Practice Prayer
How do you handle a difficult boss or anything who is an obstacle in your life? Nehemiah gave six principles for handling difficult people. First of all, practice prayer. Nehemiah was a Jewish believer, but he served a pagan king named Artaxerxes. The king had one goal in mind: to protect and to expand his kingdom. Nehemiah knew that the chances of Artaxerxes granting him permission to go back to Jerusalem to rebuild the wall were between slim and none. He knew the only was that this was going to change would be if God did something in Artaxerxes’s heart. So the first thing Nehemiah did was to pray that God would change Artaxerxes’s heart.
A.J. Gordon has written, “You can do more than pray after you have prayed; but you can never do more than pray until you have prayed.” You might be facing a very difficult circumstance in your life. It may be a financial problem or a need for a job, health issues may be confronting you. You are doing everything you can to solve that problem on your own – consulting this person, checking with that doctor, asking for help here and there. With all of the frantic activity you are engaged in to try an solve this problem in your life. So let me ask you; How much time are you spending in prayer about your problem? The truth is, there are a lot of things you can do after you pray, but you can do nothing until you have prayed.
Nehemiah understood that so he prayed. Now Artaxerxes was not a believer; he was a pagan. But Nehemiah so believed in the power of God that he believed God could work even in the heart of Artaxerxes. Whoever is standing in the way of your God – given dream – that person’s heart is in God’s hands to turn whichever way He desires. In fact, the Bible is filled with examples of God working through pagan kings. A hundred years before Artaxerxes, god had miraculously moved in the heart of King Cyrus of Persia to let the first group of Jews go back to Jerusalem. Hundreds of years after Nehemiah, God would move in the heart of a pagan Roman emperor named Caesar Augustus. He determined one day that there needed to be more tax revenue, and that meant everyone had to register to be taxed. Little did he know that his decision would cause a young couple named Joseph and Mary to travel to this nondescript town called Bethlehem and give birth to the Savior of the world. That was God moving in Augustus’s heart. Nehemiah believed god could move in Artaxerxes’s heart as well, so he prayed. If you are facing a difficult person in your life, the first thing to do is pray.