Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Heather…
Praise the Lord. Good morning, everyone.
To be indwelled by His presence, we have to be present…
In order to welcome and sense His presence, to be indwelled by His presence, we have to be present ourselves. Sometimes we come here and being staff, we have a full workday ahead of us. And a lot of you watching online, you have a full workday ahead of you. And so you’re here, you’re being filled, but you’re probably like, “Okay, I got to send that email. I got to schedule that calendar invite. I got to go to that meeting.” Your brain is going… But if we can just slow down, be present, welcome His presence. He is the great I am, meaning He is now. He’s the beginning, He’s the end. He’s all of that wrapped up. But He moves in our “nows.” He protects us from our past. He goes before us. But He moves in the present. And we have to be fully present: mind, heart, spirit, body, all of that. We have to be fully present in order to receive what He’s doing, in order to allow Him to move inside of us.
And so I want to press into that again. Let’s be fully present. And I know we have things to do. We have to-do lists. Our minds might be going fast and thinking about the things that we have to do today, or maybe the thing that happened yesterday, the thing that might happen next week, but we need to be present. That’s where He moves and that’s where He can go into our future and do those things. That’s when He can go into our past and protect us when we’re allowing Him to move in our presence and we’re fully present.
So everybody just close your eyes and take a deep breath.
Prayed…
Father, we’re present. We choose to be present right now. We choose to abide, to just sit in this moment with you, to allow you to move how you want to move in our hearts, in our minds, in our bodies, in our families, in our jobs. As we sit in your presence, as we wait on you, you are moving.
Book entitled, “True Stories of the Miracles of Azusa Street and Beyond”
Last Tuesday, Pastor Ken read out of the book, “True Stories of the Miracles of Azusa Street and Beyond” by Tommy Welchel. And I came up afterwards and I was like, “What’s that book?” And I bought it on my iPad here and devoured it in like a few days. It’s so amazing. I highly recommend if you haven’t read it, to read it.
But it’s all the miracles that took place at the Azusa Street Revival. And the thing that I love most about all of it is that God used what kind of looked like to the world, this group of misfits. A man that came out of slavery, blind in one eye and would sit with a box on his head. They were teenagers and young people. It was maybe not what people would think how God would move, right? But I think because of their hunger and because of their humility, that’s why He chose them to pour out this amazing outpouring of His glory of healings.
You read about these healings, just crazy things. Legs growing out, arms growing out, teeth growing in, tumors dropping off of people’s bodies like down on the floor. They’d have clean it up. I mean, just amazing miracles.
Shekinah glory…
But one thing they talk about quite a bit is the Shekinah glory. And if you look in the Bible, you won’t see the word Shekinah glory. It’s more like a Hebrew word for the presence of God as in that same glory that was like a cloud around Mount Sinai when Moses was up there. They referred to that as the Shekinah glory, the presence of God in a manifest way where you could see it.
I’ll just read a couple little excerpts. This got me fired up. Like, why don’t we have this? I don’t think we’re hungry enough for it. I’ll take my part. And I’m trying to stir myself up in that. What am I distracting myself with right now? What am I pressing into? What’s taking the majority of my time, my thoughts, my energy, my resources? And if it’s not Him, then we’re in trouble.
William Seymour was leader…
William Seymour was the man that started this revival; he was the leader of the services that they had. The Lord told him to sit with a box on his head. So bizarre. But he obeyed. It said, “Soon after the singing started, he would sit and he would sing with them after he’d take the box off of his head. And soon after the singing started, Seymour would say, ‘sing in the Spirit.’ Whenever that happened, heaven itself came down and filled the room. The music was beyond description, pure, powerful, sanctified. These melodies became known as a new song, and the crowd began to sing in a heavenly language, sometimes in tongues, sometimes without words. At times, it seemed as if angels joined in the singing of these new songs led by the Spirit of God.
“Although singing in the Spirit was already a part of many of the services, when Brother Sims and Brother Christopher became part of the leadership team… [They were musicians.] The music reached deeper into heaven. With the addition of piano and violin, the new heavenly song went beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary. Brother Sims was about 26 years old when he came to the Azusa Revival in 1907. He was a bit older, but still quite young to be a part of the leadership team that led the services.
“Sims recalled with joy the experience of singing in the spirit. He remembered that virtually every time Seymour instructed them to sing in the Spirit, something wonderful and beyond understanding would happen. The music would rise to a new level, and the sound that came from Azusa was like a heavenly choir singing.
“Like Sims, Christopher loved the music at Azusa and confirmed that the experience of singing in the spirit was unequaled by anything he had ever experienced in his musical career. An accomplished concert violinist equaled by few, he would share with me that when he played in the spirit, he played at a level he’d never achieved even in his greatest concert. He too said that he would just watch his hands moving while hearing thousands of violins.
“Brother Christopher also talked about the Shekinah glory and told me that he even tried to bottle it. To his disappointment, there was nothing in the bottle the next day. However, there were mighty works of God and bore witness that if you were at Azusa and your heart was right, God found a way to involve you in His miraculous works.
Christopher would talk about how shy he was. “If something like shyness kept you from going to the people, God in His marvelous ways would bring the people to you. I would sit at (?) wondering what it must have been like to hear them play when God’s Spirit took the music to a heavenly realm as the people sang a new song. I remember someone writing or saying that the music was like the very breath of God coming forth from human vocal chords. I can only imagine.
“Most of the time the Shekinah glory was spoken of with reverence. But there was one time Brother Riggs revealed a lighter side. He told me that when Seymour would come down from his apartment, the Shekinah glory would get so thick that you could hardly see the ground. With a sly smile, he confessed that when it was thick, he and Ward would get in the back of the room and play hide and go seek in the mist. My mind would wander back to these days of Azusa, and I could picture him running around full of life as he and the other youth were involved in this awesome outpouring of God.
“I asked him to seriously talk to me about the Shekinah glory. Brother Riggs explained the experience much like his mother did. I tasted a bit of heaven. Ward and I would talk and share that Azusa must have been what heaven is like. God must have sent a part of heaven down here.”
And then now he’s talking to another lady that was there.
“And he would meekly ask her to describe what the Shekinah glory was like. She would get such joy in her eyes as she told me how much she loved to be in the center of the mist-like cloud. She was so little in stature. She would sit down in it and when it was thick, the mist was about up to her neck. Like a kid, she would have fun and play in the mist. She would often lie down, breathing it in. She could feel the energy of it and describe that it was like pure oxygen being breathed into her lungs. She could smell it too. The scent was like lilac to her. Others said it smelled like roses. The aroma depended on what part of the building you were in at the time.
“When Brother Seymour was there and they would sing in the spirit, Sister Lucille told me that the Shekinah glory would just rise and fill the whole room and you could breathe so much better.”
And then later on he says, “I sat there thinking, it’s no wonder they had such a revival. No wonder this thing went worldwide. Yes, they received the speaking in tongues and that was great, but the miracles that were performed were not done by big preachers. Many of those being used by God were just ordinary teenagers and young people doing extraordinary works through God.” [end quote]
If you have time to get that book, I highly recommend it. It talks about the Shekinah glory, but it really goes through these amazing miracles and things that they experienced. And I’m not here to talk about this, like we want to seek a manifestation. But we do want to seek His manifest presence. And when we’re in His presence and when we’re seeking it and our hearts are hungry like these young people like Brother Seymour and all these teenagers that were doing. They said there was like a group of maybe about a dozen teenagers and they would do four to five to six miracles a day. Each of them… growing out legs, healing bodies.
It started with two older ladies seeking and praying…
And I think it starts with our humility and our hunger. And I’m challenging myself. And I ask that you challenge yourself as well. Like, what am I seeking? Am I hungry? And it started because two little old ladies were praying in an apartment. And then Brother Seymour was led of the Lord to get on a train at night… and he was a black man so he was not allowed to be on the train at night. But the Lord instructed him. So he obeyed. So it was very dangerous thing that he did. And he took the train and the Lord told him to get off at a certain place and to walk up to a certain apartment and knock on a door. And these two little old ladies were in there praying for revival and they had been praying for many months.
“Yes, can we help you?”
And they opened the door and to their surprise is this large black man blind in one eye. And they said, “Yes, can we help you?” And he said, “Have you been praying for revival? I’m the person that’s supposed to help bring it here.” And that’s when they started. And they bought a warehouse and started praying and it was just him and a bunch of teenagers that started this revival.
It was their hunger and their humility. And they weren’t coming in with any agenda except just to seek God and to allow Him to move the way that He wanted to move. And the healings are amazing. So read that book. It’s really encouraging.
