Thursday
Thursday
Nehemiah’s Plan
Then I prayed to the God of heaven, and I answered the king.
Nehemiah 2:4–5
The third lesson we can learn from Nehemiah is that a Christian leader seeks support from both God and human beings. When the king asked Nehemiah what he wanted, he first “prayed to the God of heaven” and then asked the king for permission to go to Jerusalem to rebuild it. He was neither so super-spiritual that he cried only to God and considered human help superfluous nor so super-confident in human resources that he considered prayer to God unnecessary.
No. Prayer and action are not alternative options. Nor are they incompatible with each other. They belong together, and either without the other is dangerously unbalanced. It is evident from Nehemiah’s first two chapters that he was a man of prayer. But this did not prevent him from asking the king for permission to go to Jerusalem, for letters to the governors of the province of Trans-Euphrates to grant him safe conduct, and for an additional letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, asking for timber for the rebuilding operations.
Fourthly, a Christian leader develops a realistic plan. The world tends to be scornful of dreamers. “Here comes that dreamer!” Joseph’s elder brothers had said. “Come now, let’s kill him … Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” The dreams of the night often evaporate in the cool light of the morning. So dreamers have to become thinkers, planners, and workers. People of vision need to become people of action. So Nehemiah, though inspired by his vision of the rebuilt city, had to make a plan. Soon after his arrival in Jerusalem he undertook a personal reconnaissance. By night he went out, examining the walls of Jerusalem. Thus in true leadership vision and action, a dream and a plan go together.
For further reading: Nehemiah 3