How to Pray: Adore, Acknowledge, Appeal

In Nehemiah 1, we read that Nehemiah, learning about the desolation of Jerusalem, was so deeply troubled that he went into a season of prayer and fasting that lasted 16 weeks. The prayer we have recorded in chapter 1 is a summary of his (many!) prayers throughout that time. While most of us won’t immediately start praying for 16 weeks, we can all learn something about prayer from Nehemiah’s example.

Specifically, we see the three primary elements of true prayer: (1) adoration of God, (2) acknowledgement of our sin, and (3) an appeal based on God’s promises.

1. Adoration of God (vv. 5–6)

Prayer always begins with a vision of who God is. You’ll never pray rightly until you see God rightly. What does Nehemiah declare specifically about God? In verse 5, he says that God is a God who keeps his covenant, a God who is filled with steadfast, unchanging, never-giving-up love; a God who is attentive and aware of what’s going on with his people.

A.W. Tozer famously said that what you think when you think about God is the most important thing about you, because it determines everything else in your life. How you see God determines what you ask for from him, and just as importantly, how you respond when he doesn’t do things exactly as you think he should.

How do you see God when you are praying to him? When you close your eyes in prayer, what expression do you imagine on his face? Is it the face of an angry judge? A disappointed father? A God too busy with other things to be bothered by your unimportant life? Jesus gave us a very different picture of the Father. He’s a God so attentive to us, he said, that he knows when a single hair falls from our heads. He’s a Father so in love with us that even after we sinned he kept looking our direction with arms open, filled with mercy and love and forgiveness. He’s a God who never stops looking at us that way even when we wander, ready to receive us when we turn to him.

In Nehemiah’s day, it was tragically true that Israel had sinned and been driven into exile. But Nehemiah knew that the discipline they were receiving from God wasn’t the full story. He saw a God who was full of compassion and never-changing love, full of forgiveness and tenderness, a God who came running to his people with mercy in his eyes.

What you think when you think about God is the most important thing about you because it determines everything else about you—including what you ask for in prayer.

2. Acknowledgement of Sin (vv. 6–7)

In verse 6, Nehemiah confesses both his sins and the sins of his people, then he pleads for God’s mercy. It’s important to note that Nehemiah doesn’t come with a list of requirements, demanding that God owes him something. I point that out because one of the hardest things for me to learn in prayer is to give up demands on what I think God owes me. Often, my prayers sound like, “God, you know, I’m the righteous one here. I did everything right, and now you owe me; it would be wrong of you not to give this to me.” That’s not where Nehemiah starts—because it’s not true.

The truth is, like Nehemiah, we are not blameless. Our lives have been filled with sin, selfishness, idolatry, inconsistency, and unbelief. Appealing to our own righteousness in prayer is like trying to cash a huge check from an account with insufficient funds.

When my kids turned 16, I gave each of them a little credit card tied to my account that they could use for emergency situations. Emphasis on emergency. Recently, we discovered that one of my daughters had accidentally tied her Starbucks app to my credit card (I must have put it in there when we set her account up), and somehow it got changed to auto-reload. For weeks, she was happily going to Starbucks several times a week, simply amazed that her account never seemed to be running dry.

Meanwhile, I’m reviewing my credit card statement, seeing all these charges, and thinking, “I’ve really got to talk to Veronica about her caffeine habit.” Eventually we figured it out, though, and selected my daughter’s debit card as the source for the reload. All is right with the world again, except that her Starbucks runs have gotten a lot less frequent—because her account usually hovers around $0.

God actually invites you to do the opposite. Your “worthiness” account, like my daughter’s checking account, hovers right around 0—but Jesus’ grace is an infinite supply. To which God says, “Switch the cards on your payment plan to mine. Appeal to my grace, not your goodness. Because that’s a never-ending supply.”

So in prayer, I say, “God, I don’t have any right to demand anything of you. But you’re a good Father, and your grace toward me is of infinite supply, so I’m asking because of that.” You’ll find that’s an account where there’s always sufficient funds.

Old Testament commentator Derek Kidner says, “After adoring God’s infinite highness and confessing our smallness, we realize God owes us nothing and therefore we come empty-handed.” But our God is a God who loves to fill empty hands.

3. An Appeal Based on God’s Promises (vv. 8–9)

Nehemiah quotes directly from Deuteronomy 30:4 in his prayer, saying, God, you said through Moses, “though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen, to make my name dwell there. … [God,] remember [your] word …” (Nehemiah 1:9, 8 ESV). The prayers that start in heaven are heard by heaven. I can’t emphasize this enough: Don’t just read your way through your Bible; pray your way through it. They say that the Bible contains about 3,000 promises; don’t leave one promise unclaimed. Note whatever promises you see in the Scripture and pray them over yourself, your family, your church.

I wear a bracelet on my wrist with the reference Jeremiah 32:40 on it. It’s a promise that says, “I will make with them [your children] an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” On dark days, when I’m worried or discouraged, I say, “God, you said … remember your Word!”

This is an updated edition of a post originally published on J.D. Greear

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