Amelia Student Ministries - Amelia Church of Christ

It seems that whenever we are looking at how to pray, we look toward Matthew 6, to what we call the Lord’s Prayer. This is a great example of prayer that is given to us from the mouth of Jesus. But I think when we only look at that particular prayer, we are forsaking a whole lot of other prayers that we can look at. One such prayer is found in Nehemiah 1. So lets look at some of the key elements of this prayer.

Worship:

Nehemiah’s prayer begins with worship of God. In verse 5, he says ⁵O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God. Worship is an important element in prayer because it humbles us before the Lord. Raising up the Lord inevitably makes us lower. The higher he goes, the lower we become. It can’t happen any other way.

Confession:

Confession is the next crucial aspect of prayer. ^6b I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you. ⁷ We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses. Confession again forces us to examine ourselves compared to God. Confession is an admittance that we are not good enough for God. Confession says that we don’t deserve God. However, it also says that we are grateful for His grace.

Faith in God’s Promises:

Another important aspect of Nehemiah’s prayer is that he had TOTAL faith that God would answer his prayer. The key to having this kind of faith is to pray things that God has promised to us already.  Ne 1:8-9 “Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, ⁹ but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’ We have been promised a lot of very cool things, such as Forgiveness, Peace, Guidance…but we have not been promised a boat, or a really hot boyfriend/girlfriend, or to pass that test that we totally didn’t feel the need to study for. Will God give us these things? Maybe, maybe not, but if we pray for things that He promised to us, we can be 100% certain he will give us to them. Because God is faithful.  And god is Truth. He cannot let a promise go unfulfilled because then god would be a liar.

Request:

It wasn’t until after this, that Nehemiah finally made his request to the Lord.

So with your next prayer, are you just going to ask for what you want, like God is a Genie that just can’t wait to lavish you with everything you could ever imagine, OR are you going to pray humbly for the multitude of things that God promised if we ask for them?

So I have started reading through Nehemiah. Nehemiah is a pretty sweet book in the Old Testament because it is written entirely in 1st person. I mean that is pretty cool. Clearly it is written by this guy named Nehemiah, bet you didn’t see that coming. Well, this guy was the man who was responsible for the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem that were destroyed in the Babylonian Captivity.

However, as cool of a book as it is, you have to read Chapter 3 to read the book of Nehemiah (sorry, you can’t skip it). This is basically a super specific account of all the people that helped build the wall, and the sections that they built. It would be very easy to simply breeze through this chapter, and think very little about it. I mean it is merely a list after all. But if you really look at this chapter, it is one of the coolest passages on unity that I have ever read.

One of the things that you find is that EVERYONE helped build the wall.  There were rulers next to common blue-collar workers. There were Priests next to the CEO’s of the companies (Ok, so obviously that isn’t an exact description of their jobs, but you get the point). No one was too good to serve. I feel like that is sometimes missing in our churches today. They say that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I find this to be pretty true.

Well, in this society, they weren’t too good. One of the rulers was responsible for building the Dung Gate. Talk about glamorous. They didn’t complain about work being too hard, they just did it because it needed to be done. There is much work to be done in the kingdom. Are you willing to step up and do the work?

Ok, so next week for me is finals week. Things have been super chaotic, which is the big reason I haven’t been doing as many Random Thoughts of late.  However, I am really coming to see that there is something that happens during this week that I can’t necessarily explain. Apathy. I can’t really explain this phenomena.  I mean I would think that I would be super motivated to do my work. I mean, after all, once I am done with this I am home free and can move onto summer. However, I find myself 2 paragraphs shy of a paper, and I can’t even motivate myself to do it. It will take me 30 minutes if I would just get on the ball, but I don’t want to do it. Then I have three more short papers which won’t be difficult either, yet I have been putting them off for quite some time also.  Surely some of you have felt the same way, right?

Well, I can’t say this for all of you, but sometimes I tend to do the same thing in my walk with Christ.  I will be going through life and doing my work and getting things done for Him. You know, stuff like reading my Bible, prayer, talking to others about Christ, and inviting people to church.  then all of a sudden, I get this unexplained apathy, where I just stop.  I mean you would think that I would be motivated because I am seeing all the good that is coming out of what I am doing. I think this is part of why Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 9:24 “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.”  Perseverance is not something that is easy. It is easy to not care and to just fall into apathy, but we need to run the race in a way to win. When a runner is running, they don’t keep stopping, but they run continually. Continually follow Christ, and chase after the things that He would want in our lives.  That is my challenge for you all today.

Hey everybody!! This is just a quick reminder that Home Skillet is staring up again on April 11th.  And…this is important…It is at a new time!!! We are going to be pushing it to 6pm instead of 6:30.  For the first hour, we are going to be having a hangout time. It is just to be having fun a chilling with each other. After that, we will be doing our devotion/Bible Study. Another important thing to note is that it is no longer going to be on the middle two Sundays of the month. Instead it will just be every other Sunday. We want ALL OF YOU to come out to Brian’s house on the 11th and can’t wait to see you there!!

On Sunday, February 7th, from 4:00pm until the game ends, the Morrissey’s will host the Annual Student Superbowl Bash at their house. Here’s the kicker, all students and their parents are cordially invited to come out that day and meet our youth ministry candidate, Thayer Wallace. Thayer will be in attendance at the party that day to meet the students and interact with them. This will give our students and their parents a chance to get to introduce themselves to Thayer and get to know him a little bit.

Included will be contests, prizes, and tons of fun. We are asking each student to bring a snack or a dessert to share and their favorite two-liter of pop.

Pizza will be provided.