E. M. Bounds
Chapter 14
Prayer and the House of God
And dear to me the loud “Amen,”
Which echoes through the blest abode –
Which swells, and sinks, then swells again,
Dies on the walls — but lives with God!
Prayer affects places, times, occasions, and circumstances. It has to do with God and with everything that is related to God. It has an intimate and special relationship to His house. A church should be a sacred place, set apart from all unhallowed and secular uses, for the worship of God. As worship is prayer, the house of God is a place set apart for worship. It is no common place. It is where God dwells, where He meets with His people, and where He delights in the worship of His saints.
Prayer is always proper in the house of God. When prayer is a stranger there, it ceases to be God’s house at all. Our Lord put particular emphasis on what the church is to be when He cast out the buyers and sellers in the temple. He repeated the words from Isaiah: “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer” (Matt 2:13). He makes prayer preeminent about all else in the house of God. Those who side-track prayer or seek to minimize it pervert the church of God and make it something less than it is ordained to be.
Prayer is perfectly at home in the house of God. It is no stranger, no mere guest; it belongs there. It has a peculiar affinity for the place. It has a divine appointment to be there.
The inner chamber is a sacred place for personal worship. The house of God is a holy place for united worship. The prayer closet is for individual prayer. The house of God is for mutual, united prayer. Yet, even in the house of God, there is the element of private worship. God’s people are to worship Him and pray to Him, personally, even in public worship. The church is for the united prayer of kindred, yet individual, believers.
The life, power, and glory of the church is prayer. The life of its members is dependent on prayer. The presence of God is secured and retained by prayer. The very place is made sacred by its ministry. Without it the church is lifeless and powerless. Without it, even the building itself is nothing more than any other structure. Prayer converts even the bricks, mortar, and lumber into a sanctuary, a Holy of Holies, where the Shekinah** dwells. Prayer separates it, in spirit and peculiar sacredness to the building, sanctifies it, sets it apart for God, and conserves it from all common and mundane affairs.
With prayer, the house of God becomes a divine sanctuary. So the tabernacle, moving about from place to place, became the Holy of Holies, because God and prayer were there. Without prayer, the building may be costly, perfect in its structure, attractive to the eye, but it comes down to the human, with nothing divine in it, and is on a level with all other buildings.
Without prayer, a church is like a body without spirit; it is a dead, inanimate thing. A church with prayer in it has God in it. When prayer is set aside, God is outlawed. When prayer becomes an unfamiliar exercise, then God Himself is a stranger there.
As God’s house is a house of prayer, the divine intervention is that people should leave their homes and go to meet Him in His own house. The building is set apart for prayer. God has made a special promise to meet His people there. It is their duty to go there for that specific end. Prayer should be the chief attraction for all spiritually-minded churchgoers. While it is conceded that the preaching of the Word has an important place in the house of God, prayer is its predominant, distinguishing feature. Not that all other places are sinful or evil in themselves or in their uses — they are secular and human, having no special conception of God in them.
The church is, essentially, spiritual and divine. The work belonging to other places is done without special reference to God. He is not specifically recognized or called upon. In the church, however, God is acknowledged, and nothing is done without Him. Prayer is the one distinguishing mark of the house of God. As prayer distinguishes God’s house from all other houses. It is a place where faithful believers meet with their Lord.
As God’s house is a house of prayer, prayer should enter into and underlie everything that is done there. Prayer belongs to every sort of work relating to the church. As God’s house is a house where the business of praying is carried on, so is it a place where the business of making praying people out of prayerless people is done. The house of God is a divine workshop, and thee the work of prayer goes on; or the house of God is a divine schoolhouse, in which the lesson of prayer is taught, where men and women learn to pray, and where they graduate from the school of prayer.
Any church that calls itself the house of God but fails to magnify and teach the great lesson of prayer should change its teaching to conform to the divine prayer pattern, or it should change the name of its building to something other than a church.
On an earlier page, I referred to the finding of the Book of the Law that was given to Moses from the Lord. How long that book had been there, we do not know. But when tidings of its discovery were carried to Josiah, he tore his clothes and was greatly disturbed. He lamented the neglect of God’s Word and saw, as a natural result, the iniquity that abounded throughout the land.
And then, Josiah thought of God and commanded Hilkiah, the priest, to go and make inquiry of the Lord. Such neglect of the word of the law was too serious a matter to be treated lightly. God must be sought. Josiah and his nation needed to repent.
Go ye, inquire of the LORD for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found: for great is the wrath of the LORD that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us. (2 Kings 22:13)
However, that was not all. Josiah was bent on promoting a revival of religion in his kingdom. He gathered all the elders of Jerusalem and Judah together for that purpose. When they had come together, the king went into the house of the Lord and read all the words of the Book of the Covenant that was found in the house of the Lord.
With this righteous king, God’s Word was of great importance. He esteemed it at its proper worth. He counted it to be of grave importance and consulted God in prayer about it. He gathered together the dignitaries of his kingdom, so that they, together with himself, could be instructed out of God’s Book concerning God’s law.
When Ezra was seeking the reconstruction of his nation, the people assembled themselves together as one man before the water gate.
And they spake unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the LORD had commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding … And he read therein before the street that was before the water gate from the morning until midday … and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law. (Neh 8:1-3)
This was Bible-reading day in Judah — a real revival of Scripture study. The leaders read the Law before the people. Their ears were keen to hear what God had to say to them out of the Book of the Law. But it was not only a Bible-reading day. It was a time when real preaching was done, as the following passage indicates: “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Neh 8:8).
Here is the scriptural definition of preaching. No better definition can be given. To read the Word of God distinctly, so that the people could hear and understand the words presented boldly and clearly — that was the method followed in Jerusalem on this auspicious day. The sense of the words was made clear in the meeting held before the water gate. The people were treated to a high type of expository preaching. That was true preaching — preaching of a sort that is sorely needed today so that God’s Word may have the same effect on the hearts of the people. This meeting in Jerusalem surely contains a lesson that all present-day preachers should learn and heed.
No one, having any knowledge of the existing facts, will deny the comparative lack of expository preaching in the pulpit today, and no one should do other than lament the lack. Topical, controversial and historical preaching have, one supposes, their rightful place. But expository preaching, the prayerful expounding of the Word of God, is preaching that is preaching — pulpit effort par excellence.
For its successful accomplishment, however, a preacher must be a man of prayer. For every hour spent in study, he will have to spend two on his knees. For every hour devoted to wrestling with an obscure passage of Holy Scripture, he must have two hours in which he is found wrestling with God. Prayer and preaching! Preaching and prayer! They cannot be separated. The ancient cry was, “To your tents, O Israel!” (1 Kings 12:16). The modern cry should be, “To your knees, O preachers, to your knees!”
THE END
**”Shekinah” is not in scripture and is, therefore, unbiblical in my opinion. This word is referenced in Midrash and Talmud. Thus, WP4Y does not utilize or believe in this depiction of the presence of God.**
warriorprincess4yeshua.blog 