Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Heather…
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to prayer this morning. My name’s Heather Sibinski. I’m one of the pastors here at Living Word. It’s my honor to lead prayer this morning.
Pastor Heather shares her experience with speaking in tongues…
I wanted to start out this morning just reading a chapter out of “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer. This is one of my favorites. Many, many highlights. It’s kind of one of those I go back to from time to time because it’s just a reminder of pursuing Him.
And I think I’ve shared before when I first started speaking in tongues, the first word in tongues that He gave me was “duh.” And I had to convince myself that I was not making that up. And so, it was a summer camp. I was 19. It was 1993, and I had gotten born again like the year before, and I had kept wanting to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And so I would go up many times to be prayed for, and I would just stand there. And nothing would come out because, of course, in my mind, I’m thinking that the Holy Spirit’s going to go “blah, blah, blah,” and make words come out of my mouth.
And so because I am a thinker, I way overthought it and I just got so complicated that I kept trying to receive the Holy Spirit. Well, let’s just say I kept trying to receive my prayer language. When you are prayed for, I believe you receive the Holy Spirit, but that evidence of speaking in tongues. And so I finally went up. And I’ll never forget because we were doing a skit. This is back in the days when you did dramatic skits, dramatic sketches, and that was very cool back in the ‘90s. And so we did a dramatic skit to “The Champion” by Carman. And so it’s a song where it’s talking about how the demons and the angels are fighting, and “Jesus is the Champion!”
And so I was dressed up as an angel because I was in drama then. I was the drama leader, one of the leaders. And so here I am, I’m in my white gown and I have a little halo and they’re painting the gold star over one of my eyes.
And my friend comes in and she’s like, “Heather, Heather, they’re praying for people to be filled with the Spirit,” because the service had started but we were getting ready for our sketch. And I’ll never forget the excitement of… And I probably told this story but I’m going to tell it again because I feel led to. It was a camp and you would go up a long dirt road up a hill to get to the chapel. It was up at the top of the hill. And I’ll never forget the excitement of running in my little angel costume up the dirt hill to go be filled with the Holy Spirit. So it was, I think, Eastman Curtis back then, and he laid hands on me and he prayed. And he’s like, “You got it. Yeah, go ahead. You got it.” And I was like, “Duh.” He’s like, “Yeah, keep going.” “Duh, duh, duh.” And I felt so silly over and over just going, “Duh, duh.” And that’s all I had was duh. And I was like, “Well, duh, that feels really dumb.” But I just kept saying it. And then after a while, that turned into yada. And so then I’m like, “Yada, yada, yada.” And I’m like, that feels so odd to keep saying that same word. Until finally I learned how to hear those words bubbling up inside of me and speak them out.
Yada means “to know Him…”
But later on in life, I found out that that word “yada” means to know Him. To know Him on an intimate level. So even in the Bible when they say, like, Adam knew Eve, that word knew is yada. And we can use that word how we know God, how He knows us. It’s an intimate knowing, like knowing that person, not knowing about them, but an intimate knowledge of who they are.
“The cry of my heart…”
And so that has always been, I believe, my heart’s cry. And I love that that was the first word that I spoke in tongues was that because I do believe that through my whole journey as a Christian and still now, even at 50… Oh, gosh, 52. I’m still yearning to know Him. Because He’s so complex. He’s so beautiful. There’s so many facets of His personality, of His wonder. We can’t describe Him in human words, right? And so it’s this journey of…
Knowing Him
Knowing Him deeper
Knowing Him more
Knowing different facets of Him
There’s times like you think you know God, right? And then all of a sudden, He’ll show you this other beautiful side of Him that you’re like, “Oh, wow.” You know, at first it was like knowing the Father God, knowing that piece of Him. And then later it was knowing the comforter piece of Him. And then learning the power of Him. He has so many beautiful qualities that we can learn to continue to know Him on deeper levels.
To know God is a pursuit…
So all that to say, “The Pursuit of God” is one of my favorites because I do feel like that it is a pursuit. It’s a continual pursuit, right? Not only is He pursuing us, He is. But He wants us to pursue Him too. And I do believe it says, “Those who seek Him will find Him.” Well, why do we have to seek Him?
It’s not that He’s hiding. He wants to be sought, right? Because things that are of value, you don’t always just leave laying around somewhere. You have to put them in safe places, precious places where people have to… You think of diamonds. People have to mine for diamonds. And I think there’s pieces of God that we have to mine for, that we press into get to know Him better. We pursue that to know Him.
Excerpt of “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer…
That was a really long intro. So I’m going to read chapter three of “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer. And then we’re going to pray because we’re going to pursue Him this morning.
Chapter three is called “Removing the Veil…”
“Hebrews 10:19, ‘Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.’ Among the famous sayings of the church Fathers, none is better than Augustine’s, ‘Thou hast formed us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee.’
“The great saint states here in few words the origin and interior history of the human race. God made us for Himself. That is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say. Should faulty education and perverse reasoning lead a man to conclude otherwise, there is little that any Christian can do for him. For such a man, I have no message. My appeal is addressed to those who have been previously taught in secret by the wisdom of God.
“I speak to the thirsty hearts whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within them, and such as they need no reasoned proof. Their restless hearts furnish all the proof they need. God formed us for Himself. The shorter Catechism says, ‘Agreed upon by the Reverend Assembly of Divines at Westminster,’ as the old New England Primer has it, asks the ancient questions what and why, and answers them in one short sentence hardly matched in any uninspired work.
“Question: What is the chief end of man?
“Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.
“With this agree the four and twenty elders who fall on their faces to worship Him that liveth forever and ever, saying, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created,” Revelation 4:11.
“God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile. But we have been guilty of that foul revolt of which Milton speaks when describing the rebellion of Satan and his hosts. We have broken with God. We have ceased to obey Him or love Him, and in guilt and fear have fled as far as possible from His presence.
“Yet who can flee from His presence when the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him? When, as the wisdom of Solomon testifies, ‘The Spirit of the Lord filleth the world.’ The omnipresence of the Lord is one thing and is a solemn fact necessary to his perfection. The manifest presence is another thing altogether. And from that presence we have fled, like Adam, to hide among the trees of the garden, or like Peter, to shrink away crying, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord,’ Luke 5:8.
“So the life of man upon the earth is a life away from the presence, wrenched loose from that blissful center which is our right and proper dwelling place, our first estate, which we kept not, the loss of which is the cause of our unceasing restlessness. The whole work of God in redemption is to undo the tragic effects of that foul revolt and to bring us back again into right and eternal relationship with Himself.
“This required that our sins be disposed of satisfactorily and that a full reconciliation be affected and the way open for us to return again into the conscious communion with God and to live again in the presence as before. Then by His prevenient working within us moves us to return. The first comes to our notice when restless hearts feel a yearning for the presence of God and we say within ourselves, ‘I will arise and go to my Father.’ That is the first step. And as the Chinese sage Laozi has said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step.’
“The interior journey of the soul from the wilds of sin into the enjoyed presence of God is beautifully illustrated in the Old Testament tabernacle. The returning sinner first entered the outer court, where he offered a blood sacrifice on the brazen altar and washed himself in the laver that stood near it. Then, through a veil, he passed into the holy place where no natural light could come, but the golden candlestick, which spoke of Jesus, the light of the world, threw a soft glow overall. There also was the showbread to tell of Jesus, the bread of life, and the altar of incense, a figure of unceasing prayer.
“Though the worshiper had enjoyed so much, still he had not entered into the presence of God. Another veil separated from the Holy of Holies, where the mercy seat dwelt and the very God Himself in awful and glorious manifestation. While the tabernacle stood, only the high priest could enter there, and that but once a year with blood, which he offered for his sins and the sins of the people. It was this last veil which was rent when our Lord gave up the ghost on Calvary, and the sacred writer explains that the rending of this veil opened the way for every worshiper in the world to come by the new and living way straight into the divine presence.
“Everything in the New Testament accords with this Old Testament picture. Ransomed men need no longer pause in fear to enter the Holy of Holies. God wills that we should push into His presence and live our whole life there. This is to be known to us as the conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held. It is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day.
“The flame of His presence was the beating heart of the Levitical order. Without it, all the appointments of the tabernacle were characters of some unknown language. They had no meaning for Israel or for us. The greatest fact of the tabernacle was that Jehovah was there. A presence was waiting within the veil.
“Similarly, the presence of God is the central fact of Christianity. At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push into conscious awareness of His presence. That type of Christianity, which happens now to be the vogue, knows this presence only in theory. It fails to stress the Christian’s privilege of present realization. According to its teachings, we are in the presence of God positionally, and nothing is said about the need to experience the presence actually.
“The fiery urge that drove men like McShane is wholly missing and the present generation of Christians measures itself by this imperfect rule. Ignoble contentment takes the place of burning zeal. We are satisfied to rest in our judicial possessions and for the most part, we bother ourselves very little about the absence of personal experience.
“Who is within the veil who dwells in the fiery manifestation? It is none other than God Himself. One God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible. And one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds. God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father and the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and glorified.
“Yet this Holy Trinity is one God, for we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, for there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and the Holy Spirit is all one. The glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
“So in part run the ancient creeds and so inspired word declares. Behind the veil is God. That God after whom the world, the strange inconsistency has felt. If happily they might find Him, Acts 17:27. He has discovered Himself on some extent in nature, but more perfectly in the incarnation. Now He waits to show Himself in ravishing fullness to the humble of soul and the pure in heart. The world is perishing for lack of knowledge of God, and the church is famishing for the want of His presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the presence in spiritual experience and to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged. This would burn away the impurities from our lives as bugs and fungi were burned away by the fire that dwelt in the bush.
“What a broad world to roam in. What a sea to swim in. This God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is eternal, which means that He antedates time and is wholly independent of it. Time began in Him and will end in Him. To it, He pays no tribute. And from it, He suffers no change. He is immutable, which means that He has never changed and can never change in any smallest measure.
“To change, He would need to go from better to worse or from worse to better. He cannot do either. For being perfect, He cannot become more perfect. And if He were to become less perfect, He would be less than God. He is omniscient, which means that He knows in one free and effortless act all matter, all spirit, all relationship, all events. He has no past, and He has no future. He is, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can apply to Him. Love and mercy and righteousness are His. Holiness is ineffable that no comparisons or figures will avail to express it. Only fire can give even a remote conception of it. In fire, He appeared at the burning bush. In the pillar of fire, He dwelt through all the long wilderness journey. The fire that glowed between the wings of the cherubim in the holy place was called the Shekinah, the presence. Through the years of Israel’s glory, and when the old had given place to the new, He came at Pentecost as a fiery flame and rested upon each disciple.
“Spinoza wrote of intellectual love of God, and he had a measure of truth there, but the highest love of God is not intellectual. It is spiritual. God is spirit, and only the spirit of man can know Him really. In the deep spirit of man, the fire must glow, or His love is not the true love of God. The great of the kingdom have been those who have loved God more than others did.
“We all know that they have been and gladly pay tribute to the depths of sincerity of their devotion. We have but to pause for a moment, and their names come trooping past us smelling of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.
“Frederick Faber was one of those souls who panted after God as the roe pants after the water brook. And the measure of which God revealed Himself to His seeking heart set the good man’s whole life afire with a burning adoration rivaling that of the seraphim before the throne.
“His love for God extended to the three persons of the Godhead equally, yet he seemed to feel for each one a special kind of love reserved for him alone. Of God the Father, he sings, “My God, how wonderful Thou art. Only to sit and think of God, oh, what a joy it is. To think the thought, to breathe the name, earth has no higher bliss. Father of Jesus, love’s reward, what rapture will it be, prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee.”
“His love for the person of Christ was so intense that it threatened to consume him and burn within him as a sweet and holy madness that flowed from his lips like molten gold. In one sermon, he says, ‘Wherever we turn in the Church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle, and end of everything to us. There is nothing good, nothing holy, nothing beautiful, nothing joyous which He is not to His servants. No one need be poor because if he chooses, he can have Jesus for his own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus is the joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter our sorrowful hearts. He can exaggerate about many things, but we can never exaggerate our obligation to Jesus or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All our lives long, we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the sweet things that are to be said about Him. Eternity will not be long enough to learn all that He is or to praise Him for all that He has done. But then that matters not, for we shall be always with Him, and we desire nothing more.’
“Faber’s blazing love extended also to the Holy Spirit. Not only in his theology did he acknowledge His deity and full equality with the Father and the Son, but he celebrated it constantly in his songs and prayers. He literally pressed his forehead to the ground in his eager, fervid worship in the third person of the Godhead. In one of his great hymns to the Holy Spirit, he sums up his burning devotion. ‘The Eternal Spirit: O Spirit, beautiful in dread, my heart is fit to break with love of all Thy tenderness for us poor sinners’ sake.’
“I have risked the tedium of quotations that I might show by pointed example what I have set out to say, that God is also vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. Such worship as Faber knew can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge of God. Hearts that are fit to break with love for the Godhead are those who have been in the presence and have looked with open eye upon the majesty of deity.
“Men of breaking hearts had a quality about them not known or understood by common men. They habitually spoke with spiritual authority. They had been in the presence of God, and they had reported what they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for a scribe would tell us what he has read. But the prophet tells us what he has seen.
“The distinction is not an imaginary one. Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen, there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribes sound over evangelicalism, but the church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy presence is a privilege open to every child of God.
“Lastly, let us remember when we are the rending of the veil, we are speaking in a figure and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant, but in actuality, there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience, that veil is made of living spiritual tissue. It is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole being consists. And to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us, and to make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made of can never be anything but deeply painful.
“Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus, and that is what the cross would do to every man to set him free. Let us be ware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life and reckon it crucified.
“But we must be careful to distinguish lazy acceptance from the real work of God. We must insist upon the work being done. We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to imitate Saul and to spare the best of the sheep and the oxen.
“Insist that the work be done in very truth, and that will be done. The cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when the work is finished, and the suffering victim dies. After that, it’s resurrection and glory and power. The pain is forgotten, for the joy that is the veil taken away. And we have entered an actual spiritual presence in the presence of the living God.”
