When We Gather To Pray…

… THE CHURCH REALIZES ITS PURPOSE.

He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”  —Matthew 21:13

What makes the church the church?

The word ‘church’ means an assembly, or gathering. But an assembly for what? It’s not just any gathering.

In ancient Israel, the temple was the place where the Jewish people assembled to make their sacrifices to worship the Lord. It was the holy place of communion with God. The priests worked as mediators of that communion. There was a very specific, ritualized order to the worship. Every detail was thought through systematically.

The assembly of Christians today, while not quite as involved, is still systematic. Our worship is very much organized and thought through, centered around the work of Jesus Christ crucified. Here at Grace our worship is organized into acts of praise, renewal, proclamation, and response. One word that’s often used for this is liturgical. We have a liturgy, or public order, to our weekly gathering. And this is good. God intended the worship of his people to have a design. After all, he designed it.

The problem is that we often take the design and warp it to our own benefit, forgetting its original purpose. This is what Jesus is referring to when he threw out the money changers and merchants from the temple court. They had turned the temple into a business, concerning themselves only with the things of the world, and not with the things of God.

But the temple was designed and intended as a bridge to heaven, a place to commune with the Almighty. As Jesus says, the house of the Lord is supposed to be a house of prayer, where the people on earth commune with the God of heaven.

And while the form of the temple has been transformed by Jesus Christ into the body of believers, the purpose statement of the temple remains the same—we are to be a house of prayer.

So then as we reflect on ourselves, we must ask the question:

Is Grace Church a house of prayer? Is prayer the culture of this local assembly of believers? Is communion with God the aim of our gathering together? If not, then we must pray, Jesus, clear your house, and make it a house of prayer.

So church family, when we gather, let’s be the Lord’s temple, a house of prayer.

Join us this Sunday evening at 5pm as we gather to pray.