What Can We Learn From Nehemiah? — Spurgeon on Building While Watching
⏱ 13 min read
You know the picture. A man on the broken wall of Jerusalem, trowel in one hand, sword strapped to his side, the night watch standing behind him with torches. Around him, men who have been laughed at for months by every neighbouring province — will they revive these stones out of the heaps of rubbish? — and ahead of him, a city wall that has been a heap of rubbish for one hundred and forty years. Nehemiah did not lead his men back into the cup-bearer’s job in Susa. He built. And he built with the watch on. And the wall closed in fifty-two days, which by every historical measure should not have happened, and the fact that it did is the part of the story you have been trying, in your own week, to remember the shape of.
This is the slow version of what Nehemiah’s life actually teaches. Not the bestseller version that ends at be a leader. The harder one, the one Charles Spurgeon kept circling in Morning and Evening — that the soul which is doing real work is the soul which has had to learn to pray and watch at once, because the work does not pause while the enemies of the work send their letters. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you want somewhere to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Nehemiah was a cup-bearer in the Persian court — a senior, trusted, foreign position with a salary and a future and no obvious reason to leave. The news from Jerusalem arrived in a single sentence: the wall is broken down, and the gates are burned. He sat down and wept. He fasted. He prayed for months before he said a word to the king. And then, when the king finally asked what was wrong with his face, Nehemiah prayed to the God of heaven in the half-second between the question and the answer, and asked the most expensive favour a foreign servant could ask. What can we learn from Nehemiah in the Bible? That the bold ask is preceded by the long quiet prayer. That the work outside is sustained by the work inside. That the wall does not get built by the woman who only builds, or only prays — it gets built by the woman who learns to do both at once, with the sword on her hip and the trowel in her hand and the half-second prayers folded into the gaps between questions and answers. (For the companion arc of a king whose mourning became a hinge, what does the Bible say about death — Spurgeon on dying well walks the older Christian language for the moments that ask you to stand up. For the woman whose building includes the inside of a home, a prayer for my husband’s success and protection at work holds the half-second-prayer practice in the smaller kitchen-and-doorway version. And for the deeper teaching about resting while building, what does the Bible say about contentment — Edwards on the sufficient God sits beside this one.)
The first passage: the perfect peace that arrives mid-task
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the conditions Spurgeon describes. He was sitting. He was meditating. The peace was not the peace of a finished task. The peace was the peace of a man who had chosen to set the task down for a few quiet minutes, and the peace had arrived in the quiet. The task was waiting on the other side of the minutes. The peace did not wait for the task to be over to come; the peace came in the chair, mid-life, with the task still ahead.
This is the line that quietly undoes the modern misreading of Nehemiah’s story. The bestseller reading says: finish the wall first, and then you will have peace. Spurgeon’s reading, and Nehemiah’s own, says the opposite. The peace is the condition of finishing the wall. The peace is what allows the trowel to move steadily for fifty-two days without the worker collapsing at day twenty. Nehemiah prayed for months in Susa before he picked up the trowel. The chair in Susa was the precondition of the wall in Jerusalem. The man who built the wall was a man whose meditation on God’s mercy and love had been steady for a long time before he laid the first stone.
What can we learn from Nehemiah at this point in the arc? That the building you are doing — the home, the work, the children, the ministry, the small daily restoration of whatever fell apart while you were not looking — will not be sustained by the building energy alone. The building energy will run out, somewhere around month three, the way the volunteer wall-builders’ energy ran out for Nehemiah at the midpoint, and the only thing that gets you to fifty-two days is the delightful sense of perfect peace Spurgeon describes — the peace that comes in the chair, the peace that arrives unbidden when the meditation on His mercy and love is allowed to happen, the peace that the trowel cannot manufacture.
The modern Christian woman has been told that the chair is the reward for the wall. Spurgeon, gently, says the opposite. The chair is the fuel for the wall. Without the chair, the wall does not get built; it gets started, and then abandoned at the third gate. With the chair, the wall closes, even when the neighbours are mocking and the night watch is tired and the trowel hand is cramping. The peace that Spurgeon names is what carries the work past the point at which work alone would have stopped.
The second passage: the listening servant
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. The first time at speed, to get the shape. The second time slowly, one phrase at a time.
Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. This is the line Nehemiah lived inside of for months before he opened his mouth in front of the king. The half-year of fasting in Susa was not waiting; it was listening. He was learning what the Lord delighted to give, and learning to ask for only that. The bold ask in front of the king — send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ sepulchres, that I may build it — was a bold ask because every word of it had been pre-tested against the listening. The asking was not impulsive. The asking had been refined by months in the chair where every other thought is hushed.
Notice the phrase I am only asking what he delights to give. This is the prayer-life of the builder. The builder who is going to last to day fifty-two is the builder whose asks have, over time, narrowed to the asks the Lord delights to answer. The builder who has not narrowed her asks will pray for fifty things and despair when forty-eight do not arrive. Nehemiah prayed for one. The one was what the Lord delighted to give. The wall went up because the asking had been pre-tuned to what the Lord was already building.
This is the part that, slowly, you can imitate. You are not going to leave Susa for Jerusalem. The walls you are rebuilding are the small walls of an ordinary modern life — the restored marriage, the restored health, the restored prayer life, the restored connection to a daughter who has not called in three months. The asks the Lord delights to give are still available to you. The narrowing of the asks is the practice. Lord, what do you delight to give in this season — and let me ask for that. The narrowing is what makes the asking strong. The unnarrowed prayer life of the modern Christian woman is the source of much of her exhaustion. The narrowed prayer life is the source of Nehemiah’s wall.
Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven. The image is contemplative. The twilight is the half-light in which the listening happens. Nehemiah’s months in Susa were a long twilight — not the bright daylight of the building, not the dark night of the failure, but the cool twilight in which the asking and the listening could refine each other. The modern Christian woman does not have months. She has an evening. She has a half-hour by the window. She has the five minutes before the children wake. The twilight is shorter, but the practice is the same. The asking has to be tuned somewhere quiet before the building begins.
The somatic that goes with the watchful builder
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Spurgeon’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place your right hand lightly on your shoulder, where the shoulder meets the neck — the muscle that, in the chronically vigilant woman, is the first to harden. Notice what you find. The muscle is, most likely, holding more than it knows. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let that single muscle lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax it, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold it ready. Let the exhale go all the way out. Let the next inhale arrive on its own.
Then take the hand away and continue reading. That one un-bracing of the shoulder is the body’s equivalent of Nehemiah’s praying hand learning to coexist with his trowel hand. The watchful builder’s body — the body of the woman who has been simultaneously building and guarding for years — is holding the watch in that one muscle. The watch does not have to be released to be lowered. Nehemiah did not put the sword down to finish the wall. He carried it. He carried it more loosely than the men who had not yet learned that the Lord was the actual watchman. The lower-shoulder version of praying and building is the body’s version of Nehemiah’s prayer in front of the king. The watch stays. The hold loosens. The wall, somehow, gets built.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of small daily settling. One page each day, a short passage, room for the honest sentence, no demand to perform. The workbook is not the trowel and the wall; it is the chair in Susa — the small daily place where the asking is narrowed and the shoulder is lowered, so that when the building hours of the day begin, the worker has been tuned by the One who is, in the end, the actual builder.
The third passage: the prolific grace that perfumes the air
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us! If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
This is the most piercing of the three passages, because of the final line. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
Spurgeon’s image is exact. Jesus is so prolific of grace that He is, by His own nature, radiating lovingkindness as He moves. The grace is not stored. The grace is evermore going out of him, the way water goes out of a fountain — not because the fountain is trying, but because that is what fountains do. The wall-building, then, is not the work of squeezing water out of a soul that does not have it. The wall-building is the work of putting yourself in His way, so that the water that is already pouring can pour through you and into the wall.
This is the part Nehemiah understood that the modern Christian woman, building her own walls, has often forgotten. Nehemiah did not generate the courage to ask the king for Jerusalem. He stood in the path of the fountain — for months, in fasting and prayer — until the courage arrived. The courage was not produced. The courage was given to a man who had positioned himself where it could be given to him. The wall was built by men whose hands moved the stones, but the grace that moved the men was grace that was already moving, and they had simply stood in its path.
Be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee. The line is for you. You have been building. You have been watching. You have been carrying the sword and the trowel and the calendar and the children and the work and the household. The slowness Spurgeon warns against is not the slowness of the building. It is the slowness of putting yourself in His way — the slowness with which the modern Christian woman defers the chair, the half-hour, the slow page, the meditation on His mercy and love. The fountain is pouring. The grace is moving. The slowness is yours.
What can we learn from Nehemiah in the Bible at this third passage? That the builder who is going to last is the builder who has not been slow to put herself in His way. That the wall in Jerusalem went up because a cup-bearer in Susa was not slow about the chair. That the half-second prayers in front of the king were possible because the long prayers in private had been kept. The boldness was not bravado. The boldness was the overflow of a man who had been standing, for months, in the path of the swift arrow of love.
What the wall looks like in your week
Your wall is not Jerusalem’s wall. It is the wall of a marriage that has been chipped at by twenty years of unattended small things. It is the wall of a body that has been chipped at by a season of stress. It is the wall of a faith that has been chipped at by the slow forgetting of why you started. The bricks are different. The practice is the same. The chair before the trowel. The narrowed asking. The shoulder un-braced by a small amount. The putting-of-yourself in the path of the fountain that is already pouring.
Nehemiah’s fifty-two days are available to you, in a slower form. Not fifty-two days of frantic building. Fifty-two days, or a hundred, or a hundred and forty, of small daily standing-in-the-path. The wall closes more slowly in a modern week than it did in Jerusalem. The closing is real all the same. The mockers do not win against the woman who has been quietly putting herself in His way every morning for a year. The wall closes. Slowly, in places nobody photographs. But it closes.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily chair-in-Susa that the wall-in-Jerusalem is, slowly, being built from.
The sibling articles in this Bible-figures series sit at what can we learn from King David — Spurgeon on the man after God’s heart and what can we learn from Paul the Apostle — Owen on Paul’s sufferings.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the perfect peace, the hushed thought, the swift arrow of love — into a daily companion built for the woman who has been building with the watch on, and is ready, slowly, to put herself in His way again.
