“ O God, strengthen my hands.” -Nehemiah 6:9

I want to give a shout out to those who didn't give up on their start up business and now going to the next level. And that single mother or father that took up those college classes to get that degree. In Nehemiah chapter 6, Nehemiah is finishing the wall, and those naysayers now see that he is actually getting it done and  try and distract him from reaching his goal. Nehemiah prayed for the strength of God to complete the job he had been called to do.“For they all made us afraid, saying, Their hands shall be weakened from the work, that it be not done. Now therefore, O God, strengthen my hands.” -Nehemiah 6:9 Maybe  you have known what it is God wants you to do, but then came all of these other things, distractions.Nehemiah was the cup bearer to the king which we would consider a wine taster, somebody to make sure that the wine hadn’t been poisoned. But, Nehemiah was much more than that. Nehemiah working for King Artaxerxes I, he gets this burden for his city and he hears how terrible things are in Jerusalem and so he does a very risky thing. The surrounding regions felt very, very defensive and very threatened by the fact that Nehemiah was rebuilding this wall. So finally they got to the place where the wall was almost complete and they were about to rebuild the gates and Sanballat realized this isn’t working.So he decided a different strategy. Sanballat decided to try to distract Nehemiah from the work and to actually get him outside the city and once he was outside the city to put him to death because they realized if we can kill Nehemiah certainly the people will become discouraged and they will give up on this crazy idea of rebuilding the wall. And, in Nehemiah Chapter 6, we find this encounter between Sanballat and Nehemiah as Sanballat tries to distract Nehemiah from the work