Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Good morning. It is Friday. Oh happy day! It’s the 17th of April, 2026. My name is Ken, and welcome, everybody, in the chapel.
We need prayer for preparation…
Well, today, we’re going to dive in. There’s no shortage of things for us to pray about, for sure. There’s just so much going on in the world in general. I do feel like perhaps if there’s a flow for it, we will definitely pray today about preparation—preparation in the world, in the church, and in the hearts of individuals for the time to come.
How many of you know that God is out ahead of things and in His mercy, He endeavors to get our attention, that we would be prepared. First spiritually, but also naturally. But spiritually, first of all. And so perhaps we’ll pray about that here in a little bit. But before we get into a flow of prayer, let me just share a couple of things that you could call a devotional or I like to say they are points of reflection for us. Hopefully they just help draw your attention to the Lord, remind you of some simple truths around prayer.
Pastor Peter Scazzero’s book “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality”
I’m going to read from two books, just two short excerpts, relatively short. The first one I’ve read from; it’s entitled “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality” by Pastor Peter Scazzero. Highly recommend it. It’s not a book you would maybe have read before if you’ve not been aware of it, but it’s definitely one that will help bring encouragement and healing to your emotional life. And help integrate your emotional life with your spiritual life, which I’m a huge advocate of. I think that that’s an overlooked area in Christianity, the aspect of our emotional health and how God wants to integrate and restore and heal the emotional side of our nature and make it a part of our spiritual, life as well. Well, uh, Dr. Scazzero writes in this one segment, “Doing for God,” instead of “being with God.”
Dr. Scazzero writes…
“Being productive and getting things done are high priorities in our Western culture. Praying and enjoying God’s presence for no other reason than to delight in Him was a luxury. I was told that we could take pleasure in once we got to heaven. For now, there was so much to get done. People were lost. The world was in deep trouble. And God had entrusted us with the good news of the Gospel.
“For most of my Christian life, I wondered if monks were truly Christian. Their lifestyle seemed escapist. Surely they were not in the will of God. What were they doing to spread the Gospel in the world dying without Christ? What about all the sheep who were lost without direction? Didn’t they know the laborers are few according to Matthew 9:37. The messages were clear: doing lots of work for God is a sure sign of a growing spirituality.”
Anybody ever felt like that?
“It is all up to you and you’ll never finish while you’re alive on earth.” That doesn’t give a lot of hope. “You are responsible to share Christ around you at all times or people will go to hell. Things will fall apart if you don’t persevere and hold things together.” Sometimes I felt that way. I’m sure you have as well.
He goes on to write…
“Are all these things wrong? No. But work for God that is not nourished by a deep interior life with God will eventually be contaminated by other things such as ego, power, needing approval of and from others, and buying into the idea of success and the mistaken belief that we can’t fail. When we work for God because of these things, our experience of the Gospel often falls off center. We become human doings rather than human beings. Our experiential sense of worth and validation gradually shifts from God’s unconditional love for us in Christ to our works and performance.”
Jesus measured up for us…
That’s why I often say Jesus put in a perfect performance on behalf of some very imperfect people. That’s us. So that we no longer have to strive or labor or live under a sense of condemnation or I might fail to try to measure up. Jesus measured up for us so that we don’t have to strive to measure up. Instead…
We enter into relationship.
We enter into a journey of discovery.
We enter into a journey of day-by-day learning more about Him: who He is, His character, His love, His grace, what He thinks toward us.
We enter into what He’s already done for us.
Define Christianity in one word—Done!
I think oftentimes if you ask some Christians, “In one word, how do you define Christianity?” They would say, “Do.” Do. Do. And do more. But the reality is Christianity can be defined or described in one word: Done. Amen. Jesus exhausted His final breath on the cross and said, “It is finished.” He gave up the ghost. It was finished. He’d crossed every T, dotted every I. He had fulfilled every demand of the law. He did everything that was necessary, not only to remove the stain of sin and to wash us and cleanse us by His blood to become new creatures in Him but He also took the punishment needful to obtain our peace, needful to redeem us from sickness.
The Bible says that He Himself bore the stripes on His back that we might be made whole, from ailment, from disease, from infirmity, from injury, from pain, from whatever would afflict us physically. Jesus paid the price in full. Healing is part and parcel of the Gospel revelation of the Gospel provision. He provided healing. He sent His Word. Jesus is the Living Word, right? He’s the embodiment of the Word. He came into this realm, into our realm, into our arena as man but also God, to put in a perfect performance and to pay the price in full. So that every accusation, every condemnation, every failure, every sickness, every point of insufficiency in your life could be met. So that you could receive. So that I could receive.
And there are things that we “do.” There is a calling on each of our lives. And we are to pray. But we do so not because we’re trying to obtain, but because we have received. So there must be an equal and greater receiving in our lives before we enter in and do what God has called us to do—including prayer.
Pastor Lynne used to say…
“We must have an experience, or a measure, of God’s presence in our lives, His Word in our lives equal to and greater than what we’re dealing with around us what we’re experiencing in our earth lives and journeys.”
And so Peter goes on to say this…
“Our experiential sense of worth and validation gradually shifts from unconditional love for us in Christ to our works and performance. The joy of Christ gradually disappears. Our activity for God can only properly flow from a life with God. We cannot give what we do not possess. And we are nothing apart from Him. But in Him, we can live and move and have our being. In Him, we can do all things in Christ. Saturated by His presence, inhabited with His Word.
Finally, he says…
“Doing for God in a way that is proportionate to being with God is the only pathway to a pure heart and seeing God.”
I like that. Let me read that again. Doing for God… In other words, what you do for God should be done in a way that is proportionate. In other words, proportionate to being with God. In other words, our being with God precedes our doing for God.
Jesus is the template…
And Jesus laid down and gave us that template in His earthly life. He got up well before dawn, most Bible scholars agree, maybe 3, 4 a.m. and went off to a lonely place, to a desert-ous place, to a mountainous place, behind some granite boulder somewhere in the desert where He spent time with His Father, where He prayed and listened and received and encountered His Father’s presence. Power and enablement.
And then He shows up in the streets of Galilee or the city of Capernaum with His disciples. And without seemingly much effort, He calls forth dead bodies from tombs. He casts out demons. He delivers people of terminal illnesses and they go forth and live out their full length of days doing all of the plan of God.
Why was that so easy? Why was there such a flow from Jesus?
Because He was doing life in proportion to His receiving from the Father.
Your daily “to-do” list starts with being with Him…
So today you might see a list of things that have to be done on your to-do list, but your to-do list really starts with and really is to be with Him. Because in receiving, then you can, like Jesus, carry out the Father’s plan for your life. But only first when we have received His presence, His anointing, His voice, His Words.
Quote from Dr. David Yonggi Cho’s book, “Prayer That Brings Revival”
Now let me read one other excerpt here before we pray. It is found in Dr. David Yonggi Cho’s book, “Prayer That Brings Revival.”
And he writes in this section…
“Paul understood the spiritual warfare that we have been called to exercise when he stated, ‘we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ (Ephesians 6:12)”
In other words, there’s a battle going on in the realm of the spirit around us…
A battle for our attention
A battle for our will
A battle for our lives
A battle for our health
“Whatever the case might be, the enemy, if he can’t keep us out of the kingdom of God or keep us from professing Jesus, then he’s going to do his best to try to impede our progress in the plan of God through spiritual warfare.”
He goes on to say…
“To put all of this into clear perspective, we must understand the spiritual reality, or what I have called the fourth dimension. Satan was cast down from his place in the heavenlies where he held an exalted position. We were created in a higher stature than angels, in that we are capable of understanding spiritual reality. Satan has known since the Garden of Eden that through mankind, his kingdom…” [In other words, the fallen realm, the demonic kingdom] “would be destroyed through mankind.”
Ooh, I’m excited about that.
“That through mankind, through humankind…” Through you, through me, through the church. “…the Devil’s kingdom would be destroyed. God gave him the title of Prince of the Power of the Air because he has been able to exercise real authority over the earth’s atmosphere. He has been able to influence the nations, yet God gave authority to man.”
That’s us. Say, “That’s me.”
“Man lost his authority in the fall through the sin of Adam. Even so, God has not been without a witness in the world. His people have been able to exercise authority in prayer and intercession. When Christ came, He allowed the world to judge and crucify Him. Yet, through His sinless life, atoning death on the cross, and glorious resurrection, Christ took the keys of death and the grave and received all authority.”
