House of Prayer

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Introduction

Reba McIntyre?

Today we are continuing our series started last week by David Carey called, Foundation Stones, by talking about things that I believe God wants to be pillars or foundation stones in Cornerstone Church.

Last week Dave kicked it off by talking about us being a House of Worship. One of the pillars of this church should be worship. Our goal and our vision should be to be a church that worships passionately and pursues God with our whole heart.

Today we are going to be talking about the second foundation stone, which is this…

Main Point -

Cornerstone Church Is To Be A House Of Prayer For All Nations

In other words, I believe God is calling Cornerstone Church to be a place where prayer is a centerpiece of what we do. Now. I know for me this subject is extremely difficult to preach on. I’m going to ask you to make prayer a centerpiece in your life, while simultaneously admitting to you, that I’ve struggled with prayer over the course of my own life.

And it’s true. My own life has not been a life marked by prayer, but primarily it’s been a life marked by the absence of prayer or better yet, it’s been marked by emergency prayers. Do you know what I mean there?

An emergency prayer is like the fire alarm on the building, it says “In case of emergency, pull this handle”. My confession is that too often in my life, I’ve treated prayer like a fire alarm. I ignore it until I really need it.

But that’s not how God intended prayer. He intends for it to be so much more, and we are going to talk about that in a little more detail shortly, but when we regulate it to just an emergency alarm or a “get out of jail card” (if you’ve ever played monopoly), then we have lost the true meaning of what prayer should be.

Today I want to take some time to look at what prayer should be, for us individually, but specifically what a praying church should look like. So, if you have your Bibles, please turn with me to Isaiah 56.

Isaiah 56:6–8 ESV

“And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” The Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares, “I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.”

Let’s first talk about the context of this passage briefly and then dive into why this is a blueprint of what I believe God wants for Cornerstone Church. So here’s the main thing I want to point out about the context of this passage - this passage, while written to the children of Israel, I believe, is most certainly a prophetic passage as well.

In context, this passage is a declaration of how God feels towards the foreigners who decided to follow him. In other words, this passage is written about people who are not jewish but decided to follow after the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Now, with that said, the amount of foreigners doing this in the Old Testament time period were not that many. But, here in the New Testament time period, after Christ, the church is largely made up of people that are not Jewish.

Now I bring this up for a purpose. The way an Jewish man would interpret this passage and the way I am going to interpret it is a little bit different. But, I do believe the message is very similar because it’s written to those, like us, who are not Israel by birth, but rather we have been grafted into the family of God.

This passage would later be quoted by Jesus himself after he cleanses the temple in Mark 11:15-18. And Jesus prophetically declares the same thing that Isaiah here prophetically declares…my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.

This isn’t past tense or even present tense for Isaiah or Jesus, this is future tense. I believe they are talking about the time we are living in. I believe their vision for the people of God wasn’t accomplished in the past, but is being accomplished in our present and will be fully fulfilled in our future. In other words, this is where the church is heading, not where it’s been.

God’s desire throughout the Old & New Testament has not changed. He wants his house to be known as a house of prayer. So when we talk about foundation stones for Cornerstone Church, it has to start with this. We need to become a House of Prayer.

Prayer must become one of the foundations of our church. Without prayer, anything we accomplish isn’t worth much. God wants his house to be known as a house of prayer, that requires us to pray. I know that sounds simple, but that means we as a people have to make it a priority.

In other words, this isn’t something that we can just give lip service to. We can’t claim to be a praying church and not hold and participate in prayer meetings. This is vital to health of this church. If we want to see God move in our church in and in our generation, it will start with prayer or it won’t start at all.

Today I want to look at prayer through the lens of this passage in Isaiah and ask the question, why does God want us to be a house of prayer? Why is this important?

Prayer Is Based On Relationship

Look at verse 6 in our passage, it says foreigners who join themselves to the Lord. This word for join is the same Hebrew word for Adam and Eve were joined together. It’s a word that means intimate connection. When we get saved, we are joining or uniting ourselves to God. This is basis for our prayer, relationship.

When we pray, we pray out of a basis of who we are and who God is and how we are connected to him. He is our Father and prayer is simply talking to Dad.

Now I’ve heard people say things like there is a progression to learning how to pray. This isn’t a linear progression, so you might find yourself in different places in this, but your goal should be to understand all four.

Talk To God.

Talk With God.

Listening To God.

Being With God.

Some of us struggle to talk to God, some of us may be learning to talk with God, others struggle to listen to him, while many of us are learning to be content with being with God. These are all places where we can grow.

With that said, our basis for any of these distinctives is that we have relationship with him. We are foreigners joined to God. We are connected to him through the intimate relationship of father and child. And our prayer life is a thermometer of our relationship. In other words, if you have a vibrant prayer life, you have a vibrant relationship with the Father. This is incredibly true because, for my own life, when my prayer life has been mainly emergency mode only, I’m treating my father, like many of us treated our earthly dads as teenagers. We didn’t talk to him unless we wanted something. OUCH.

Here’s what I believe, our prayer life directly reflects our love for God. In other words, the quality of our prayer life can be used as a thermometer to tell us how passionate we are towards God. The more passionate the prayers, the more passionate the love towards Him. If we aren’t praying, that tells us something too.

Let’s frame this another way, for those of us that are married, if I never spend time with my spouse, what would you think about our love life? If I barely speak to her, would you think that I loved her or merely tolerated her presence? It would be ridiculous to think that I truly loved my wife if I never spoke to her.

Prayer is all about relationship. It’s communication. Communication is the building block of all truly successful marriages and our relationship with God is described as a marriage. We are the bride of Christ.

Prayer is what creates relationship with God. If Cornerstone is going to be House of Prayer, it’s first got to realize that as a body, we must cultivate a deep love for the Father. Love is the foundation of what moves us. It’s the fuel for our fire.

True prayer is the by-product of our personal “love relationship” with the Father.

Warren W. Wiersbe

Wiersbe is right. Our prayer life is a by-product of our relationship with the Father. It reflects our love for God. So our love life fuels our our prayer life, if you will. If your love for God wanes, your prayer life follows closely behind. So here’s my encouragment, stoke the fires of your love for God and your prayer life will follow closely behind it.

As a dad or a mom, think about the ways that your children have ministered, encouraged, uplifted you. How have they made you feel loved? For many of us, it’s when they spend time with us. My kids can build me a lego house, draw me a picture, give me a card, clean their room, do all types of things for me, but what really thrills me is when they talk to me and they listen to me.

When my kids take the time to really listen to what I’m saying and they spend their time really sharing their heart, there is nothing more valuable to me that that. When they just enjoy being in my presence, it ministers to me. It builds up my heart and soul. I enjoy it.

I believe God, who is a much better father than I am, enjoys prayer even more. He loves it when we pray to him. He loves it when we call his name. He loves it when we spend time with him and we listen to him. He loves it. Listen to what the Lord said to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 33:3 ESV

Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.

Notice that God isn’t very demanding is he? He doesn’t say Jeremiah, you need to jump through these hoops, or you need to make these sacrifices, or you need to offer these burnt offerings, no! He says, CALL TO ME! Talk to me, I want to hear from you. I’m not looking for all these other things, I’m looking for you to call to me!

If you call to me, he says to Jeremiah, I WILL answer you! Not, that he might consider, answering you. You know, it’s a definite maybe. No! He says, call to me and I will answer you. Some of us think God doesn’t hear us and that he refuses to speak. That is the enemy lying to you. That is not your Father. Wait on the Lord! He will speak. His promises are sure and steadfast. You can count on Him!

Also notice this, not only will he answer you, but he will tell you great and hidden or secret things that you have not known. As you grow in relationship with the Lord, he is going to feed you the hidden mysteries. You will learn things about him that you could not imagine and you didn’t know.

That’s the beautiful part of an intimate relationship with God. He can trust you with these beautiful truths about himself.

As a church, we should be mindful that when we pray we from a position of relationship. He hears us and speaks to us as a corporate body. We have joined ourself to him and he loves to spend time with us.

Prayer Should Have An Outward Focus

There are many types of prayer - prayers of lament, prayers of praise, prayers of thanksgiving and so on. I want to tell you about two and focus in on one. Two of the types of prayer are prayers of petition and prayers of intercession. Prayers of petition are what most of us are a familiar with, “Lord, my car won’t start, I need you to get it running.”

We are petitioning God for a need that we have. There is nothing wrong with this type of prayer. God wants us to bring our needs to him. When the disciples asked how to prayer, Jesus included in that model a petition, Give us this day our daily bread. Nothing wrong with prayers of petition.

Prayers of intercession are different though and this is where I want to focus. If prayers of petition are you asking God to move your behalf, prayers of intercession are you asking God to move on other’s behalf. It’s believer’s taking on their priestly role by standing in the gap for someone else. Intercessory prayer has an outward focus and in our society, these are hard prayers to come by.

I know I am, but I think most of us are comfortable asking God for things for ourselves. We get in those emergency situations and so we pray an emergency prayer. But intercessory prayers go against our selfish nature. Intercessory prayers focus on the needs of others. Some of our marriages would be in a better place if we were to start praying intercessory prayers. Although for some of us, the real answer to our marriage is Lord, change me.

But back to our topic. When we look at the church and Cornerstone Church in particular, the church should be praying intercessory prayers. As a corporate body, our prayers should be made on the behalf of others. Look at the text…

The last half of verse 7 says that God’s house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples. What is he saying? Two things, first - all people are welcome in God’s house. Two - The type of prayer offered up at God’s house will be predominately for other people. He’s not saying that you can’t pray for yourself from time to time, but I think the majority of our prayers as a church body are prayers that are offered up with an outward focus. We are praying for others.

So what does this look like? When we have prayer meetings we should predominately be praying for others. When we have home group, we should predominately be praying for the needs of others. A House of prayer for all nations, means that we are focusing on prayers on people outside of our walls. We intercede for them. We ask God to move on their hearts and on their behalf.

Those are some of the most powerful prayers you can pray. When we pray for people in Africa or Asia or Virginia or Durham, we are praying prayers that we get nothing out of (because they aren’t self-focused), but they are prayers that move the very heart of God. They are forcing us to get our heads out of our own situations and realize that the world is much bigger and there are more important and pressing things going on out there.

When we pray for others, it actually helps us, but that’s not why we should do it. We pray for others because of our love for God and his love for them. Our love for him should fill us with love for others.

Now there is a missional aspect to praying like this. It causes us to love those outside of our circle. It drives us to evangelism and missions work. I know so many missionaries who will tell you, I didn’t think I was going to be a missionary, but as I prayed for Africa, or Mexico or Asia or wherever, God put such a strong burden on my heart, I couldn’t help but to go there. My heart burned for those people. I wanted to touch them with the love of Christ. That’s the power of outward focused prayer. It changes our heart and changes the world at the same time. God wants that for Cornerstone Church.

Closing

Prayer based on relationship and focused on the people of the nations is what isaiah and Jesus says that God house should look like. It’s the adjectives to describe his house. So my question is this. Does it describe Cornerstone Church or to bring it home, does it describe you? Do you reflect this type of church? After all Paul says we are all the body of Christ and individually members of it. I have to take ownership of that. You have to take ownership of that. If we do that, what does that change about the way our church looks and operates?

We will pray more -

Before service

Monthly meeting. Lets take a few minutes and reflect and pray now.