The Tent of David Is Now Open
How Worship Is The Fuel and Goal of Missions
“I will return and will rebuild the tabernacle of David… So that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord.” Acts 15:16-17
I have spent nearly twenty years in leadership of various expressions of Davidic worship, and have experienced firsthand the connection between worship in the spirit of the tabernacle of David and the transformative impact on individual lives, as well as on cities and nations. When believers come together to host the presence of God with day-and-night, prophetic worship and prayer, it propels the advance of the kingdom of God in a region. I could give several examples of how this has played out in our ministry experience, but an example involving a literal tent seems most fitting.
Worship Helps Transform Lives
There’s something about a tent in particular that gives us a beautiful image of God’s heart for the lost to come back home to Him. A tent is open and inviting — a vivid demonstration of the invitation found in the gospel of Christ. My journey of participating in tent gatherings began when we started to build relationships with similar prayer groups around North Carolina. In 2013, I was busy leading the Boiler Room when God told me to begin to reach out to leaders of similar ministries in our state and region. God also spoke to me about David Bradshaw, who was organizing an effort in Virginia to connect prayer and worship groups there in partnership with one another (I’ll come back to David in a minute).
One of the leaders I met in that season was Mike Thornton, who lived in Wilmington, NC. He was writing a book on revival history in eastern North Carolina and was feeling stirred about hosting tent revival gatherings. We brought our ministry efforts together in 2014 to host our first tent gathering that featured day and night worship and prayer in Dunn, NC. Dunn was a significant location during the Azusa Street revival of the early 1900s. The tent was dubbed “The Jesus Tent’ and we partnered with Mike to host several tent gatherings from 2014 to 2017—primarily in eastern North Carolina. Each gathering featured day and night worship, prayer, and outreach. God moved powerfully every time! I could take a whole chapter to tell stories, but I want to highlight one.
We finally brought the Jesus Tent to our hometown in Greenville, NC, in 2017. We hosted 80 hours of non-stop worship, gave away free meals, and ministered to the surrounding low-income neighborhood. One of our first nights, a young couple came from across the street to get free hot dogs at the tent. Someone from our ministry team started talking to them and quickly led them to the Lord. This couple lived in a house across the street from the tent.
The next day, the outreach team visited their house, where they found a great-grandmother in her wheelchair. Multiple generations of her family lived in the same small house with her. The team discovered that she was a praying believer who was longing for her family to be saved. She had been crying out to God for years. It turned out that ten or twelve people were home at that point, and they were invited into the room. After our team shared the gospel with them, the whole family got on their knees and accepted Christ! Years of sowing in prayer led to a bountiful harvest that day!
A few days later, they brought grandma over to the tent to enjoy the worship. While she was there, a local newspaper came to report on the tent gathering. They ended up talking to her and others from her household, and their story became front-page news. The family shared how the culture of their home had shifted, and they were no longer arguing with each other since turning to Jesus. The front page had a photo of this grandma smiling in the tent with the headline: WORSHIP HELPS TRANSFORM LIVES.
This is the power of the presence of God. When we began to host God's presence with day and night worship and prayer in that neighborhood, the prayers of grandma were answered — God’s kingdom was manifested dramatically and lives were changed forever. This amazing story reminds me of the story when Paul and Silas had been flogged and thrown into jail. As they sang hymns and prayed at midnight, God sent an earthquake that broke them free from their shackles. They were able to share the Gospel with the jailer and his entire household began to follow Jesus (Acts 16:25-34).
Tents Are A Silver Bullet
There is something about tents that speaks so profoundly to God’s desire to invite people who don’t yet know Him to experience His presence. On a practical level, tents of day and night worship create an easy environment for the body of Christ to come together in unity, without gathering in one particular church building. They also provide an easy way for the general public to wander in and experience God’s presence. Since a tent is not a formal church building, there is much less pressure. Not only do tents point prophetically to the deeper truths of David’s Tabernacle, but they serve practically in our modern times to manifest the spirit of the tabernacle of David in public places. Interestingly, North Carolina’s Jesus Tent is not the only day and night worship tent that has surfaced in recent years.
About a year before the Jesus Tent was set up in our home state, a group of YWAM missionaries hosted forty days of non-stop worship on the National Mall in Washington DC. After hosting David’s Tent DC as a special event for two more years, they decided to launch into a 24/7/365 schedule on September 11, 2015, and the worship has not stopped since! This perpetual love song to Jesus is the only modern expression of continual worship that I’m aware of that takes place under a literal tent.
A few years after David’s Tent DC began their unceasing expression of worship, God began to stir another group about tents. David Bradshaw, whom I mentioned earlier, was leading a house of prayer in Fredericksburg, Virginia as well as helping to unite prayer groups across their state. God brought up David Bradshaw’s name to me when He began speaking to me about unity among prayer groups. In 2017, David and Jason Hershey, the founder of David’s Tent DC, received a vision from God to host fifty tents on the National Mall in Washington DC with simultaneous day and night worship. The idea was that each state in the nation would host a tent with worshipers from their state filling the hours.
This dream became a reality in October of 2017. Over 1000 worship teams helped host three days of day and night worship, prayer, and outreach for the first national Awaken the Dawn gathering. Tens of thousands of worshipers converged in America’s capital for a historic gathering. Not only was it an amazing expression of unity, but God’s presence was palpable throughout the event. As the country came together to host God in their capital city, dozens of unbelievers got saved, many were healed, and the crime even slowed down across Washington DC during that time.[1]
I believe this increase in tent gatherings is God speaking to His church about the importance of understanding David’s tabernacle. I also believe God has been inviting those in the global prayer movement to take the presence of God into the streets, parks, campuses, and public places to see God’s life-changing presence crash into a lost and broken world. If God’s presence changes everything, then we must not keep it to ourselves.
The Tent Is Open
This era of history, between the first and second comings of Jesus to the earth, provides a unique time for the nations to enter a covenant relationship with God. David’s tabernacle gives us a vivid picture of this truth. Just as David’s tent had no veil and was open for the Gentiles to engage in worship, Jesus has opened the door for anyone to come into God’s presence through faith in Him. David’s tabernacle symbolizes a time when the Gentiles (the nations) can enter into our original purpose as worshippers of Yahweh.
You will remember that during David’s reign, there were two tents. One was Moses’s tabernacle that remained in Gibeon, with all the ornate furniture, animal sacrifices, and Old Covenant rituals. The priests continued to follow the Law, but there was one thing missing — the ark of the covenant. They were going through the motions of worship without the presence of God. The other tent was David’s tabernacle. It was in Jerusalem with the ark. There, the Levites offered sacrifices of praise from their hearts before the Lord. Their worship in Zion was centered on God’s presence. They were interacting directly with the Lord in a real relationship.
These two tents point to the two options we are given in this age. Jesus has established a New Covenant with His people by shedding His blood on the cross. As Jesus’s body was torn, the veil of the Jerusalem temple was also torn. God has made a way for relationships with His people again. David’s tabernacle points us to this New Covenant reality where there is no veil of separation between us and God, where we can come boldly to His throne of grace. The “ark” of God’s presence is accessible to Christians because of the work of Christ.
The tent in Gibeon is the tent of empty religion. There the rituals continued without the presence of God, just as many church-goers go through the motions of Christianity while detached from true intimacy with the Lord. Jesus warned of those who honor Him with their lips while their hearts are far from Him (Matthew 15:8). This kind of religiosity tries to earn with our piety what Jesus has purchased for us and offers us freely. There are still two “tabernacles” operating at the same time in our day. The tabernacle of self-righteousness and the tabernacle of grace. The tent of Moses and the tent of David.
This article is chapter 13 of Matthew Lilley’s book, David’s Tabernacle: How God’s Presence Changes Everything. Paid subscribers may continue reading below.