Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Heather…
Good morning. Welcome to Morning Prayer. My name’s Heather Sibinski. I’m one of the pastors here at Living Word.
I wanted to share something… as I was doing my devotions this morning. I’m going to read a good portion of Luke five. We’re going somewhere, so just be patient and hear it.
Just close your eyes and listen to it. Put yourself in the story. See Jesus. See the sea of Galilee. See the people. Just really put yourself into this story because we’re going to go somewhere with this.
I’m going to start out with Luke five…
I’ll summarize. Everybody was crowding around Jesus and they wanted to hear Him. He had just started His ministry. He started doing miracles and the crowds were gathering. And so He gets into a boat with Peter. We know the story, and He pushes out and teaches. And then He calls Peter. Well, He tells Peter first, “Go out in the deep and try to get some fish.” Because they had fished all night and didn’t catch anything. And, of course, Peter’s like, “Well, Master, we fished all night. We didn’t catch anything. But at your word, I will go back out and I will cast out my nets again.” And we know the story. They got so much fish that they had to call another boat to come help them. And then He calls Peter and we know Peter and James and John, they just dropped their nets and they followed Jesus immediately.
Verse 11 in the Amplified Classic…
So after they had run their boats ashore, “they left everything and joined Him as His disciples and accompanied Him.” Verse 12, “While He was in one of the towns, there came a man covered with leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and implored Him, saying, Lord, if you are willing, you are able to cure me and make me clean. And Jesus reached out His hand and touched him, saying, I am willing. Be cleansed. Immediately the leprosy left him.”
Back in those days…
Real quick. Back in those days, if somebody had leprosy, they were unclean. They weren’t allowed to be near people. They had to yell out, “I have leprosy. Stay away.” And if you touch somebody with leprosy, you would be unclean, according to the Jewish law in those days. But here’s Jesus breaking the Jewish law and He touches the man with leprosy. And the leprosy did not make Jesus unclean. Jesus healed this man of the leprosy and made him clean.
Continued…
“Jesus charged him to tell no one that he might chance to meet until he said, you go and show yourself to the priest and make an offering for your purification as Moses commanded for a testimony and prove to the people that they may have evidence of your healing. But so much the more the news spread abroad concerning Him. And great crowds kept coming together to hear Him and to be healed by Him of their infirmities. But He Himself withdrew in retirement to the wilderness, desert and prayed.”
I’m going to pause right here…
I love every moment that we see Jesus withdrawing and going into the wilderness and praying. And having gone to Israel in February as we drove in the bus through all the terrain of Israel, I would look up at those hills and I would think, “I wonder if Jesus walked up and prayed on that hill. I wonder if He snuck away under that tree and prayed.” Because you see throughout the Gospels, Jesus being in crowds, ministering, healing the sick, doing miracles, and then withdrawing to pray. Coming out, doing something, fulfilling prophecy, doing miracles, and then withdrawing to pray.
His ministry started with prayer. He would pray.
And then I also like to sit and think, what did those moments look like between Him and His Father? What was the conversation like? Was it “Alright, Lord, these people, I’m telling you today, Peter did this and he said that.” Or was it, “I’m going into the groups today. Show Me what you want Me to do.” And listening. I think there was a lot of both: speaking and listening. Because obviously He had communion with His Father. But what did that prayer look like?
So maybe in your own prayer time…
Close your eyes and ask God, “What did that look like? What did that sound like when Jesus withdrew to pray.” And sometimes we see Him being up on the mountain all night praying or getting up before everybody else. And Israel is rough terrain. So you picture Jesus at maybe 3 or 4 a.m. getting up and climbing up these hills. And it was probably a little cold in the morning, you know? And sometimes I’m like, oh, I can’t sit down and pray until I have my coffee. Right? Jesus wasn’t like that.
Continued…
“So He withdrew in retirement to the wilderness and pray. One of those days as He was teaching, there were Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting by who had come from every village in town of Galilee and Judea, and from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was present with him to heal them.”
So here are the Pharisees and then it says, “And the power of the Lord was present with Him to heal them.” Who? Probably the Pharisees. I’m guessing some of them needed some healing as well.
“And behold, some men were bringing on a stretcher a man who was paralyzed and they tried to carry him in and lay him before Jesus, but finding no way to bring him in because of the crowd…”
So think of that…
The crowd was so large and tight around Him, they couldn’t even bring someone before Him. They went up on a roof and they lowered him with his stretcher through the tiles into the midst in front of Jesus.
“And when He saw their confidence in Him springing from their faith, He said, ‘Man, your sins are forgiven you.’ And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason and question and argue saying, ‘Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ But Jesus knowing their thoughts and questionings answered them, ‘Why do you question in your hearts? Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven you, or to say, arise and walk about.’ But that you may know that the Son of man has the power of authority and the right on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralyzed man, ‘I say to you, arise, pick up your stretcher and go to your own house.’ And instantly the man stood up before them, picked up what he had been lying on and went away to his house, recognizing and praising and thanking God.
“An overwhelming astonishment and ecstasy seized them all and they all recognized and praised and thanked God, and they were filled with and controlled by reverential fear and kept saying, we have seen wonderful, strange, and incredible and unthinkable things today. After this, Jesus went out and looked attentively at tax collector named Levi (Matthew) sitting at the tax office and he said to him, ‘Join me as a disciple and side with my party and accompany me.”
Back in those days…
The tax collectors were despised. I mean, they were like filth, dirt. Nobody liked the tax collectors, right? What does Jesus do? Goes right for a tax collector and calls him to be one of His disciples in His group.
“So Matthew forsook everything and got up and followed Him, becoming His disciple and siding with His party. And Matthew made a great banquet for Him in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others who were reclining at the table with them.”
Now we’re getting to the part that I want to sit in today.
“Now the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling against Jesus’ disciples saying, Why are you eating and drinking with tax collectors and preeminently sinful people? And Jesus replied to them, it’s not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to arouse and invite and call the righteous, but the erring ones, those not free from sin to repentance, to change their minds for the better and heartily to amend their ways with abhorrence of their past sin.”
“Then they said to Him, the disciples of John practiced fasting often and offer up prayers of special petition. And so do the disciples of the Pharisees also, but yours eat and drink.”
The Pharisees point out what the law says…
So now the Pharisees are pointing out what they do, what the law says, what they have been practicing, which is basically religion, a list of rules, right?
Continued…
“And Jesus said to them, Can you make the wedding guests fast as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and then they will fast in those days. He told them a proverb also. No one puts a patch from a new garment on an old garment. If he does, he will both tear the new one and the patch from the new one will not match the old garment. And no one pours new wine into old wine skins. If he does, the fresh wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled and the skins will be ruined, destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wine skins and no one after drinking old wine immediately desires new wine for he says the old is good or better.”
So what is Jesus saying here?
Jesus is talking about how the Pharisees wanted Him to abide by their rules. They wanted Him to do things the way that they think He should do them, right? They had a little box, and they wanted to put Jesus in that box and say, “This is how we want you to do your miracles. This is how we want you to fast. We want you to abide by all these rules that we have.”
So the Pharisees are basically rebuking Jesus and correcting Him. So we’re going to go into Luke six. I’m still landing the plane here, so bear with me.
Landing the plane now…
“One Sabbath while Jesus was passing through the fields of standing grain, it occurred that His disciples picked some of the spikes and ate of the grain, rubbing it out in their hands. But the Pharisees said to them, Why are you doing what was not permitted to be done on the Sabbath days? And Jesus replied to them saying, Have you never so much as read what David did when he was hungry? He and those who are with him, how he went to the house of God and took and ate the sacred loaves of the show bread, which is not permitted for any except only the priests to eat. And also gave to those who were with him. He said to them, The Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
And then it occurred on another Sabbath that when He went into the synagogue and taught, a man was present whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees kept watching Jesus to see whether He would actually heal on the Sabbath in order that they might get some ground for accusation against Him.
Okay, let’s pause there real quick.
How sad is that? There’s a man here that needs healing and what are the Pharisees doing? Are they concerned about this man? No. They’re just watching Jesus just waiting for Him to break a rule. You know, their hearts were so hardened that they couldn’t even have compassion for a person that was in pain that needed to be free. They were just so focused on just catching Jesus. But He was aware of all their thoughts,
Continued…
“…and He said to the man with the withered hand, come stand here in the midst. And he arose and stood there. And then Jesus said to them [the Pharisees and people standing and watching] I ask you, is it lawful and right on the Sabbath to do good so that someone desires advantage from it? Or to do evil to save a life and to make a soul safe or to destroy it. Then He glanced around at them all.”
I love that. So here’s Jesus. He brings the man up and then He looks them all in the face and He’s like, “Tell me what’s right to do today.” It wasn’t just a gentle… This was a very stern correction. He’s looking in their faces, like, just really think about how hard your hearts are right now.
“Then He glanced around at them all and he said to the man, Stretch out your hand. And as he did, his hand was fully restored like the other one.”
Don’t you think that would be a moment to rejoice and to be thankful and to praise God?
“But they were filled with a lack of understanding and senseless rage and discussed, consulted with one another, what they might do to Jesus. Now in those days it occurred that He went up into a mountain to pray and spent the whole night in prayer to God. And when it was day, He summoned His disciples and selected them from the 12 whom He named the apostles, special messengers.”
The Pharisees want to put Jesus in a box…
So where I want to go today with that is you see Jesus, first of all, going from place of prayer to place of prayer to place of prayer, doing miracle after miracle after miracle. And then where are the Pharisees? The Pharisees have hardened hearts and they’re challenging Him at every corner. And they’re wanting to put Jesus in their little religious box. This is how you can do this. This is how you can’t do this. So much of their laws by then were even past what was in the law of Moses. They added so many things, and they just kept adding and adding. You can’t do this, and you can’t do this, and you can’t do this. Right?
So, where am I going with all this today?
How many of us have put Jesus in a little box? And we tell Him how He can move in our lives, what He can do, or how we expect Him to move? Or how many of us, we have our day planned out. “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to go here, I’m going to do this. I’m going to get up. I’m going to go to work. I got to go to the store. I got to pick up the kids. I got to go home. I got to pay the bills. I got to clean the house.” And then, Jesus, I’ll just fit you in, right? I’ll fit you in my life here and there.
And really, that’s what the Pharisees were doing. They were wanting Him to fit into their way of doing things. And how many of us, we just really need to guard our hearts. And I’m speaking to myself. This is what I heard as I was doing my devotions today. He wants to come and do something that is out of our little box. He wants to do something in our lives, and we say we want that, but do we really want that? You have these Pharisees that like, obviously they loved God. They gave up their whole lives to read and study the Word every day. So it’s like there was something there. They loved Him, right? But when God did something that was beyond the way that they thought He should do it, they had a hard time with it. They kept stumbling. It was such a stumbling block for them to the point that they killed the Son of God.
So just guarding ourselves…
There’s a scripture where Jesus says a bit of leaven leavens the whole bunch. What was he talking about there? He said, “Watch the Pharisees.” The leaven of the Pharisees. So what is that? It’s that thing that we have that’s just like… it’s critical. We want to criticize or we want to pick apart or we want to say, “God wouldn’t move like that,” or “God wouldn’t do that.” Or we get almost cynical.
May we never be like that, where we’re so cynical where God can’t do something that our heads don’t understand. Like God might want to do something that just completely offends us. He might want to heal a person that we think is the last person that He should heal. He might want to use a person that we think is the last person that He should use. We might be going, “Well, if God knew what that person… I know what that person did on Saturday night. I saw them. I know what kind of life that person leads. How could God use him? How could God use her?” That sounds a lot like what we just heard the Pharisees saying, right? “If He knew what kind of man is sitting at this table with Him, if He knew why is He eating with tax collectors?
Let’s be honest with ourselves…
So what I’m wanting to do today is just soften our hearts before Him today and just be honest with yourselves this morning. I had to be honest with myself. Am I living my life for Jesus or am I living my life and fitting Jesus into the little cracks? Fitting Jesus into the desperate moments. Fitting Jesus into the convenient moments. This is my life. These are the plans that I have. And then, “Umm, Jesus, I’ll talk to you from this time to this time, and I’ll talk to you from this time to this time. I might check in with you throughout the day if I have time.”
Or is it “I’m living my life for you.” I’m checking in with Him constantly. I am listening for His voice constantly. I’m practicing His presence constantly. That my thoughts are a constant dialogue with Him, not a dialogue with myself.
The Lord challenged me one time…
“What if every thought that we had was really designed to be a conversation with God?” How many of our thoughts are just conversations of us fighting with ourselves, right? Or replaying a conversation or condemning ourselves?
And so just rethinking, first of all, how we think, how we act. And instead of putting new wine in old wine skins, instead of taking what Jesus wants to do this fresh way, maybe He wants to move in a way that we’ve never seen before. Will we let Him and allowing Him to be the sole purpose of why we live and not the other way around where we’re living and we’re just inviting Him in. Or we’re asking Him to get us out of a mess, right?
It’s a change of heart…
It’s a change of how we think instead of “This is my life and, Jesus, I’ll invite you in from time to time.” It’s a “I died and I rose again with Him.” It’s not I that lives but it’s Christ who lives through me. So shouldn’t He be constantly living through us and moving through us. Shouldn’t our dialogue in our head be a constant conversation with God?
