2021 Year of Prayer

Matthew 21:12–17 NKJV

12 Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’ ” 14 Then the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. 15 But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant 16 and said to Him, “Do You hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes. Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have perfected praise’?” 17 Then He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, and He lodged there.

Tonight, on our first night back in church on Wednesday in just over one year, I want to share what God has done for us and how He wants us to move forward.

We’ve titled 2021 a Year of Prayer. The idea is biblical and also inspired by the Holy Spirit for our congregation!

Our text and what we will pray about tonight comes from a familiar scene, Passover, everyone went to Jerusalem. This time it was different.

1. Jesus Cleansed the Temple

2. Jesus gave God’s vision for His people

3. Jesus performed miracles

4. Jesus received the praise of kids and youth

I believe Matthew 21 serves as a blueprint for what God has for us. But first, I want to Recap 2020

1. Deeper, go deeper in 2020

a. Looked promising

b. Good services

c. Better attendance

d. Increase in finances

2. March 17, 2020 information about closing down for two week, which turned into longer

3. March 22, 2020, on the parking lot, for a “few more week” stayed on there until May 31

4. May 24, Shelly died suddenly in the night

a. Bekah and I took a while to regroup

5. July 5, big plans to return to all our services

6. June 25, we test positive for Covid

7. Regroup as a church, attendance drops, but starts to build then people in our church start to test positive, back to the parking lot on August 8 until November 21

After trying to resume in July and then in August, we kept having to stop. So I began to pray, God are your trying to show us something?

Through prayer, I felt the Lord wanted to shift something. I kept saying, God is trying to do something through this, we just don’t know what it is yet.

Bekah and I would pray. I would tell Bekah, please pray God gives us direction.

Then I had an encounter with God one night. I won’t go into deep detail, but I knew the Lord spoke to me, I just needed clarity as to what He was saying.

Every day before I left or Bekah left, she would pray, God give Daniel direction and wisdom for our church.

After praying through my encounter with the Lord for a few weeks, I felt like God help me see:

I wrote it in my prayer journal on September 29, 2020

As we move forward in a post-Covid world:

The enemy would love us to consume our schedule with “harmless” activities. If he can keep us busy as a church with activities, we could potentially miss out on spiritual productivity.

Therefore, I have continued to pray that God would help us move forward with Spiritual Productivity

To see this happen, I feel a strong sense that 2021 needs to be a Year of Prayer, where we pray like never before.

God laid this on my heart toward the end of October. I visited with Pastor Davis and he asked, “is God saying anything to you?”

I said, well, yes, I feel like 2021 needs to be a year of prayer. Then I shared with him the scripture, My House Will Be Called a House of Prayer

He smiled and asked, what did Jesus do before He said that? I answered, He cleansed the temple.

It was like the lightbulb went off in my spirit.

I know 2020 was not the best year on many fronts, but I believe God has used it to cleanse our temple. To help us prioritize what is most important.

Now, we begin again, for twelve months we’ve only had morning worship, two Sunday nights, and many home bible studies.

God will use us greatly through PRAYER!

Recap what happened at the Temple

1. Jesus Cleansed the Temple

2. Jesus gave God’s vision for His people

a. Pray, pray, pray

3. Jesus performed miracles

a. God responds to prayer

4. Jesus received the praise of kids and youth

a. Future generations experienced God like never before

As all of this is rolling my head, the Lord reminded me of a service Bekah and I attended in Brooklyn, New York at the Brooklyn Tabernacle

In September 2019, we went to their Tuesday night prayer meeting. I can say that night was a night that changed my life. The Lord was there as nearly 3000 prayed, and I mean prayed.

I left the service, walking on the streets of Brooklyn and entering the Subway to Manhattan, smiling, singing, and speaking in tongues!— Good news about NYC, NO ONE CARES!

God did something in me that I will always remember. I came home and read the Pastor’s book called Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire.

I’ll tell the pastor, Jim Cymbala’s story briefly:

In 1972 he went to a run down church in Brooklyn, NY.

Poor church, wife started a choir with eight people:

tenor and alto had a baby out of wedlock

an usher stole the offering

After a few years, he was discouraged and had a conversation with God:

I told the Lord that I would rather die than merely read water throughout my career and ministry…always preaching about the power of the Word and the Spirit, but never seeing it.

Around that time he developed a nagging cough for six weeks. He went to his in-laws home in Florida for rest. One day on the ocean he told God, “we had to have a visitation of the Holy Spirit, or bust.”

The Lord spoke to Him:

If you and your wife will lead my people to pray and call upon my name, you will never lack for something fresh to preach. I will supply all the money that’s needed, both for the church and your family, and you will never have a building large enough to contain the crowds I will send in response.

When he came home from his time in Florida, he shared what God told him with the church:

From this day on, the prayer meeting will be the barometer of our church. What happens on Tuesday night will be the gauge by which we will judge success of failure because that will be the measure by which God blesses us.

If we call upon the Lord, he has promised in His word to answer, to bring the unsaved to Himself, to pour out His Spirit among us. If we don’t call upon the Lord, he has promised us nothing— nothing at all.

I read all of that in 2019, and did not think about it much until almost a year later the Lord reminded me their testimony.

I feel so strong what God spoke to him decades ago is a word for our church. This is not trying to imitate another church, but to follow God’s instructions to PRAY!

How will we do this?

We will pray.

The Lord showed me something last year about prayer. There were times I questioned and wondered why? It seemed all the momentum went in our favor at the beginning of 2020.

Then all at once, it stopped. I’d love to say I was this GREAT man of FAITH, never doubting and staying positive. But Bekah can tell you, there were many times I would pour out my heart to God for direction in a situation we could not control.

But the Lord reminded me, starting in May 2018, we commited one Sunday night a month to prayer. We prayed:

For our services

our young families

Sunday School

the presence of God

And God heard. So now I feel a new challenge, if we will commit EVERY Wednesday to prayer, what will God do in our lives, families, and church?

Nothing will stop us if we PRAY!

Last year:

1. Jesus Cleansed the Temple

2020, everything stopped

2. Jesus gave God’s vision for His people

2021, we will pray

3. Jesus performed miracles

God will answer supernaturally

4. Jesus received the praise of kids and youth

Future generations of our church will experience the supernatural impact of our prayers!