4

Having conversations with Nehemiah is risky. I had just finished writing about daily prayer. I went up to take a shower. And as I was turning the water on I said, out loud, “Wait a minute. Is that all you did for four months?”

I’m pretty sure Nancy didn’t hear me.

But Nehemiah did. He was waiting for me when I went back down to my office.

“Of course not,” he said, answering my question. “I prayed. I went to work. I started paying attention to the needs around me. I talked more with my brother, who also started praying. And the strangest thing started to happen. One day I was thinking about the situation and thought, ‘The city is in ruins and the gates are burned.’ Just that simple. In the middle of preparing the king’s wine, I would start thinking ‘You know, if I did go to Jerusalem, we’d need to get some lumber to rebuild those gates.’ Listening to reports come in from the provinces, I’d think, ‘We would need to get permission to pass through their territory.’

“After four months of talking to God and thinking about the problem, I had a whole plan worked out. I wrote it on the papyrus on my table. I called it ‘What I would do if God gave me a chance.’”

I leaned forward. “So that day when the king asked what was wrong, you were ready?”

“Absolutely. I mean, I was terrified about getting caught looking sad in front of the king. I was surprised that this was the day, but I realized that God was ready.”

I said, “But I always thought God just gave you the plan instantly when you were in the situation. Like Jesus said would happen when the disciples were brought before judges.^[1] I didn’t know you actually thought about all this.”

Nehemiah sat up straight. “Oh, I don’t have any question about God being able to work that way. But I had four months to think and pray and research. If I hadn’t used that time, I would have been pretty irresponsible.”

I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or not.

After we talked, I decided that it was time to share an essay I wrote about Nehemiah’s plan. I call it, “Nehemiah’s five-step plan to rebuild a destroyed city by asking a foreign king to give you all the supplies you need.” Or that’s what I wanted to call it. Nehemiah said that was too long. So now I call it, “Five steps to God-shaped plans.” Nehemiah still calls it “my life.”

***

“The city is in ruins and the gates are burned.”

Nehemiah lived in Susa, a city in Persia, in modern Iran. Nehemiah’s brother came 900 miles from Jerusalem to visit. When Nehemiah asked how things were back in their home country, his brother said that Jerusalem was in ruins and the gates were burned.^[2] When Nehemiah’s boss, King Artaxerxes, asked him why he was so sad, Nehemiah said that the city of his ancestors was ruined and the gates were burned.^[3] When Nehemiah got to Jerusalem to begin his work, he did a late-night tour to see that the walls were ruined and the gates were burned.^[4] When Nehemiah finally talked to the leaders in Jerusalem about the work in front of them, he said “the city is ruined and the gates are burned.”^[5]

Four times in the first two chapters. Every time Nehemiah has to explain the problem, it’s very simple: the city is ruined and the gates are burned.

So what’s the point? It’s the first point of Nehemiah’s great work.

1. Nehemiah had a clear picture of what was wrong.
He was able to summarize the problem for himself, and for others, in vivid, factual, brief words.

Let’s take a look at the other four parts of Nehemiah’s plan.

2. A simple confidence that God was involved from the start.

This may be the hardest truth for many of us. We don’t know whether God is talking to us. We aren’t sure whether an idea is from God or from our own imagination or from somewhere else. We don’t understand how God gives ideas.

So let’s look at the story from the first two chapters of Nehemiah’s memoir:

• Nehemiah’s brother brings him news.
• Nehemiah spends time praying, fasting, mourning.
• Nehemiah talks to God and ends that prayer with this request: “Give me favor with that man.”
• And then, Nehemiah goes to work; the King asks him what he wants to do, and we read, “I prayed and said to the king…”

I think that Nehemiah had a pretty clear picture of what he would say if the king ever asked. He had spent four months thinking and praying. And I think this reflects his belief that God actually answers prayer. Nehemiah assumed that if he was asking God for wisdom and opportunity, then the ideas that came, the plans that were laid out were the wisdom. When the king asked the question, that was the opportunity Nehemiah had asked for.

3. A simple proposal of what to do.

When the king asked Nehemiah what he wanted, Nehemiah said, “Send me to rebuild the walls.” When Nehemiah told the people what they were going to do, he said “Rebuild the walls.”

Yes, in every project there are details. There are strategies. There are all kinds of plans that need to be laid out. But Nehemiah had distilled everything into a simple statement: “The city is in ruins. The gates are burned. Let’s rebuild the walls.”

4. A specific plan of how to proceed.

Okay, now life gets more complicated. The planning phase can overwhelm the project. But Nehemiah has worked out the details. So when the king asks questions, Nehemiah has clear answers.

• I will need a leave of absence from work, so here’s how long I need.
• We will need permission as we travel, so give me letters.
• We will need wood to rebuild the gates, so give me a letter to the forester.

And he knew what he needed to do when he got to Jerusalem.

• Rest without telling people the plan.
• See for himself how badly the city was damaged.
• Gather the leadership and tell them the plan.

The specificity of Nehemiah’s plan is remarkable. And the steps of the plan are a pretty good model for anyone needing to know how to approach a challenging project.

5. A commitment to act on the plan.

No matter how good a plan, it is useless unless you actually do stuff. Nehemiah actually did stuff. When the king asked, he answered. When the king approved the plan, Nehemiah left. He did every step in his plan with confidence. And when he faced opposition, he was able to tell his distractors, “Here’s what we’re doing. You can’t stop us.”

So what?

I don’t know what your great work is. For some of my friends, it starts with one of these:

• “Kids the age of my daughter are being bought and sold.”
• “I don’t know enough about the Bible to answer my friend’s questions.”
• “Families are broken and the kids are getting lost.”
• “There are people in that village who don’t have a Bible in their heart language.”
• “We’ve abandoned the people around our church.”

Whether you are leading an organization or leading yourself, I commend Nehemiah’s five steps to you.

***

“That was pretty good,” Nehemiah said. “That’s what I did. But I wasn’t following any points like that. I was just doing what made sense.”

“I know,” I replied. “But some of us haven’t learned that sense. Until we watch you, that is.”