Heart for Jerusalem

Nehemiah 2:12
I set out during the night with a few men. I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem. There were no mounts with me except the one I was riding on.

Nehemiah's night ride into Jerusalem. Picture the scene. Moon and stars shed a pitiless white light with harsh black shadows on the broken stone and burned gates. Though Nehemiah has his posse, he hasn't shared his heart for Jerusalem. Only after he has seen it does he speak of God's hand and the king's favor.
In a perfect case of God's provision, his companions immediately agree: "Let us start rebuilding."
We should never be afraid to say what God has put in our heart. Because he's probably put it in other hearts too.

Sad Heart

Nehemiah 2:2
so the king asked me, "Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart." I was very much afraid,

Nehemiah, one of my favorite books. In the short first chapter, the Jewish cupbearer to the Persian king, still living in Susa, learns of the crisis in Jerusalem. Shocked, he spends days in fasting and prayer.
The king is named in the second chapter--Artaxerxes. The proud Nehemiah had never showed him a sad face before, and maybe it is an unguarded moment when he does this time, because the king's notice causes him fear. Or perhaps he fears to be honest about the reason, but he speaks up anyway.
And Nehemiah's excellent adventure begins.
What can I take from this heart? What is in my heart will come out, whether it be anxiety and sadness, or the purity of heart Jesus spoke of. Yet here God launches a mission from a sad heart. So there is no point in faking it. Pray constantly, and let the heart show.

King's Heart

Ezra 7:27
Praise be to the LORD, the God of our fathers, who has put it into the king's heart to bring honor to the house of the LORD in Jerusalem in this way.

I'm not sure what happened between Cyrus and Artaxerxes, his great-grandson, who is the king of the hour. King of kings, he called himself in the letter to Ezra, the teacher well-versed in the Law of Moses. I will research those chapters later.
The important thing here is that God put it into this king's inmost thoughts to honor the house of God. He offered Ezra everything and reminded him to buy animals for the sacrifice.
Maybe (without looking at the particular facts of the case) I need to be less worried about the moment. God has it in his hand. What about the generations who suffered in Europe till the time came to go to the new land? God works in the big picture. It's all present in one glance to him, and he touches up here and there. Speak to a king, then speak to his great-grandson. Nothing is lost. The train is right on time.

Moving Hearts

Ezra 1:5
Then the family heads of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and Levites—everyone whose heart God had moved—prepared to go up and build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem.

I love Ezra because it is such a story. Things happen rapidly. One day the Jews are living their lives in exile in Babylon, like Esther and Mordecai in her book. Suddenly God is moving, in the heart of Cyrus the Great, and then in the hearts of the sons of Judah and Benjamin and Levi, and their neighbors begin giving them supplies for the trip home. The gold and silver from Solomon's Temple is going home too. Like iron shavings to a magnet, everything that belongs in Jerusalem is drawn home.
God moved. From one moment to the next, everything changes. I have to take courage from this. It may seem that nothing will change, or only for the worse if it does, but that is only hardness of heart talking. When God moves our hearts, nothing can stop Him.

Cyrus the Great Heart

2 Chronicles 36:22
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:
Ezra 1:1
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:
2 "This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:
" 'The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. 3 Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem.

Good transition. The last verse of 2 Chronicles is the same as the first verse of Ezra. A few verses earlier, Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, hardened his heart. Here, the magnificent Cyrus, self-proclaimed king of the world, yielded to God moving in his heart.
I tend to read over the names of these ancient kings and emperors rather quickly, and they become a blurred backdrop to Israel's story. Here is what I learned about Cyrus in a few minutes of research. He is called Cyrus the Great, and he is huge in Persian history. It was when he liberated Babylon that his path crossed the Jews in exile. His appreciation of gods foreign to him was one of his trademarks, as was his policy of ending slavery, rather than enslaving. He is thought by some to have been Zoroastrian, but it is not certain.
What matters here is that God moved his heart, and he became part of Israel's story. He encouraged Jews to go home, and, more than that, rebuild their Temple. Perhaps he didn't see Yahweh as the one true God, since he calls Him the God who lives in Jerusalem.
And so begins the excellent stories of Ezra and Nehemiah. When God wants something done, he looks for listening hearts.