Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Pastor Ken…
Good morning, everyone. Good to see you. Welcome to Tuesday Morning Prayer.
It’s about the oil of the Holy Spirit…
I have a simple reflection this morning that has to do with the oil of the Holy Spirit. I know that we focus a lot maybe individually in our lives, as ministries, departments, as individuals in a particular calling that God has us in or on. And we may focus a lot in the natural as to how we can level up or improve our skillfulness or our ability or our strategy or organization or our wisdom or knowledge in a particular field. But at the end of the day, we have to recalibrate ourselves on a regular basis that it’s about the oil of the Holy Spirit, that we are anointed.
Isaiah 61:1…
It says in Isaiah 61:1, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.”
Acts 10:38…
Then in Acts 10:38, it says “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil for God was with Him.”
God is with us. And I know maybe we, once upon a time, received the initial infilling of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in a heavenly language. But God intends for us to regularly and consistently be filled, be anointed with the oil of His Spirit. We need that more than ever. I need that more than ever. I’m dependent on that more than I’m dependent on my next level up in my skillfulness and my job. I need His anointing.
First John 2:20…
1st John 2:20 says, “But you have an anointing from the holy one. And you know all things.” If you jump down into verse 27, it says, “But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you. And you do not need that anyone teach you. But as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things and is true and is not a lie and just as it has taught you, you will abide in him,” in the Holy Spirit in His anointing.
Matthew 25…
And then lastly, I was reminded of the passage found in Matthew 25, where Jesus writes about the 10 virgins: the five foolish and the five wise. And it says in verse two, “Now five of them were wise and five were foolish. Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them.” Oil of the Holy Spirit. “But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.” The Amplified says they took extra flasks of oil. They filled up. They replenished themselves with the oil of the Holy Spirit for their journey.
Acts 1:8…
In Acts 1:8, it says, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” So I just want to draw our attention to the fact that it’s the oil of the Holy Spirit rubbed on us and in us and in our lives that is the difference maker and the key to what God has for us and wants to do through us in the coming days as a staff, as individuals.
King David was successful because of the anointing…
King David had many victories in war, but it wasn’t his great strategy but the presence of God, the anointing, that caused him to be successful. He made many good decisions. But it wasn’t his personal great discernment, it was the Holy Spirit that made the difference. He had amazing loyalty among his men, but it wasn’t his charisma or ability to win friends or influence people. It was the anointing on and in his life that drew the right people to him.
We need to have our oil replenished every day…
So I just want to remind us of that this morning. The importance of the oil of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit would just replenish in us today as we worship and set our focus on Him this morning.
Prayed…
Holy Spirit, we just welcome you in this place today. We thank you for your presence and for the oil of your Spirit. And we recognize that it’s not our ability or our skillfulness in the natural that’s going to get the job done. We know, Lord, that unprecedented times require unprecedented levels of God the Holy Spirit in our lives.
And so, Lord, as we just turn our thoughts and our affections and our attention to you today as a people. We do so, Lord, with the remembrance that you’ve created us not to go it alone, not to do it out of memory and what we’ve learned in the past in our lives spiritually, but to recalibrate our perspective and our hearts and our faith on and in you, Lord, and in your anointing to be the difference maker, to be the thing that takes us from where we are to where you’re calling us to be, individually and collectively.
And so, Lord, we just call out to you today and say, “Lord, we need you. We can’t go it alone. We can’t do it by ourselves or because of our great natural learnings.” Instead, Lord, we choose to lean in today to put our faith in you and say, “Lord, have your way during this time. Fill our hearts, replenish our souls.” We pray that your anointing, the oil of your Spirit would freely penetrate our hearts and those areas that are dry and dusty and in need of a touch of God. We don’t want to do it going forward on our own. We want to do it in collaboration and in contact with you.
Last night, I jotted this down…
“We don’t necessarily need better skills, although skills are good, right? We don’t necessarily need a bigger budget, although resources, financially and otherwise, are good. We don’t need necessarily another post-modern strategy, but we do need the Spirit of God to inundate and overtake our lives.”
Let’s put our faith in the anointing of the Spirit…
So I feel the Lord prompting us this morning to, once again, put our faith in the anointing, in the oil of the Holy Spirit to do what we can’t do on our own, whether it’s in this time of prayer. We can’t even pray on our own. We need the inspiration of the Spirit. We need God-granted prayers to be breathed through us today, individually and collectively in the Spirit and in our understanding. We need the oil of the Holy Spirit to regenerate and recreate us from the inside. God never intended us to reach a certain plateau as leaders, as individuals, as followers of Jesus. He intended us to perpetually be recreated, reinvented to live not out of memory or what we have known from the past, but out of inspiration.
He wants to take us places we’ve never been before…
I feel like that’s one of the things the Lord’s put His finger on right now in the church. And for us is that He wants to take us places we’ve not been before. And that will require an abandoning of what we’ve known in some ways, a greater reliance on the inspiration and the uprising, if I can put it that way, inside of us of the Holy Spirit to take us where we’ve not gone before.
The life of Brother Nash…
I love what Brother Nash once said. He was an associate of Charles Finney. He was one that Charles Finney put a lot of credit toward in regard to the fruitfulness of his ministry back in the 19th century because of Brother Nash’s prayers, and anointing and inspiration to pray. And Brother Nash once said, “I am convinced it’s my privilege and duty and the duty of every Christian to pray for as much of the Holy Spirit as came down on the day of Pentecost and a great deal more.”
He went on to write, “My body’s in pain, but I’m happy in my God that I’ve only just begun to understand what Jesus meant when He said, ‘All things whatsoever you ask in prayer, believing you shall receive.’”
So my prayer this morning is that we would just be anointed afresh as a people, that we would be anointed. I don’t know about you, but that’s as bottled as deep as my prayer life gets sometimes. “Lord, I need a fresh infilling of your Spirit.”
It’s our job to position ourselves to receive from Him…
That’s my job to see to it that I position and posture myself in such a way that I receive from Him, that He has opportunity to download and disperse in me His presence and the oil of His Holy Spirit. Just something about the anointing. If we will live holy-filled and flooded and abandoned to God, there’s something about that, that allows God to do things on a level we can’t do in our natural limitations. Hallelujah.
Prayed…
And so, Father, as we enter into worship this morning, we thank you that you’re here. We sense your presence all around. We sense your angels, Lord, who thank you for your presence.
Lord, we repent for going it alone, for trying to work things out in our intellect, for striving and struggling in our natural human agency.
We pray for the rain of God the Holy Spirit in our lives and in all that we set our hands to.
Lord, we just bow to you and say prepare in us a heart… change our hearts, Lord, rearrange us on the inside. Make adjustments that are necessary in even the most simplest of ways.
The habit of brother Nash…
One of the reasons why Charles Finney leaned so heavily on Brother Nash is because of the results that he saw. Father Nash was known to go into cities and countryside and places sometimes days and even weeks ahead of Charles Finney meetings. And Nash would fast and pray. He and a couple of others would just pray for days and weeks in some cases. And then when Finney would come with his team to preach and hold those meetings, it was almost like the will of God took care of itself. The lost souls of men and women would just be swept into the kingdom.
Let’s be bulldozers for the Lord…
We see in the Word that prayer pushes back darkness, but prayer also bulldozes and makes a way where there isn’t a way. And the image I got… and I think we need to pray here just for a little bit about something in particular. The image I got in my mind was World War II, in places like the far-flung islands of the east. The military would go in with bulldozers and equipment and they would build new runways on the far-flung islands of the Pacific so that there would be a refueling stations and places for operations in that theater of the military at the time to conduct themselves.
And I just saw us praying, preparation for the Lord to land on areas that we’re going to prepare right now as pray-ers to conduct operations where He hasn’t previously done so, to touch lives and do things that we don’t even realize are possible right now.
Prayed…
And so, Father, we just come together united in faith this morning with the understanding from your Word that things occur, things are set in motion when we pray… things are prepared, even at the proclamation of our words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And so we declare preparations today out ahead of the coming days and weeks and months. We declare preparation. We declare that there would be built a highway for our God even as John the Baptist came to prepare the way of Jesus in His earthly ministry.
We pray, Lord, for preparations now in our own hearts, that new landings strips and runways, spiritually speaking, would be prepared in our lives and in our services.
