Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Prayer leader Mike…
Morning everyone! Thank you for joining us here today. And thank you to everyone joining us online today for morning prayer, our morning workout. My name is Mike Hines, and typically, my wife, Jeannie, is here as well, but she was feeling a little under the weather this morning, so she’s resting.
Jeannie and I were talking about a few things of how we wanted to cover today. And then I was looking at something else this morning and I thought, “Well, maybe we’ll do that.” So I have some thoughts, but we’ll see where this goes. So let’s just quiet our hearts and our minds and open them.
Prayed…
Father, we thank you for this day. Regardless of what we’ve been going through, we do what you said.
We roll all of those cares onto you, and we just worship you this morning.
We thank you, Holy Spirit, that you are the best gift ever because you are the ultimate comforter, counselor.
You are with us always.
And I thank you that you continue to remind us of all the goodness that you’ve given to us that are ours for the taking.
So Father, I thank you that you are with us now to guide us, Holy Spirit, that whatever I may be led to share or pray, that your Holy Spirit knows what each person needs individually and you know how to speak exactly to whatever their need is, that even in the midst of corporate prayer or in the midst of one, we always have an audience of one with you.
John G. Lake…
I bought a book a few months ago. The author is John G. Lake. I knew kind of his name, and that was about it. But then somebody was preaching and mentioned John G. Lake. I’m like, “You know what? I’m just going to find out a little bit more about this.” So I went and bought this book. And it’s basically, a lot of his sermons and thoughts and things like that. He was a man who had such a topsy-turvy life. He became very successful in insurance and then decided the call of God was on his life. He was a businessman, and then he just gave it all up and ended up going to Africa. But he had such an impact on this world that 100 years later, we’re still going back to glean off of his experiences with the Lord.
And so, today, as I was considering and praying about what should we talk about, I found this one sermon of his. Now, it’s like five, six pages long, so I’m not going to read all of it, but something about it really hit me. So there’s a lot of things that I want to share his thoughts on this that we can use for hopefully teaching us, reminding us, and even a place that we can start praying from.
Title for sermon by John G. Lake “Spiritual Dominion”
The title was “Spiritual Dominion.” And there’s a couple things he says in here that we sometimes think that we’re unique going through something. But he put this sermon together back in 1924. So that’s 102 years ago. But that’s what I love about the Word of God is that it doesn’t matter. I mean, we all face a lot of the same things, kind of like Solomon wrote, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” But thankfully, people have written things down, who have shared things with us, either in books or now. I mean, you could spend 24/7 for the rest of eternity of all the videos on YouTube of people teaching and preaching. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. So I’m so thankful that these things were recorded so that we can learn from those who came before us, so we don’t need to start at the bottom again. We can just keep building and building and building.
Now some of the scriptures that he’s using in here, he uses the King James, but I’m going to read it in the Amplified just because it hopefully gives a little more context to everything. And so let’s see, where was I going to start?
So he starts off…
“Do you know we do not read the scriptures like people read a textbook? Have you ever observed how a scientist reads his textbook? He weighs every word, and each word has a particular meaning. If we read the Word of God like that, we would get the real vitality of what it says.”
And he says in 1 John 5:11 and 12…
“And this is the testimony and the evidence. God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who possesses the Son has that life. He who does not possess the Son of God does not have that life.”
I love how John pretty much made it this or this. There was nothing in between. There was no middle ground. There was no like, “Well, but maybe…” because I know there’s a lot of things in the Word that might sound a bit confusing, we don’t always get. But if we trust in what His Word says, that’s where faith is. We either believe Him or we don’t. But what I love about the Holy Spirit is even if we’re not sure, we’re wavering in the middle, He will help push us and guide us if we really desire that.
And so John G. Lake says…
“There is no eternal life outside of Jesus Christ, by the declaration of Jesus Himself.” And then he says, just to remind you, that God had gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
He says…
“All the scriptures are dear to my heart and bring their peculiar ministry and lesson, but the words of Jesus are the supreme words of the Gospel. Jesus said in John 6:63, ‘It is the Spirit Who gives life [He is the Life-giver]; the flesh conveys no benefit whatever [there is no profit in it]. The words (truths) that I have been speaking to you are spirit and life.’
“Do you know the difficulty in our day…” and this is amazing when you realize he was writing this a hundred years ago. “Do you know the difficulty in our day is that we have run away from Jesus, meaning the church at large has. The world is making a great struggle at the present hour. We are in the midst of it ourselves to get back to Jesus. We have run into false theology. We have run into churchianity.” That was his little colloquialism or euphemism for religious Christianity. He said, “We have run into churchianity.” Gee, I think that’s still going on. “…and human interpretations and a hundred other follies. But friends, it is a perfectly lovely and refreshing thing to get back to Jesus. Take the words of Jesus and let them become the Supreme Court of the Gospel to you.”
Meaning the things that weigh the good and the bad. And we know this all too well of the struggles that we’ve had. You know, when you hear him say this a hundred years ago, and to say like, “Yeah, that’s kind of the same thing that’s been going on probably for a long time.” The world has its view. You’ve probably heard at some point, at least once, someone trying to debate somebody about the Bible, but they’re not a believer, but they just pull something because they heard somebody else say it. But they don’t really know it. And sometimes I think I’ve done that too, used something without the full context. But it’s that spirit. It’s not just the text. It’s that spirit that gives us life, and that’s where that spiritual authority comes from.
And then later on he talks about in 2nd Timothy 1:6, and he says…
“That is why I would remind you to stir up and rekindle the embers of, fan the flame of, and keep burning the gracious gift of God, that inner fire that is in you by the means of laying on of my hands.”
He says…
“Paul had some faith in the value of putting out his hands or laying his hands on people.’ And he says, ‘Beloved, it takes faith to exercise your gift of God.’”
And what God was showing me on the way in today, He said that sometimes I think we can throw the word “gift” around, but we don’t realize how precious those gifts are. I don’t know what the scripture is, but he says all good gifts come from the Father of lights, from above.
Are there gifts from God lying dormant in you?
And sometimes I think we can get stuck knowing that He gave us all these gifts, but are we really truly receiving what those gifts are? And he said there are just lots of people around everywhere who have gifts of God, and they are lying dormant in their lives. And there’s no value for the kingdom of God through them because of the fact they have no faith in God to put the gift in exercise and get the benefit of it.
He goes on saying…
“Probably Timothy was a timid fellow, and Paul is going to show him why he should be exercising this gift of God, which he believed to be in you.”
He said in Second Timothy, God has not given us a spirit of fear. That He didn’t give us that. That is not a gift from God. Now, we’re not talking about a fear of falling or those things. I mean, He gave us that thankfully, so we don’t think, “Hey, this could be fun to jump off this building. I’m not afraid of that.” That’s kind of dumb or stupid or a fool. A fool would be a more biblical way to say that. So He didn’t give us a spirit of fear.
And then I love how John G. Lake goes on. I can imagine he was getting pretty fiery.
He said…
“I confess, I would like to swear sometimes, and I would like to say ‘to hell with preachers who are all the time preaching fear.’” And I say amen to that myself. “They preach fear of the devil, fear of demons, fear of influence, and fear of that influence, and fear of some other power. If the Holy Ghost has come from heaven into your soul, common sense teaches us that He has made you and us the master thereby of every other power in the world. Otherwise, the Word of God is a blank falsehood.”
John said in 1 John…
“Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” And I know we love to quote that when we’re facing things, but I got to say, sometimes it feels just like empty recitation sometimes. But then Jesus Himself in Luke 10:19, “Behold, I give you power to tread and serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.”
And again, those are one of those things that I think that we can say, and we’ve said many, many times and quoted many times, and that’s really good. And Holy Spirit is wanting us to get that so into our hearts that when we say it… When Jesus spoke, there was power that came out of that. It wasn’t just the text or I’m saying a bunch of words. It was that spirit behind that because He said, “My words are spirit and life.” He said they are both things.
And then John G. Lake goes on…
“And if we had faith to believe that greater than He is in us, bless God, we would be stepping out with boldness and majesty. The conscious supremacy of the Son of God would be manifest in our lives. And instead of being subservient and bowed down and broken beneath the weight of sin and the powers of darkness around us, they would flee from us and keep out of our way. I believe before God there is not a devil comes within 100 feet of a real God-anointed Christian.”
Spiritual authority is everything…
That is the kind of vision God put in my soul. And I believe every one of us has that vision as well. That these things that Jesus talks about, that that spiritual authority is everything. We’ve heard so many times of how real is the spirit realm. This physical world is just the manifestation of that, and we can see the manifestation. It’s good, it’s evil, it’s everywhere in between. It’s, like, so good it almost doesn’t seem real, and it’s so bad that you’re thinking, “What in the world? There’s no way.”
I mean, we’ve been experiencing that just in our culture over the last ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. That evil is not going away until all this is done with. But Jesus said, “I overcame all this. You’re going to have trouble, but be encouraged. I overcame this.” And we may even want to think, “Well, yeah, well, you’re Jesus, of course you got over everything.” He still had to do everything, and He experienced everything we did.
Now, it’s not all recorded, but I’m sure He experienced loss. He experienced frustration. Obviously, people were coming against Him with their words and eventually physically. But He said, “I overcame.”
John G. Lake even goes on about this power that God gave us. Now, this is of course Old Covenant where the Holy Spirit wasn’t just present. It would come on people for certain times. They weren’t in that yet, but the principle was there. And he talks about how Moses came to the Red Sea with impassable mountains on the right hand and impassable mountains on the left, and the army of Pharaoh behind him and the sea in front of him. If any man had a right to stop and pray, surely you might say that man had a good reason.
And I know we’ve all felt that too where it really looks like there’s no way out. Over and over again, when we get to the real ditch, we try to jump the thing and put the responsibility back on God. Just watch God make a real man. When Moses got his prayer nicely started, God rebuked him. And said, in the Amplified version. This is Exodus 14:15–16.
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? You tell the people of Israel to go forward. Lift up your rod and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, and the Israelites shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea.’”
I love how he says this.
“I want you Pentecostal Christians to get this. God did not say, ‘Moses, you stretch forth your hand and I will divide the sea.’ He said, ‘Stretch forth your hand over the sea and divide it.’ You have faith in Me, you stretch forth your hand and divide the sea.”
