Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Well, good morning, everyone. Happy Wednesday.
I’m going to read a passage in Colossians. It’s a prayer that the Apostle Paul prayed continuously. And I want to read it. I also want to pray it over us this morning for maybe personally what we’re facing, but also us as a collective family, a unit that God has assigned in the earth in this hour to partner and pray out the plan of God—for not only for our lives, for our church, for our city, but for the world and for what God wants to do globally.
Colossians 1:8 in the Passion…
Paul writes in Colossians 1:9. I’m going to read from the Passion translation. “Since we first heard about you, we’ve kept you always in our prayers that you would receive perfect knowledge of God’s pleasure.” Or you could say “God’s will.” “…over your lives, making you reservoirs of every kind of wisdom and spiritual understanding. We pray that you would walk in the ways of true righteousness, pleasing God in every good thing you do. Then you’ll become fruit-bearing branches yielding to His life.” Ooh, I like that phrase right now, this morning.
“Yielding to see yourself…” Imagine in your mind’s eye just yielding to His life. Even as we enter into His presence and into prayer this morning, we want to yield to His life, right? He’s made His whole life available for us and all that His life contains—healing, restoration, peace, supernatural grace for every endeavor that we will face today and in the days ahead. There’s so much in us yielding to His life.
Paul goes on to say…
“Then you’ll become fruit-bearing branches yielding to His life and maturing in the rich experience of knowing God in His fullness. And we pray that you would be energized.”
I pray that over you this morning. If you’re online, I pray this over you. If you’re in the chapel, I pray you would be energized with all His explosive power from the realm of His magnificent glory, filling you with great hope. You could translate that as, “great earnest expectation.” An expectation that causes you to crane your neck almost and look with anticipation at God coming through for you.
Visualizing when I was young…
When we’re young… At least when I was young, I think this is generally true for kids. I had an easy time dreaming. I had an easy time envisioning myself in that football game, throwing a hail-Mary pass like Fran Tarkenton of the Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s. In the last moment, throwing that pass and winning the football game in the last moments of the fourth quarter. Oh, I just imagined that. I visualized that. I saw that. I practiced that with my friends. I would visualize and imagine and really daydream as a young kid on the small farm that I grew up on what my life would be and what I wanted to do and what I wanted to see and the things that I would experience.
Life sets in and we stop visualizing…
As we grow older, we lose the propensity to visualize, for whatever reason. Maybe life sets in and challenges knock us down and the enemy discourages us and people tell us what we can’t do incessantly over the years. And so we stop dreaming. And we start coping and surviving and getting by. But how many of us know that the Bible says that Jesus came to give life and to give it to us in abundance to the full. One translation says, “till it overflows.”
God is still on His throne…
And contained in His life as we yield to it is an earnest expectation that God is coming through for us today. That despite what happens in our nation and is reported on the news later today or next week or whatever, that God is still in charge. He’s still on His throne. That His words still ring through with abundant truth. That He cannot lie, the Bible says. There is no shadow of turning in Him. If He said something ought to be so in your life, then it will be so if you will partner with it.
Let your imagination run with expectation…
One of the ways we partner with His Word and will is by letting our imagination run with expectation and images of us receiving in full His healing power, for example. Receiving in full His goodness. There were accounts in the gospels where it’s recorded that there were some that said, “Lord, I know that you’re able, but are you willing?” And emphatically in a number of occasions, Jesus said, “I will! Be made whole. I will deliver you. I will respond to you.”
There’s no account where He prayed for something and He didn’t get an answer. There were accounts where people refused to believe or held onto their doubts or their religious indoctrination, and therefore, the Bible says one place that He could there do no mighty works except lay His hand on a few sick people with minor ailments or minor symptoms. Because they were too familiar with Him: “Isn’t He the carpenter son? What can He do?”
God has called us to honor His anointing…
No! God has called us to honor His anointing, to have an earnest and daily expectation that He’s coming through for us today. That if His Word says it, once again, I believe it. So let it be settled. Amen. And I believe we can get to a place where you just get so rooted and grounded in the reality of what He has stated ought to be, could be, and really should be in our lives and that includes divine healing… that includes a steady state of peace and joy and the exhibition of the fruits of the spirit on the branches of our lives—love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, temperance and self-control. Right? I’m preaching.
Let me finish reading this passage here…
So Paul prays and I pray for you this morning “that you would be energized with His explosive power from the realm of His magnificent glory, filling you with great hope.” I pray for great hope to invade your heart today, that your hearts can soar with joyful gratitude.
Gratitude has an attractive quality…
There’s something about gratitude that it’s attractive. There’s a frequency that gratitude emits. When you rejoice with joy unspeakable, you become filled with His glory. There’s something about when you complain that you typically end up remaining where you are. But when you give Him praise, when you are grateful, you attract miracles.
As they went, they were made whole…
There are instances where Jesus prayed for people for physical ailments where in the moment He prayed, they weren’t instantaneously healed. But He told them, “Go, giving thanks to God.” Go and do what the law required. And give an offering and let the priest and the temple know. And the Bible says in many accounts as they went, praising God, as they went with a heart of gratitude, they were in the process made whole.
So if you are standing for a miracle this morning, whether it’s individually, in your church, in your home, in your children, in your finances, know that oftentimes the miracle is “as we go.” As we get up and as we go today, cultivating an attitude of gratitude, letting our thoughts more and more be aligned with His thoughts for us, His way for us, what His Word states ought to be so in our lives.
Daughter’s experience of visualizing…
I talked to my daughter about visualization and using your mind to meditate on the best-case outcome in her sport. She plays volleyball and during her club season here a few months ago, she was struggling with server receive. There were some really good servers on the opposing team, and they were hitting some really line shots and a lot of velocities to them, and she shanked a couple of them. And she remembered what I and her coach had told her about pausing, taking a deep breath and just visualizing herself receiving that serve and passing it perfectly and not handling it wrongly, but handling it rightly and perfectly as she visualized in her mind’s eye.
Joshua practiced meditating on the Word…
And of course, this is not anything new. The Bible going back to ancient times, talks about the power of being one who meditates on the Word of God. Joshua, going back to that point in time, 3,000 plus years ago, this Book of the Law, this Word of God shall not depart out of your heart or out of your mind, but you shall meditate therein day and night that thou mayest observe to do or be obedient to the Word. Therefore, you will make wise decisions and you’ll make your way prosperous and you’ll have good success. All because you choose to be one who meditates on the Word.
The cornerstone of the life of every person of prayer…
This should be a cornerstone of the life of every pray-er, of every believer, so that our prayers are not from a place of devastation and insufficiency and lack and destruction, but from a place in God’s Word of expectation. There’s nothing too small for Him. All things are possible to Him who believes.
“Oh, we’ve heard that, Pastor Ken.”
Well, guess what? You’re going to hear it again. I’m preaching it to myself this morning. Because God wants us to pray. He wants us to worship from a place that He’s already purchased and provided for us. And that place is beside Jesus, spiritually speaking at the right hand of the throne of God, a place of victory, a place where God is willing to move on our behalf, is willing to answer that big, hairy, audacious prayer, is willing and will follow through on what He stated He will do for you.
We limit God because of our “stinking thinking…”
But He needs us to partner with Him. Not limit Him like the children of Israel did in ancient times. They limited the holy one of Israel, the scripture reads, because of their “stinking thinking.” Because of their “old tapes” that kept playing… their old reels that kept cycling in their minds and caused them to want to go back to the old place called Egypt, a place of bondage.
Resist the old negative dysfunctional ways…
But I’m here to tell you today that God wants to initiate and plug in so that you might play some new imaginations, some new thoughts, some new expectations, so that today could be a different day. Somebody here this morning, somebody online this morning, it doesn’t get any more complex than this. God’s just saying, “Will you receive and adopt as your own My thought for you,” the Spirit of God would say. “Will you see it My way? And will you resist to imagine and obsess over the old, negative, dysfunctional, broken way?”
The message of grace…
My daughter, just in a moment of time, in the middle of a game, took a moment to visualize herself performing as she wanted to perform and the next serve, she handled it very well. That’s really the story of grace. I’ll stop here. That’s the message this morning. This is the message of grace. The message of the law is one that points out your flaws and gets you focused on your mistakes and where you messed up and how you failed and what’s not going to work out. The law really could be defined like Murphy’s Law, where you imagine and you think and you see and you expect that if anything can and will go wrong, it will today for me. That’s what the world says. Or even karma. “Well, you screwed up. You did something bad. You can expect something bad.”
Grace disrupts the old pattern…
No! Grace intervenes and grace comes to disrupt and interrupt the old pattern in the old way and say, “Hey, no, it’s not about what you have done. It’s about what Jesus came to do and what I’s He dotted and T’s He crossed, the heavy lifting He performed on our behalf. And the Bible over and over, even from the Old Covenant, points us in a new direction and says, “Hey, don’t look at what you did or how you performed yesterday or where you messed up or how you screwed up or where you had a misstep. Instead, look unto Jesus, the author, developer, as one translation says, and finisher of your faith. Look to Him and see who I have now called and ordained you to be. See that He is righteous. He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
A little secret of Bible interpretation. How you see Jesus is how He sees you. And the more you look into the perfect law of liberty, stare into it, meditate on it… let a new reel or video play in your mind. The more the old disconnects from you and the more you step into a bigger, fuller, more abundant light where things get easier and things flow more organically because it’s by faith and not by your willpower or best efforts. That’s the old way. That’s the law’s way.
But grace says, “Look what Jesus has done. Look unto Me.” Because it will transform you on the inside and empower you to live how you know God wants you to live.
Finishing this verse in Colossians chapter one. Let me start again with verse 12. It says, “Your hearts can soar with joyful gratitude when you think of how God has made you worthy to receive the inglorious inheritance freely given to us by living in the light. He has rescued us.” I love this. “He has rescued us completely from tyrannical rule. The rule of darkness and has translated us…”
In other words, He’s moved you out of the old, wrong side of the tracks, and He’s moved us out of darkness and He’s moved you… Do you see that today? He has moved you. I don’t care if you’ve been in the same address emotionally, financially, in your relationships, and in your “stinking thinking.” Guess what? Today’s the day of salvation. Today is the day. Every day is a new day. God’s grace is new. And He is saying, “Hey, I’ve called you out from behind those tracks to a new address, to a new place, to a place of glorious inheritance where you don’t have to live and experience life the same old way for it’s a new day.”
God has called us to a bright, abundant joy-filled life…
I can just tell hope is germinating in somebody’s heart this morning. Even just joy. Do you know God’s will isn’t that we would just be hunkered down with a sourpuss look on our face, you know, melancholy all about how our whole life is all melancholy. No. God has called us to a bright and burgeoning and abundant and joy-filled life of freedom.
And guess what? When you face challenges and obstacles, praise God, I can give praise for it because you know why? It’s an opportunity to engage my faith, to use my voice in worship, in prayer, in faith decrees. Because I know that if I’ll stay the course and I’ll stay with God, even though maybe today goes from bad to worse in some ways, well, praise God, that just tells me the enemy is nervous. He is freaking out because he knows what’s on the other side of your mountain. What’s on the other side of that adversity. What’s on the other side is transformation. What’s on the other side is breakthrough. What’s on the other side is his inability then to maybe tempt you in that way in the future because you gain the victory.
When you lift weights, you may tear micro muscles in the moment, but in the coming days, that muscle repairs and multiplies and you get stronger.
“He has rescued us completely from the tyrannical rule of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom, a realm of His beloved son. For in the son, all our sins are canceled.” Praise God. Somebody can say “amen” after that this morning. If it was just that alone, that our sins were canceled, and that God sees you as entirely pleasing because the blood of Jesus has been applied to your life and the past that you went through has been washed away, and you stand sparkling white in the righteous robing of Jesus. So, of course, you can come boldly under the throne of grace with worship and prayers.
Finally, it says…
“Our sins are all canceled and we have the release of redemption through His blood.”
Praise God. Hallelujah. Glory to God.
