Morning Prayer Notes for Wednesday, January 5, 2022

  1. “Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist

Pastor Ken…

Welcome everyone, to those of you joining us online and those of you that made the trek this morning on this cold and snowy winter morning here in Minnesota. Glad to have everyone join us and be a part of our gathering here.

Announcement to join theprayermovement.com

This morning, I thought I would announce that if you haven’t already checked out our theprayermovement.com website to do so, and to subscribe by leaving your email address, and also to join our Facebook group. Because on a regular basis, we are posting things there. In fact, we’ll be posting another video today that Pastor Lynne recorded. And I want to share that with you guys. So be sure to go on theprayermovement.com to go to that webpage, click on, join the Facebook group. And, once you’re in, then you’ll start seeing the content and we’re sharing regular teachings and videos and just some good things that you don’t want to miss out on. So be sure to subscribe and be a part of that.

Pastor Ken shared…

This morning I thought I would start out by reading a something that comes from a book entitled “The Keys to Brilliant Focus: The Power of Wisdom to Reclaim Your Identity” by Graham Cook. And he’s a real deep thinker and pray-er. And it has some really great things to say about identity, about focus.

Yesterday I shared some things about the importance of leaning into 2022 by faith. To not let our faith go inactive or dormant, that there’s no instance in the Bible where we’re given the latitude to take a “faith vacation.” But especially as we look toward this coming year, while there may be more turmoil and there’ll be some craziness and chaos in the world, I’m sure. But the truth is God has good things. He proclaims from the start to the finish of His book that He’s a good God and He does only good. And I believe He wants each of us to be neon signs in a dark world of His goodness. I believe He wants each of us to be a reason why people know that God is good because of the goodness He’s able to perform and do in each of our lives. And, of course, prayer connects with His goodness. Prayer is our opportunity to align with Him and receive that which He wants to do in us.

The enemy is waging a war on the Church

And I’m talking about faith. I talked about faith yesterday. I want to talk about it further today. One of the reasons is because, you probably hear about it as well and know about it. Maybe you’ve experienced it. But clearly in the hour we’re living in, an epidemic of anxiety, of people’s emotions and souls spiraling out of control at times to the point where people aren’t even able to deal with the day-to-day life. And, of course, that is not coincidental. The enemy is waging a war on the Church and on people and especially on believers. He wants to neutralize us. He wants to make us ineffective. He wants us to not go any further in the plan of God, because he knows that God is going to have the final say. He knows that God has good things for us in this hour.

And, you know, there’s a passage in some writings, in the books of CS Lewis, especially in the Screwtape Letters where you find that he writes that there’s an assignment given to demons to go and to scheme or to craft ways to distract people, to keep them from being effective. And my reflection is, is it seems like in our generation anxiety, panic, and pressure is what the enemy is using to cause us to be undone, to become ineffective in our lives and our purpose.

Prayer is the doorway to the supernatural

And especially as pray-ers, I think it’s so important that we recognize the true gift and opportunity that we have in praying.

It’s not just a spiritual activity or duty that we have to do. It’s an opportunity. It’s a doorway into the supernatural for us to interact with the supernatural. It is our supernatural equipping, if you will.

Prayer is a spiritual weapon

If it’s true that the enemy is waging a war of attrition through anxiety and fear and dread and panic and so many other things, then there must be spiritual or supernatural weaponry that God has given us that we can counteract and overcome his war. And so I just want to remind us this morning that we are in a spiritual war and battle. And we must first fight that war with spiritual weapons. And prayer is one of those, right? Prayer is so essential, so important.

The Word gives us our identity

I’m gonna read a couple excerpts from a chapter in his book. He says “It is very easy to become dismayed about the future. It can seem so out of focus or out of reach. One reason for the lack of clarity is that we are discouraged about what we are in the present. We can lack the fortitude to move forward because our identity,” or you could say our perspective, what we’re looking at, or what’s going on in the atmosphere of our own internal world “needs an upgrade in the here and now. You see God uses scripture in a personal and relational way with His people.”

Remember we talked about that yesterday; the weapon of the Word, the double-edge sword and how the Word is mighty to shape and inform us on the inside, to create a whole new atmosphere, regardless of what’s going on, on the outside. The Word is designed to impregnate us with hope, with vision. God’s always speaking and He’s always ministering and He’s always drawing our attention to the outcome, to the promise, to the future.

In fact, God exists in the past, present, in the future and knows each of them and has a command of them the same, equally so. We live in the present, but He lives in all three. But when He comes to speak to us, when He comes to prompt and inspire us to pray, He is speaking to us from the future. And He has only good things to say. He comes to inform us of the future. And that is, is that we overcome and that we win in the end. And that fear cannot have the upper hand. But that faith and the purpose and promise of God will win out.

Invite God to shape you

But Graham goes on to say, “God uses scripture in a personal and relational way with His people. He is part of our story and journey. Don’t forget to invite Him daily into your journey, into your story. Personally, intimately, invite Him to shape you, to guide you, to direct you. John 16:13 says from the King James, “How be it when he, the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” Not only truth of scripture, but also truth as it’s to be for your life specifically.

And he goes on to say, “And He will show you things to come.” The Word is God’s personal informing of us. God informing us and trying to draw our attention to the fact that even failure has been factored into the equation of our lives. And guess what? It all turns out well. The last time I checked the narrative of scripture reveals that God is in the business of taking the work of the enemy and difficult things that we go through and using it, leveraging it as a platform for increase in progress and a whole other level of His goodness. He’s not intimidated by what the enemy has done. And we shouldn’t be either. Because He’s going to have the final say.

Choose God daily

He goes on to say, “We belong to Him and we must walk with Him in the way of His choosing.” In other words, in His way. And one of His ways is that we must choose Him daily. We must invite Him into our journey. We must turn our hearts and turn our attention toward Him. And go to Him for our needs, including our emotional needs. And the peace that He wants us to dwell in and live in.

God calls us to take command of our inner life

He goes on to say, “He gives us passages of scripture because He wants them to give us vision and inspire our identity.” You could say also “inspire your perspective or the atmosphere of your inner life and what’s going on inside you.” God calls us to take command of our inner life. And prayer is our opportunity to do that. In Jude 20, it says that we’re to be, be built up in the Holy Spirit, praying in the Spirit. “Rise higher” one translation says. I like that. “He gives us promises that He intends to be realized in our life circumstances.”

What God says to you should become more real to you than this world

He goes on to say, “Caleb became a man of a different spirit from those around him. A stand-out person, both in his own tribe and to successive generations of Israelites. Why is that? Well, simply because who God was and what God said to him and what was to be was more real to him than the circumstances around him.” Isn’t that interesting? That you can become more convinced of what God has said and what God has proclaimed and prophetically spoken over your life inside of you, that it becomes more real to you than what’s going on presently around you.

God has called us to change the atmosphere around us

That’s how we, as believers, are to live. Not informed and controlled and dominated by the atmosphere outside us. God sent us into this world to actually, as I said, make history. But to influence and impact and change the atmospheres around us, not just in the chapel on a Wednesday morning or wherever you are, but to influence and impact and make a difference and bring change into the atmosphere, into the very world that we enter into each and every day. Homes, businesses, marketplace, gas stations, grocery store, relationships, marriages, children, people that you might even see on the news. God has called us to influence and make a difference.

Our vision of the future must have an impact on who we are now

But he goes on to say, “I have sought to partner with the Holy Spirit in the cultivation of our identity. My outlook on life problems, difficulties, and warfare stem from a sense of majesty that Caleb obviously had. Our vision of the future must have an impact on who we are now. That’s what God’s intent is. His intent is that every day His Word and His words to us whispered quietly in our spirits by the great Holy Spirit would have an impact on us, would dispel fear.” Even as I said before, even just in a moment of maybe you feeling anxious or uncertain, you just speak over your own soul. “It is well. Everything’s going to be okay. God is on my side. He is with me. He’s not going to leave me nor forsake me. He’s right here with me.”

He goes on to say, “We are in Christ, who is our prophet, priest, and king. Therefore the prophetic part of His nature empowers us to interact with our future as we relate to God in the present.” Isn’t that interesting? In other words, our relationship with God, our time with Him in His presence, are being saturated with His presence, filled with His Word waiting before Him silently in our home or in our car. That divine interaction affects us, changes us, prepares us, and propels us toward the preferred future that God intends for us, toward His perfect will, toward His promise. But it all starts on the inside. Praying in the spirit in your prayer language engages with God’s divine book of destiny for you. It’s your opportunity to pray out those sentences and those paragraphs and whole chapters that God has penned down for your life. That it encapsulates and includes goodness and greatness and beauty and abundance and blessing that eye hasn’t seen nor natural ear heard. But only God can reveal as we engage with Him in the present. So that the future He intends becomes reality. Come on now! This is really good stuff this morning. I’m gonna preach myself happy here today.

“That means in prayer and devotion, we can explore the plans of God now in fellowship. We can go into the future in our sanctified imagination and dream of what the Lord is seeing, thinking, planning, and speaking. We can get a sense of how it looks and feels to be in that place of favor.” Or you could say at that place of breakthrough, that place of abundance, that place of answer, that place where you are perfect and complete. There’s nothing missing, nothing broken. There’s no more symptoms. That is true. God has given us the ability to journey by faith so much so that on the inside, the reality of our future is more real to us than the presence of a symptom or the circumstances that swirl around us. I’m not saying this out of some intellectual thing that I’ve embraced. I’m saying this out of my own experience. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. I’ve done it.

Just a little bit more here. He says, “The future is designed to make our present become brilliant. Prophecy achieves the same purpose. God speaks from the future into our present so that we have a clear path to go there in fellowship with Him.”

Daily interact with the promises of God… it’s our future

I’m going to say this again. I wrote this down last night. “God sees and knows the past, present, and future equally so or equally well. And He speaks to us from the future. He’s speaking to you from your future. He’s knocking on the door of our hearts to today, saying, “Hello! This is your future.” It’s not what you see. It’s not what you feel. It’s not what you’ve experienced, past tense. It’s not what the enemy is trying to beat you over the head with or get you to be regretful about or fearful or cower in. No. It’s what God is saying. He’s saying from the scriptures that the future is bright, that the future for the righteous grows brighter and brighter until that eternal day. He’s saying you are strong in Me and in the power of My might. He is saying, My desire is that you be whole from head to toe. He’s saying that I desire for you to live in abundance and perfect peace. This is the purpose of scripture, not just to mentally assent to it or say that, “Hey, I’ve committed that to memory. I’ve read that scripture before.” No! That daily, we would supernaturally and divinely interact with the promises of God, because it’s our future. It’s prophetic of where we’re going. And while it might not change in the day or in the very moment, it’s meant to inform us and change us and even translate us on the inside, in our thoughts, in our emotions, in our state. And yes, in our identity. And as it does so, it equips us, provides a vehicle for us to go to that preferred future. And take on the reality of that promise of healing, that promise of abundance, that promise of next steps, that promise of breakthrough and wholeness and freedom and joy and all that God has prepared and keeps in store for those that love Him.

God wants to give us an upgrade

“Prophesy gives us an outcome, which means that from prophecy spoken to prophecy fulfilled, everything between those two places is now designed to train us, to become the person God saw when He spoke over us. The process to fulfillment is our training and proving ground, where we cultivate the identity and develop the faith, focus, favor required to move in the Spirit at that level. Our problem can be that we have limited vision of our identity,” or you can say we have limited perspective. Who we are in God’s eyes and the presence. This is precisely why God speaks to us. He must upgrade our vision. I know that fear and angst and anxiety can be really real and tangible at times. And like grip you and affect you physically. I get that, but it’s not designed to overcome us or have us, or have its way with us. God wants to give us an upgrade. Even right now, if you’re experiencing that, I just pray that the presence of God would just rain down on you. It just overflow, spill over in your heart with peace and hope and new perspective and vision. Hallelujah.

Prayer helps us to process our lives

There’s been so many times in my life where I felt concerned about things. And then just a few moments in His presence, turning my attention to Him and processing that which I was dealing with, with Him. You know, that’s an important thing. As pray-ers that we’re not just here to pray just for the nations. We’re here to remember that prayer processes the things that go on in our lives. Prayer is our ability to process panic, fear, dread, turmoil and grief, which is important because all psychologists tell us that unprocessed grief, unprocessed trauma will show up as perpetual anxiety, fear, and overwhelm. And prayer and the presence of God and the opportunity to meditate on His promises are our ability to process, to dissolve, for God to put His finger on those things and minister council and comfort and healing and wholeness and the help that we need personally and specifically intimately down on the inside of us so that we don’t continue day after day, just carrying around this low grade or full-blown panic. God wants us to go from panic to perpetual peace. And as pray-ers, that is our destiny. That is God’s design. That’s why every drop of the Lord’s blood was dripped from Calvary’s hill for us, that we would know peace and hope and have power to not live in what the world’s living in, to not be perpetually handicapped with what we’ve been through in our past or what we’re experiencing in the present. But, instead, so that we could process it. Meditation, quiet, and prayer helps us to supernaturally process what’s going on inside us. Let me finish this and then we can pray.

Everything begins and ends with God

“He must upgrade our vision to us. We learn to view where we stand in relationship to where we are going. We learn to comprehend how to stand in relation to who we are becoming. Everything begins and ends with God. He is both the author and the finisher of our faith. That means the outline of our story is established in His heart and He has titled the ensuing chapters of our lives. The outcome of His intention is the finishing line He intends that we reach. When we start with the future and work back to the present, we get to understand the outline of our story. And we can partner with the Holy Spirit to walk with the path of that particular process. God uses our imagination. You say your internal world to cultivate His intentions for us. We partner with His intentionality and discover the faith, focus, and favor that He willingly makes available. If the outline of our story is already written, isn’t it time that we understand it, step into it and begin partnering with God in its unfolding process.”

There is a passage of scripture in Philippians 4:6–8 which says “don’t worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank Him for all He has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds everything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”

Prayed…

Father, we just thank you that you speak to us today in the present from the future. You speak to us from a place of truth, a place of power, a place of victory, a place of having overcome, a place of absolute strength and knowledge and authority over every work of the enemy. Over every demonic strategy meant to try to trip us up or slow us down or hinder us in some way in life.

We thank you, Father, that we’re in a place and in a position to rise up in that same strength and victory that you accomplish through the resurrection of Jesus.

And so, Father, we just yield our hearts to you. We yield our lives to you. We cast over onto you every care, every worry, every ounce of panic, trepidation, concern, past issues. We just cast it over into your hands today, Lord, and we lean into you today. Inviting your Holy Spirit to just come and have His way. Even right now in our hearts, in our lives, in our circumstances, in the name of Jesus.

We invite you Lord to invade this realm, our world, this nation. Lord, invade the church world in this time. Invade and come Lord in power in glory in majesty, in victory, in absolute authority.

We pray that the sound of your coming and your visitation would break the atmosphere open for God… and break off darkness and dissolve the tread and fear and the deceptive works of darkness.

Even now today, we command that realm to open up. We command America to open up. We command the nations to open up today.

We pray for a mighty force, a mighty hand of God moving now with the fist of God breaking, breaking, breaking every shell of darkness, every work of evil, every strategy of the enemy perpetrated on humanity, on the church and the believers.

Father, we pray for light. We pray for a cascade and a bursting forth of light from heaven of help of healing, of an awakening in a reviving.

Come to earth in this time in our generation, Lord, … in our lives to the door of our homes and our families and our marriages and our situations.

Father, we call out for you. We’re hungry for you. Your Word says, Lord, blessed are those who will hunger and thirst for the rightness of God for they shall be filled in and be satisfied with it. And so, Lord, we hunger for that today more than we desire our own deal, agenda, things. We desire what you desire. We want what you want for our churches, for our cities, for our nations… And so we call for it today. And we make a way … we go out into the spirit realm … we pray over situations right now.

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