Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Good morning, everyone. Good to see y’all. Happy Tuesday.
There are four things God wants to restore to the church…
I want to share a couple of thoughts in regard to what I’d like to pray about today in particular. I was reflecting and praying a little bit last night, and some things just really stuck out in my spirit. Four things, in fact, that I believe God is wanting to do. And the more I reflected, the more I realized God wants us to pray about these things. At first, I thought, this is what God wants to do this morning, which I believe He does want to do this in our hearts. But in addition, He wants us to pray about these four things that He wants to restore for our church, for our youth, for our MCA students, for those in our household. This is something I believe He wants to do right now in particular. And He wants us to join Him in agreement. He, once again, has chosen to partner with us in the execution of His plans. And so I want us to step into agreement and pray about these things in just a bit here.
Number one: God wants to restore lost purpose and hope…
There are four things. The first one is simply this: He desires and wants to restore lost purpose and hope. Can anybody ever identify with losing track of your purpose and your hope? And I say this because, I was reminded of a strategy of ancient Israel’s enemies. They would oftentimes take up the strategy to fill in the wells and the cisterns that Israel drew its water from for themselves and for their livestock. They would attempt to poison and fill in even with earth the wells of Israel to clog and stop the flow that sustained life.
And I believe that’s an analogy for our hearts, for our lives. Is there any wonder why the enemy attempts to poison us with unforgiveness or trauma or discouragement or despair or things like that? Is there any wonder why the enemy attempts to distract us and overschedule us and cause us to be perpetually focused from an intellectual standpoint on our world and circumstances, and even our ministries. He’s attempting to fill in our wells so that there’s no life or sustenance to draw from.
Prophetic word—Re-dig those wells…
But can I just give you a prophetic word this morning? It’s time to re-dig with those ancient wells, the ones that Abraham and Isaac once dug. As it says in the Old Testament, it’s time to re-dig the well that’s on the inside of us. As Pastor Lynne once said, “You got to clean out the clutter in your soul, so that there is a free flow of heaven to earth of heaven to your life. So the Holy Spirit is able to do what He wants to do.” So God desires to restore lost purpose and hope. That’s number one.
Number two: God wants to rekindle our spiritual hunger and holy fire…
Ephesians 1:11 says, “Before we were even born, He gave us our destiny that we would fulfill the plan of God who always accomplishes every purpose and plan of his heart.” That’s in the Passion translation. The second thing God desires to do and He wants us to pray about… and I challenge you if this resonates with you, believe that He’ll do that right now in your life. The second thing is He wants to rekindle our spiritual hunger and holy fire. Matthew 5:6 says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” That simply is the rightness of God. “…for they shall be filled.” I love that word “blessed” at the beginning of Matthew 5:6. That means “empowered to prosper.” You were automatically empowered to prosper and succeed when you are spiritually hungry. So God wants to rekindle that in us.
Number three: God wants to rejuvenate us with joy…
Three, He wants to rejuvenate us with joy. Is there anybody that could use a little bit more joy? Is it just me? Come on now! Isaiah 56:7 says, “Even them I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful.” Somebody say “Joyful.” “Joyful in my house of prayer. Their burned offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” So you can expect to receive joy this morning because you are engaged in prayer today.
Number four: God wants to reset our spiritual focus back to relationship with Him…
The fourth thing that I believe God wants to do in our hearts as followers of Jesus is that He wants to reset our spiritual focus back to relationship with Him. I think actually this is may be more needful the longer we journey with Him because there’s this thing in organizations called “complexity creep” where things tend toward overscheduling and over legislation in government and things just get more complex and clunky and murky and burdensome. And I think of that concept from the business realm because I think that’s true with us spiritually. We tend to move toward getting overscheduled. We tend to get caught up in the dos and the don’ts sometimes, and legalism and trying to be good and not be bad. “And am I doing this right? Am I doing that right?” And drifting from our true focus, which is what Jesus has already done on our behalf. And taking advantage of His grace.
John 17:3. I love this. I quote it almost every week. Jesus defined what eternal life was: “And this is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus whom you have sent.” So God wants to reset us, I believe, back to His original intent, which is connection, friendship, relationship with Him. Everything flows out of that place, right?
Excerpt from devotional…
Pastor Trina shared with me a short devotional yesterday. I want to read it to you.
“Beloved, I’m your Savior and Lord. Yes, but I am also your friend. I enjoy spending time with you and hearing about the things that are on your mind. I love laughing with you, creating with you, working with you, and being by your side when you rest. I’m involved in your life. I see every moment of every day. I know what makes you tick. And I even love your personality. I gave it to you, after all. I will give you all that you need to grow and become more like Me. I don’t pull away from you when you neglect Me, nor will I ever reject you. I will not judge you based on your weakness but will cheer you on and remind you of who you are. I can do more than encourage you when you’re having a bad day. I can infuse you with strength and wash away your weariness with a smile. So come and enjoy the sweetness of our friendship. And I will share the secrets of My heart with you.”
I love that. That’s simple. He just simply wants to share the secrets of His heart with you, which are the secrets of His kingdom and the secrets of His plan and purpose that He has predestined for you and me that we would walk out and engage in on a daily basis. It all starts there.
It started when I was a young person…
For me, it all started when I was a young person. I grew up just north of the cities in a rural area, small farm. And one of the things I had discovered early was that I could talk to God without any particular religious air or christianese sort of language. I could just talk with Him. I was an athlete and so in the springtime, I would walk up and down the fields and hit baseballs and softballs. I would just talk through my problems, my aspirations, my hopes, and my dreams with the Father. And I found that He would talk back to me, and He would comfort me. Of course, I would later discover that the Holy Spirit is our comforter, right? One of His primary job descriptions is that He comes to comfort and impart hope and speak to our hearts.
It’s hardwired into our DNA to converse with the Father…
So I remind us all of that this morning. It’s hardwired into our DNA to hear from God, to converse with Him, to even hear Him on a given day, “I enjoy you.” The Spirit of God will even say that to you. “I enjoy you. I love you. I want to spend time with you. I want you to know Me more. I want to hear your heart.”
Let the Holy Spirit make course corrections in your life…
In fact, in Pastor Lynne’s book, “The Master Is Calling,” she shares in the first chapter one of the keys to effective prayer, powerful prayer. The antidote to when we have seasons where we’re just covered over and distracted by so many things, and it feels like we’re barren, so to speak, spiritually in the prayer place. But maybe even our calling in our ministry. It’s like nothing seems to be moving forward, and we’re just stuck in some ways. And she actually points to this very need of resetting ourselves perpetually, almost like a jetliner course corrects a thousand times on its way from Los Angeles to New York City. If it doesn’t constantly course correct, it’ll never hit the mark of the airport in New York City. And so that’s true for us. We’ve got to perpetually let the Holy Spirit course correct us in ministry, in life, in whatever we’re called to do.
But it’s interesting, Pastor Lynne talks about this in the first chapter about Hannah and how Hannah was barren for years. And she wept and fasted because she could not bring forth a child. Hannah eventually got results.
Excerpt from Pastor Lynne’s book, “The Master Is Calling”…
“How did she get such remarkable results? Did she obtain them by mechanically applying a formula for answered prayer? Did she get them by working up the best, most wonderfully sounding petition she possibly could? No. She did it by pouring out her heart honestly and openly to God.”
You can say amen right there, by the way. Because you know that’s good. It may be simple, but that’s good. I don’t know about you, but I need to hear that. It says King David poured out his soul like water before the Lord. There’s therapy in that. There’s opportunity for God to speak and to surgically work in our souls and our emotions, in our thoughts. And, yes, in our will even. God helps our wills. He stated in His Word that “I desire to will in you My desire and My good pleasure.” But sometimes we don’t let Him. We’re too busy, or we don’t open the door to our hearts and we don’t pour our hearts out to Him. She goes on to say…
“And by believing He heard and answered her prayer just as the priest said He would. If you’re sensing barrenness in your prayer life, you may need to do the same thing. You may need to do what Lamentations 2:19 says and arise from your bed. Cry out in the night at the beginning of the watches and pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord.”
You see your soul is like a container. It has many things inside. Most people just try to relate to God from the surface of that container. So their relationship with Him remains very superficial. Those people remind me of a teacher I had in seventh grade. She was an extremely unique person, and one of the most memorable things about her was that she had a closet in her classroom. She packed it so full that she couldn’t open the door all the way because if she did, a mountain of stuff would come tumbling down upon her. Whenever she brought a coat to school, she would open the closet just to crack, jam the coat inside and slam the door. Some people’s souls are just like that. They’re cluttered with spiritual debris and emotional junk they’ve accumulated over the years. What they need to do is open the door to their hearts and let everything just fall out before the Lord.”
Whew! I sense an anointing on that.
“In other words, they need to get very honest before God. Actually, we all need to do that. We need to stop trying to present to God our spiritual side, the part of us that is all brushed up nice and neat. We need to be real and admit to God we have problems with our attitudes and motivations and ask Him to come in and change them.”
That, my friends, I’ll say is bottom-line Christianity. We just give Him opportunity to do work in us before He’s ever able to do a work through us. But make no mistake about it, He does the work.
“Did you know you can keep God out of certain areas of your life by refusing to expose them to Him. You can close the door on Him by failing to communicate with Him honestly about them and trying to act like something you’re not.”
I know there’s nobody that has ever done that, especially in here, right? No.
“But by the same token, you can throw open the door with simple honesty and prayer by saying, ‘God, did you know what I thought this morning? It was the most ghastly thing. I need you to forgive me and help me in that area.’ Pouring out your soul is like cleaning out the cluttered closet. Some things just need to be confessed and put under the blood of Jesus and thrown away forever. Other things like cares and worries need to be given to God in faith. Still other issues may just need to be discussed with the Father, then put back in your heart in a more orderly fashion. You may even discover some things within you that are too big to articulate in words. You can sense them there, but you don’t know exactly what they are, much less how to communicate them. In those instances, you can pour them out to the Lord in other tongues.”
Prayer is just simply lifting up to Him what’s going on with you…
Can I just give you permission with something this morning? There are times when, yeah, you don’t exactly know… I’ll be honest, there have been times in my life where I didn’t really know what was going on in my heart. I don’t know why I was feeling the way I was feeling. Maybe it was quasi good, maybe it wasn’t so much. And I would just go to my prayer closet, and I just say, “Lord, I don’t know what’s going on, but I just lift that up to you right now.” Because one form of prayer is just simply lifting up to Him what’s going on with you? What you know, the best as you know. And sometimes I’ll just say, “Lord, I’m just going to use my tongues, my prayer language, and I’m just going to articulate from my spirit, even though I don’t comprehend what I’m saying, what’s going on inside of me. You know, Lord. Because your Word says that the deep in me cries out to the deep in you.”
And when there’s that connection, then there begins a flow of healing, a flow of wisdom, a flow of transformation, a flow of prayer. But when you lift it up and you’re open and honest and truthful with yourself and with God, then the most amazing thing happens. God then sends back to you wisdom.
As Pastor Lynne has often said, He may grant you prayers to pray that furthers your progress in the plan of God, furthers your healing and your deliverance and what God wants to do. There have been times where I’ve been in my prayer closet and hurting in some way and just said, “Lord, I don’t know what this is, but I just lift it up to you. You are ultimately the restorer of my soul, the one who breathes life into me, not just once upon a time at an altar, but perpetually.”
He wants to breathe life into us. We have to be hungry for that, pursuers of that. We need His breath in our spiritual lungs. We need His beat in our heart. And we ought to be the most desperate people, as John Lake once said, upon the earth. Because it’s our hunger and our passion to have Him and want Him and seek Him, that empowers us automatically to receive and to be changed. Not our best efforts, although there needs to be effort at times applied to the will of God. I get that. So let me finish this last excerpt here.
“I found myself just weeping and just like my soul convulsing at times, but I knew the Holy Spirit was doing surgery in me, lifting things off of me.”
Sometimes that’s all He wants to do. He just wants to lift a monkey off your back. I’ve had that experience before. Just something was just dogging my way. He just wanted to deliver me and lift it off of me, and He did.
She says, “You may find yourself weeping as you do that. If so, just yield.”
In fact, I’m just going to encourage you guys to do that right now. Just yield. I do that all the time. “Holy Spirit, I just yield to you, not my will or my way, or what I have to offer, but what you are, Lord, let that be in me and through me.
“Just yield to that weeping because it is the Holy Spirit moving upon you. Keep praying until you feel the peace of God and sense that you have finished pouring your heart out. If your closet hasn’t been cleaned up for a while, that means your heart, or your soul, it may take you more than one prayer session to reach that sense of completion. If so, that’s fine. Set aside time each day and keep going back to the Lord until with the help of the Holy Spirit, you get the job done. From then on, keep your soul uncluttered by communicating to the Lord often, honestly, openly, and always straight from the heart.”
