Is Your Body A House of Prayer?
In Matthew 21:12-16, Jesus enters the temple in Jerusalem and finds buying and selling in the portion of the temple reserved for Gentiles to pray. His reaction was swift and stern. “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” He shouted, “but you have made it a den of thieves.” And with a whip in hand, He overturned their tables and chased the money-changers out of the temple. That was a side of Jesus they had never seen!
What provoked Jesus to become so visibly angry? The fact that people were being kept from praying in a place built for prayer! The temple was supposed to be a place where people would gather to meet with the Father, seek His help and receive His blessings. But temple authorities for selfish reasons allowed it to become something else. They displaced prayer and replaced it with a marketplace.
The temple in Jerusalem no longer exists. But God has replaced it in the New Covenant with another temple. Your body!
“Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (I Cor. 3:16 NKJ)
You see, today, your body is the temple of God because the Spirit of God dwells inside of you. And like the temple in Jerusalem, God created your body to be a “house of prayer.” It is the place where your spirit and the Holy Spirit are to meet and fellowship, in which you are to claim God’s promises, enjoy God’s presence and receive God’s power.
But if you are not careful, your body can be turned into a something other than what God created it for. Prayer can be displaced and replaced with something else your flesh finds personally “profitable.” When that happens, your body can become a “den of thieves,” a hiding place for all kinds of immoral things to take refuge; from which they can express themselves.
Prayerlessness equals no miracles, no supernatural transformations, no mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Without prayer, the blind remained blind and the lame remained lame. Nothing changed until the money-changers were cast out and prayer was restored to its rightful place.
Then we read: “Then the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them.”
Child of God, don’t permit your body, God’s temple, to become a “den of thieves.” Make it a house of prayer. And if anything tries to displace prayer in your life, do what Jesus did. Deal with it. Cast it out.
Why? Because of what will happen in you and through you when prayer permeates everything you do.
A Moment of Grace 
Wow, what a blessed world. I am blessed. May God help us to be that house of prayer for Him. Thank you, Bishop.
Amen, Bishop, thanks for sharing this. We have been speaking on Miracles in the church. And this Sunday we will be teaching the platform for miracles. This message will be a blessing to many in Bethel Sanniquellie and the people who will be listening to us through radio in Nimba County. Thanks. Pastor Martin
Amen thanks bishop.