Years ago, on a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle, I had a window seat as we flew over the Pacific Northwest. As we crossed Springfield, Oregon, a place where our family once lived, I looked down and could see familiar landmarks—the streets, parks, shopping malls, even our old neighborhood. From above, everything looked different. That higher perspective changed my view entirely.

Our global civilization is in an epoch cycle of change. This cycle of change will test the things we know and believe. Human solutions will fail with ever-increasing frequency because earthbound realities will not meet the needs of desperate people living in desperate times. People will begin to turn to God for answers. This turning is what we have historically called revival.

As this turning begins, God will ask His Church to respond to the world around them from the fresh revelations of His heart. God will release a deepening hunger for prayer within His Church—a hunger for the language of heaven. God is preparing us to minister supernaturally in a world exhausted by dead religion.

A refreshing wind of God’s presence is blowing across creation. This wind will clear our field of vision so we can see what God intends for His Church.

One of the greatest, most culture-transforming powers available to the Church has always been prayer. Prayer moves heaven to bring its environment down upon the earth to transform the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our Lord. Jesus Himself said that His house would be known as a house of prayer.

The house of God is not a physical temple or a church facility. God’s house of prayer is a presence-carrying people who are living and breathing temples of God. God dwells in that kind of house with power.

God is encouraging the Church to experience a shift in how and where we see ourselves in prayer. He is asking us to reposition our prayer altars from the place of our earthly struggle to the place of our heavenly victory – a place where we fully realize our position in Christ, not only as a theological truth, but also as a positional truth from which we can pray.

Paul wrote, “For he raised us from the dead along with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6).

We are being asked to add a prayer altar to our position in Christ at the right hand of God’s throne and from there to pray the will of God down into our circumstances upon the earth. Our concept of prayer is critical in creating an environment filled with hope and joy. We need to expand our perspective in prayer in order to do that.

God has given us prayer to change this world through the transforming word of Christ. Your neighborhood and nation are waiting to be called the New Earth. All of creation is in a perpetual groan, waiting to experience once again the freedom it knew before sin entered the earth. God’s heavenly perspective should be the content of or prayers for all humanity. That kind of prayer releases God’s preferred future through Jesus as we pray in partnership with Him.