I want to start today’s message with a prayer. Let us pray: “Dear God, please help everyone to stay awake and listen to my sermon today. Amen.” On the internet the other day I was browsing around looking for good stuff on prayer and I came across a great little website that listed some examples—from real life—of how not to pray. The prayers were organized into categories, one of which was “The Lecturer” category. A couple of the prayers went like this: “Lord, forgive this congregation for their continued failure to tithe.” My prayer just now was a lecturing prayer, wasn’t it? Or maybe it was just the prayer of an experienced preacher!

Let’s talk about prayer today. At the outset of this year we started a journey of growing closer to God and learning to know God more completely. We have already seen how our faith tradition gives us some powerful tools by which we can increase our knowledge of God and therefore also increase our receptivity to God’s power in our lives. You may never have thought of these tools in this way, but all of them are designed and given to us by the Lord so that we may not be clueless disciples but informed disciples. The Lord’s Supper, baptism, and worship we have already considered. We’ll go on in the next couple of weeks to look at scripture and the community of the church. All of these, prayer included, are about helping you and me to know and then experience the grace and love of the Creator who made us to enjoy this life and to glorify him in the process. I have spoken about these tools in modern terms of communication. In communion we download God’s grace. In baptism we set up our username and password. In worship we learn proper online etiquette with God. And in prayer, I would propose, we have a way of communicating with God that is even better than texting.

Like all the tools God gives us for knowing him, we can learn a great deal about prayer from the stories and experience of those who have gone before us, especially those we meet in the Bible. Nehemiah is one of those with a great reputation for knowing how to pray. Nehemiah was a faithful Jew who lived in Persia a little more than a hundred years after the fall of Israel and the deportation of many of her citizens to Persia. He had risen to a position of some power and prominence in the Persian kingdom. Nehemiah is one of the good guys in the story of the Old Testament. We can learn much from his example.

As is often the case when it comes to human communication with God, which is what prayer is, Nehemiah’s prayers sprang from a context of great suffering. In this case, it was the suffering of those Jews who had been left in the ruins of Israel and who even now, many decades after their conquest by the Persians, struggled to sustain life. In a sense, you and I can think of the situation in terms of a modern context of suffering that we see playing out in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. There is something about pain, fear, and grief that turns the human heart toward something that we hope is bigger than our problems, something that we hope can give meaning and even relief to our desperate situation. Though suffering is not what God wants for his children, it is also true that such suffering can be the occasion when you and I finally approach God with an open spirit and go much deeper into a relationship with him that is, in my experience, more important than the suffering that led us there.

Nehemiah’s actual prayer at the outset of scripture’s story about him is a classic example of how you and I should pray. When friends from Israel tell him about the terrible situation in Jerusalem, the very first thing he does is come before God in prayer. He uses a structure for his prayer that modern Christians remember with a simple acronym: the word “ACTS.” Nehemiah starts his prayer not with a list of the things he wants God to do for him, but with a recognition of who God actually is. “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love….” This is about adoration, the “A” in the ACTS acronym. Nehemiah knows that when we pray we need to start by remembering just who this God is to whom we pray. He is a capable God, a trustworthy God, a caring God. He is not powerless, or distant, or distracted from paying attention to us. Adoration in prayer helps you and me connect again with what we believe to be true: that we have a God who can and who does do something about helping us get through this life. The next thing Nehemiah prays about is not God but about himself and all the people of Israel. “Both I and my family have sinned,” he says. “We have offended you deeply, failing to keep the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances that you commanded….” This is about confession, the “C” of ACTS. Nehemiah knows that when the Creature comes before the Creator, we need to admit who we are and what is the status of our lives before him. We are people who make mistakes, who foul up, who blow it when it comes to living in the way we were designed to live. God can do nothing with us until we admit we need his help and his saving. The next thing Nehemiah brings before God is a memory of what God has already done for his people. “They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand.” This is about thanksgiving, the “T” of ACTS. God does indeed forgive sin, which we need to see in a broad context. God delivered slaves from Egypt and made them a nation. This is who God is, the one who takes us from the broken places we are and leads us to the blessed places he wants us to be, places of wholeness, well-being, and well-doing. We thank God for what he has done already as the pretext to our request and expectation that God will do so again. Finally, at the very last, Nehemiah prays about what you and I usually pray about first, about what he wants from God. “Give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man!” This is about supplication, the “S” of ACTS. God wants to know what we want, just as loving parents want to know what their children need. In supplication, we lay before God the reality of our lives in all their pain and misery as well as in their joy and beauty. We do so because we know that God not only creates us but God also sustains us, day by day, year by year, as we live out the existence that he willed.

Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication: all are key components in correct order of a vital and powerful prayer life. These principles are shot through all of scripture. But there is more we can learn. From the words of James, who lived about 500 years after Nehemiah, we see other important aspects of how we can know God’s power through prayer. James, too, speaks of suffering, sickness, and evil as the context for prayer. But he adds an important dimension. “Are any cheerful?” he asks. If so, we should pray by singing songs of praise to God. You see, prayerful conversation with God is not just for the hard times and the unfulfilled needs. It is about everything else in life as well. Some people view prayer, and even spiritual life in general, as reserved for times of weakness, times of need. But God is with us not just in times of trouble. God is not interested in us only when we are failing and flailing about. God is also about joy, beauty, grace, and success. It is easy to remember God when we are hurting, but it can be so hard to remember God when things are good. And yet, if we forget God too much, we can find ourselves in times that are not so good, because all goodness comes only from him. We pray our thanks and our joy to God from out of sheer gratitude and also from out of a spiritual knowledge that recognizes how easy it is to slip away from Him who is the Source of our lives.

So James reminds us to pray in good times as well as in bad. And James highlights for us another key principle of prayer, that all prayer springs from our faith in God. He says, “The prayer of faith will save the sick,” and “the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” Christians believe, and we are always wanting to believe more and more, that there is a God who is intimately involved with us and ultimately wanting to bless us, to place us in that magnificent intersection where heaven and earth touch each other. Because we believe in this kind of God, we are always wanting to talk to God and to hear from God. It is illogical and absurd for us to proclaim our faith in God and then ignore God in our daily lives. We pray that we might have more faith and we pray because of the faith we already have. And we know that, when it is part of his perfect and good will for us, God grants us what we ask, or if not, God grants us what we truly do need.

The third thing James mentions is that prayer is not just a personal, private, and individual thing. Ask the elders to pray for you, he says. Pray about your sins with one another, he says. We believe God loves us so we pray to him. And we believe that God wants us to love each other so we pray with and for each other. Christian faith is a community thing, a family thing. The creed of life that Jesus left with us was all about loving God and loving others. If we get that right, everything else falls into place. One of the powerful ways we love each other is when we lift each other into God’s hands through prayer. Many years ago, when Helen first began teaching school (to junior high kids, no less!), she learned from other teachers about how to handle the “problem” kids. One teacher gave her a perspective about those difficult kids that I’ll never forget. She said to Helen, “You know, we need to pray for those kids, because they may have no one else praying for them.”

You and I need to know the hows and the whys of prayer, so that our communication with God becomes more effective. We need to know how to hear from God and how to speak to God. If we don’t learn this spiritual discipline, we may find ourselves in the predicament of the three hikers. One day, three men were hiking and unexpectedly came upon a large, raging, violent river. They needed to get to the other side, but had no idea of how to do so. The first man prayed to God, saying, "Please God, give me the strength to cross this river." Poof! God gave him big arms and strong legs, and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours, after almost drowning a couple of times. Seeing this, the second man prayed to God, saying, "Please God, give me the strength and the tools to cross this river." Poof! God gave him a rowboat and he was able to row across the river in about an hour, after almost capsizing the boat a couple of times. The third man had seen how this worked out for the other two, so he also prayed to God saying, "Please God, give me the strength and the tools and the intelligence to cross this river." And poof! God turned him into a woman. She looked at the map, hiked upstream a couple of hundred yards, then walked across the bridge.

Competent Christian prayer speaks about God in adoration and thanksgiving, it speaks to God in confession and supplication. Competent Christian prayer speaks with God about every aspect of life, good and bad. It speaks from the conviction of faith, that God is there, that God wants to hear, and that God can and will do something about what we say. It speaks on behalf of others who are part of the family of faith and the whole human family. Competent Christian prayer keeps us connected with God so that he can hear us and so that we can hear him.

There is one final thing we need to know. Prayer is never just about words. Prayer is also about works. Nehemiah heard of the plight of the beleaguered people of Israel. He prayed to God. And then, Nehemiah journeyed from Persia back to Israel. And there, he led in the rebuilding program for the wrecked city of Jerusalem and in the renewal program for the shattered spiritual life of God’s chosen people. Prayer is never just words. It is also action. What are you praying about today? How can we be praying for each other? Let’s all pray that when we pray we will hear from God about how to pray more and how to pray better. And then let’s do something about those things for which we are praying.

Amen.