Building Your Spiritual House

How is your house remodeling project coming along?
Your spiritual house remodeling project that is!
This NEW BLOG will hopefully build some community around all of us praying with more intention and passion...and discussing the process periodically.

Peter tells us in 1Pe 2:5 [Come] and, like living stones, be yourselves built [into] a spiritual house, for a holy (dedicated, consecrated) priesthood, to offer up [those] spiritual sacrifices [that are] acceptable and pleasing to God through Jesus Christ.

If you are like me, you have spent years resting in what Jesus Christ has done, receiving the free gift of salvation, going to church, reading the bible, getting into small groups, even leading some, as well as praying for myself and others.

As great as all that is, I could not escape the sense that there is more to my relationship with God than I had experienced. I was not seeing breakthroughs in several key areas of life and I was not seeing those breakthroughs in my Christian friends either.

I spent some time talking to God about my concerns. Was I missing something? Or was I just being ungrateful about the good life I had?

About that time a good friend, who had a prayer life I really admired, introduced me to a what a strange method of praying. I decided to give it a try.

It’s called the Temple or Tabernacle Prayer, and it was developed by Pastor David Yonggi Cho of South Korea. Pastor Cho is perhaps the most successful pastor in modern history, pasturing a church of over 750,000 people. He swears by this form of prayer, crediting his ministry success to the Temple prayer model that he has practiced for over 40 years.

The change in me became apparent right away. There was something in this mysterious form of prayer that was different than anything else I had ever done in my devotional time.

First of all, the Tabernacle prayer requires a lot of time, at least one hour a day.
For American Christians like me, this was unheard of. Before the Temple prayer, ten minutes was a long prayer time for me. Today, (not to scare you or anything) I find myself praying the Temple prayer for one to three hours almost every day. But take heart, my 12 year old daughter claims she can pray it in only 15 minutes.
The truth is, once you embrace the Temple Prayer and have prayed it many times, your daily prayer times can be shorter or longer depending on what your are willing to let God do that day.

Many days when I pray for a couple of hours, it feels like I’ve only been praying for 20 minutes or so. This is one of the amazing things about the Tabernacle prayer, your prayer time just flies by.

Praying the Tabernacle pattern of prayer is not boring, or legalistic. My experience is that it is energizing, faith building, and incredibly stimulating for Holy Spirit activity in my life. I’ve never had any spiritual discipline be so much fun and feel so rewarding. And the rest of my day always seems to go better. I feel more in touch spiritually, I feel closer to God. I have more margin for dealing with any difficult things that may come up during the day. I am a better husband and a more patient father. My work is more productive in less time, and I have much less stress in my life. I’ve been praying the Tabernacle for over three years now, and I honestly am still learning things as I pray it. I can say truthfully that I look forward to praying the Temple Prayer tomorrow morning even more than I did when I first started.

Praying according to the Tabernacle, I’ve seen the Bible come alive for me in a whole new way. I’m seeing connections in the Old and New Testament that I never imagined. Years ago I was discipled by a Navigator in how to have a quiet time, how to study the bible, and how to memorize Scripture.

Since so much of the Tabernacle Prayer is praying the Scriptures, I now have a daily use for the Scripture I have committed to memory. I find that using scripture in my prayer time has really been the turning point in taking advantage of God’s Word. Never before have I seen Scripture come alive for me like it does now. As I pray His Word, my faith in it and in Him seems to grow by leaps and bounds. But I’m not just taking a shotgun approach, I’m using this ordained pattern of worship found in the Bible that was the core of how God commanded the Israelites to worship Him.

Let me know what you think and stay tuned for more!!!!!

Derek