Stand Up and Bless

He prays sitting down. All of it. Every word of it, for thirty-four years.

Same chair, mostly. Elbows on knees, head down, hands together or apart depending on how the week has gone. It is a good posture and there is nothing wrong with it and half the saints in history have used it.

And the content matches the posture, which is the part he has never noticed.

Everything he says to God is about his own affairs. Not selfishly, exactly. He prays for his wife's back and his son's exams and the man at work who is going through it and the situation in the world, and all of those are outside himself in one sense. But every one of them is inside his own field of concern. Everything he brings is a thing he is worried about.

He read a chapter in Nehemiah on a Thursday in the spring and it stopped him, and he could not have told you why for about a week.

It is a scene where the whole nation is gathered and a group of men stand up in front of everybody and say: stand up and bless the LORD your God for ever and ever. And then they do it, and what follows is not a request. It is nine hundred words about who God is and what He has done, going all the way back to the making of heaven and earth, and there is not a single thing asked for until you are most of the way down the chapter.

He sat in his chair reading that, and thought: I have never once done that.

Two things change in that verse and both matter

Then the Levites said, Stand up and bless the LORD your God for ever and ever: and blessed be thy glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise (Nehemiah 9:5).

Look at the two instructions inside it.

First: stand up. The posture changes. Not because sitting is wrong, but because the body is being asked to do something that matches what the mouth is about to do, and a man on his feet is in a different relationship to a sentence than a man with his elbows on his knees.

Second, and this is the larger one: the subject of the sentence changes. Bless the LORD. Not tell Him about your week. The whole of the rest of that chapter is about God: what He made, what He said, what He did in a wilderness, what He put up with, what He never once withdrew.

You have been given a second kind of prayer and you have never used it. Scripture puts it in the mouth of a whole nation and gives it nearly a whole chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a sentence about God into worship rather than into a recitation, because He is the one Scripture says glorifies Christ rather than ourselves.

Why every prayer has been about your own field

I want to say this kindly, because you are not a self-absorbed man and it would be lazy to suggest it.

You pray about your concerns because you are a responsible man carrying real weight, and prayer is where a responsible man puts weight down. That is right and God designed it that way and Peter tells you to cast your care on Him because He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7).

But a man who only ever puts weight down has a prayer life shaped entirely by his own anxieties. And that means the size of his God, over decades, quietly becomes the size of his problems, because those are the only dimensions he ever discusses.

You are speaking to a God who is bigger than the field you have been describing to Him. The word says His glorious name is exalted above all blessing and praise, which is Nehemiah's way of saying He is past the reach of the best sentence anybody could construct, and the Holy Spirit is the one who enlarges a man's sense of God rather than a man doing it by effort.

The Hebrew habit: bless first, remember second, ask last

There is a shape to that chapter and it is worth having, because it is not decoration; it is architecture.

They stand. They bless. They remember, at length, in detail, out loud, what God has actually done. And only then, a long way down, do they bring their situation.

That order is not a rule to obey. It is a route that puts a man in the right place before he speaks about his own troubles, so that when he does speak about them he is standing in front of the God of the wilderness and the sea rather than in front of a resource he hopes will cover this month.

You have a route available to you that ends where you have always started. The written word lays it out in order and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a man down it, and Scripture says we do not know how to pray as we ought and that He helps us in exactly that weakness (Romans 8:26).

And I will keep it honest, because you would notice if I did not. Praying this way does not change what is in your field. Your wife's back is still your wife's back. What is settled is that you have a second kind of sentence available, and a man who has stood up and spoken about God brings his field to a God he has just described rather than to one he has only ever asked.