Prayer: The Key to a Healthy Sending Church

Good morning, Piqua Baptist.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Joel Hollins. I come here like twice a year or so, but I really enjoy fellowship with your church — brothers and sisters in Christ that I’m getting to know better and better every time we come here. So we really feel like this is a home for us. You are so welcoming and encouraging to me and my family. Praise the Lord for what He’s doing in your church, right? He is setting a fire in your hearts for the gospel and His kingdom being spread out all over the world. It is so exciting to be a part of that. So thank you for the privilege it is to just open up God’s Word with you, encourage you in these things, and see the Lord at work in your congregation. There’s nothing better than that. So I’m thankful to do that today from Mark chapter 11.

Before we do that, though, I want to remind us of the Great Commission, because that’s what we’re here to talk about — missions. And it never gets old to me to continue to read Matthew 28:18–20:

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

And praise the Lord — we’ve seen that even this morning, with a baptism, right? You are making disciples here.

The main driving force of the Great Commission, of course, is that one command: make disciples. It’s modified by three words in there — going, baptizing, and teaching. And while there’s much we can say about that, I want us to focus on one of those modifiers: the going one. That’s the emphasis God has commanded the church to make disciples by going to all the nations. I like to call this the scope of the Great Commission. The particular emphasis, the essential focus of this command, is that we are to set our sights on all peoples of all places, wherever they may be. We must be aimed at going to all the nations — not just our neighborhoods or our own country.

So to obey our Lord, we must go out from where we find ourselves and plant new churches, for that is where disciples are made — and we must emphasize the going to all the nations. Our church planting is aimed at planting churches cross-culturally. We cannot simply seek to evangelize people who live next to us and who are just like us. If we do that, then we’re missing the scope. As the book of Acts comes to a close, we already find ourselves in the “ends of the earth” stage. Missions is fundamentally focused on crossing cultures.

The reality is that there are many churches who do not have this scope in mind. They’re focused on themselves and their immediate surroundings and their community — maybe even their own nation. The fundamental, underlying reason why most churches are not aimed at the nations in missions is simply this: they’re not praying for them.

When Jesus was walking on the earth, this same thing could easily have been said about the nation of Israel. Israel was not focused on the nations — they were focused on themselves. And so Jesus wants to reorient our perspective. He wants to take our heads in His hands and lift them up, so that we see the Father’s glory among all the nations. He wants to show us that the reason the Father sent the Son is because God so loved the world — and “God so loved the world” means He loves all the nations of the world, all the different peoples. As Jesus teaches Israel this lesson in our passage today, in a very dramatic fashion, we learn about that underlying distinction between those who are focused on themselves and those who are focused on the nations. And that distinction has everything to do with our prayers.

In order to teach us His will, God sometimes uses very dramatic events in our lives. For example, I didn’t realize how much I loved my son until one day he almost drowned — thankfully, he was rescued by a friend of mine. But from that moment on, we were much more aware of where the kids were when they were around water. My kids are the same way — sometimes as they’re growing up, some drastic measure is needed for them to learn a lesson. Sometimes they have to learn things the hard way, and sometimes I have to take a drastic measure — remove a privilege or something — for them to learn a lesson. Unfortunately, many of the important lessons we learn, we learn the hard way.

So in our passage today, Jesus takes some drastic measures. And the drama we observe is a lesson that the nation of Israel failed to learn for thousands of years. I pray that as we approach our text in Mark 11 today, we would be shocked — as Jesus intends for us to be shocked — and that we would heed the lesson He’s trying to teach us in it.

Setting Up the Text

The central story in Mark 11:12–25 is the cleansing of the temple. But it needs to be read in the context before and after, to really understand it. The cleansing of the temple is sandwiched on either side by Jesus’s preoccupation with a fig tree, and the two stories have one dramatic lesson to teach us. Jesus curses this fig tree, and then he turns over some tables, and then he comes back to the fig tree to teach his disciples what it’s all about.

So let’s read Mark 11:12–25, and I’ll ask you to stand so we can give our full attention to the Lord and His Word.

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching.

And when evening came, they went out of the city.

As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank You for these words. Grant us now Your Spirit, that we may understand them and be united by faith to Your Son, for Your global glory in the church. Amen. Please be seated.

Well, as the young ones might say, Jesus was having a day. Maybe he was a little hungry, right? He couldn’t find anything to eat, and he was so upset about it that he went into the temple and turned over tables. What in the world’s going on here?

This is one of the few stories repeated in all four Gospels, and it is by far one of the more controversial events in Jesus’s ministry. Yet this is not all action — Jesus is doing a lot of teaching in these moments, in the framing of the story with the cursed fig tree, and in the central component of cleansing the temple. Both are focused on teaching us a similar lesson, and they both focus on prayer. Jesus cleanses the temple and says, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations.” And then Jesus tells the disciples, in front of that withered fig tree, “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe in your heart that you have received it, and it will be yours.” As shocking and confusing as these stories are, we need to pay attention to what we’re told in the text is what they’re all about: the fig tree and the cleansing of the temple are stories about prayer.

Jesus curses this fig tree in dramatic fashion, and then he makes a whip and turns over tables — all in service of teaching his disciples a lesson on prayer. So our big idea today is this: prayer is the key for Great Commission–minded churches.

There are four lessons on prayer packed into this passage. The first two are about the context of prayer. The third lesson is on the reason for prayer, and the fourth is the content of prayer — two contexts, one reason, and one content. As we unpack these verses, I hope you’ll see that this text is leading us to pray for all nations. Prayer has everything to do with God’s design for the church, and what we are praying for has everything to do with the mission He has given us. This is why the church exists. The image of the fig tree and the overturned money tables illuminates God’s purpose for the church.

I. We Pray With Zeal for God’s House

The first of our four lessons on prayer is one of the contexts of prayer. Number one: we pray with zeal for God’s house.

Prayer, first and foremost, is an act of dwelling with God — enjoying His presence, communing with Him, exercising that great blessing of being united to Him through faith in Christ. The whole of Jesus’s ministry is focused on Jerusalem and the temple there, and he’s walking in that direction in our story. Jesus was found in the temple, his Father’s house, even when he was only twelve, and he points to himself when he says, “Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days.”

Our passage says: And they came to Jerusalem, and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple. And he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

Jesus obviously cares a lot about the temple, and so should we. There is a pure and right worship of God, where we enjoy His presence — and if there’s one thing this world gets wrong, especially fake Christianity, it’s the worship of God.

Moreover, this is not just a primary focus of Jesus’s ministry — it’s a major theme throughout all of Scripture. Jesus gets his emphasis on the temple because that’s what the Old Testament emphasizes. The Garden of Eden was the place where man walked with God, and ever since his exile east of Eden, he’s been longing to get back into that presence. The Israelites are called out of Egypt into worship and fellowship with God, and He calls them to a place, a land, where He would make Himself known to them. The first instructions they’re given after entering into a covenant on Mount Sinai are for how to construct and care for the tabernacle. That’s the reason they’re entering the Promised Land: so that they can establish a permanent temple, because God would establish the one place on earth where He was to be worshiped.

King David was right to want to make a house for God — yet his son would be the one to establish the dwelling place of God with man on earth. And even after entering the land, they knew they were not yet at their final resting place with God, as they continued to observe the Feast of Tabernacles — living in tents, saying that this cursed world is not our home. We still long to be in the dwelling place of God forever in heaven; there was still yet a rest for them to enter into.

Israel, as a nation, was meant to be a light to all the nations of the earth — calling them with what you might call a centripetal force, a center-pulling force, to come to the temple, for that is where God made Himself known: come and see, and worship. The great sorrow the prophet Ezekiel expresses, as Israel is judged over their sins, is really the destruction of the temple and the glory of the Lord departing from it. And when Jesus is born, the magi from the nations are drawn by that same centripetal force, and they come to worship him, and his name is declared Immanuel — God with us. For Jesus put on flesh, and he tabernacled among us — finally, the dwelling of God with man.

And then, after Jesus’s resurrection, while the disciples are asking him if he would now restore the kingdom, Jesus does the most shocking thing of all: he leaves them. They’re left scratching their heads a little bit. He tells them he would send them his Spirit, and he would dwell in their hearts, so that where two or three are gathered in his name, he would be there among them. And the great directional change that occurs in the New Testament is that Jesus commands us no longer to say “come and see” — now we are commanded to go and tell, such that unbelievers who enter the fellowship of churches all over the world would hear the preaching of God’s Word, fall on their faces, and declare that God is in their midst.

The very nature and structure of the local church is designed to be mobile, to be transplantable — no longer a centripetal force calling people to the one place where God is worshiped, but now a centrifugal force, going outward into all the world, so that God would be worshiped in the farthest corners of the earth. In the New Testament, a zeal for God’s house means a zeal for the local church, where God is rightly worshiped. And today, the church is supposed to be known as a house of prayer.

When you come into the presence of God, what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to pray. That’s what communing with God looks like. When you come into God’s house, you talk to Him. If I were to invite you over to my house, I’d want to talk to you — it would be really weird if you just ignored me the whole time you were there. It’s one of those essentials of the church. Acts 2:42: “they devoted themselves to the prayers.” And the lesson we need to learn about prayer is that we too should have a zeal for God’s house.

Now, we do not believe there’s something mystical about the walls of the church building that makes God’s presence there, but we do believe there’s something amazing about the church as the people of God gathered in Jesus’s name. So I ask you: do you have a zeal for God’s house? Do you have a zeal for church? Do you long to worship God and pray to Him with God’s people? Furthermore, does prayer mark your church? How well attended are your prayer meetings? The church is the context of prayer — praying together with God’s people is important.

II. We Pray With All Nations in Mind

So that’s the first context of prayer, our zeal for God’s house. But this is only half of the context of our prayers. The second lesson on prayer is our second context: we pray with all nations in mind.

This is the scope of the Great Commission I talked about at the beginning. Jesus does not simply describe the temple, God’s house, as a house of prayer — He says it’s a house of prayer for all nations. This is why we need to understand the specific place where Jesus was overturning those tables. You see, they were in the outer court, often called the Court of the Gentiles. And Jesus is upset because people would set up shop there so that the Jews who were coming to worship God, going into the inner court, could have sacrifices to offer — poor people could buy a couple of pigeons, while the wealthy could afford sheep or goats or something bigger. But the effect of this worship market is that it crowded out the space that was supposed to be designed for the Gentiles to worship God. The Gentiles were not allowed into the inner court, so they had this outer court where they could pray to God and worship.

The sin of the Jews is that they were self-focused. They did not make any space for the Gentiles to pray to God. The sin of the Jews was not just that they rejected their Messiah, but that they rejected the idea that their Messiah was for anyone other than themselves. They claimed this exclusive privilege as the children of Abraham. This is the sin of the prophet Jonah, who hated the fact that God would have compassion on his mortal enemies, the Ninevites. God has compassion on all nations, for He is the God of all peoples, not just the Jews. And the Jews did not grasp that the true people of God are those who are children of Abraham in their hearts — children of the promise, and not merely of the flesh. After all, the promise to Abraham is that all nations of the earth would be blessed through his offspring.

And yet again, we’re forced to wrestle with: why did God choose just one nation? Why did He establish an inner court and an outer court? Why did He choose this one nation, and from that nation bring blessing to all the nations of the earth? The reality is that God did keep the Jews separate from the other nations. The primary purpose of that is that God was pointing to the exclusivity of Jesus Christ — He was pointing to the purity of the lineage of that promised offspring who would come from Abraham’s line.

One of the best ways to understand the promise to Abraham is to remember the context in which it’s given. The context of Genesis 12 is Genesis 11 — the table of nations and the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is this low point for all humanity in the book of Genesis; it represents mankind’s united rebellion against God, and the curse of that sin is the division of nations, separated by many languages. But at Pentecost, after the resurrection of Christ, we see the first reversal of Babel — we see unity in Christ across historic divisions that once separated us. This is the vision of the church: unity in Christ. The gospel breaks down dividing walls of hostility.

The temple teaches us God’s purpose for the church, and the church is better — the church is better because there is no more outer court. Those divisions that once kept Gentiles out have been removed. But if we’re not careful, we will be just like the Jews, whose field of vision was only on people just like themselves. The scope of the gospel is meant to be on all people. But if we separate ourselves by our languages and our ethnic tribes, then we are practically denying the gospel, and we’re no better than the money-changers who were in the outer court.

The church has a structure that contrasts with the nation of Israel — the church is meant for all people who would have faith in Christ. So as we put points one and two together: the church is a house of prayer, and it is for all people. The church is the gathering of both Jews and Gentiles into one body, the body of Christ. That’s the context of prayer.

What’s so amazing about the gospel and the new covenant in Jesus is that all people can come and worship God together. Those divisions and that hatred, that separation of one people from another, is not true in the church — or at least it should not be. What a privilege we have, that God has made peace in the body of Jesus Christ. And I think we take it for granted sometimes — how easy an access we have to God, especially because the vast majority of us are Gentiles. We have such easy access to God. Our Father in heaven bids all people to come and pray, and He bids us to pray in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Christ throughout the world. What a blessing we have, that Christ has brought us near to God in prayer — and what a blessing it is that Christ has brought us near to one another in prayer as well. And so the Great Commission is the call to bring that blessing of easy access to God near to all people everywhere. Everyone can have easy access to God in prayer.

I know a pastor in China who has been in prison for the last eight years. I know of men who have lost their jobs in India because they’ve converted to Christianity. Furthermore, there are whole societies of people who have no Bibles in their languages, no gospel witnesses, and they are dying without hope, unless someone goes to them. How do we respond? We should pray. Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest field. This is the central focus of this passage — the purpose of the church and the scope of the Great Commission upon all nations. God’s house is a house of prayer for all nations. So I want to encourage you: infuse your ministries and your gatherings with news of the harvest field and prayers for the nations.

III. We Pray Because God Can Move Mountains

But we’re not quite done, because there are two more lessons on prayer. So far we’ve only talked about the context of prayer. Now we want to consider one reason and one content of prayer. The third lesson on prayer is the reason for prayer. Number three: we pray because God can move mountains.

After Jesus leaves the temple — what I can only imagine is a very chaotic scene — Jesus and his disciples walk past that now-shriveled fig tree, and he tells his disciples the lesson they’re supposed to learn, in verses 23 and 24:

Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

There are a couple of pitfalls in this passage. First, Jesus is not telling us to be holy excavators, praying for the relocation of large quantities of land. Second, Jesus is not telling us that God is like a divine vending machine, giving us whatever we ask — the prosperity gospel loves to abuse this verse. We’ll get to what we’re really supposed to be praying for in the next point. Third, this is not a call to just believe more, to simply have a stronger faith, as if the reason we don’t get stuff is because we have too much doubt in our hearts. No — the point is actually in that phrase at the end of verse 22: have faith in God. The reason we pray is because we have faith in God. God is the one who moves mountains, not our faith. The whole point of moving a mountain is that it’s impossible for man to do it, and just mustering up enough faith won’t do it either. We have faith in what God tells us He is going to do, because He can do it. God can do the impossible. We know it’s going to happen because God tells us it’s going to happen.

So what does this have to do with a fig tree not bearing fruit? Why does Jesus use this cursed fig tree as an opportunity to teach us a lesson about God moving mountains in prayer? The point of the fig tree is that a fig tree is supposed to have figs, and a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit is worthless. Furthermore, this tree had all the signs of fruit — Jesus sees it from afar and sees that it has leaves, and when it’s having those leaves, it’s supposed to have fruit. So there’s a sense in which this tree is hypocritical — it was signaling that it had fruit, but it didn’t. And when Jesus comes up to it, he’s expecting to see fruit there, but it did not have it. It’s a hypocritical tree.

And the point is this: our prayers are the fruit of having faith in God. Our prayers are rooted in the life-giving truth that God is faithful, that God is all-powerful, and that God can move mountains. If we have faith in God, then we will demonstrate that faith in prayer. Prayer is the fruit of faith.

Furthermore, this connects to what just happened at the temple. Israel had all the signs of being fruitful — they’re like this tree. They had the temple worship; they even had a marketplace for all the sacrifices they were making. But those were only leaves — that wasn’t the fruit God wanted them to bear. The Jews looked like they were worshiping God, but they were just a tree with leaves and no fruit — no real fruit. And the church would do well to heed the warning of judgment for fruitlessness. It’s quite possible that we can look like we are worshiping God but not bearing the fruit of faith. Some will think they’re being obedient to God, but Jesus tells us they will be cast out as workers of lawlessness. Others will be judged on the last day, their works burned up as wood, hay, and straw.

The Jews were not focused on God’s plan for His worship — they were self-focused. They did not have the scope of their vision upon God as God over all the nations; they didn’t see God’s plan that His house would be called a house of prayer for all the nations. But if the Jews had understood the Scriptures rightly, they would have seen God’s heart for the nations. Our faith must be rooted in what God has revealed to us in His Word. If God tells us He’s going to move a mountain, then we must believe Him that He will do it. And if we ask of Him anything in accordance with His will, we should be confident it will happen, because God loves to answer our prayers. And God has told us there is a mountain that He is moving.

IV. We Pray for Forgiveness

This, of course, begs the question: what is the impossible mountain-moving that we are supposed to be praying for? Jesus tells us the answer in our fourth lesson on prayer, which is the content of prayer: we pray for forgiveness.

Our last verse gives us the content of prayer we’ve been anticipating. Verse 25 says: And when you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. We pray for forgiveness — a fuller concept here might be reconciliation. There’s a similar phrasing and logic found in the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Notice the order — we don’t wait for God’s forgiveness before we forgive others; it’s the other way around, which is quite interesting. We’re not entitled to God’s forgiveness — we know we don’t deserve it — but it’s the one thing we want more than anything else: to be reconciled with God. And because of that, we forgive others who have offended us, all the while recognizing that we have contributed to the divisions, that we have contributed to the curse that separates people from one another. Our sin is really not primarily against others — it’s primarily an offense against a holy God, in whose image those other people have been made. When we sin against other people whom God has made, we need God’s forgiveness.

The Apostle Paul captures the essence of ministry well in 2 Corinthians 5:14–21. As I read these verses, I want us to recognize the connection between the gospel of Jesus’s substitutionary atonement for us and then the implication for how we are to live with each other:

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Did you notice, in that particular emphasis, when he says Christ died for all, “we regard no one according to the flesh,” that God is reconciling the world to Himself? Who’s the “all” there? It’s not universalism. The “all” is Jews and Gentiles — the “all” is all of the nations of the world, people from every nation and every tribe and every tongue. And what is it that needs to be reconciled? Our divisions. We’ve separated ourselves from one another through our sin and its curse — ever since the Tower of Babel, really, even before that, we’ve been cursed in our divisions.

And the answer to that division is found in that wonderful statement of the gospel in verse 21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Those two words that make it all possible are in Him. We are united to Christ in his death and resurrection. We have caused division with our sin, and we’ve been separated from God and from one another. Yet Christ, in his resurrection, defeats the greatest division — our sin, in his death. He’s defeated our death. And as we are reconciled to God in Christ, we are reconciled with one another as well. The great mountain that needs to be moved is every last division that is separating mankind from one another and from God.

Doesn’t that seem impossible to you? That’s a huge mountain — how are we going to cross these cultures and reach people so different from us? That impossible mountain to move is our sin, and our guilt, and the shame that goes with it — mankind has put up all of these barriers to reconciliation. We make it really hard to get along with one another, don’t we? But this is what God has told us in His Word that He is doing — He is doing the impossible. Since the promise made to Abraham, and even before that, God’s plan is that He would reconcile the world to Himself, and He would reconcile mankind one to another — that He would make a new creation in Jesus, that He would make one new man where there was once two — those two being Jews and Gentiles.

And today we still have this ministry of reconciliation. The ancient dividing walls of hostility do not deter us, because Jesus has promised that he will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. That means we have confidence that we can go to the most remote places of this world, to the people who have the most hostility against each other, and they can be reconciled in Christ. Ukrainians can have fellowship with Russians. Palestinians can have fellowship with Israelis. Even Ohio State fans can have fellowship with Michigan fans. It’s true.

Application

Global missions is first and foremost about having faith in God. So we look to His Word to know what He’s doing and what He has commanded us to do. And from beginning to end, God is reconciling the world to Himself. The local church is the only place on earth where forgiveness and reconciliation are paramount, and as such, the church goes out as ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

So let’s set our sights on the scope of the Great Commission, praying for all people to know and worship God. And the only hope we have of moving the mountains we face in that Great Commission is that the church must be a house of prayer for all nations. This is why the first and most important action we can take to be obedient to the Great Commission is to pray. The first step we take in missions is to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the harvest field. And I can guarantee you this: God will answer your prayers. So be warned — God wants to answer this prayer. And if you pray that God would send more workers into the harvest, do not be surprised when you see more workers arising from within your own fellowship to go to the nations.

As your church is a house of prayer for all nations, rooted in the confidence that God is sovereign over all things, that He can move mountains, we focus those prayers on forgiveness of sins and reconciliation. So where are the greatest divisions? Where are the largest mountains standing in the way of the advance of the gospel? You’ve already identified some on these boards here — huge hurdles we have to cross to reach these people. What are the ancient dividing walls of hostility that still remain, that seem impossible for man to overcome? In what ways has the scope of your vision for the Great Commission been too narrow, too limited by your own capabilities? Who do you know who needs to be reconciled to God — and does your heart break for them in prayer?

The scope of the Great Commission is upon all peoples everywhere. So we lift up our eyes to the fields, for they are white for harvest — and let us especially consider those people who do not yet have a church in their language or culture. Jesus uses these most dramatic lessons, like fig trees and overturned tables, to urge the church to pray. Jesus insists his house is to be a house of prayer for all nations.

So we pray with zeal for God’s house, and we pray with all the nations in mind. We pray because God moves mountains, and we pray for the greatest mountain of all — the reconciliation between God and man, and between one another. We pray for forgiveness.

So I pray that your church would do this: one, that you’d be welcoming to all nations in your fellowship, and two, that you’d be a church that’s praying for all the nations. And when your church prays, expect to see God move mountains. Have faith in God. He will do it.