Nehemiah’s Strong Hands

Read Nehemiah 6
 
Nehemiah 6:9 Now therefore, O God, strengthen my hands.
 
DO you know someone with strong hands? Good, strong hands belong to one who can expertly craft and build. Skilled strong hands mix strength with a delicate touch. They can lift heavy weight and gently hold a newborn baby. My son-in-law’s hands are like that. He works all day with tools to remove dents from cars. To me those tools are complicated, and I have no understanding of how they can remove a dent from the middle of a car door and not touch or disturb the rest of the door. He makes the dent smooth. It disappears, and you would not know it existed. He has strong hands with a delicate touch, the hands of a craftsman.
    Our hands for the gospel of God are to be those same kind of hands. In Christ’s sacrifice, he has stretched out his hands to receive the piercing, agonizing wounds. Then he rose from the dead to say, “See and touch my wounds.” so we would know his delicate love to forgive our sins. In his grace God has given us strong, faithful hands to actively love and to serve the risen Christ and to serve one another. In the strength of His Spirit and in the delicate touch of His healing mercy, we use our hands to pray for a broken heart, to embrace one in grief, to lift high in praise, to hold a child in love, to wipe tears from a grieving eye, to administer justice to victims, to guide an aged one to the table. He has given us hands to “remove the dents” from people’s lives to make them whole in heart and Spirit. Jesus’ strong hands remove the sins as if they never existed.
    Thank you, God, for strong hands we can use as we trust your strong hands caring for us.
    Nehemiah’s prayer is a good prayer for us all, as we consider the physical and spiritual demands of our lives, let us look higher to know the power of God’s strong, loving and delicate helping hands.
 
Proverbs 12:14 From the fruit of his lips a man is filled with good things as surely as the work of his hands rewards him.