Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Prayer Leader Mike…
Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. I want to welcome you here this morning to prayer. My name is Mike. My wife, Jeannie, is usually here. She, unfortunately, had a conflict, so it’s going to be me and John playing today.
A Holy Ghost kind of day…
So this is going to be one of those days where we’re just going to have to let Holy Spirit kind of lead everything to a degree, which hopefully He’s doing anyway. But there was a couple things that yesterday He kind of brought to my mind to maybe just give us some thought about today. And maybe where to pray. So I have a few things marked out. I have some different material I want to read out of, but we’ll see what happens.
Prayer…
Father, we just purpose our minds today to focus on you and what you have for us. Regardless of what we’ve been facing in the past days or weeks or even years and not even thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow, we’re going to focus on today. We thank you that your Spirit is always there to give us anything and everything that we need for that moment in that day.
Yesterday I was thinking about some thoughts about what we might want to pray about or just consider. And my eye caught this book that I brought. I’d read it a little bit. But there was just something about it and I was kind of reading through a few things and there was some things that God just highlighted to me that I thought would be good to share. Now, some of you may already know this, but there’s a lot of things we already know that God can always bring new light to.
E.M. Bounds book called “Collection on Prayer”
So the book I brought is by E.M. Bounds. And it’s “Collection on Prayer.” And it’s a compilation of all eight books that he wrote about prayer. And it’s really exhaustive. I mean, it’s huge. It’s two inches thick and there’s a lot packed in here. So if you can’t find something about prayer in here, you’re not looking hard enough.
Everyone thinks “This is the worst time to be alive…”
When I was reading through some of these, the thought really occurred to me. Everyone when they’re thinking about the culture they live in, the things that they’ve been working through, they faced, it can be easy to say, “Wow, this is like the worst time ever to live.” But as I sat back and thought about what some of the things he wrote, I was thinking, “Okay, well I don’t really know much about him.” So I did just 10 minutes of reading about him. And I think it helps me anyway to understand where he was coming from when he wrote these books.
Profile for E.M. Bounds…
So he was born in like 1830 or 20 something. He was in his late twenties when the Civil War broke out here in the US. So I was thinking, we can always say we have it worse now, but it’s not a contest to talk about who had it worse. We all have gone through hard times throughout history. That’s just kind of part of being in this world because it’s a fallen world. But it helped me maybe get a glimpse into what was behind him, what he was experiencing when he wrote these.
And what I learned was, he did a few things. He was an attorney. He tried to make it big out in the gold rush out in California and that didn’t work. He basically spent the majority of his life in the Missouri area in the south. And in his late twenties, he was alive when the Civil War broke out.
He had been imprisoned twice. He actually was thrown in prison and it was more about what was going on with the war and who is he was supporting and things were coming against him that he had no control of. Kind of sounds familiar to what’s going on today.
He also suffered some really bad bayonet wound on his forehead. So he had been through a lot. He was married. His wife died after 10 years and they had a couple kids. He eventually got remarried, had three sons, two of them died, one at six and one at 1-year-old. So he’s been through a lot.
So after a lot of these things happened, he wrote these books over time. I think a lot of the prayer stuff and what he wrote down happened later in his life. So he had had all these experiences and yet he wrote tremendous volumes about prayer and its importance.
We can all relate…
So I just wanted to share that a little bit because over the course of the last decades, and just throughout history, we’ve all faced things that are going on in our culture, in our society that we’re always wondering, “What’s going on?”
Now, I didn’t read any more about him other than just that kind of excerpt of the highlights of his life, some of the main points. But the main point that struck me was here’s a man who went through a lot also in his time and in his life, faced war, he was in it, was thrown in jail because he was considered a confederate sympathizer and he wouldn’t pay money.
So he wrote all this stuff and I just wanted to read some of it. But it’s almost like a little sermon. But it helps me understand a bit more about, “Okay, we talk about prayer a lot.” We’re obviously here to pray, but just some of the thoughts that he had, I thought would be helpful, encouraging. Maybe you’ll learn something new just about his take. Again, based on what he has gone through. I mean, we can read the Psalms, the ones that David wrote and his emotions are all over the board. But he still pressed through.
The reality of prayer…
And so in this one part of E.B. Bound’s book, he’s talking about the reality of prayer. And they’re kind of broken up into several paragraphs of different thought. I’m just going to start with this first one.
“We are encouraged to pray”
God encourages us to pray not only in the certainty of the answer but by the generosity of the promise and the bounty of the giver. How princely the promise.” Then he quotes a part of Matthew 21:22. And it’s about the story of the fig tree that Jesus cursed. “And Jesus said to them, truly, I say to you, if you would have faith and you would not doubt not only will you do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you would say to the mountain, you must be removed at once and you must immediately be cast into the sea, it will happen. And everything you ask in prayer when you believe you will take.”
And when we add anything to that whatsoever promise that covers all things in everything without qualification, exception, or limitation, then the promises expanded and made minute and specific. The challenge of God to us is “call into me and I will answer you and I’ll show you great and mighty things, which you know us not.” That’s from Jeremiah. This includes like the answer to Solomon’s prayer which was specifically prayed for, but embraces vastly more of great value and of necessity.
Almighty God seems to fear that we will hesitate to ask largely because we are apprehensive that we will strain His ability. He declares through Paul that He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all that we ask or think. He almost paralyzes us by giving us carte blanche of ask me of things to come concerning my sons concerning the work of My hands. Command you me.” That’s from Isaiah 45:11.
He charges us and commands us and urges us to pray. He goes beyond promise and says, in essence, behold, My son, meaning Jesus, I have given goes beyond promise and says in essence, Behold, My son, I have given Him to you. He that spared not his own son but delivered Him up for us, how shall He not with him also freely give us all things?
God gave us all things in prayer because by promise, He had given us all things in His Son. What an amazing gift is Jesus.
And in another part, he talks about the wonders of God. And I thought this was good.
The wonders of God’s power are to be kept alive, made real and present, and repeated only by prayer. God is perhaps not so evident in the world, so almighty in manifestations as of old. Not because miracles have passed away or because God has ceased to work, but because prayer has been deprived of its simplicity, majesty and power. God still lives and miracles still live while God lives and acts. For miracles are God’s way of acting. Prayer is dwarfed, withered, and petrified when faith in God is staggered by doubts of His ability or through the shrinking caused by fear. When faith has a telescopic far-off vision of God, prayer works no miracle and brings no marvels of deliverance. But when God is seen by faith’s closest fullest eye, prayer creates a history of wonders.
And when you stop to think about it, this was written 150 some years ago? And he, even back then, there was probably a lot of people saying, “Oh, I’m praying, but nothing’s happening and God doesn’t move. And well maybe someday…”
It kind of brings that verse of “there’s nothing new under the sun.” We still struggle with the same things that he was struggling with. But let’s be encouraged by His Word. Let’s be encouraged by His Spirit that God is still working. God still is answering prayers. He’s still providing miracles. He’s still making things happen for us. There’s that song that says, “even when I don’t see it, you’re working.”
Now some of us, that might seem like some wishful throwing out there Christian thing to say, but the fact is that it’s actually true. And just because we’re not seeing maybe the things that we’re believing for or we’re going through these things that just seem impossible or “Not again, not again. When are things going to change?”
God is inviting us to say, “No, I know these things are going on. Jesus didn’t say this was going to be a cakewalk one time, but He promises that He was going to be with you always to the very end.”
God said He never changes…
And you know what? He never changes His mind. He can’t lie. He can’t deceive. So when we read these words I’m just praying right now, Holy Spirit, that whatever vision and lens and filter, whatever name you want to give it, when it seems like you’re not working, when it seems like the things that we’re going through, the struggles we face, the corruption we see, the death and the “right in our face” evil, wanting to have a stare down to see who’s going to win, that your Holy Spirit is not weak. Your Holy Spirit cannot reach any depth. It cannot not find us if we would just continue to stay with Him.
