king looked up from the cup and said, why do you look sad. And the man was terrified, because sad faces got people removed from rooms like that one. And in the half second between the question and the answer, he prayed. Then he opened his mouth.

And here is what he did not say. He did not say, I am fine. He did not say, pray for me. He did not say, if it is meant to be it will be.

He asked for the lumber.

The prayer was real and it was not the whole thing

I want to be careful here, because I grew up around people who loved God and I am not about to stand over anybody's praying.

Those four months were not wasted. That man fasted. He confessed. He got low. If you read the first chapter of that book you find a prayer that is better than most of mine, and it ends with him reminding God of what God Himself had written. That is a man who knows the word. He is not casual and he is not faithless.

But watch what happens the moment the door cracks open.

Then the king said unto me, For what dost thou make request? So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said unto the king, If it please the king, and if thy servant have found favour in thy sight, that thou wouldest send me unto Judah, unto the city of my fathers' sepulchres, that I may build it. (Nehemiah 2:4-5, King James Version)

He prayed and he asked, in the same breath, in front of a man who could have him killed. And then he kept going. He asked for letters. He asked for safe passage. He asked, by name, for timber out of the king's own forest, and he said what he wanted it for: the gates, the wall, and the house he would live in.

You are not being greedy when you name the thing, and you are not running out ahead of God when you open your mouth. That is not my opinion about your situation. It is what the text does, in verse after verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who is putting the sentence in your mouth right now, the same way He put it in that man's mouth in the half second he had.

Somebody taught you that asking is beneath you. I know where that teaching lives, because I grew up in the house next door to it.

What we called faith and what it actually was

In my house we prayed about everything, and we asked nobody for anything.

Those two things sound like the same thing. They are not even related. My father would pray for a house at the kitchen table with real tears in his eyes, and I believed every one of those tears, and I still do. Then he would go the whole week without calling one person about one job. Not out of laziness. Out of a conviction. He believed that if God wanted him to have it, it would come to him, and that going after it was a kind of unbelief.

He was not lying to us. He was repeating something that was handed to him by people who loved God, and he never checked it, and neither did I until I was nineteen years old.

You are not dishonoring anybody by reading the verse for yourself. That is what the written word is there for, and the Holy Spirit was given to lead you into truth, not to lead you away from the people who first told you about Him.

Here is what I have found since. The word never once separates the praying from the asking. Nehemiah does both in one breath. Abraham's servant prays at a well and then walks up to a stranger and asks her for water. Paul prays without ceasing and then writes letters asking churches for money for other churches and for a coat he left in Troas.

You have not been disobedient for wanting somebody to say yes to you. Look at the verse again: he asked the king. The written word does not blush about that, and the Spirit who inspired it is not embarrassed by your need this morning either.

The half second before he opened his mouth

I love that half second. It is the most honest sentence in the chapter.

So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said unto the king.

There is no gap in there. No week of waiting for confirmation. No fleece. The door opened and he went through it praying, which is the only way anybody should go through a door.

That is what people miss about that man. He is not brave. Read verse two: he was very sore afraid. He is terrified and he asks anyway, and the asking is not a failure of trust, it is what trust looks like when it has a body attached to it.

The fear in your chest right now is not a sign that you have the wrong plan. Scripture already told you what it is: it is a man who is sore afraid opening his mouth anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one steadying your voice while you do it.

I need to say the other half too, because a message that only pushes is a message that will hurt somebody. The reason he got the timber was not that he asked well. Read the end of the sentence.

And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me. (Nehemiah 2:8, King James Version)

The good hand of my God upon me. He asked. God moved. He never once confused the two, and he never once let the fact that God moves be a reason not to ask.