Week 20 Nehemiah
The backstory is that in February I was falling behind in my reading. One fix was to add a psalm to my daily plan. So I’ve been reading the psalms.
Now today while I’m reading Nehemiah’s prayer I notice this: O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you.
This sounds just like psalms I’ve been reading:
hear-the-voice-of-my-supplications
hear-my-prayer-O-Lord
hear-my-cry
hear-my-voice
Something I notice is that the prayer has a kind of pre-prayer request: please hear this prayer.
It got me thinking about a couple of things:
a) it seems like some people praying in the bible didn’t always instantaneously get what they asked for, and
b) the response-lag was understood as inattentiveness or deafness on the Lord’s part, so
c) that made it necessary to add a please-hear-me reminder to the Lord.
Personally, even though I understand that sentiment I’m pretty sure the Lord hears well enough. I think he has the capacity to manage very large volumes of audio signals simultaneously and to process them at a very high rate of speed.
So I suspect that a please-listen-to-me appeal to him is more a signal of my own anxieties over not getting the reply that I want, or not getting it when I want it.
Do I need to tell the Lord to listen-up? I doubt it.
But he seems to put up with it.
Notes: quote from Nehemiah 1:11 (NLT version); and Psalms 28:2, 39:12, 61:1, 64:1 (NASB version).