For the Wednesday of Holy Week I have been working for some time on a plan based on Mark Stibbe's excellent book, Drawing near to God.
Jesus famously enters the Temple during Holy week and throws over the tables of the money lenders because they had turned the house of prayer into a den of thieves (Matt 21:13). I wondered what Jesus was expecting in terms of praying around the Temple, hence reading the book and working on the plan.
I made a booklet as I wanted people to be able to access more Bible verses than I could possibly read out, but I also wanted people to be able to make notes for themselves so that they could use some of the things we worked through to help them at those time they struggled in prayer.
Download Praying around the Temple booklet
The Gates of Thanksgiving
This is the entry point into the Temple. Thanksgiving is the remembering of God's acts in the past. We spent time thinking and then thanking, and we used Post-Its and pens to write things down so that we remember them.
The Courts of Praise
Praise is the speaking out of God's character. We had two parts to this. The first related to the character of God, which flows out from His Holiness...
...and the second was the names of Jesus from Scripture.
(The pages I made here were blagged from Stibbe's book and is here as a pdf Download Names of Jesus).
We spoke out the character and names in praise.
The Altar of Sacrifice
It is important not to skip the need for self-examination and confession. We allowed time for this and two activities to help mark confession and to receive assurance of forgiveness. On the left if a heart-shaped double candle. This was lit and we dropped crumbs of green wax into the flames. On the right is a bowl of water and we washed our hands.
The Holy Place
We knelt before the Holy Place and spent time in petition and then intercession. We allowed time for people to think before we jumped into praying out loud so that we could encourage the quieter ones to join in as well. Interestingly the suggestion was that petition (prayers for ourselves) came before intercession (prayers for others) which made me a little uncomfortable, but we went with it. We prayed for ourselves in the first person plural, though, and it seemed as if that cleared the air to allow us to then move on to intercede for others in a very focussed way.
(I really enjoyed this part!)
The Holy of Holies
I had assembled a gazebo as we lack a sense of a special place to pray, and put some items in and around it...
...with the empty throne (God is not absent, he is just not contained by it) and some cherubim on either side.
It was wonderful to arrive at this point. We had spoken all our words of thanks, praise, confession, petition and intercession and so we were silent.
We read Revelation 4 and 5 as a reminder of the picture of the throne room from John, and then we spent time listening.
We will keep the gazebo as our dedicated prayer space as we invest in prayer, getting ready to join the Thy Kingdom Come season between Ascension and Pentecost.
Tomorrow we join Jesus and pray in the Garden...
Comments