The Reports That Should Break Our Heart
Nehemiah 1:1-3; Luke 19:41-44
A few days ago, I got home and checked the mail. There was one thing in the mailbox that was of any consequence. Literally everything else had been sent by some organization attempting to convince me to vote for one candidate or another.
We’re in that time of year when you can’t turn on the television, open your mailbox, or scroll through your phone without someone trying to persuade you. Over and over again, I’ve said that instead of all the attack ads and carefully crafted messaging, I’d love to get one simple mailer with the candidates side by side giving honest answers to the questions that matter most to me.
But that’s probably never going to happen.
Why?
Because people are rarely moved by information alone.
Facts matter. Truth matters. But, information by itself does not usually move us to action. Yet something happens when information becomes personal. When a statistic gets a face. When a problem becomes a burden. When something moves from our heads to our hearts. That is exactly what happens to Nehemiah.
At the beginning of the book, Nehemiah is living in Susa, one of the major cities of the Persian Empire. More than a century earlier, Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians and many of its people had been carried into exile. By Nehemiah’s day, some Jewish people had returned to Jerusalem, and the temple had been rebuilt, but the city itself was still vulnerable and broken.
Nehemiah had risen to an important position in Persia. He was the cupbearer to the king—a trusted official with extraordinary access to one of the most powerful men in the world. Then one day, Nehemiah’s brother Hanani arrives from Judah and Nehemiah asks how things are back home.
And he gets an answer he probably wishes he hadn’t heard.
The people are struggling.
The walls are broken.
The gates are burned.
Technically, none of this was new. Jerusalem had been destroyed roughly 140 years earlier. Someone else could have heard this report and shrugged.
That’s terrible.
Someone really ought to do something about that.
I’ll pray for them.
And then they could have gone on with their day.
But Nehemiah couldn’t, because these weren’t just facts to him. This was Jerusalem. This was the city of God’s people. This was the place where God had chosen to make His name known. These were Nehemiah’s people living in trouble and disgrace. The information became a burden. And in tomorrow’s devotion we’ll see what happened next. Nehemiah is so burdened that he weeps and mourns for days.
Before Nehemiah ever rebuilt a wall, God built a burden in Nehemiah, and I think that matters tremendously for us right now.
Yesterday, I shared the new vision statement for CVC:
“A world where the gospel, the Bible, and a healthy church are within reach of everyone, everywhere.”
Behind that vision are some realities that we desperately want to see change.
- There are more than 3 billion people in our world who still lack meaningful access to the good news of Jesus Christ. That number is almost impossible for us to comprehend. We live in a place where we can hear the gospel on the radio, watch sermons online, buy dozens of Bibles, listen to Christian podcasts, attend churches, and access more Christian resources from our phones than Christians throughout most of history could have imagined. And yet billions of people do not have that kind of access.
- There are roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, and Bible translation work has still not begun in thousands of them. It is possible for someone to hear about Jesus and yet have no Bible available to read in the language they understand best.
- Following Jesus was never intended to be a solo activity. God places His people in a family called the church, where we worship together, learn together, serve together, carry one another’s burdens, and help one another become more like Jesus. Yet both around the world and in our own communities, healthy churches and equipped Christian leaders can be difficult to find.
Those are facts. Those are statistics. Those are pieces of information. But the question I want us to wrestle with is this: Do they burden us? Because there is a tremendous difference between knowing something and carrying something. There are people who may live their entire lives without ever hearing clearly who Jesus is.
We can hear those things and think, Wow, that’s terrible, and then move on. Nehemiah couldn’t move on.
What if we asked God to do the same thing in us? Not to manufacture emotion. Not to make us feel guilty. And not to overwhelm us with the weight of problems that are far bigger than anything we could solve on our own. But to give us His heart.
Lord, teach us to care about what You care about. Break our hearts for what breaks Yours. Make the unreached more than a statistic to us. Make the person without Scripture more than a number. Make communities without healthy churches more than a missions presentation. Help us see the people You died to redeem—people You love.
Don’t begin by asking God what He wants you to do. Begin by asking Him to give you His heart—to show you what He sees, to cause you to weep over what He weeps over, and cause you to love what He loves.
Question to Consider:
What would change in your prayers, priorities, and actions if God truly broke your heart for what breaks His?
Prayer Prompt:
Lord, cause me to feel the way I ought to feel about the things that grieve Your heart.
