house of prayer for all nations |

A New Day!

7 Comments / News & Reflections, Prayer / Tom Stuart

The first of this month, April 2014, I began a new chapter in my life and ministry. In God’s providence, through a series of divinely orchestrated events, I have been invited to become the executive director of the Twin Cities House of Prayer (TC-HOP).

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog have undoubtedly picked up on the fact that prayer has been the preeminent burden and focus of my heart over the past year from my many posts on that topic.

My personal prayer, breathed by the Holy Spirit has been “Lord, make me a house of prayer for all nations.” Over the course of time, as with any God inspired prayer, He has been answering. As a result there had been a growing passion within me that cries for the “kingdom of this world to become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” (Revelation 11:15)

Starting with me, where spiritual journeys of transformation always begin, my scope of prayer has expanded in concentric waves outward to include my home, my church and the church at large. All of these constitute His “house,” His dwelling place. It is the same house to which Jesus issued His mandate that first Palm Sunday after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem when He declared “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations!”

A New Day! Read More »

Two ways to be a house of prayer for all nations

And He was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” Mark 11:17

What did Jesus mean when He said “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations”? This is a most critical question. If as Jesus’ teachings and the New Testament indicate, that His “house” over which He is the head is “the church which is His body,” then the church must be sure to make it a priority to be about that which He has called it to be. (Ephesians 1:22-23 & 1Timothy 3:15)

In order to understand this mandate for the church more clearly we must look at the context in which Jesus said this and specifically what He meant by the phrase “for all nations.”

This call for the church to be a house of prayer is recorded four separate places in the Scriptures: three times in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew 21:13, Mark 11:17 & Luke 19:46) and once in the quote to which Jesus is referring, when He says “is it not written”, in Isaiah 56:7.