Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Prayer leader Mike…
Morning everyone. Thank you for coming to our daily gathering where we can worship the Lord and pray and seek Him. My name is Mike Hines. My wife, Jeannie, and I are grateful to be a part of this. So as probably happens with people who are leading prayer, you may have some ideas where you want to start, but we’re going to let the Holy Spirit also help guide us as well.
Prayed…
So, Father, we come to you with thanksgiving, whether we’re having the best day ever or we’re having the worst day or the worst week we’ve had in a while. We set all that aside, and we focus on your goodness, your Word, your promises, your character, your never-ending love. Nothing is too far or too hard for you to overcome in our lives and through our lives for those around us.
Book, “Sparkling Gems” by Rick Renner…
I think I’m going to share what was on my heart a couple days ago. I’m reading from Rick Renner’s “Sparkling Gems,” first volume. And if you’re familiar at all with Rick Renner, you know he can get into detail. It’s almost overwhelming, which can be good because the more I’ve taken the time to understand what some of the words meant back in Hebrew and Greek and things like that, it’s amazing. Like there’s some things that you think, “Oh, well that seems pretty harsh.” But when you actually understand what he was saying, you’re like… oh my gosh, they had such descriptions. It’s like he covers everything. He wants to give you the full picture.
Chapter: “What Lies in Your Future If You Choose to Give Up and Quit”
This is several pages long so I’m just going to try to hit some highlights. He titled this one “What Lies in Your Future If You Choose to Give Up and Quit.” Now, most people would never say, “I don’t choose to quit, but maybe my circumstances have just made me feel like I’m forced to quit.” And I’m not saying that there aren’t things that we need to like, “Okay, something is done and we need to move on.” That’s not what I’m talking about. He’s talking about the attitude of when people’s faith is shaken, and they’ve just slowly, by decision by decision, moved away from what God’s Word says.
A righteous man falls seven times…
And hey, if you’ve never been there, congratulations. You did it. Everybody else, I think we’ve all gone through something where we’re strong one day, and then someone says something or we see something and our faith crumbles. And we’re in a puddle on the floor crying and weeping to God. But the Bible also says, “A righteous man falls seven times.” Now, I’ve fallen way more than seven times. But the idea is that he said, “But he gets back up.”
So he sets it up by talking about a friend of his who was a pastor in another guy’s church. He believed that he needed to start his own church. But he was struggling. And so Rick’s friend invited him to come and try to minister to this guy who had been struggling. It was several years after he took the step of faith to start his own church. But because his new organization hadn’t grown as quickly as he wished, he’d become very discouraged and depressed. And as a result of these disappointments, he began to question everything he believed about walking by faith. He didn’t name the name. He said he had been previously associated with many great men and women of faith. So he was in that atmosphere. And then he stepped out and did this.
And he goes on…
“He had even become very bitter and sour toward anyone who claimed to walk by faith.” I mean, that takes a while to get to. “Unfortunately, this minister made the mistake of starting to measure what he believed by what he was experiencing.” And Rick was trying to encourage this guy and was trying to locate him, trying to figure out “how can I minister to this guy?” This minister had already made up his mind that God had no plan of victory for his life and that anyone who believed it was God’s will for people to be victorious was a charlatan. I mean, when you hear that, you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s for sure a 180.”
Rick finally got to the point where he’s like, “All this guy was doing was bashing people of faith.” It had gotten to that point in this gentleman’s life where Rick said he finally just gave up. They were meeting for lunch. Rick said, “I just got up and left. This guy’s not going to listen to me.”
Have you been there?
Have any of you been tempted to say, “I don’t want to hear that right now. You don’t know what I’m going through or what I’ve experienced”? Rick said he left. He said, “There was no reason for me to stay there any longer because the bitterness in this man had defiled him so completely that he wasn’t willing to hear anything from me or even my other friends who also believe in the walk of faith.”
You can’t argue with a fool…
It’s kind of like in a sense, you can’t argue with a fool. It’s pointless to argue when you realize they just don’t want to change because of whatever they’ve been facing or whatever they’ve been struggling with. Sometimes, people struggle with stuff for years and years and years.
And he goes on to say…
He references Hebrews 10:38–39 in the Amplified. “But the just shall live by faith. My righteous servant shall live by his conviction respecting man’s relationship to God and divine things. In holy fervor, born of faith and conjoined with it and if he draws back and shrinks in fear, my soul has no delight or pleasure in him.”
That doesn’t seem very Christian to say, “I don’t delight in him anymore.”
The definition of “draw back”
I don’t know which version this is, maybe King James, he says, “But we are not of them that draw back into perdition.” So then Rick gave a little context of what he’s talking about. He says the words “draw back…” in the phrase “If any man draw back” basically depicts someone who is shrinking back, withdrawing, retreating, regressing, receding, backing away, backsliding, or someone who is recoiling from something. It’s like backing out of a position or belief that they once strongly held.
Now, when I read that, that’s what I was saying earlier about the “if any man draw back, my soul has no pleasure.” Draw back takes on a whole different feeling and meaning to me when I start saying that he’s backing out of a position or belief he once held. It’s like receding, backing away, backsliding, shrinking back, withdrawing. I mean, it’s not just, “Oh, I’m just going to step away from it.” It’s way more than that.
Draw back into perdition…
And then he talks about, “But we are not of them that draw back into perdition.” And the word “perdition” in the Greek describes something so ruined and rotten that it is decomposing. And what I realized too is that decomposing doesn’t happen just like that. It takes a long time for something to decompose. Rick likes to kind of say things to try to pull them in to make it make sense. In essence, he’s saying, “This is pretty serious if you’re stepping away from that faith.”
And then Hebrews 10:39 says…
“But our way is not that of those who draw back to eternal misery or perdition and are utterly destroyed, but we are of those who believe, who cleave to, trust in, and rely on God through Jesus Christ, and by faith preserve the soul.”
So thankfully, he finishes it by saying, “Okay, this is the example of what happens when you just let so many things get in you. But there’s always a way out. Rick says, “I’m amazed at the short-lived nature of some people’s faith. For example, if their prayers for healing aren’t answered as quickly as they wish, they permit their flesh to lead them to the conclusion that it must be God’s will for them to be sick. Or if they sow their finances believing for a financial harvest, but they don’t see that harvest after a few months, they conclude that what they were taught about prosperity must be wrong. But you have to give faith time to work. Faith and patience are partners.”
Patience is an attitude, not a time frame…
Now, no one loves patience when you’re in the middle of something. Jeannie and I were talking about patience the other day; patience doesn’t have a set time on it. Patience doesn’t mean “years from now.” It might mean this afternoon. Patience is just an attitude that we have. It’s not a timeframe. It’s like if people are trying to have children and they look to Abraham, it’s like, “Well, does that mean I got to wait 25 years for this to happen?” No, because it doesn’t say that. It’s an example.
And he says here the word “patience” comes from the Greek word, hupo-mene [phonetic spelling], a compound of words, but it basically means “to stay, to remain, to continue, or to permanently abide in one place.” And he mentions that same word in John 15:7, which says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done for you.”
And he says a literal translation could be, “If you steadfastly and continuously abide in me, and if my words steadfastly and continuously abide in you, you may ask what you will, and it shall be done for you.” It gives the idea of something that is rooted, unmoving, and stable.
To be unmovable…
And then he also talks about when you add this prefix “hupo” so the hupomene, it kind of changes everything. And it’s basically saying someone who’s committed to maintaining his position, he will stay under that heavy load as long as is necessary for him to achieve his victory. He is intent on standing by his commitment regardless of the cost he must pay. Nothing can sway or move him to change his mind. If you intend to beat the Devil at his game and successfully do what it’s called to do, you must have this hupomene. If you have this working in your life, it’s just a matter of time until your victory comes to you. It’s not a question of “if” it will come, it’s only a question of “when.”
Rick continues…
“So don’t let loose of your faith. The day your vision dies is the day your joy will disappear, your life will be depressing, and you will turn bitter. But don’t let discouragement keep you from being who God wants you to be. Just hold fast, hold tight, and determine that you’re not going to stop until you see your dream or what you’re believing for come to pass.”
