The year 1517 may not mean much to you, but for many people, including myself, we remember the great Martin Luther who nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg.
We tend to bring it to mind every Reformation Day, October 31, aka All Hallows’ Eve, aka Halloween. Nailing the 95 Theses to the church door was a declaration, like Doc Holliday quipping “say when,” where Luther listed out the various disputes and disagreements he had with the Roman Catholic Church.
But Luther wasn’t merely calling people to change their minds or their ways. He was calling people to repent. Because repentance is what precedes reformation. As Luther said, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘repent!’ He willed that the whole life of believers should be one of repentance.” Luther knew that repentance precedes reformation.
Nehemiah 9 is a textbook example of this principle: that repentance, confession of sin and commitment to live according to God’s Word, must come first. Before we can have renewal, we must have repentance.
The Assembly
The assembly gathered in Nehemiah 9 is not a church service the way we think of church. It is a reconstituting of the nation, reading the Book of the Law as their national constitution. They came together to covenant themselves before the Lord. But before covenant comes confession.
The Posture of Confession (9:1-4)
The people of God gathered together after the Feast of Tabernacles, about two days after the feast ended. They fasted, clothed with sackcloth, think like a canvas bag, and put dirt on their heads. This symbolic dress and posture accompanies the fasting because it was meant to be comprehensive and corporate.
The people of God separated themselves from all foreigners because this was a time for God’s covenant people to gather before their God, not a time for those who were not covenantally bound the Lord. It was a time for the people of God to confess their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. As Matthew Henry put it, “Those that intend by prayers and covenants to join themselves to God must separate themselves from sin and sinners; for what communion hath light with darkness.”
Together they heard from the Book of the Law of the Lord their God. This took around three hours. Three hours of reading and hearing from God. Why hear from God first? So that they know clearly how they have transgressed God’s law. Then they entered into three hours of confession and worship.
Confessing sins takes time. We should not rush through confession. It’s a running joke that when I lead the time of confession during liturgy, I tend to let the moment linger longer than is comfortable. I want people to have ample time to confess to the Lord. Confession is so rarely practiced in our world.
The Levites, the appointed priests set apart to preside over just this type of activity, lead the time of confession as the people cried out to the Lord. This was their responsibility. The spiritual leader must lead the people of God in these activities.
To come to the Lord in sincere confession is a wonderful thing. What follows in the text is an honest prayer, rendered from a sincere heart before the Lord. We are not avoiding naming sins and failures when we go to the Lord like this. But in order to pray this honest prayer, you must come to terms with your own sinfulness. How often have you displeased the Lord? This may be difficult.
Maybe you do not think your sins that great. You have offered excuses and given reasons, trying to justify your sin, but this will go nowhere. God doesn’t ask for our excuses. He wants us to own our error. If your understanding of your sin is small, then your understanding of the cross will be small. After all, if you are not that bad and had good reason to sin the way you did, then the cross of Christ is not really that important.
But if you understand the severity of your sin, whatever that sin may be, the cross of Christ will be that much larger. If you don’t sense the weight of your sins, perhaps pray: “Lord, give me a sense of my sin, that I might have a greater sense of your grace and beauty.”
The Prayer of Confession (9:5-31)
The priests led this prayer while standing on the stairs before the people. They were the liturgical leaders for the people of God. The prayer follows a pattern we see throughout the Bible.
Adoration. The prayer begins as any good prayer begins, with the adoration of God. This is how the Lord Jesus instructed us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer. The text highlights the comprehensive nature of the Lordship of God: all of creation, his sovereignty, no other God like God.
Election. They highlight how God called Abraham and chose them to be his people. There was election and choosing on God’s part to call into covenant.
Deliverance. Next they recount the Lord’s deliverance of his people, how he saved them. He brought them out of slavery in Egypt by his mighty hand. He sent plagues. He parted the seas. God gives laws. He points the way to the good life. He gave them his holy law, which was a reinforcement of natural law, that law designed by God to convict and show us the path of life. He gave bread from heaven (Lord’s Prayer). As Christians, the cross of Christ is our Exodus story. And in prayer we recount the marvelous work of God in bringing us from darkness into light and giving us new life in Christ.
Disobedience. Here we see the turn that makes this a prayer of confession. They recall the disobedience of God’s people. The people of God are stiff-necked. They are stubborn. There is a type of faithfulness that looks like stubbornness, but there is a type of stubbornness that is faithless. Their sin was to go after other gods. But even in the wilderness God was faithful to provide. And when we are faithless, Christ is faithful (2 Tim. 2:13).
Conquest and Complacency. God sends them to take the land. But their prosperity leads to rebellion. We have been given the commission, the Great Commission, to take ground for Christ by preaching the gospel to all nations. Now it is the entire world that has been subjugated to Christ not simply one geographic region. See how the gospel message has advanced over the last 2,000 years. The Lord is making the nations his. But we must not be lax in our evangelistic zeal. We should not be like the Israelites who became lazy and complacent in their prosperity.
Discipline. Disobedience and rebellion lead to their displacement. This is the discipline of the Lord. But even in God’s discipline he is showing his love. When we are disciplined by the Lord, in a variety of ways, we should go to him with sincere hearts. We should not look to excuse our rebellion against God.
As Matthew Henry wrote, “It becomes us, when we are under the rebukes of divine Providence, though ever so sharp and ever so long, to justify God and to judge ourselves; for he will be clear when he judgeth.” Even in the discipline, God sends prophets to call them back to himself. Today, God sends preachers to herald his Word, and yet sometimes people will not listen.
The Covenant After Confession (9:32-38)
This brings the people of God to their present state of affairs. Their cry, their confession, and their condition are followed by their covenant. They confess the various sins and appointed leaders who have not kept God’s law. How in their prosperity there was rebellion because they became lazy and derelict in their duties to obey God. They were distracted by other gods, chasing after them. Their leaders failed to fulfill their duties to honor the Lord God.
They cry out to the Lord about their current sad state of affairs. And then they make covenant. A corporate recommitment to the Lord as one people.
But if you’ve been paying attention, this wasn’t just a church event for them. It was a national event.
Two Offices, One Lord
Under the old covenant, the Levites were tasked with stewarding the covenant which operated as a type of national constitution. Now, with the Lordship of Christ over every nation, he has given the jurisdiction of spiritual matters to his church, over which pastors are to govern. Magistrates or civil officials have national or local jurisdiction depending on their office, and they have a duty to honor the Lord in the administration of justice.
There are two offices: the church is over the immaterial concerns, the eternal matters, heavenly things, and the governing authorities, who are over earthly things, must honor the Lord and promote true religion, by which we mean Christianity, according to Romans 13.
The common objection to national renewal of the kind we see in Nehemiah 9 is that the people of God in the Old Testament were directly ruled by God. It was a theocracy. True enough. And today, because Christ is Lord, we believe that every nation on earth belongs to Jesus Christ and is under obligation to worship him as Lord. The nations are accountable to Christ.
The church, Christ’s body, is of course ruled by Christ our head. But every nation should give due honor to the Lord. This is simply taking the Lord’s Prayer seriously: we want earth to be like heaven, patterned after the heavenly city. And when Jesus taught us to make disciples of all nations, that wasn’t just for individuals but for entire polities.
The Levites led in Nehemiah because the offices hadn’t yet been differentiated. After the resurrection, the prophetic voice (pastor) and the civil authority (magistrate) are distinguished but cooperative. The pastor says, “Thus saith the Lord.” The magistrate says, “Therefore, I proclaim a day of fasting and prayer for this nation.”
An American Tradition
This is not foreign to our own history as Americans. There is a great deal of talk about revival or renewal today; what it might look like for our nation to turn back to the Lord. Nehemiah 9 is a textbook example of what that would look like. We as American Christians desire to see our nation renewed, in our churches and from our governing authorities. And our nation has a storied history of the magistrate encouraging the people in national repentance and fasting.
The 18th Century. Between 1775 and 1784, there were sixteen calls for national days of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer. George Washington called the first one in July 1775. And this wasn’t novel. It went all the way back into 17th-century America.
The 19th Century. Abraham Lincoln in 1863 issued a proclamation for a national day of prayer and humiliation. It is worth reading in full:
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.
And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
— Abraham Lincoln, March 30, 1863
You may say, “that was way back then.” No. This continues through our history.
The 20th Century. During World War I, President Wilson proclaimed a day of public humiliation, prayer, and fasting, saying: “It being the duty peculiarly incumbent in a time of war humbly and devoutly to acknowledge our dependence on Almighty God and to implore His aid and protection... I, Woodrow Wilson... proclaim... a Day of Public Humiliation, Prayer and Fasting, and do exhort my fellow-citizens... to pray Almighty God that He may forgive our sins.”
On June 6, 1944, President Roosevelt led the nation in prayer: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity… help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.” He didn’t just call for prayer. He led the nation in prayer to God himself.
President Nixon in 1970 encouraged the nation to observe a day of prayer to the living God. Ronald Reagan established a national day of prayer on the first Thursday of May every year.
If you add humiliation into that day of prayer, you’re almost there. In fact, the loss of humiliation is part of the reason why this tradition has lost its teeth. We pray, yes, but are we repentant and humble before the Lord? To be humiliated before him is to acknowledge our sins and confess them to him like the people of God in Nehemiah 9.
All of this matters because the confession and humiliation in Nehemiah 9 is not merely something the Israelites did. It is something that our people, our nation, has done and should do.
But today both offices have abdicated. Pastors have stopped preaching to magistrates, and magistrates have stopped acknowledging God’s authority over the nation. It should not be so.
The Model of Renewal
We see the model of renewal in this text. If we want national renewal, it will look like a solemn putting away of sin: confessing our sins to the living God, confessing how we have become prosperous, thanks to God’s sovereign hand, but how that prosperity has led us to trade vigilance for God’s ways for apostasy and many sins.
We have legalized abortion. We have attempted to overthrow the natural order by suggesting homosexuals can be married. We have become filled with greed and covetousness, with our large debts and spending. We have refused to honor the Lord and have traded loyalty to him for free religion of any and all manner of pagan religions. Our prosperity is even reflected in our bodies, where we have become gluttonous on the many riches we have been given. We have widespread pornography use and adultery; divorce is common. The very things that our nation boasts about only serve to harden hearts, as in public education where children are raised to be atheists. We have fatherlessness almost explicitly encouraged by the government through welfare schemes, and fathers have neglected to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We are a nation that breaks God’s day of rest, the Sabbath, regularly and habitually. Our courts have become perverted; law is applied unequally in the name of social justice. Justice is perverted in our nation.
This is what coming to terms with God looks like. This is what humiliation sounds like: owning our devious ways and putting away sin. Christians pray for leaders who will lead the nation in these kinds of confessions.
But of course, to see our nation renewed must start with ourselves being renewed. How can the people of God claim to be the light in the darkness if we ourselves practice darkness?
What Must We Do?
We reckon with our sin. Where we have dealt treacherously against the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, we confess it. You may imagine a renewed and restored America but of what consequence if you yourself are not redeemed?
You must come to Christ. Turn from your wickedness and turn in faith to Jesus Christ.
And then we imagine. Imagine what this would look like in our towns and in our nation. Imagine if the governor of Colorado declared a day of humiliation, prayer, and fasting for our sins. Imagine if the mayor of Boulder did this. I am afraid that some Christians would find this to be objectionable. They have been so indoctrinated by the doctrines of religious liberty that they would find such an act inappropriate. But what a day that would be.
We, as Christians, pray to such ends. And we call upon these leaders to do this with hearts sincerely devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ. May it come to pass in our time.
This sermon was preached at The Well Church in Boulder, CO on February 15, 2026. To watch this sermon go here. To listen to this sermon go here.