The House of Prayer

In the days before we leave for our Baltimore Mission Trip on July 7, I would like to examine prayer and post these thoughts here on the blog. Most of these studies were shared in our mid-week prayer services about 2 years ago.

In the weekly schedule of most evangelical churches is a midweek service dedicated to a time of corporate prayer. These services vary in length and order. At the Brooklyn Tabernacle, they observe a midweek prayer service that the pastor credits with the phenomenal growth of that church.

So, as in many churches, we gather each Wednesday night to pray. It’s a tradition for many folks. They have been gathering on Wednesday nights for years. However, for many, the Wednesday prayer service is not a tradition and is apparently not a high priority. My desire is that the prayer service at FBC Leakesville would not just be another meeting—not just a time to get together with old friends to find out the latest news on the “sick.” I pray that we would treat this time as a power hour—a time of joining out hearts together in prayer expecting God to change us, our community, and our world.

Shortly after Jesus made his much celebrated entrance into Jerusalem, he entered the temple and found merchants in the temple area selling religious merchandise and sacrificial animals in a manner unpleasing to God. He knocked over the money changers' tables and the tables of those selling doves and shouted, “My house shall be called the house of prayer” (Matthew 21.13). Please notice he never said, “My house is to be a house of wholesome family activities.” He didn’t say. “My house is to be a house of dynamic preaching.” Nor did Jesus say, “My house is to be a house of beautiful music.” He didn’t even say, “My house is to be a house of community service.” Jesus declared, “My house is to be a place for prayer—a place for praying.”

When a church is a praying church, do you know what it becomes? A house of prayer will be filled with inspiring and uplifting music presented by believers that have spent time with God and seek not to entertain people, but to honor Jesus. A house of prayer will be a place of wholesome and honorable activities for families, because the workers will lead activities and Sunday School classes that they have taken to Almighty God in prayer and he will bless their efforts. A house of prayer will have dynamic preaching, not because they have a preacher with a $1000 suit and a million dollar vocabulary. The preaching will be dynamic because a prayerful preacher prepared a sermon under the leadership of God to a praying congregation that spent the days before they gathered lifting up their pastor in prayer and praying that God would do a great work within them.

The popular phrase “Prayer changes things” is true. However, I like to think that it is not the act that changes things, but the God to whom we pray that changes us. Jesus said, “For your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him” (Matthew 6:8). The act of prayer is not to inform God of what we need, but to condition us to humble ourselves in recognition that we need God.

For me, prayer is “talking and listening to God.” To further explain, I would like to offer an acrostic that I have developed that helps me remember some important aspects of prayer:

Personal
Required
Acknowledgment
Yearning
Effective
Responsive

I will examine each point in the next few days.