Prayer is the easiest to perform yet the most under utilized spiritual discipline. You can do it most anywhere and at many different times during the day. It requires only that you focus on God
for a few minutes. Yet our busy and distracted lives prevent prayer from having it’s transforming impact in our lives.

Now I’m talking about any kind of prayer here. There are many different kinds of prayer. And the Tabernacle Prayer is my favorite by far. But TP is like a college education vs. a grammer school assignment. I believe all prayer is good. And more prayer is better than less prayer.

This week, a familar verse… an often lost subtlety…revealed in the Amplified version. These kinds of things only apprehend your soul when you are praying them. Review in Matthew where the Lord is encouraging us to be prayers:

Mat 7:7 Keep on asking and it will be given you; keep on seeking and you will find; keep on knocking [reverently] and [the door] will be opened to you.

There are several profound lessons in this verse that become very clear in the Amplified. “Keep on” is one. Your pastor has probably mentioned this from the pulpit a time or too. “Keep on” means “keep on” asking until something happens. “Keep on” until there is peace about it. “Keep on” until a specific answer is clear. Or “keep on” until your heart sees things differently. So keep on praying every day about it until something happens.

One or two prayers about a situation vs. “keeping on” could be a key to how faith is activated in us.

“Keeping on” in prayer lends itself to the Tabernacle prayer because by practicing the Temple prayer, the Holy Spirit (your best teacher) teaches us to develop a daily prayer discipline so we get maximum benefit from our time with God. And more importantly the Lord experiences a blessing from your focused and consistent worship of him according to His pattern of worship.

But there is more in the (amplified) version of this verse: Mat 7:7 Keep on asking and it will be given you; keep on seeking and you will find; keep on knocking [reverently] and [the door] will be opened to you.

Whoa… knock reverently…. what is that? Here the Lord is revealing a secret to approaching Him. God your father, the creator of heaven and earth, the one who formed us in our mother’s womb, he deserves reverence.

Dictionary says: reverence – 1 : honor or respect felt or shown : DEFERENCE; especially : profound adoring awed respect 2 : a gesture of respect (as a bow) synonym see HONOR

We Americans are very poor at honoring or being reverent to anyone. Yet God says that if you want to really please him, show him the reverence that is due his name… even in prayer.

Now I could write a book about this but suffice it to say in this blog that there is a proper protocol to approaching the president of the United States. And there is a proper protocol to approaching God.

I believe that the biblical pattern of reverence is best revealed in the Tabernacle of Moses and best exemplified by Jesus Christ. It is by far the best and most throughly documented pattern of worship in Scripture.

So give it a try and watch what God does when you approach him reverently.

Until next time … stay in His House!
It’s where the action begins!

Derek