What is happening today? If you go into the church to worship, will it be worship? Will it be a house of prayer? What is prayer? Prayer is words, whether they are thought or sung or spoken. Prayer is words directed to God, ideas that can be expressed in words. What is the house of God? – the temple, now the churches of Christ. They should be houses of prayer, first and foremost. You would think they were houses of music! You would think they were houses of instrumentalism and clever arrangements. You would think they were houses of rhythm – the hypnotic effect of rhythm, the rhythm drug: to lift you, move you, manipulate your feelings. Heavy rhythms, strident rhythms, pulsating constantly. You would think that that was the house of God. No, it is words, prayer. ‘Worship is words’ – that was the cry of the Reformers. ‘Out with this Roman theatre’, they said in their day. ‘Out with the costumes, and the incense and the candles and the stained glass.’ The stained glass unfortunately came back quite a lot. ‘Out with the theatricals, and the drama, and the performance, and the attempt to manipulate feelings and create feeling artificially.’ It should be about God's words, sacred words, God honouring words, felt from the heart and winged to heaven: and the whole soul joins in. What is the feeling system? It's a system of response, response to thoughts. You worship with the mind and the heart joins in. That is feeling, spiritual feeling, worship feeling. Not drumming up sensual feelings with sound and spectacle.
There are so-called Christians polluting the house of God everywhere in the world today, borrowing from this godless world and employing that to entertain people. No, the teaching of this passage is that Christ cast it all out, and the will of Christ is to cast it all out today. We will try our best to do that. If I had my way not one song, not one worship song, from the stable of people who are polluting the house of God would be let in. They are people who are just making money like the priests and the moneychangers. They dress up like popstars and prance across the platform, and play the world's instruments and entertain. They write their songs, and some sounder people mistakenly say, ‘Well, we will pick the best of them.’ I wouldn't take anything from the stable of the polluted and the corrupt. The Lord cast them all out of the temple, and we want our church to be a house of prayer. Even their songs seem to be – most of them – written in deliberately half-literate style. Extraordinary! People who are quite capable of writing good sound legitimate verse, write bad verse for the sake of writing a Christian song, and faulty verse which obeys none of the rules of grammar and poetry. What a strange world we are in! No wonder there's no sense of God in these churches. No wonder there's no real sense of holiness.