Building an Altar

Should this be your new prayer focus?

In prayer over the last few months, I’ve felt the need to get a refreshed sense of what God is doing in the Church so that I can truly get on that page in intercession.

To be honest, some of the previous themes I’ve laboured into in prayer have felt flat, kind of like yesterday’s manna. Perhaps that’s been your reality too. Whenever this happens, I shift into listening mode. I try to notice what God is moving on, and where the Spirit is brooding. Jesus knows exactly what He’s doing, He is the master craftsman who is building his Church, only He sees the Church with perfect clarity, and only He has the full blueprint. Ultimately, it’s way better for us to take our cues from Him and follow His lead, than to contend in intercession, trying to convince Him to build according to our plans.

Meanwhile, as I’ve been in this seeking mode, I’ve been reading through Ezra and Nehemiah, the two books that detail how the people of God reestablished themselves in the land after the Babylonian exile. Looking around, especially post-Covid, it certainly feels like a time similar to what Ezra, Nehemiah, and their contemporaries would have experienced. Covid and politics have divided churches, while deconstruction and progressivism have eroded the faith of many— particularly our young adults. There’s lots of mess and rubble.

Joining with the worldly trend of deconstruction, we’ve dissed the “institution” of the church so much, that now that we need its stability and strength, we find it's been sorely neglected— and is also in disrepair.

How do we build, rebuild? How do we move forward?

Thankfully, we aren’t the first ones who asked these questions!

The biblical principle, illustrated in Ezra and Nehemiah, involved building three structures that enabled Israel to corporately function as the people of God, a people who had the astonishing reality of God dwelling with them. Pause there for a minute— we get so familiar with that truth, we can become desensitized to how incredible it is. GOD literally dwelling in the midst of his holy nation. Selah.

To enable that hosting of His holy and fearful and glorious presence, they built, in this order: the altar, the temple, and then the wall around the city. Remembering that the old covenant is a foreshadowing of the new— we also need to build, rebuild, and keep building these three features—but reinterpreted for our new covenant reality. What does this look like in our day? I think we answer this question by identifying the function of the altar, the temple, and the wall, then observe what serves those functions in the Church.

My sense is that the Lord is giving great grace, for this kind of building in the Canadian Church, a grace similar to the empowerment of the people of God, who, under Nehemiah’s leadership  built the wall around Jerusalem in a remarkable fifty-two days. Whether your congregation is being led to focus on the altar, the temple, or the wall at this point, the grace is here to build.

Let’s consider how these three structures can be interpreted in our new covenant, New Testament, context so that we can notice how they may be being built up in our churches and join in the efforts with our freshly activated intercession. Catching a fresh vision of what God’s up to in this hour will give us a renewed impetus to intercede. I can certainly attest to this!

The Altar- This is where the most intense presence of God is, it’s the place of the cross, the place of the greatest union with Christ, and the place of corporate encounter.

The altar zone’s atmosphere is worship, presence, and prayer— in unity. It’s corporate, so it’s a place of us participating, engaging, perhaps functioning in our gifts, synergizing with each other, while the Spirit carries us all deeper into Christ. At times this can be energized, exuberant, and passionate; at other times, quiet, holy moments, resting and soaking, receiving and being filled, awe and surrender. While there are ways that we can encounter God in our own “secret place” that Jesus taught us to cultivate (Mt 6:6), and that he modeled for us (Lu 5:16), there are also ways that we can only encounter God in the corporate expression (Acts 2:42, Jn 17:21-23). We absolutely need both expressions, personal and corporate.

CENTERED IN THE TABLE

However, the altar zone can get highjacked and turn into a soulish, self-centred time if it’s not anchored in the cross, and the most biblical way to do that is with the centrality of the Lord’s Table. Allowing the Lord’s Table to call us to worship, to focus us on Jesus, to renew us in holiness and right relationship with Him and each other, holds the altar zone in its true function.

The Church has always viewed the Lord’s Table as the place of greatest union and communion with Christ and one another. The early Church Fathers taught that “the real presence of Christ” was experienced in the elements of bread and wine. Not just a recollection of His love for us, or the wonder of the cross, but an actual, mysterious communing with Him. Remember His words— you know, the ones that have always made us squirm… “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in Him.”(Jn 6:56).

WHAT ABOUT YOUR BROTHER?

Anchoring our altar zone with the Lord’s Table sets some other things in motion as well. Scripture teaches us that we should never come to receive communion without first examining ourselves, allowing the Holy Spirit to bring to mind any sin that we may have committed, be it an attitude, unholy thought, internal judgment of others, things left undone (love withheld), or any other kind of sin against others or against the Lord. Paul goes on to explain to the Corinthian church that without these moments of self-examination and confession they are at risk of “eating and drinking judgment on themselves”, which would mean that some are weak, ill, or even die (1 Cor 11:28-30).

Jesus says, “if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” (Mt 5:23,24). The Jews of Jesus’s day heard this instruction in their context of animal sacrifices but we understand it as a variety of offerings, including worship. Do we bring an offering of worship while there’s broken relationship, and it’s within our ability to see that reconciled?

Could setting the Lord’s Table as a central feature of our altar expression activate long overdue reconciliation among those that have just been independently worshiping while alienated and offended with one another? Could it also, cultivate a lifestyle of short accounts with God, producing sanctification and a new devotion to holiness in our hearts?

THE FRUIT OF HOUSES OF PRAYER

As many of my readers are aware, I served for 20 years in the prayer movement of Canada, with a focus on building and leading houses of prayer. Then in 2017, the Lord spoke to me that “the house of prayer movement has peaked” and that he was going to be moving the Spirit of Prayer— which had been wonderfully cultivated in this movement—  into the local church.

I knew He didn’t mean that all houses of prayer would automatically close, nor that He was lifting His grace, but rather, that there was going to be a waning and a gradual transfer over time into the local church.

I wondered what that would look like…

Did it mean we’d see many churches with dedicated prayer rooms and prayer staff? That was all I could initially envision. You see, I was still thinking in the old paradigm, with prayer as a separate ministry, although attached to the Church. No, prayer wasn’t going to be bolted on to Church—it was going to flow from the place of the Table and the altar zone would be rebuilt. In fact, His House would be a house of prayer, prayer would arise and develop in the very heart, then course through the life of the Church.

Leviticus 6:12 has been often used as a vision statement for houses of prayer, “The fire on the altar shall be kept burning; it shall not go out.” Invoking the image of the fiery altar, these holy words have been used to inspire both passion and a call to endurance as we laboured in the house of prayer movement. But imagine this same spirit of prayer that has been carefully tended, with its zeal and mature endurance, being grafted into the local church. Of course, It would look different and be expressed differently, but the spirit of it could be the same. It would look like a high frequency of corporate expressions of prayer, the Table, soaking, and worship— ways that enable us to corporately abide in Him.

As glorious and important as the house of prayer movement’s contribution has been, there’s also been a couple of unfortunate by-products that could end up being remedied by this exciting shift. Houses of prayer have, at times, inadvertently fed the notion that only certain people are called to zealously invest in prayer, these are the gifted and qualified ones, and intercession should be delegated to them. (Of course we know that’s contrary to God’s word.)

Secondly, this structure of a separate, para-church, house of prayer has enabled a culture of unaccountable independence that wars against building authentic, committed community in the local church. So for the Lord to grow a spirit of prayer in the greenhouse of the House of prayer movement and then graft this precious gift into the local church makes so much sense! His ways are good and wise.

A PLACE OF MISSIONAL WELCOME

The altar in the new covenant is also missional. The weary, the wandering, and the spiritually impoverished— like the sparrow and swallow of Ps 84:3— find a place of peace and safety near the Lord’s altar, where God’s love can begin to be revealed. The doors to the altar zone are wide open, anyone can come and delight in His presence¹. It can be a place to have a God- encounter that awakens the appetite for him like nothing else in the hungry and seeking.

Do you have an altar in your church? It might not be a stand-alone meeting called “The Altar”, it could be woven into other meetings and even your church’s ethos, so look carefully, it might be more a part of your church than you realize. It might even be the cumulative effect of many meetings or parts of meetings.

A tell-tale sign is that there is a regular place of corporate refreshing, and the Lord’s Table is a frequent part of that. Let’s pray that in our post-Covid rebuilding we give real attention to this and allow the altar to be a protected priority.

Then as we see in Nehemiah and Ezra’s day, while the altar was first and central, it was not enough. The temple and the wall were necessary to protect it and enable it to remain a powerful place of encounter. So next time we’ll look more closely at the way the Lord is building up our churches as temples, and how a wall protects the place of His presence, while yet at the same time, giving us the ability to go to the highways and byways with a missional invitation of “come and see where the Lord is dwelling”.

“Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, ‘What seek ye?’ They said unto him, ‘Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?’

He saith unto them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day..” Jn 1: 38,39 KJV

1. While the altar zone is open to all with blessings, prophecy, prayer and personal ministry—  the vast majority of the Church would agree that Lord’s Table is for believers only.