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The Church as "a house of prayer" is not only God's "ark" for survival through the last of these Last Days..."life together" constructed and maintained through worship and intercession. It will also be the prayer-vehicle whereby God ensures the dispensation of His power to preserve through extreme chastening unto total salvation, every son and daughter of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob alive upon the face of the earth at the time.
Such is our Lord Jesus Christ's agenda. If it fails to become our personal and corporate vision and task, then we risk reducing ourselves to the role of culpable bystander and witness to history's (and even existence's) ultimate moment of crisis and divine intervention.
"The distant sounds of our Master's chariots are already heard," says the Messianic "father", David Baron, "and Jesus Christ is coming quickly to render to every man according to his work.
"Who will be up and doing? Who will rise to the Lord's help against the mighty? Who by their prayers and substance will help to carry the gospel message to poor scattered Israel?"
(1) "And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth." (Rev 12.4) "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt...for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." (Mt 2.13)
(2) "Dogmatics in Outline" by Karl Barth (Harper & Row, NY 1959)
(3) As the Apostle Peter expounds (1 Pe 2.6-7), Jesus is both the "founding" and the "finishing" stone of God's House. It defies all logic, and sanity itself, to accept one completely crucial building block, and reject the other?
(4) Nebuchadnezzar, who invaded Judah, captured Jerusalem, and destroyed it and the Temple.
