Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Pastor Ken…
Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening on this Wednesday.
Announcement about Labor Day…
I have an announcement which is we’re going to continue with live prayer hosted here in the chapel, 8:30 a.m. central standard time through this week. However, next Monday, at least here in the United States, it’s Labor Day. So there will not be prayer this coming Monday. No live prayer that is. But if you want to still connect and pray, we’re going to be streaming one of our “best of” morning prayer sessions on our YouTube and online church channel. So be sure to check that out. Then we’ll resume again with live prayer next Tuesday.
Opening prayer…
My prayer this morning is just, “Lord, what do you want us to do? Engage in? What kind of flow do you have in mind this morning that will, number one, bless your heart, and number two, bless the hearts of your people. And so let’s just get behind that today and believe for that.
Father, we thank you this morning for the beautifulness of grace today. We’re just reminded that you’ve not left us alone to do life by ourselves. We thank you, Father, that even though feelings at times grip our hearts and try to convince us or sway us in a particular direction, Lord, we can check in with our hearts, with our spirits, and know and sense that God the Holy Spirit is on board and in our lives if we professed your name.
God’s priority is His desire to connect with you…
There’s no priority in the heart of God that goes higher or is greater than His desire to connect with you. We were created for connection. And in that connection, in that place of His presence, everything changes. Everything is supplied. Opportunities open up. Healing flows. Divine wisdom and inspiration for your purpose and calling in life are abundant. The Bible invites us come boldly to His throne of grace that we might obtain. It’s a place of obtaining. It’s a place of answers. It’s a place where all things are fulfilled. Amen.
Jesus left us with a pattern…
And we can’t lose sight of the model and the pattern that Jesus left us, which was to spend much time alone with our Heavenly Father. And let everything outflow from that place of hosting His presence. And so let me just remind you of a few passages of scripture this morning.
Philippians 4:6 says, (Passion translation)…
“Don’t be pulled in different directions or worried about a thing. Be saturated in prayer throughout each day, offering your faith-filled requests before God with overflowing gratitude. Tell Him every detail of your life. And then God’s wonderful peace that transcends human understanding will guard your heart and mind through Christ Jesus.”
Again, admonishment, encouragement to pray, to seek Him, to connect with Him.
1st Thessalonians 5:16–17…
“Always be joyful. Never stop praying.”
Luke 11:2 Jesus said…
“When you pray, say our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, He assumed that we would pray. He said, “when you pray,” Jesus proclaimed.
James 5:13 says…
“Is any among you suffering?” Or one translation says, “going through a tough time, let him pray.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that, right?
I’m just reminding you this morning that there are answers in a commitment to pray beyond morning prayer, beyond corporate prayer in church, but just to become a person that is pursuant of His presence, a person who practices His presence in prayer.
Luke 18:1 says…
“Then He spoke a parable to them that men ought always to pray and not lose heart.” One translation says, “to grow weary, get faint-hearted, or give up.”
Luke 18:8 says…
“I tell you that He, Jesus that is, will avenge them (His righteous ones) speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”
Prayer expressed through the body of Christ…
Now, what does that mean exactly? Faith on the earth? Well, if you look in the first half of chapter 18 of Luke, you’ll find that the context is prayer. So when Jesus returns, there’s one particular thing He’ll be looking for, and that is prayer expressed through His body, faith expressed through prayer in His body. In fact, the Passion translation puts it this way.
In Luke 18:80, it says, “God will give swift justice to those who will not give up. So ever be praying, ever be expecting in the same way as the widow,” which is what’s talked about in the first part of Luke 18. ‘Even so, when the Son of man comes back, will he find this kind of undying faith on the earth?”
Martin Luther…
I like what Martin Luther said: “The less I pray, the harder it gets. The more I pray, the better it goes.” He also said, “Prayer is climbing up into the heart of God.” I like that one… up into the heart of God. He also said, “If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal of the fire of faith.”
D.L. Moody…
And then DL Moody said, “Every great movement of God can be traced to a kneeling figure.”
Also…
I want to share this with you as well. Again, just kind of a refresher to remind us that prayer is analogous to breathing. “Just like your lungs demand to be filled with oxygen with air, so that you can be sustained. Life can be sustained in any particular being, whether it be animal or human being, so too your spirit, your life with God must be supported and sustained by breathing. Only that breathing is prayer. To pray is to breathe in a spiritual sense.”
R.A. Torry…
And then in the book, “How to Obtain Fullness of Power. R.A. Torry writes, “The first Christians were men and women of tremendous power. What power Peter and John had for example, had in their lives, what power they had in their work. There was opposition in those days, most determined bitter and relentless opposition in the first century against the church. That opposition in comparison with us today would make any which we might encounter to appear as child’s play. But the work went right on. We constantly read such statements “The Lord added to the church daily, such as should be saved,” Acts 2:47.
In other words…
You kind of hear these phrases in scripture and realize that the Lord’s connecting what occurred to the church’s willingness to give themselves to prayer, to breathe in and breathe out the presence and the sustenance of heaven through time and conversation with their Heavenly Father.
Things flowed out of a place of prayer in the first century church. And things God desires that things would flow out of your life more prolifically as we’ve been praying about here in the days ahead. The gifts of the Spirit, the working of miracles, ideas for new organizations that must be started to promote kingdom purposes, new ministries, new works that God wants to do in and through His people, in and through whole companies, the prolificness of heaven and what God intends must be poured out.
And He’s chosen to do that through me and through you and it’s our willingness to breathe in His presence. It’s our willingness to give ourselves to a call and really a command to pray that sets the church up, that sets you and I up individually and personally to overflow with heaven into the earth.
On earth as it is in heaven…
That’s why Jesus taught His disciples when they asked Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’ He said, “Pray that it would be on earth as it is in heaven.’ But that’s possible because you are the portal that pours out heaven to earth. That doesn’t happen because we are mindlessly preoccupied with entertainment or 1,001 other distractions that culture and society have to offer. It happens because we choose to pick up our cross and follow Him. It happens because we choose to deny ourselves the luxury just to be lazy, or the luxury to just stay put and just kind of stay in one place.
Instead, we choose to pick up our cross once again and follow Him and go another day pursuing Him and determined to know Him more today than we knew Him yesterday. Determined to make a connection with Him, determined to breathe the very air of the eternal realm that we would be inspired and fueled and sustained and healed and equipped and enabled to operate as Jesus Himself operated on planet earth in His earthly ministry. That’s why we’re called sons and daughters of the most high God. We are to be an extension of Jesus. We are to be His hands, His feet. We are His body. He is the head.
We’ve got to be connected to the head…
Anything other than that is a freak, a headless thing, if you will. And so whatever you’re facing today, whatever decision you need to make, whatever symptoms you’re experiencing, whatever answers you need, they’re all found and being reunited and reconnected to the head. That’s Jesus. Through prayer, through presence.
R.A. Torry says in another passage…
“How be it many of them, which heard the Word in the first century church believed and the number of the men was about 5,000.” In other words, there was probably 10, 15, 20,000 people that heard the Word when you add in women and children.
That’s found in Acts 4:4. “And believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes, both men and women.” Acts 5:14. “The apostles themselves explain the secret of their irresistible power. When they say, We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.”
Brother Kenneth E. Hagin…
You see, brother Hagin said this in a message I was listening to, “It’s all about fullness, about what you choose to be full of, what you choose to spend your time, your attention, your effort, and maybe your resources on filling your life with. Other things, lesser things, things of this world and this age that are fleeting and passing away and will not mean anything at the moment Jesus returns or you enter heaven. Will we fill ourselves with those things or with eternal and spiritual and incorruptible things?
But it was not only the leaders of the early church who had power in life and service, so did the rank and file. What a beautiful picture we have of their abounding love and fruitfulness. In other words, that’s another word for prolificness. God wants your life to be a prolific flower. A prolific tree of God fruiting out with the beautifulness of His grace, putting on display His goodness and His power, and His wisdom and His purposes to influence people, to enter into the course of human affairs and shift things in a direction of righteousness and justice.
R.A. Torry goes on to write…
“The secret of this fullness of power in life and services found in Acts 2:42, ‘They continued steadfastly in prayers.’
Is it that simple? Yeah, it is! But it isn’t always easy, right? Because you have a flesh. I have a flesh. We have a will and there are things we must contend with. And therein lies the good fight of faith. To fight to choose what we’re going to be filled with and consumed and focused on today.
I choose God. How about you?
