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.