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

Nehemiah chapter 1 verse 11.

Oh Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name and give success to your servant today and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.

I don't have time to go into all the context behind Nehemiah, chapter one,

but Nehemiah is about to take a major step of faith.

He's about to go to the King to ask for permission, to leave his post as cut-bearer to the

king and to go and rebuild the walls around the city of Jerusalem.

And there's a lot of risk involved in what Nehemiah is about to do. And so he

he praise and really the whole first chapter of

Nehemiah is him praying and he gets to the end of this prayer and he says

Lord please let your ear be attended to the prayer of your servant to the prayer of

other servants who delight to fear your name and give me your servant's success today. Grant me mercy in the side of this man, this king that I'm about to go to.

And I want to combine this with Nehemiah Chapter 2, which will pray tomorrow.

So this will just be part one.

But the picture here is Nehemiah, knowing what he's about to do and spending concentrated time in prayer as he's

looking toward what's about to happen for God's help and what he's about to do.

And this applies certainly to big decisions we make in life or big steps of faith that you or I take

to spend concentrated time in prayer in fasting, which is part

of what Nehemia is doing in chapter one.

In preparation for taking certain steps, in preparation for making certain steps and

preparation for making certain decisions and taking steps of faith

and our lives and our families and our work whatever it might be spend concentrated time in prayer and in

...