Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Good morning, everyone. Oh, happy Wednesday. Hope you’re doing well. Thank you for joining us. My name is Ken Olson and I’m a pastor on staff here at Living Word. And just glad to be with y’all.
God’s taking you somewhere when you pray…
I have a sense that this is what the Spirit of God’s wanting to remind us of. I know this to be true from His Word. That when we come together to pray, when you go into your prayer closet, so to speak, to pray and seek His face as you devote your life to Him one day at a time, one moment at a time, you’re going somewhere. God’s taking you somewhere—taking you somewhere individually and us collectively. He’s taking us down the path that He’s ordained for each of our lives—a path that leads to His high purpose for you, for your family, for those who come after you. Because oh yes, your devotion to Him, your prayers in relationship bring connection with Him, even touch things concerning the future.
Prayer is supernatural technology…
Prayers outside of time, it’s a supernatural opportunity to pray out ahead of time and space, if you will. And to even make a way for those in your family who will come after you. Those halfway around the world who you may never meet.
Prayer is supernatural technology, as I like to say, that God has graced us with, equipped us with, to not be victims any longer, to not be alone any longer, but to be endowed with the great and mighty Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of prayer, who’s our teacher and our guide and our instructor.
Example of how the military trains its personnel…
I’m just thinking of like instructors that teach our military, our Air Force personnel, men and women in the Air Force, how to fly 70-million plus dollar fighter jets. I know that because you may have heard a report of a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier here this last week that fell over with the tug attached to it into the sea. They said it was like $70 million, just that one plane.
But they have ongoing training. There’s instructors and veteran military personnel who are constantly training and instructing. And they’re going through the routine of how to fly that $70 million piece of equipment that you paid for. Ongoing training.
The Holy Spirit also trains and mentors us …
Well, guess what? The Holy Spirit is there in each of our lives to ongoing train us and mentor us and instruct us in the use of supernatural technologies such as your prayer life and your ability to pray in other tongues. Worship is a high form of prayer.
There are various kinds of prayers we see in the Word and the Holy Spirit is our teacher and instructor and helper. Be aware of Him today as we pray. Be aware of Him as you go throughout even the most mundane aspects of your life. That He’s right there with you, instructing you, wanting to download into your heart and into your thinking what direction to go or decision to make…
An example of prayer of identification…
Or maybe you feel a certain way even. I’ve had that happen many times, but just recently I was feeling a certain way, like not feeling so well. Well, it turned out I was picking up, I was identifying as you say, with somebody who was struggling with some sickness and a reaction to some medication actually. And I don’t think I picked it up right away, but eventually I did and began to pray.
God wants to grant us a “level up” in our skills…
So God is at work. As I said yesterday, there’s a lot of supernatural God-ordained activity going on right now. And God wants us to cooperate with that, with the angels, with His Holy Spirit. Each and every day, He’s wanting to grant us a “level up” in our ability and our skillfulness to use our faith to pray, to exercise authority, to worship. Just like those military instructors are constantly teaching and training and running those fighter pilots through drills so that they’re ready to go when they’re called upon.
Are we ready?
Are we ready to go when we’re called upon? I believe we will be. I believe we’re getting there. I wanted to read a classic passage on prayer found in James chapter five. I’m going to read it from the Amplified classic version.
It says this in James 5…
“Confess to one another therefore your faults, your slips, your mess ups, your offenses, your sins, and pray also for one another.” So don’t underestimate the importance of your supply of prayer for those around you, for those in the workplace, in your school, in your home, in your church who just come up in your heart or even things you see on the news.
E.W. Kenyon quote…
E.W. Kenyon once said that many people are falling down under the weight of the challenges that they’re facing each day because nobody is praying. We’re not just to pray for ourselves and our own. God expects and is leading us to pray for things far beyond us, in fact. That’s how much in authority, that’s how much endowment of the Spirit He has equipped us with. That it goes beyond just you and your circle of influence. God wants to change history with your prayers. He wants to affect the atmosphere in nations. He’s wanting to use our supply of the Spirit to affect the decisions in leaders in our own country and around the world.
Kenneth Hagin quote…
So there’s far more authority, far more invested in us through the work of Jesus than we recognize or we’ll ever know, in fact, in this lifetime. Brother Kenneth Hagin said that a number of times at the end of his life, he said, “I’ve come to realize there’s a lot more authority, a lot more that God looks to us to do than we realize.”
Jesus quote…
Jesus often said to those He encountered in His earthly ministry “Be it unto you according to your faith.” He would ask sometimes people, “What would you have Me to do?” So, of course, the enemy’s wanting to lull us into a victim mentality or a hopeless, helpless kind of consciousness.
No, no, no, no!
Shake that off and recognize that the work has been finished in regard to redemption. All the I’s have been dotted, all the T’s have been crossed. Jesus’ officially delegated authority to you and to me, to the church, and that we have the right to the use of His name—that very name that’s been exalted, that very name that the Word describes that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Yeshua is Lord.
The name of Jesus…
You being in His family as his younger brothers and sisters have the right to use the name of Jesus. And evidently according to the Word in some people’s firsthand accounts, at the name of Jesus, jail cells swing open and swing wide. Naturally speaking. Bodies come back to life. Cancer begins to die. People at the threat of imminent death are protected and set free. Angels are dispatched to stop an accident from happening. At the name of Jesus!
God has made available through Jesus all of heaven’s resources…
This isn’t just for Mac Hammond or Billy Graham or some select well-known ministers. What the Bible reveals, what it uncovers and we should discover on a daily basis is for every last one of us in every country around the world, whether you’re in a first-world or a third-world country, regardless of your language, regardless of whether or not you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, God has made available through Jesus the resources and all that is needed to succeed and overcome in life to each and every one of us for free. Through the simple act of discovery. And being made aware on a daily basis, choosing to be a student of the Word and understanding who we now are and what we have received.
James 5:16 continued…
Let me finish this passage in James 5:16. It goes on to say, “Pray for one another that you may be healed and restored to a spiritual tone of mind and heart. The earnest, heartfelt, continued prayer of a righteous man or woman makes tremendous power available, dynamic in its working.”
And I thought I would read on the next couple verses; it says, “Elijah was a human being with a nature such as we have with feelings, affections, and a constitution [or you could say a ‘makeup’] like ours. And he prayed earnestly for it not to rain. And no rain fell on the earth for a space of three years and six months.”
You can look that up in 1st Kings 17:1.
And then in verse 18 it says…
“And then he, Elijah, prayed again, and the heavens supplied rain and the land produced its crops as usual.”
So here’s a guy who we could identify with. If we met him on the streets in the 21st century, we wouldn’t think anything like, “Oh! There’s Elijah! I know him. He’s my neighbor. He is two doors down. He works at the local grocery store, or whatever. He has weaknesses just like me. He’s made up just like me.”
But yet the Bible says he prayed that it would not rain, and then he prayed that it would rain and the heavens responded to his prayers. There’s some deeper meaning here. I believe this also is prophetic and a reminder to us as the end-time church that we are to look to the heavens and pray that the spiritual reigns of awakening and revival would begin to fall once again. And that we would see the harvest and the wrapping up of the end of the age.
The church is on a mission to pray for an awakening…
So God is saying, “Hey, church, realize that you’re on a mission. You’re assigned to this generation to pray for awakening, to pray for revival, to pray that it would rain.” Why? So that the seeds that are already in the earth that have been planted some generations before us through prayer and through work some ministry and through prophecy, that those seeds that have laid latent for years, maybe hundreds of years, would begin to germinate intentions and initiatives of God’s heart, the harvest of the precious… The Bible calls people the precious fruit of the earth.
For harvest, we must first have rain…
Well, for that precious fruit to be produced, there must be first rain. The seeds would germinate that they would grow and that there would be a harvest. So evidently prayer is a part of that. Prayer is a part of the collaborative effort of God. So understand prayer and your devotion to the Lord is taking you somewhere, is taking this whole thing called the plan of God and the church somewhere. It’s taking us down the path of what God has before ordained that we would experience and walk out.
Lester Sumrall testimony…
Now, let me read another testimony to you just to kind of stir up your thinking and perhaps inspire you to give yourself further to prayer, to continue down the road of believing and standing and utilizing all the various kinds of prayer. You understand there’s such a thing as a prayer of faith, prayer of worship, prayer of commitment or consecration. There’s the prayer of intercession.
God wants to lead us into the utilization of all the different kinds of prayer so that fruit would be produced. This comes from Lester Sumrall. He writes of one of his accounts many years ago. Lester Sumrall was a great man of God, great missionary and minister of the Gospel. And he writes this account regarding prayer that he experienced once upon a time.
“The marvelous thing about prayer, it’s so far reaching. The effects of prayer do not know the bounds of distance or time. We can pray for something near or far in the future. We can pray for our neighbor next door or someone halfway around the world. The effect is the same. God hears the prayer of faith and glorifies Himself in the answer.”
Answered prayer brings joy…
The Bible says ask that you may receive that your joy may be full. So evidently answered prayer brings joy to our own hearts. But somebody needs to ask first. So I just double-dog dare you today. If there are things in your heart, ask. I don’t care if it makes you a little uncomfortable. Maybe that’s what the Lord’s prompting you to do. Like, “I don’t know if I can ask for that, Lord. I haven’t been good enough.”
Well, it’s got nothing to do with whether or not you’ve been good enough. Okay? So just root that out of your thinking. It’s all about how good Jesus has been. And He is the darling of heaven, and He put in a perfect performance on yours and my behalf, so that we can identify or find our identity in His perfect performance.
That’s why Paul goes on to write, “Come boldly to the throne of grace that you might obtain.” Boldly. Why? Because you’re righteous. I just feel like that’s making somebody uncomfortable right now on a Wednesday morning.
“Oh, I can’t say I’m righteous.”
In fact, you’re holy!
“Oh, I don’t know if I can really believe that.”
Well, you better believe that brother or sister.
Because the Bible says you have been made righteous. He who knew no sin became sin, that you might be made the righteousness of God in Him. You’ve been called out as a holy priesthood, a royal nation, a people set apart for His purpose, a sacred purpose.
So you can hold your head up high. I don’t care if you’ve been beat up and you got the smell of smoke because you’ve been through some dumpster fires recently on you. It doesn’t matter. Or maybe it’s a little thing that always gets you down, like that eighties, early nineties Christian song. The little things get you down. I don’t remember who did that song, but we can shake those things off too and refresh our consciousness with each passing day. Sometimes moment by moment throughout the day that, “Okay, yeah, greater is He that is in me than He that is in the world. I’ve been made the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. I’m holy. I’m acceptable. I am beloved. I am well pleasing to my Father.”
You may have messed up an hour ago or the last weekend, but if you are endeavoring to walk with Him and you’ve put it under the blood of Jesus, as the saying goes, then you stand right before Him and you are qualified to ask and receive that your joy may be full.
You’ve been sent to earth to be an “asker,” a pray-er, a decree-er…
You’ve been sent into the earth to be an “asker,” to be a pray-er, to be a decree-er, to be a one who prophesies your way forward. You’re going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You’re going to have to make some choices to start saying things before you see them. Because Jesus said, “Whosoever shall believe in his heart and doubt not that what he says will come to pass, he will have whatever he says.” So you’ve got to say things when it doesn’t look like it and it feels like a risk. And what do people think?
You’ve got to step over the threshold of self-preservation…
Most people don’t step out and do things or say things, not because they’re fearful of failure, but because they’re fearful of looking stupid or being embarrassed. And many of the accounts I’ve read through the years of great men and women of God who are bold in their faith and did something great for God, they just stepped over the threshold of self-preservation and what people thought and the fear of man, they just stepped over it and said, “Come forth, you dead bones and come to life.” They spoke things boldly and prophetically. They acted with intention.
Anointed prayer will infuse the pray-er with great courage…
There’s something about prayer that it infuses great courage in you to do things you wouldn’t do in your natural temperament or personality. It’s okay if you’re an introvert. I’m an introvert. It’s okay if you’re an extrovert… a raging extrovert. It’s okay. When you avail yourself to the presence of God, to the Word of God and to prayer in particular, praying in other tongues, the personality of heaven, the personality of Jesus will fill your soul and equip and propel you forward to do what you can’t do on your own in your natural temperament.
