“Nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch against them day and night, because of them.” Nehemiah 4:9
Don’t you just love it when the trials of life come? You get up thinking your day is just going to be smooth sailing and along comes this valley that you have to walk through!
I am writing out the book of Nehemiah at the moment and I’ve always enjoyed this book. Here Nehemiah was in captivity just setting his mind to the task at hand. He was the king’s cupbearer. This meant he had to not only bring the king his food but taste it to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. I would guess this was already a stressful job. God knew he could handle it because it seems to indicate he was favored by the king. Tri
When Nehemiah wanted to return and help his people rebuild the walls around Jerusalem, this king readily allowed him, too. Plus, he gave Nehemiah bodyguards and supplies. Nehemiah was a worker but not just any worker, a hard and loyal worker. He was one who did not let the difficulties show on his face, either. He just went about his duties faithfully.
When he got to Jerusalem the walls began to go up again. They were being repaired and one verse in Nehemiah I like said the “people had a mind to work” (verse 6 of chapter 4). Now that is a great reputation to have! So many of their loved ones were in captivity and yet here they were not wallowing in their misery but working.
Pretty soon, the naysayers came around upset that the wall was being fixed. Sanballat was the ringleader. He and his cronies try hard to stop the work from going forward. What does the verse at the top say? Nevertheless. Nehemiah encouraged the people to ignore these evil people who were just tools of the devil and keep working.
Something else I noticed was they did TWO things. They prayed to their God asking for strength to build and the evil men to leave. However, they didn’t just sit back and think, “okay, God, now it’s Your turn.” No, they then did what? Exactly, they got busy DOING. They set a watch meaning they put guards around to watch out for any evil doers.
Life is hard. Trials are coming our way if they haven’t arrived already. We will need God and He will be there to help us through the trials but we also need to make sure we are doing our part. We can’t just sit back whine, pray and think I’m a Christian so God is going to fix this. Sometimes, our prayers need to take action.
Often, that action may be as little as pulling out His Word and being encouraged. Or, it might be that we pray and then go about our daily duties with a calmness of mind and a peace in our heart that as we do our daily known tasks, the unknown future is being arranged by an all knowing God.
Whatever trials you face today, don’t just pray and then fret. Pray to an all knowing God for help and then set your mind to peace. Go about your day doing in the moment what needs to be done and God will show you what the next step in your path is. That’s all you need to know for now. He already is there down the path so we don’t have to be!
God will take care of you,
Through every day, o’er all the way;
He will take care of you,
God will take care of you.