Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Good morning and welcome to morning prayer…
We are going somewhere…
I just had this distinct impression. I’ve had it before and I know it to be true… that we are going somewhere. You are on a path, and you are going somewhere in God. Hallelujah. Make no mistake about it, life has its way of eroding our perspective at times and getting us to think that we’re just kind of randomly chaotically, “happenstancely,” doing life, bumping off of this situation and bumping off of that problem and occasionally experiencing Him experiencing what the world calls good luck, which we don’t believe in luck. We believe in His favor, right?
God has a plan…
But the truth of the matter is God has a plan. He has a plan. And if I’m to believe my Bible (and I do and I believe you do as well) there is a divine destiny that God authored long before you showed up on the world stage. According to Psalm 139, an actual plan and a high purpose and a beautiful intention that emanated from the Father’s heart that He authored in His book of Destiny for you and for me. And that book contains all the good thoughts and plans that God has in mind for today, for tomorrow, for the balance of our lives.
So we are on a path onward upward into God. And our experience ought to go from glory to glory, from strength to strength, from victory to victory, from blessing to blessing, from point of influence to point of influence in the plan and call of God.
Oh yeah. There’ll be times when we will have to resist wanting to grow weary and draw back and wave a white flag maybe. But aren’t you glad? As I’ve said before, you can leverage your will and say, “No, today I’m going to go with God. Today, I’m going to believe the report of the Lord and not the report of that symptom, nor the report of my past or what someone said to me in a well-meaning, although wrong way, I’m going to believe the report of the Lord.”
We’re going up today.
We’re going on today.
We’re going in today.
I said yesterday as well… let me shift to a spiritual truth here that when it’s cold in Minnesota, which has become cold here in recent days. If you’re in a warmer climate, well, God bless you. We’re quite north of the equator here in Minnesota, so it’s a little colder. But when it’s cold, you have to do things to keep warm. You have to build a fire, for example. Some people still do that, right? In the old days, they used to build a fire.
You have to build it.
You have to attend to it.
You have to stoke it.
You have to fuel it with whatever that is.
God wants us to build a fire…
Well, the truth of the matter is, God is endeavoring to help us to see as His body, as us as individuals, that He wants us to build a fire. Not in some stove somewhere. But in your heart. He wants the church at large to build a fire at the center of who we are as His people. A fire of the spirit.
Annecdote…
And I was reminded this morning when I was driving into work, my daughter was getting ready. She can get ready because I’m driving and we were just talking about some different things and I was just reminding her about the importance of praying in your heavenly prayer language and how prayer in the spirit in your prayer language or under the inspiration of the Spirit builds a fire. Builds you up.
Giving earnest heed to those things…
I know these are simple things, but remember the Bible says we’re to give more earnest heed to those things which we’ve already learned, lest at any time we let them slip. And these are foundational truths where it concerns building a fire and developing a white hotness to our faith and to our spirituality. God desires that we would be white hot, that we would be fully aflame. For some of us, He’s been trying to get momentum to your life because it’s going to take a certain amount of spiritual momentum for you to get over where you need to get over.
God wants you to have momentum…
Some of us build a little momentum, but then we end up two steps back. But God wants you to have a momentum about your spiritual life. So that you sense God’s backing and you sense the propulsion of heaven’s flow in your everyday life. Not just when you’re on your knees praying, but in your business and in your job and in your decision making for investments or to hire this person or to go in that direction or to buy this house or to engage in this initiative or that initiative.
Propelled along by Heaven’s flow…
He wants us to be a supernatural people propelled along by heaven’s flow, taking advantage of supernatural momentum that carries us up and beyond the status quo, that helps us to fully break free of limitations. The enemy seeks to limit our prayer lives because he knows when you pray in other tongues and under the inspiration of the Spirit or simply a prayer of faith. Prayer limits him and his power. He wants to limit you first because prayer limits him and restricts him.
Prayer pushes back darkness…
In fact, prayer pushes back the boundaries of darkness. It pushes back his influence and his effect in your life but also others’ lives. He knows… He doesn’t want you to know, but he knows the enemy in all the forces that he’s arrayed through the fall, the power and the exercise of spiritual authority that is exerted when you pray out of your heart from a place of passion and determination to follow God.
Example continued…
So I was reminding my daughter this morning of the importance of prayer in the Spirit. And, of course, I was reminded immediately of Jude 20, which states this… I’m going to read it from the Passion translation. It says, “But you, my delightfully love friends, constantly and progressively build yourselves up on the foundation of your most holy faith. By praying every moment in the spirit.”
If you read the commentaries, that refers to prayer in your heavenly prayer language. But also prayer once again, out of the inspiration of the Spirit inspires you to pray in your known language. And here’s the beautiful thing about this, is that when you create momentum, when you build yourself up… I think one translation says when you pray an unknown tongue, you are charging yourself. You’re filling up your spiritual batteries. You’re creating momentum within your innermost being. And it’s from that place in your spirit, your innermost being that is charged up, that then feeds your physicality and informs your mentality. And enables you to do life on all the other levels, on a higher level, in a higher way.
Charging yourself up…
Because when you receive spiritually, it affects you mentally. It helps you emotionally. It stabilizes you and helps your emotions to be healthy. When you pray and charge yourself up on the inside, you receive life. Jesus said, “My words are spirit and life.” Well, guess what? When you pray in the Spirit, you are praying according to Romans 8:26, according to the perfect will of God. In other words, the Word of God. You’re praying out of your book of destiny and according to the Word of God. When you pray in the Spirit, you’re praying according to that. And those words are spirit and they are life.
Yes, the words from His Book, but also words prayed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They are spirit and they’re life. And they charge up your inner man and then go on to affect you physically. And minister healing and life to you physically.
Hallelujah, glory to God. Thank you, Jesus.
A way to create spiritual momentum…
So don’t overlook the importance of praying five minutes in other tongues or lifting up holy hands and worshiping Him for five minutes after you’re done eating your lunch today. That’s a small way and one way that you’re yielding to God the Holy Spirit in your life. And one way that you are creating spiritual momentum.
And that momentum, while you may not notice it in the moment, will be there when you need to resist temptation at some point. And it’ll be easy for you to resist temptation because you’ve built yourself up.
Momentum through spiritual disciplines…
Well as you build momentum by engaging in a spiritual conversation with somebody who is of like faith, that creates momentum, once again. When you practice spiritual disciplines, that creates momentum. And that momentum then is stored within you and enables you then to obey. When God says, “Do this or do that, or say this.” It becomes easy instead of arduous or difficult.
Build a fire within you…
And so many people’s Christianity is really out of religious duty rather than out of a flow that we create because we build a fire within us. A fire built with a Word. A fire built with a yieldedness and surrender to the Holy Spirit, including through prayer.
That’s good, isn’t it?
Again, as I referenced yesterday, a spirit, a flame, and full of holy fire is the most essential prerequisite to effective prayer. James 5 tells us “The effectual, fervent white hot prayer of a righteous man or woman makes much power available, dynamic in its working.”
We are to be “standouts” in the world…
God wants us to be a people on fire so that people come and watch us burn. It is the thing that causes us to stand out. We’re called to be standouts in this world. And what causes us to stand out is not the smoke machine. It is not the newfangled technology. Although I think we should redeem all of that and use it for God’s glory. But the thing that is to cause us to stand out as a people, as followers of Jesus is the glory of God, is the fire of heaven. If you’re in the world and you are far from Jesus, you don’t know Him, you’ve not received His free gift of salvation, then you cannot be occupied. You cannot be endowed with the Spirit because you have not yet received His mercy and His grace. But you and I have been fully cleansed and sanctified and forgiven and made right and in fact righteous in His sight. Not because of our goodness or badness, but because of Jesus’s perfect performance on our behalf so that the Holy Spirit could rush in and indwell us.
We must cooperate with Him…
And while He is there, there are things we must do to cooperate with Him so that He can come into fullness of flame. You’ve got to build a fire every day. Your most important need and your most important desire, it should be anyway, is to build a fire, to kindle a fire, to not let the flame go out. You might be a burning wick, you might be a smoldering ember, but I’m here to say, God is breathing your way today, that you would be burst once again into a full and raging fire of the Holy Ghost. So that people will come and see you burn, so that you can be profound and effective in prayer. So that you can easily and almost without thought at times, lay hands on a sick person and see them recover instantly. So that life flows through you and me. And not religious regurgitation, but rather supernatural inspiration.
Oh, that’s good! Somebody can post that in the chat this morning if you’re on Facebook, on YouTube, on online church.
But it’s true. God intends that every day we would be recreated and refreshed. That every day there would be newness and hope and divine help. Not because of our best efforts, but because of His greatest presence. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit that we would be a people lit up with the presence of God. Not just on Sunday or maybe one day, but every day. Including today. Now is the time for the church to be on fire.
