Be Still And Know

Nehemiah 1.4 NLT 'When I heard this, I sat down and wept. In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven.' Not surprisingly many people have a special affection for the book of Nehemiah. It offers us an engaging first- hand account of a man of huge courage and faith. Here we meet Nehemiah in Persia which was about 1000 miles away from Jerusalem, his ancestral home. Many years before Jerusalem had been attacked by King Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, and much of the population had been taken off into exile. That must be as humiliating a punishment as could be imagined but for the Jews, for whom the land was a gift of God, it was an excruciating penalty. The people longed to return to their homeland and were eager for any snippet of news. On this particular day Nehemiah had heard the latest and it is a story of unrelieved misery. Although many of the exiles had returned to Jerusalem they were in great trouble and disgrace and the walls of the city were broken and the gates bur