Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Heather…
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Morning Prayer. My name is Heather Sibinski. I’m one of the pastors here at Living Word. We want to thank you for joining us online.
Book by E.W. Kenyon entitled “In His Presence”
Since we don’t have a worship leader today, I thought it’d be good to read from “In His Presence” from E.W. Kenyon. This book has been blessing me so much, and it’s a classic. But it has those faith foundations that I think sometimes as life and the world gets a little more complicated, it’s nice to go back to that simplicity of those faith foundations and those foundations of prayer of the old-timers, as they like to say. I’m picking up halfway through chapter two. He talks about prayer on a winning basis.
“Prayer on a winning basis”
“God made prayer a winning business proposition. We didn’t ask Him to do it. We didn’t send our representative and say, ‘Now, Father, we want you to give us certain promises and certain abilities.’ No. He did it all. He planned it all for us. He based a prayer life upon His own Word. It was a daring thing for Him to do, but He believed that we would believe. He dared to give His Son. He dared to give man eternal life. He dared to make us new creations.
“Why?
“Because He believed that man would respond to His love and that man when challenged by such grace would meet it with a glad response. And so we are fellowshiping with Him in His faith fight for a lost race. We are helping the men for whom His Son died and has redeemed. Our combat is warring against God’s enemy. It is saving the men for whom Christ died. It is making the strong weak. It is giving God’s children a chance for winning in life’s fight.
“We are the instruments.
“We are the forerunners.
“We are the pioneers in this marvelous life of faith.
“We are joining the men of all ages who have dared to walk where paths have never been.
“We are opening channels for His grace to reach the human race.
“We are God’s under-engineers.
“We are building roads for others to walk upon; our faith life has joined with God’s faith life, and we have become His tilled land, His fellow workers.
“We are the branches that are bearing the real fruit from the real vine.
“We are opening channels through which He can pour Himself out on man.
We are winning…
“Our ministry is not a failure. We are winning. We are making out of these failure men successes. Our union with Him is beckoning other men to dare to come into the union too. They see failures transfigured into successes. They see men who have been held for years absolute slaves to narcotics and drink set free to walk in the fullness of their liberty in Christ. And those in bondage reach their hands out for help, and our Father grasps them and lifts them up onto the solid rock.
“Come on, you pray-ers…
“Join this mighty group of intercessors who are making the desert places blossom like the rose. Come on, you men and women who have never made prayer a business. Make your investment of time. Learn the art, yes, the secret of His greatest business of the age. Throw yourself open. Let Him pour Himself through you until your home and your business and your associates will feel the throb of His mighty life and the lift of His love.
The twofold value of prayer…
“Let me state it with all simplicity possible that you can’t have prayers answered without having miracles performed. If you deny that miracles are for this age, you deny the need and the privileges and the benefits of prayer. The twofold value of prayer lies first in sitting in His presence or in direct fellowship with the Father.
“The second benefit is the answer that comes to us. John says, ‘If we ask anything according to His will, we know that He heareth us, and if we know that He hears us, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked.’ For God the Father to hear my prayer is equivalent to His answering it.
Answered prayer is a miracle…
“Now, for God to hear me is a miracle. For God to answer my prayer, regardless of its nature, is a miracle. Whether my petition is for a postage stamp or for a million dollars, it is a miracle. Any divine intervention, any arrest of the laws of nature that comes in answer to faith is a miracle. If prayer brings an answer, that answer is a miracle. It is then that faith has its true place.
“The instant that you say there are no miracles in this dispensation, you deny that our walk is a walk by faith, and you declare that our faith, our walk, is a walk by reason.
We live by faith…
“I challenge you to find one place where God tells us as believers to walk by reason. God is a faith God. We are a faith family. We are all born by faith. We live by faith. By faith, we live, breathe, and have our being in Christ. If there are no miracles, then there is no reason for faith. If there are no miracles, God can’t answer prayer because He can’t answer prayer of any character that is not a miracle.
The day of miracles is not past…
“You men and women who tell me that you believe the Bible to be the Word of God, that it is God-breathed and without error in the original, and then in the same breath tell me that the day of miracles is past, you are the most illogical thinkers, the most inconsistent believers that the Devil ever deluded. I believe profoundly that the Devil is the deceiver of the whole inhabited earth and of that type of Christian in particular.
Let’s take our place…
“So let us reverently come back to God. Let us take our place. If we pray at all, we expect prayer to be answered. If that prayer is answered, God has done it. And if God has answered prayer, He has performed something outside of the realm of reason. We will have to give up on our prayer life utterly, or we will have to believe in miracles.
God acts in response to our faith…
“I believe in miracles. I believe in divine intervention. I believe that the prayer of faith reaches God our Father, and when it reaches Him, He acts in response to that faith. When He acts in response to our faith, His action is above our reason. It is the realm of miracles. For me to deny the privilege and benefits of prayer would raise a storm of protest among those who deny miracles today. I want you to see, my brother, as you read this today, that your position is untenable. Faith causes a man to act like God. Love makes him like God. Prayer is an excursion into the supernatural realm. You are in the throne room, in the presence of God, of all ability. He has promised to hear your petition and to give you your request. You have come on the ground of His Word.
In prayer, you are doing the Father’s will…
“He said, ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask of my Father in my name, He will give it to you.’ You understand that the words that Jesus spoke were His Father’s words, so you come now with the Father’s words in your lips, and you are making your appeal on the ground of His own Word. You are not a servant. You are not a slave. You are a son [and a daughter]. You are taking Jesus’ place, acting in His stead, doing the Father’s will. You may know that you are the Father’s will, just as Jesus was the Father’s will. Because of His own, He will beget you. You are the fruit of His own Word. You came into being by His own power and ability. You have received eternal life, His very nature. You recognize your place in Christ. You are acting the part of a son. The great unsaved world must know what He has done for them in Christ.
You are doing your part just as Jesus did His part…
“And so you are taking His ability, doing your part in saving of men as Jesus did His part. You belong to a supernatural order of being, whether you recognize it or not, whether you have taken your place or not. You have the ability of the indwelling presence. You have the wisdom that Jesus had in His earth walk because Jesus has been made unto you wisdom. You can think of yourself as linked up with ability, linked with omnipotence. You remember He said, ‘And nothing shall be impossible to you.’ I know that sense knowledge, reasoning shrinks from this, but here is where the challenge of grace leads you. We dare to take our place, dare confess what we are, dare confess that He made us what we are, that we can do what He says we can do because He is at work within us. We have His Word that He is in us. The latent ability and energy within us is His who gave it to us.
The Word is the source of faith…
“This makes the prayer life a master thing. You are not asking for the possible. You are always praying for the impossible. You are asking for things that can’t be done in any human method. Fasting and long hours of prayer do not build faith. Reading books about faith and about men of faith and their exploits stirs in the heart a deep passion for faith but does not build faith. The Word alone is the source of faith, but the Word will not build faith unless it becomes a part of us. ‘If ye abide in me and my words have their place in you,’ that is, they have their place in our conduct.
Faith is built in us by the Word being built into us by acting on it…
“Jesus gave us the key. He said, ‘The words that I speak are not mine, but my Father’s, and the works that He did were not His, but His Father’s.’ Jesus acted on His Father’s words. Jesus never needed faith. He had it unconsciously. Faith is built in us by the Word being built into us by our acting upon it. It is the Word of faith. And so as the Father builds that into us in our daily walk, faith becomes an unconscious asset.
“We come to realize that we are part of Him as a branch is part of a vine, and that He, a part of us as the vine, is a part of a branch, that we have His life, we have His ability, we have His love nature, we have His strength. That gives us an unconscious certainty as we go into His presence.
“We know that we are working together with Him to one common end.
“We know that He is the strength of our life.
“We know that He is our ability.
“We know that we are His righteousness in Christ.
“We know that He needs us to carry out His will.”
Pastor Heather shares…
And so we are taking our place as a son and a daughter, carrying out His dream for man. So it’s that He is working through us, and that prayer, when we’re praying, it’s not through reason. We’re not praying for Him to figure things out in a practical way, right? And sometimes we can do that.
We can be like, “Okay, Lord, I need you to pay this bill, so here’s how you can do this,” and we’ll give Him a little 10-step program, and we’ll help Him out. Like, “You could do it this way. You could do it that way. If you could bring a dog with a sack of money in his mouth and drop it on my front door, that would be great,” right? And maybe He will.
But you know what? When we’re praying, it’s about trusting Him. And He has His own ways, and His ways are way higher than our ways. And so I’ve found sometimes when I’m trying to tell God how to answer my prayer, I need to hush my mouth and just say, “I know that you know, and I know that you know a way.” And speaking the Word, obviously.
We come to Him in faith…
So if you need healing in your body, speak healing, but you also don’t need to tell Him how to do it, right? Just trusting Him that He is still the God of miracles, and that when we’re praying, we’re coming to Him in faith and believing that the things that we’re asking, He’s already doing it as we’re praying, that He’s sending out His ministering spirits. His power is going out. Our words are powerful.
When we don’t know how to pray, He knows how to pray…
So as we pray today, I just thought that was a good encouragement and a reminder that we can pray all the things we know in the natural, and we can pray with reason, and there’s not anything wrong with that. But more importantly, we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, that indwelling power of God, that when we don’t know how to pray, He knows how to pray. And He always knows how to pray the right way.
