Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Welcome to Wednesday morning prayer. Good to have you with us. If you don’t already know, my name is Ken and glad to be with you guys this morning.
Upper Midwest Faith Explosion announcement…
I wanted to give you a friendly reminder that there is no service here at Living Word tonight. So our normal Wednesday night service is canceled in lieu of the beginning of our Upper Midwest Faith Explosion tomorrow night. So make note of that. Guest speakers will be Terri Saville Foy, Kenneth Copeland, and Jesse Duplantis.
What we need is total immersion…
Sometimes what is needed in our lives, whether it’s us desiring to go to the next level of what God intends for us or we need a breakthrough in some way, what I’ve found what is needed is total immersion. Time to just be saturated and immersed in the presence and Word of God. After all, Jesus Himself said that His words were spirit and life. And I like to say that God’s Word is chock full of spiritual DNA and carries with it healing and deliverance and whatever is needed for your particular situation. The Word of God is full of deliverance, full of healing, full of life. So just have that expectation. Never get so familiar in your journey with God, in His presence, in His Word that we forget to understand that we’re privileged to be able to engage with the supernaturalness of God, the power of God, the Word of God.
I often “check” myself…
And I think I do that often where I check myself, I remind myself that, “Hey, I’m not just coming before any person. I’m coming before the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords when it comes to prayer, when it comes to my personal time with Him.” So I ought to prostrate my heart in such a way that I’m honoring Him, that I’m worshipful toward Him. I ought to lift up holy hands. I ought to lean in and endeavor to block out all the distractions of my day or week and focus on Him. He is worthy.
He deserves our all and all…
In reality, most of us don’t give the lion’s share of our life to Him as far as time. It’s maybe an hour here, an hour there, a service here, a service there. But the rest of the time is spent on what we want. So He deserves our all and all. He deserves our attention and our quality focus.
I was thinking the other day how when you surrender yourself to Him with your worship, with your prayer, with your focus and attention, you connect with everything Jesus purchased and paid for through His surrender, through what He accomplished in the surrendering of His life on the cross. So just have that expectation this morning.
Sometimes a change in perspective is all that is needed…
I also was thinking about how all that is needed to do to change is to have a change in perspective. That having faith or really believing in having faith is as simple as hearing from God. And so I just want to encourage you this morning that God is speaking and that He is reminding us that “I’m with you. I’m for you. I’m in you. I’m still at work.” And He will continue to be at work in our praying this morning to shift the course of events in the direction of what He intends for our churches, for our homes, for our nation.
This is the day the Lord has made so, “Let’s go!”
So I’m excited this morning. God’s up to some big things, some good things. Today is going to be a really good day. What is it? The 14th of August? Let’s go! But this is the day the Lord hath made. We get to rejoice and be glad in it.
Prayed…
And so, heavenly Father, we thank you this morning for your faithfulness, that we can come humbly before you today and surrender our lives and in doing so connect with everything you purchased and paid for through your surrendered life.
So, Lord, we’ve come to work with you, to make ourselves available to your plan and your purposes here today.
We recognize your presence, and we humbly submit to the ministry and the operating of the Holy Spirit in this place this morning. Lord, we just want what you want. That’s our prayer. Hallelujah. Glory to God.
Jesus was an example for us as to how we’re to live…
I have a couple of things in my heart. As we were worshiping, this verse came to me. It’s found in Galatians chapter five. And the gist of what I want to remind us regarding this morning is connected to what I said yesterday, how Jesus labored in the Spirit. When He prayed, He was intense and focused when He was with His Father to hear from Him, to co-labor with Him in the Spirit. He gave Himself to a life in the spirit.
And as a result, as one author writes, when He went out to minister the next day, it was effortless to raise the dead. There was an effortlessness and “organicness” about the ministry God wanted to perform through Him. Because it wasn’t Him, Jesus the man. It was the Spirit of God that was on Him. It was the fact that He had given Himself to what was primary and most fundamental and that was connection with His Heavenly Father. And as a result, everything flowed as it should. And that’s a great example and reminder for us as to how we’re to live.
Galatians 5:16…
Galatians 5:16, Passion translation. Paul writes to the Church of Galatia, “Let me emphasize this, as you yield to this dynamic life and power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life.”
Anybody here could use some deadening of your self-life and your own will and your own propensity to be tempted in some regard. Well, guess what? The New Testament says it’s not us mustering up more willpower to resist the enemy or resist our lower nature that gets the job done. It is yieldedness to God the Holy Spirit. The life of grace is a life led by God the Holy Spirit.
“That’s a good word, Pastor Ken.” Well, I’m glad that you agree. Somebody share that online.
God has called us to be led, to be surrendered, to perpetually surrender and seek to follow Him whom Jesus sent and said would be to our advantage that He would inhabit us and indwell us and guide us and empower us. So even the simplicity of yielding yourself to prayer in other tongues strengthens you, empowers you, enables you to go God’s route in that decision or in that area in your life. It deadens the works of the flesh and the harassing voices of the enemy.
The Holy Spirit helps us to abandon the cravings of our self-life…
Let me read this again here. “Let me emphasize,” Paul writes, in the paraphrase of the Passion Bible, “As you yield to this dynamic life and power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life. When your self-life craves the things that offend the Holy Spirit, you hinder Him from living free within you.”
And of course, we want the Spirit to live free and released in us.
“And the Holy Spirit’s intense cravings hinder your self-life from dominating you. So then the two incompatible and conflicting forces within you are your self-life of the flesh and the new creation of the Spirit. But when you yield to the life of the Spirit, you will no longer be living under the law, but soaring above it.”
Learn to orient your life in surrender to Him…
And I would suggest to you that all the things that we desire and we intensely pray about, come more easily and more organically when we learn to orient our lives in surrender to Him, in giving ourselves to Him, and putting Him first place.
Excerpt from book by Nancy Dufresne’s “Life in the Spirit”…
There’s an excerpt in Nancy Dufresne’s book entitled “Life in the Spirit,” which she writes, “There is a place for the believer to live in which the world knows nothing about. A place the world doesn’t even know exists. Nevertheless, it is a place which God invites His children to occupy.”
And I’m just here this morning ringing the bell, reminding us that, “Hey, real life, real freedom, real fruitfulness in the plan of God, real joy, real love, real whatever it is that our hearts crave and desire is found not in the externals that we seek with our eyes and the touch of our hand but is found in the yieldedness of our spirit to God the Holy Spirit and what the Spirit is prompting us to do.
Life in the spirit, of the spirit, by the spirit is the great antidote…
There’s a whole other life that God is calling us to. And that life in the spirit, of the spirit, by the spirit is the great antidote to this age and everything that is negative about it that the enemy has conjured up to beat down the church and to hinder the plan of God in our generation.
So God is saying, “Hey church! I’m extending you a personal invitation today to be a lighthouse, to be the lit-up ones to a generation—so that it can be spread, so that we can be igniters of His glory.
It’s got to start somewhere.
Why not here?
Why not us?
Why not now?
Now, in Jesus’ name!
We have the ability to leverage our will and make decisions that “Today, Lord, I’m going to go with you. I’m going to devote some time in your Word. I’m going to spend even a few moments during my lunch to pray in other tongues, to simply look to my heart and say, Lord, what’s up? What would you have me to say? How can I add value to those around me today? Who can I pray for?”
Testimony…
In fact, I had this experience yesterday. After morning prayer, I went down to my office and I had a text from a fellow pastor I hadn’t heard from in years who said that while they were praying, he and his wife thought of me and they were praying about some situations in my life that they didn’t even know about.
I mean, wasn’t it Mark Hankins’ dad once said that if you’ll listen to the Holy Spirit, He’ll make you look like a genius. And so much of what we seek and pray for personally really isn’t our concern.
God is saying to us this morning, if you’ll accept My invitation and follow Me and connect with My plans to pray for things, you’ll have the same experience on a regular basis like I did just yesterday. Where as we were praying in this chapel about certain things beyond myself, I got back to my office and they were praying for me.
That’s just one of the ways of God. He wants us to take up His intentions and His plan and pray it out and walk it out and engage with it in practical ways as well. And as we do so, we free His hand to work on our behalf, to do what we can’t do on our own. Whether that’s in your financial life, in your relationships, in your calling, in the dream that you’re intent to see come to pass. God is able to do it.
We’re hearing from God this morning…
And I’m sharing this because having faith is as simple as hearing from God. Well, we’re hearing from God this morning.
“Well, I don’t know if I would say that, Ken.”
Well, I am. You’re not. And I’m here to say that God’s way is higher than our way. And Jesus demonstrated and modeled the way, which is to put the Spirit life first place, this inner walk with Him. And as we do so, we will walk into the fullness of all that God has planned and prepared for us emotionally, relationally, financially, in our individual callings. God wants to unfold it before our very eyes.
Choose to be part of a revolution…
If we’ll respond to this invitation, there’s another offer before you today. I don’t care if you’ve been a Christian for five decades, six decades. There’s so much more that God intends to do in us and through us and through the body of Christ. When we chose to follow Him, we have chosen to be a part of a revolution—in living, in loving, in conducting our lives.
Nancy Dufresne excerpt continued…
But Nancy goes on to say, “A life lived in the Spirit is the only life that will accomplish living in the highest sense. Paul wrote of life in the Spirit in Galatians 5:16 and 25. This I say then walk in the Spirit. If we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit.’”
I’m highlighting and punctuating this, this morning because this is the essence of real effective, power-producing prayer is not you coming up with your perfect agenda, which it’s not bad necessarily, but choosing to live a life in the Spirit by the Spirit.
God grants prayers…
Pastor Lynne taught us that God grants prayers. He’s right there within us on any given day, ready, willing, and able to inspire us with prayers that hadn’t even occurred to us maybe. Like my friends. They hadn’t probably thought of me in a long time. But they were inspired yesterday morning to pray for me. And those prayers were powerful.
So what is He inspiring to pray through you? to pray through us today? What is He inspiring to say through you? What decisions does He want to make through you? How does He want you to move today? The Bible says we live and move and have our being in Him in the spirit. It’s not going to be might or by power. What God wants to do in the church and through the church in this hour, it’s going to be by His Spirit.
Excerpt continues…
She goes on to recount a story here. “A minister was telling about experiences he had while working with a world-renowned woman evangelist. Glued to his every word, I requested him to tell me about working with her. He began, quote, ‘the most outstanding thing about her was that she never came out of the spirit. She lived in the spirit and the effects of that were often seen.’”
Oh, that’s interesting.
“So an internal life lived in the spirit has an outward working, an outward demonstration. One day I arrived early at the television studio where I was to shoot some television programs with her. I was talking to some of the cameramen, who although they worked for a major secular network studio, were born again. While having a conversation with them, a wind suddenly blew through the studio where we were doing our shooting, a wind so strong that the studio curtains began to blow. ‘What was that?’ I asked the cameraman. ‘Oh, that’s her,” he said, speaking of the evangelist. ‘Every time she walks into the building, a wind blows through the studio. She will be making her way from the door into the studio in about 45 seconds.’ Sure enough, about 45 seconds later, she walked into the studio. And thinking about this incident, I am reminded of Ephesians 2:10 from The Amplified. It says, ‘Taking paths which He prepared ahead of time, that we should walk in them.’”
Oh, come on now. What? I mean, God’s already gone ahead of me and He’s prepared some paths and put some things in place and already has provided answers for problems you haven’t even encountered yet!
Oh, you better believe it, brother, sister!
We serve a God that is so much greater than the smallness of our intellect. Come on now. This is the God we serve! The Bible’s very clear in the book of Psalms. He has already architected a plan for you, for your life. He’s already written a beautiful, successful, fruitful story and purpose for your whole life. He’s already made paths that we should walk in. So know that today.
Exhale the toxicity of doubt and unbelief and inhale the beauty and the cleansing and the peacefulness of His presence, because He’s already made a way where we don’t see a way maybe with our eyeballs. He has made a way for our ministries. He’s made a way for our finances.
Hang with God and you will see the goodness of God…
I can say that with conviction because I have hung over hell for a period of time in my life where it didn’t look like it was going to turn out well for me. But instead of just hanging over hell, I hung with God. And I believed that I would see the goodness of God, maybe not in earth terms, in a day or a month or a year. But make no mistake about it, I saw and I am still seeing the goodness of God. And so will you, regardless of what the enemy is threatening within your life.
