I like that song, Prayer Bells of Heaven. Yes. Oh, an oldie but a goodie, as they say. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and take those Bibles and run over to the book of Isaiah, chapter number 56. We want to look here at this one particular verse for a simple thought here this morning. We will do our best Elizabeth Taylor impression this morning and not keep you too long. Hey, man That's what she said to her 20th husband. Don't worry. I won't keep you long But Isaiah 56 verse number 7 The prophet writes down here even them will I bring to my holy mountain and of course he's writing here on behalf of God and and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar. For mine house shall be called a house of prayer for all people." A house of prayer here. Of course, we know that Jesus references this verse when he gets over there to the temple, and he finds everybody selling all the animals and whatnot, and exchanging the money there in the temple, and he got all mad, and he overturned the tables, says, my house shall be called a house of prayer. Very interesting to note that he didn't say it would be called a house of preaching, a house of teaching, a house of singing. No, he said a house of prayer. Because prayer is faith being exercised. Well, if you're going to have a house, though, you've got to have a little bit of reason for it. You've got to have it laid out the way it's necessarily to be built. Why is it being built? All these good things here. So what we'd like to do is bring our sermon here this morning real quickly on this thought of the blueprint of the house of prayer. Blueprint of the house of prayer. Let's go ahead and go to the Lord in a word of prayer here. Abba Father, come before you now, we're asking you Lord, please for your blessings upon the sermon here today. Ask you Father, please to help me to present the sermon in a way that you'd have me to, that it would be a help to each and every one that is tuning in, whether it's live here, or on down the road, or here on Facebook, or over on Sermon Audio. Whatever the case would be there, Father, we pray Lord that people would get the help from the Master that they need. I'm certainly not the Master, no, no, no, no. You are the Master. You are the one who's done all of this and we are eternally grateful father for all that you've done for us We ask father for your continued blessings Pray father for brother Frank and his family and in this time of great sorrow and loss for them That you'd strengthen and comfort and encourage them We thank you father for again there for miss Bonnie and Getting to come home from the hospital pray Lord for quick healing for her, please we ask you father for all the Other prayer requests, Brother Rich and his recovery from his recent surgery as well. And just help us, Father, please, to be obedient to you, to follow your holy will. In the name of Jesus, we do pray. Amen and amen. So, I imagine not too many know this. I had actually had graduated high school and with the thought of going into architectural drafting, and wanted to pursue that, but I ended up washing out there at Purdue because I had worked at a burger joint, and it's pressed meat, and the way you gotta apply the pressure on the tools there to make the pressed meat, just about developed carpal tunnel in both hands from it, and it turned arthritic on me, to where I can't hold a pencil long enough to get the job done. And this was, you know, computers were starting to take off, but the one professor we had there at Purdue, he, no, you don't do nothing on computers, you do it all by hand. If you can't do it by hand, you ain't passing my course, and I had him for two courses. So I ended up not being able to pursue that, became the bread man instead. But the fact of the matter is I got a little bit of understanding about architecture from the couple of years that I took it here in high school. And I got to understand a little bit about this whole thing about needing blueprints. Very important to have them. Number one, if you ain't got blueprints and the government finds out you're trying to build something and you ain't got blueprints, you could be in trouble. Number two, it sure does help to have blueprints because if you're just going by what's in your head, you're going to run into issues. You get it all laid out there, you get it drawn out, measurements are able to be taken, supply lists are able to be drawn up, you're able to follow the necessary steps in order to do the construction. Not very helpful to build the roof and you ain't got any walls erected yet. Kind of a problem. But when you do, when you follow the blueprints, you see how things are planned out, you see what is supposed to go in what places there, how things are supposed to work, and you tend to have things go a whole lot easier when you follow the blueprints that have been laid out for you. Amen. So God here, He gives us this little snapshot of the blueprints for His house of prayer. Now this is not a proposed house. He's already approved it. He's already designed it. He's already built it. It's a matter of us if we're going to go forward with it. Amen! It's a choice that is there for us, and He lays it out here so as to help make the choice easier for us to live in His house of prayer, to use His house of prayer that our Father has provided for us, or to shun it. The problem is that far too many are shunning it. Far too many use prayer as a break glass in case of emergency type thing here, instead of living by prayer. As you go through the Gospels, you are going to find time and time again that Jesus spent time in prayer. For that matter, he's God in the flesh and yet he's still praying when it came time to name the twelve apostles We're told there in Luke chapter number six. He spent all night in prayer now I don't believe he was agonizing over the situation. I believe that he's already chosen He went to the father and says these are the ones and then he began to pray for each and every one of them including Judas Iscariot there Jesus spent time in The disciples came to Jesus, chapter 11, and they said, teach us to pray. They understood that prayer is important. Amen. The problem is, so many of us, we don't think prayer is important. So many of us, we go to the restaurant, we don't even pray over the food that we are about to receive. Or when we do, it's as quick and quiet as we can possibly make it. Let's not draw attention to ourselves. We don't pray over our food before we eat here at the house. We get to church and someone is going to be standing up to pray. It's the pastor or someone he calls on to pray and we just stand there or sit there and bow our heads and we keep quiet. We don't join in prayer as well. Don't worry about it. can pray at the same time somebody else is praying God's gonna hear both of you crystal clear because he is omnipotent he is omniscient he is omnipresent and he's able to deal with each one of us on an individual basis amen we need more prayer in our lives now that I've given you the sales pitch Let's look at this house of prayer here, these blueprints that God has drawn up for us. Number one, I want you to know that there is purpose with this house of prayer. It don't do no good to draw up blueprints for something that's never gonna be used. It don't do no good for someone to draw up blueprints for something and it ain't gonna be put to use at all. It ain't gonna be built at all. No one's ever going to realize it. I got me a whole set of blueprints for this great big house I designed back when I was in high school, still sitting in my basement. And trust me, I'd love to have the money to do it. They succeeded in getting me the necessary grade that I needed there to graduate and all that good stuff there. But it's not going to be fully realized because I just ain't got the hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be necessary to build it. If you're going to dream, dream big. But God designed His house of prayer with purpose. He wants it used. I want you to notice here some words in this verse here, verse number 7, to help me to illustrate the whole purpose for the house of prayer. Notice with me here that it says that this is my house of prayer. The word prayer is talking about intercession. It is talking about supplication. It is talking about thanksgiving. All of these are in reference to what we are supposed to be doing with our prayers. We are supposed to be going to God, not just rambling off some habit Prayer not not just going in there and saying something as quick as we possibly can That is akin to calling someone up on our phone there And they pick up and we hang up as soon as we hear them say hello I said all I gotta say already you didn't hear that's on you Too many times we do that to God We rush through our prayers and don't even give God a chance to even think about responding because we just wanted to hurry up and get out of there. We've gone through the motions and it fails us every single time. But when we take in prayer, we need to be going on somebody else's behalf. We've got people all around us who need someone to stand in the gap for them to come to the father and request Prayer for what is going on in their lives? We are supposed to be going to the father there and asking him for our for our needs for our Circumstances for what is going on in our lives. Yes. He knows all about all of this and It's the very fact that we're using our faith and going to Him and trusting Him that He could supply the need, that He can take care of what is going on in our lives. That's why we're supposed to be bringing the intercessory prayer. That's why we're supposed to be bringing our supplications to Him in prayer. Oh, and by the way, don't forget, the Bible says that we have been made in the very image of God. I like to hear when my daughter says, thank you, Daddy. You know what that means? My heavenly Father. Abba, He likes to hear when I say, thank you. When was the last time we stopped and we said, thank you to Daddy? Hey, hey, here's a good one for you. When's the last time we just spent the whole prayer thanking Him for it? Hoo-wee. Think about that one for just a moment there, church. We don't ask Him for something. We ain't begging Him for something. We ain't telling Him this is what we need. We're just sitting there saying, thank you, thank you, thank you. Whoa, talk about a different type conversation right there But that's part of the whole purpose of prayer there is to get it all off of our chest Not just some of it, but all of it. Let him know that we love him occasionally, too He likes to hear that we like to hear from our friends and family. He likes to hear it, too The next words here are burnt offerings Now I want you to pay attention here. Let me read the verse. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar. Now, we look here at these two words, burnt offering, our first instinct is, okay, he's talking about the animal being sacrificed on earth. He's talking about the grain offerings that are taking place here. But actuality, the burnt offering as it's being used here in Isaiah 56-7, it actually carries with it a different idea. The idea of a step, collectively stairs, ascending The notion that we are going up. Now why is that? Because we're bringing it up to Him. We're not going to one another. We're not degrading ourselves by going down to the world. The psalmist said, I will lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. We are going upward with what is on our hearts, with what our burdens are that we are carrying. We are bringing it up to Him. Purpose church. It says here, their sacrifices shall be accepted. The word accepted means delighted. We had little ones. They would come home from school and they've got these little things, these little drawings they've made, these little things they've cut out and pasted together and they give them to us. The child comes running in with a dandelion. Mommy, this is for you. I picked you a pretty flower. We delight in these things, don't we? They've made an effort for us as their parents. Who cares if it's a school project? Look what I did. We're excited. Helene took Gracie to therapy the other day. And I got up that night for work and got on there on Facebook real quick, check to see what's going on, and Helene had tagged me in it. Her post said, stop the presses. Gracie walks 600 feet in therapy today. Let me tell you something. I delighted in that. That was accepted in my book. That was something wonderful for a child with cerebral palsy to be able to walk 600 feet. That got me all excited inside. You don't think some little something that you're trying to do for God doesn't get Him excited that you tried to do it for Him? By the way, the rest of that post said she took three breaks. Yeah, it would have been wonderful if she hadn't had to take any breaks at all. But she was able to do it. That's the important part. We try to do something for God and we fall flat on our face. But we get back up again and continue to try to do it for God. Let me tell you something church, He's going to delight in that. He wants to see His children take the initiative in trying to serve Him. He wants to see His children trying their best to serve Him. They fall and they get back up. He wants to see that getting back up part. He will delight in these things. Yeah, the enemy's going to sit there and run us to a hole in the ground how big of failures we are yet again. Tell us just how wrong we are. And obviously we got it all messed up. We are wrong for it. But when the enemy gets done brow-beating us, or we more, actually more to the point, we get tired of being brow-beaten by the enemy, and we start just getting back up and going back serving God. That's what God takes pleasure in. We turn to God and we just, Lord I'm whooped, I'm beaten, I'm worn, I need help. He takes delight in that. Not in that we're hurting. Not in that we were in such sad shape. No. He takes delight in the fact that we came to Him for help. That we trusted Him to help us. He likes that church. As the verse continues, "...for my house shall be called..." The word called means to address, to be known as. As I said earlier, Jesus didn't call it a house of preaching, a house of teaching, a house of singing. He called it a house of prayer. What do we call our churches? Too often times we call them just that, churches. And we've taken the power out of what's supposed to be there, because we don't practice praying. By the way, let me just throw this one out there for you. I promise I won't charge you on this one. The Bible tells us that we have been bought with a price, that we have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit. He lives inside of us. We are His house. We're supposed to be praying. We see, you know, people asking for their prayer warriors to start praying about a particular subject for them. Let's keep in mind that actually all of us are supposed to be prayer warriors. Yeah, I realize some of us, you know, we go about as if we've got God's personal phone number. It's like, hey, I need you to pray for this. And then, boom, it gets done. And it's like... How do you rate getting through to God and I don't type thing? But the fact of the matter is, every soldier is taught how to use their weapons. Yeah, granted, some of them get specialized equipment that they excel at, so they get to use those, but we're all called to be able to use our weapons, and prayer is one of those weapons we're supposed to be using. Don't forget, you know that whole armor of God thing there? We always leave off the next verse on there, after the take the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, praying with all prayer and supplication. Prayer is just as much of a weapon as the sword of the Spirit. Amen. We need to be praying, church. We are supposed to be praying, because we have been called to pray. Men are to pray and not faint. And then the verse continues on. It says, called on house of prayer for some people. If your Bible says some people, get you a new Bible and throw that thing out that you've got. Because it says all people. And I looked up that word all. And I love when I look up that word all, and I find that it means all. Not some, not a few, not most, not many, all. people. We are all, the whole, every last one of us is supposed to be praying. This is part of our purpose. I want you to know here, as far as this house of prayer, we'll move off the purpose and I want to move to the protection aspect of this. You get here, the rooms, a good house, as far as here in Israel was concerned, a good house here would have the ground floor and a floor above it. That floor above it, the rooms there would be assigned to the wife upstairs. Okay? Up above it. No one was allowed in those rooms that were assigned to the wife except for the master of the house. Now let me tell you this. You know what that means, Church? Once you are saved, you're His. You cannot be demonically possessed because you are owned by Jesus. Jesus is the master of the house. You're born in this world. Satan is the master you get saved Jesus now becomes your master. You cannot lose your salvation Jesus is not gonna sell the house that he has paid such a dear price for Jesus not gonna trade you away. He's not gonna rent you out He's not gonna sublease you you are his and because you are his you've got this protection around you Yeah, there are times we're gonna get into trouble. We're gonna get hurt We're gonna have a lot of bad things come our way and a lot of those times is because of our own stupid stupidity, pardon my French there, there's gonna be times when things are gonna come our way that God allows Satan to do to us. Remember, Satan couldn't do nothing to Job without getting God's permission first. But I want you to know, church, he can't do nothing to you without getting God's permission first. Now we can do it to ourselves. We fall into temptation. He can tempt us all he wants. It's up to us to choose to avoid the temptation or to go into it. But we've got this protection there. As the bride of Christ, we don't have to yield. Temptation comes your way, start praying. You can't just walk away? Pray. I know it's difficult. I know it seems like all we're doing is putting off the inevitable. Don't worry about putting off the inevitable. You just pray. That's essentially you sending Jesus to the door to answer it. I want you to know too, as far as those rooms go that have been designed into the blueprints for this house of prayer, that there is privacy. The upper rooms were higher and larger. They were secluded, spacious, and very comfortable for those who were going to be living in them. But they're up above what is taking place downstairs. They're secluded away from what is taking place out on the streets. They're secluded from what is taking place in the courtyard. There is privacy that is there. You've got the room to move. You ain't in a crowded room so small that you have to step outside just to change your mind. You've got the freedom inside there to move about, to do what needs to be done. Oh, and let me tell you something else, with it being higher and larger as part of that privacy, you can be in this room and undress yourself to God. I ain't talking about these clothes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm talking about God. This is what's troubling me. God, I need to pour my heart out to you. God, this is why I'm hurting. God, these are the temptations that keep coming my way, and I need help dealing with them. You are undressing yourself here, but it's in the privacy of only His audience. There ain't no sin in this. This is us getting honest and real with God. With our Heavenly Father. He's not going to turn around and go announce it to the whole world. Oh hey, Dennis just confessed to me that this bothers him and he's having these problems here and he's having these issues here. He did it in private, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you all right now. It's a one-on-one thing. Praise God, I couldn't handle having to go to another man and say, oh, please forgive me. I've got these issues here. And there ain't no privacy with that. I've told him. Who's to say he don't go around saying, well, you know, I can't name names, but there's this issue with certain portions of the congregation here. It takes long for some people to figure that out. But we can go to God one-on-one and don't have to worry about Him turning it against us either. Him going and blabbing His mouth. But with this house of prayer, there's also what's called a prophet chamber or aliyah. This room would be built over the porch or gateway of the house. You usually would have one, maybe two rooms. You could use it to store your wardrobes. You could use it for entertainment, for rest, for a place of meditation, a place just to get alone with God. There would be steps that would lead directly up to it from the outside there. There'd be a flight of stairs also on the inside coming up from the courtyard there. Both directions leading up to this one room here so that you have access. We have easy access to God. Don't forget the whole idea of the burnt offering, the ascending, the going up part. This ain't on ground floor here, this prophet chamber. No, no, no. This is up there on that second floor and you've got easy access to get there. Figuratively, not just literally in that we're a little bit closer up there to the third heaven when we're down here on planet earth, but figuratively you're getting a little bit closer to God by going here into this prophet chamber so that you can have a little talk with Jesus and let Him make things right. So that we can go there and have that sweet hour of prayer. So that we can go there and ring those prayer bells of heaven. So that we can go there and pray without ceasing. for our own profit. If we will just take and use it. I want you to notice also that there's a palette. P-A-L-A-T-E. And while I was trying to look up a P word for a roof or ceiling, came across this one here and it just really clicked into place for me. So I want to explain this to you. The pallet. You take your tongue and touch the top of your mouth, the roof of your mouth. That's the pallet. That's the, you know, you hear about the kids being born with cleft pallets. They've got a hole there. In anatomy, the roof of your mouth is called the palate. It separates the oral cavity, that's your mouth, from the nasal cavity, that's everything behind your nose, where you breathe through. Now this works for us because we need to breathe and Jesus is the breath of life. He breathed life into us. But we also need to talk to Him. They work in conjunction. Do you see how that works there, church? Separate but equal in this particular case actually does work. Because we're supposed to breathe in through our nose and exhale through the mouth. As we're exhaling, we're speaking. I realize some of us get plugged up noses real easy. sinus issues and all that. Put all that to the side. Look with me in the spiritual sense on this church and how God has worked this out. Every building needs to have a ceiling above it. Also means you got to have a roof on the outside to keep stuff from coming in that shouldn't be coming in. If you're missing one or the other, you've got problems. If it's a building and you're supposed to have some sort of protection above you, and you're missing one, you've got problems! Access to the roof for these Jewish homes was done by a stairway from the outside of the building leading up to the top. That's how those four friends were able to bring their friend to Jesus. They went up those stairs along the outside of the house, got on the roof, they broke up the roof, they were able to lower Him down. Removed the roof, removed the ceiling, got to Jesus. So if that roof, spiritually speaking, is blocking your prayers, spiritually speaking, what that means then is, church, It's time to bypass the ceiling, get to those stairs on the outside, climb those stairs, get on top of the roof, and start praying there. When it feels like your prayers ain't getting past that ceiling there. You need to start doing something. Change something. Get your act together. Get more faith put into those prayers there. Spend more time talking with God. You've got to get past the ceiling. Get up there to the roof so that you've got the clear connection straight through to heaven. won't settle for, well, I couldn't get it past the ceiling. I guess God just ain't going to get that prayer answered. I'll just mosey right on along. God ain't looking for defeatist attitudes. He's looking for can-do attitudes. He's looking for those who are going to be trusting in Him. I can trust in God. I will trust in God. I do trust in God. And I'm going to bring my prayers to the very throne of God because I'm looking for grace to help in my time of need. You see, because up there on the roof is where we get to spend time with God. The Israelites used the roofs for a place of retreat and meditation, for private worship. You find there in Acts chapter 10 that Peter was up on the roof in a trance. He had been praying, he got hungry, he fell into the trance and God lured the sheep down to him. He didn't do it while Peter was in the house, he did it while he was up there on the roof. Up there on the roof is where Rahab had the flax laid out there to dry. The flax was going to end up being turned into some linen. And she had it up there to dry. And she had the spies underneath the flax up there on the roof there. And she was preparing the clothes there. Up there on the roof is where you get a a good breeze to blow across to you. You're inside the house, you ain't got all that many windows, so you've got to be up there on the roof if you want to get the full effect of the breeze blowing in on you. But notice how everything so far has been dealing with that second floor and the roof above it. There's a reason for that, Church. There's a reason. Because there's also the first floor. And this is the placement area. You see, the servants' quarters were down here on the first floor. The kitchen's down here on the first floor. The storage is down here on the first floor. This is the first floor. This is where things get done. Down here is easy access to the menial jobs of the house. Down here, those who live down here exist down here. This isn't living, this is existence down here. Satan wants to keep us down. He wants to keep us down on the ground. He wants to, okay, fine, you got into the building. I don't want you getting past the first floor. I don't want you moving on up. I want you staying down as much as possible. God's calling us up. Don't forget, we're supposed to be doing those burnt offerings, ascending, going upward, being closer to God and all that stuff there, but Satan wants to keep us down. He doesn't want us to be any success for Christ. He doesn't want us going forward for Christ. He doesn't want us actually praying. He doesn't want us actually doing anything for God. He wants us to accept our place in this world. He may have lost us, or he can't take us to hell with him, but he doesn't want us to do anything for God. He wants us to ride that bench. So he, okay, fine. You could be there in the house of prayer, but I want you down there on the ground floor. You don't need to pray. That's what somebody else is doing. That's the pastor's job. Oh, the pastor called on somebody else. Well, you still don't have to pray because it isn't you he called on. You don't have to pray. You don't have to teach your children to pray. You don't have to spend time in prayer. You don't have to read your Bible. You don't have to do nothing. stay down here on the ground floor and just exist. You know this is the same place that the prodigal son was willing to live. When he came back home to daddy, Father I have sinned against heaven and thy sight, no more worthy to be called thy son. He originally thought to do it, he was going to say, make me as one of thy hired servants. The hired servants would have lived there on the ground floor. But when he got to daddy, I'm no more worthy to be called thy son. There was a period put on there. I firmly believe, I ain't got no Bible for this, but I firmly believe the father put his finger to that boy's lips. Shh. Because he knew what was coming next. And he would have granted him his request. But because he loved him, he shushed him. Son, you ain't gonna live on the ground floor. I want you to come a little higher. I don't care what you've done. I don't care where you've been. I don't care how bad things have been for you. I want you to come higher. I want you up here with me. Too often we deny ourselves what our Father has ready for us in the form of blessings, in the form of living, because we would rather stay in the wrong place. There's no point to it, but too often we do. I've got just two questions in closing here for you today. Number one, are we settling for less than we have rights to as the children of God? And number two, are we living in a house of prayer or merely existing in one? That's up to us church, which we will do. totally, completely up to us. Abba Father, thank you Lord that you've given us a house of prayer. That you've given us the ability to become the house of prayer. So we can be a witness for you, so that we can bring our concerns to you, so that we can come and be thankful for all that you've done for us. Thank you Lord that we don't have to wait till we're inside the church house to do it. We can pray as we're driving down the street, just got to keep our eyes open. But we can do that. We can pray with freedom here in our restaurants before we eat, in our homes, at work. We can pray whether we have a need or just want to stop and say hi. Thank you Father for this. Thank you Lord for each and everyone who's tuned in today. I pray Lord that you'd give them an extra special blessing for it. In the precious, precious name of my brother, Jesus, the Christ, in His name I pray. Amen and Amen.