Spring Forward

March is officially the beginning of spring, a celebration of new life with blossoms and lambs and the exciting announcement of highland cows calving in Pollok Country Park! Spring is my favourite season. To me it’s a much better time to call New Year especially if you want any hope of keeping resolutions. Plans to get fit in January have surely faded by February when all I want to do is comfort eat by the fire! In spring there’s fresh energy and at least the desire to clean and declutter.

Heart Reset

This year we celebrate Easter in March – a time to reset my heart values. Yet again the aim is to improve my all round fitness – body, soul and spirit, to eat healthier, exercise to my ability, appreciate God’s goodness and be more aware of his presence. This year I do feel an extra strong urge to make prayer a priority.

Personal prayer, group prayer, concerts of prayer or prayer movements always precede revivals. The needs in our world have never felt greater. Prayer for ‘me and mine’ isn’t really the issue. I carry these personal heart burdens continually before the Lord, but there’s so much else to pray about. We, God’s people, have been given a priestly role for our homes, streets, cities, governments and nations but I feel weak in the area of intercession.

Spiritual Workout

Prayer at home alone is vital to our relationship with our heavenly Father, but a well led prayer event can be like a workout at the gym. When we gather together to pray there are fewer distractions, we motivate and learn from each other and re-centre our prayers on godly perspectives. Our hearts pump with God’s passion; he stretches us beyond ourselves, and gives us weighty prayers to carry that will make us strong and build spiritual stamina. Perhaps we need to rediscover the dynamic of corporate prayer.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced prayer meetings that have degenerated into ‘shopping lists’ when we’ve told God about all the problems we can think of. Perhaps in reaction we’ve tried silently moving around meditative prayer stations, and though this can be helpful, it isn’t corporate prayer where deep calls to deep, iron sharpens iron and we build on each other’s faith. I suspect God has much on his heart that he won’t do unless we pray. We needn’t think of intercession as a ‘shopping list’ but rather as Paul Billheimer suggested in his book, ‘Destined for the Throne’; God has a pile of cheques he has already written, and is waiting for his church to use her authority in prayer to countersign.

‘Ask of me and I will give the nations as your inheritance’ (Psalm 2:8).

House of Prayer

At the beginning of Holy Week we read of Jesus riding into Jerusalem where he cleansed the temple court of money changers and animal sellers, declaring,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers.’

Jesus’ death and the tearing of the curtain at the entrance to the ‘Holy of Holies’ marked the end of the Jewish temple and old covenant sacrificial system. Never again would God dwell in a temple made with human hands (Acts 17:24). For Christians the term ‘temple’ has two applications. The individual is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1Corinthians 6: 19-20), and corporately we are a spiritual house of living stones (1 Peter 2:5).

I’m challenged to think how much clutter and noise are in my life in the place of prayer, and as a community of faith, would outsiders describe us as ‘a house of prayer’? The result of Christ’s cleansing of the temple is so good. It brings healing for the poor and needy and the children crying out their praise (Matthew 21:13-16).

This is what I want to see. Perhaps God is calling us to move forward this spring in our Christian discipleship to individually and corporately clear the clutter and make prayer more of a priority in our service.