Called to be a House of Prayer
"My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations." — Isaiah 56:7
When Jesus arrived at the temple that first Holy Week, He walked into a flurry of religious activity. Animals were being sold, money was being changed, sacrifices were underway — a veritable three-ring circus of religious devotion. And yet Jesus was displeased. So displeased, in fact, that He deliberately fashioned a whip of cords and set about disrupting the whole enterprise.
He began overturning the tables and driving out the animals. Get these out of here. Stop turning my Father's house into a market.
Something had gone wrong with the temple. Not with religious activity as such — there is nothing inherently wrong with it. God commanded the sacrifices. The people needed a way to change their money. So what had gone wrong? These lesser activities had expanded to fill all the available space in the temple — specifically the court of the Gentiles, the closest a Gentile could come to the holy place.
But what so displeased Jesus was what they had displaced: the central and vital activity of the house of God…namely, prayer.
"My house will be a house of prayer for all nations," the Lord declares through Isaiah. The defining feature and function of the house of the Lord is prayer: the interchange, the communion, the communication, the intercession, the meeting of God and human beings. This is what the temple was for. And as the new temple of God built of living stones, filled with the Spirit the church is still called to be a house of prayer.
And yet. When we look at so many of our churches, we find that, just as the animals and the money tables once crowded prayer out of the temple, countless things now crowd it out of the church — things that are themselves good, useful, even laudable. Many churches (including my own) fill the calendar with so much good that men, women, and children have no time left to come to a Wednesday prayer meeting — or the prayer meeting has quietly been cancelled altogether. Our Sunday mornings are full: good preaching, good worship, good announcements, Sunday school, kids' church, activities. And yet do we pray? Often, there is no time for it, no space for it. And because there is no space, even if we made some, many would no longer know how to use it.
Friends, this is not good. This does not please the Lord. With the holy zeal for His house that consumes Him, the Lord wants to ‘clean house’ among us, so that the one needful thing is not lost in the shuffle and bustle of religious activity.
This is the altar of the church. Just as the presence of God must be the organizing principle of our lives and our homes, so it must be the organizing principle of the church. And where there is no room left for prayer, for presence, for the seeking of God, the tables and the animals need to go.
This is the reason for the New England Revival Covenant. We are calling churches and believers back to a bare-minimum, sustainable rhythm of seeking God: daily on our own, and weekly with our local churches. If we cannot gather to pray each week with our local church, for the Kingdom, for renewal, for awakening - this is the indicator that it’s time for a deep clean.
Rev. Greg Johnson
Director, Revive New England