Pray the Word with David Platt is a resource from radical.net.

Nehemiah chapter 9, verses 33 and 34.

Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us.

For you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.

Our kings, our princes, our priests, and our fathers

have not kept your law or paid attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave them.

These verses come in the end, near the end, of a long prayer of confession among the people of God

before Him as they are acknowledging God's faithfulness to them and their unfaithfulness to Him.

What strikes me when you get to verse 33 and they're praying and confessing sins really of their fathers before them that have led to the destruction of Jerusalem and exile in Babylon.

But when you get to verse 33 and these people are confessing sin, they say, yet you have been righteous and all that has come upon us,

for you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.

And so when they're talking about the sins of their fathers, they're not just saying they

have acted wickedly.

They're like those who went before us who caused this destruction of the city of Jerusalem

and led to the exile. I mean, you could hear them almost

in a self-righteous way saying, yeah, they send and they brought this about, but now here we are,

we're seeking you, but that's not what they do. As they pray, they put themselves in this picture.

We have acted wickedly against you. Not they have, we have. It's the same

thing we see. If you look back in Nehemiah chapter one, when Nehemiah prays, I mean, he's not even

in Jerusalem at that point. And he says, we have sinned against you. There's a picture here.

Just like we see in the Lord's Prayer, when Jesus teaches us to praise, is our Father in heaven. There's

not just an individual picture in prayer, that there's corporate petition in prayer, that we pray

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