Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Ken…
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to morning prayer.
Jeremiah 33:3 says…
“Call to me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.”
The Passion translation renders that particular verse as “Cry out to Me and I will answer you. I will reveal to you great things, guarded secrets that you never could have known.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says…
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
The ambiguity in our lives…
One thing I was thinking about this morning is the fact that we all deal with ambiguity in our lives at times. We all deal with seasons and, very often, unknowns. The Bible reveals that we see through a glass darkly in this present age and time.
We don’t know it all.
We don’t see it all.
We don’t always understand God’s timing with some things.
There’s ambiguity, in other words.
How to deal with ambiguity …
And we were talking about this actually in a meeting yesterday, how to deal with ambiguity in life and leadership. And I was reflecting on that very topic myself a little bit and realized that I know that we are all about the answer and all about the destination as people. Because we’re just wired that way. And we think that way. We’re in the here and now, and we filter things through our five physical senses.
But understand God is orchestrating a plan that goes beyond time and space and beyond the present moment of your life. And I suppose that’s why prayer in the spirit or in other tongues is so powerful because it’s, as I say, a supernatural technology that enables us to engage and participate in the plan of God and praying it out and processing it out into the future and in ways we don’t understand in our natural understanding.
God’s supernatural comes upon us and enables us to accomplish things in the Spirit we could accomplish no other way. And as we read in that passage there earlier, reveal things we could understand or reveal in no other way.
When you don’t know, you ask Him…
And so I just was thinking about ambiguity. What do you do when you’re faced with another day where nothing has changed and you don’t know the answer and you don’t know exactly what comes next. Well, as the Bible shares with us there, we call on Him and ask Him, right? You have not because you ask not.
Is it a test?
For me, when I’m faced with ambiguity, I recognize oftentimes that it’s a test. God doesn’t temp, test, or try with evil. We know that. The Bible says that explicitly. But there are tests of faithfulness and tests of obedience that He puts before us. And He waits to see how we respond. He knows how we’ll respond. But He waits for us to respond. And there’ve been many seasons of ambiguity for me where all He was asking was simply for me to get up and go another day, for me to lean in through spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude, worship and prayer, study and meditation. Lean into Him and go deeper.
Because perhaps the ambiguity, the unknowns, the status quo that you’re still experiencing, even though you’ve been praying, perhaps it’s a test that you are passing in that you are going deeper, your roots are going deeper. You’re learning to trust in a greater way. Because after all, God desires our faith to be refined and to be sure and strong and enduring. Because us going deeper with Him in times of ambiguity, us trusting Him when we don’t see the way forward, but we trust in His Word and we trust in His nature and what we know about Him.
Stand your ground and refuse to back off…
Those seasons of ambiguity and those seasons where nothing has changed yet, where we’re still in the same place it feels like is where our faith is refined and our foundations go deeper. And we are transformed on the inside. And we passed the test because we stood our ground. And we refused to back off.
Israelites in the wilderness…
The children of Israel, when they came out of Egypt, they entered into a wilderness place. Bible scholars tell us that the land of promise shouldn’t have been more than six- or eight-weeks journey away by foot. Yet they seemed to get stuck in the desert. Why was that? Because they were in a place of ambiguity, unknown exactly. They had seen God miraculously deliver them, but for whatever reason, they began to think back into their past and maybe how “okay” it was in Egypt. At least they had leeks and potatoes and McDonald’s and onions and Egypt.
They didn’t handle ambiguity very well. They didn’t handle that in-between season, between the “yes” and the “amen,” and the “Look, there it is!” And so their souls began to wander. And they began to wonder. And they began to fear. And they began to doubt instead of keeping their attention and their focus on who God was and what He said He would do and had already done for them, in fact.
They didn’t pass the test…
So the Bible says they had temptation and opportunity to turn back to Egypt. They complained. They murmured and griped about Moses. In other words, leadership. They didn’t pass the test. That season was to be just a matter of a few weeks to the promised land, to cross over Jordan and enter into the land that flowed with milk and honey. That season was to be a season where they learned to trust God and walk with God.
Preparation seasons are never wasted…
Brother Hagin always used to say, “Preparation seasons are never wasted seasons.” Much of the execution or the walking out of God’s plan for your life in small things and in big things has to do with God preparing you and transforming you to walk out what He has in mind for your future.
God is interested in what He can do in you…
And so we’re looking for the answer, the ultimate outcome, the end zone. And God is interested in what He can do in you. And your roots spiritually going down deeper into the bedrock of His Word. Your roots going down deeper into an intimate and ongoing and personal relationship with the Father through Jesus by way of the Holy Spirit. Because He knows the promotion is prepared and is certain if you will let Him prepare you and ready you to handle the promotion. To step into the answer. To enter the new season.
So let seasons of ambiguity or the in-between space, between the “Yes and amen” and the “Look, there it is!” be seasons that prompt you to go deeper into Him. To not wonder or wander, but to lean into His faithfulness and lean into spiritual disciplines such as prayer.
Declare, “I’m coming out of the fire without the smell of smoke on me!“
I have really trained myself when I experienced adversity and opposition, I let that be a good trigger to say, “Devil, you’re going to regret that you messed with me. Because I’m going to grow stronger in the midst of this.” Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego of old, you can throw me into a furnace heated seven times hotter, but I’m coming out without a singe or even the smell of smoke on me.
I can preach that. Can you preach that?
We should be able to preach that in this day. Come on now! That’s the kind of faith God was wanting to form and fashion and develop in us now. That’s what we’re going to need to stand in the face of opposition and stand in the face of supernatural evil that clearly is showing up on the scene of our planet right now in these final hours of this dispensation.
We don’t have to fear…
Jesus said, “Hey, you’re going to have tumults and trials and tribulations, but don’t fear. I have already done what it takes to provide you an unction, to provide you an anointing, to provide you a faith that will help you stand up in the midst of that and actually overcome and come through that stronger and better as a beacon of light and hope for those around you.” Glory to God.
So I’m just here to encourage you this morning. God heard you. He knows. Sometimes I catch myself like, “Lord, remember da da da… I prayed about this the other day or last year, or whatever…” And I remind myself, “Oh yeah, He knows.” He knows before we ask Him. We still need to ask Him, of course, as the Bible reveals. But He knows.
Stay your course…
Just continue to lean in and grow stronger with each passing day. The Bible says Abraham grew strong in faith giving praise and glory to God, even though he was well past years to have a son. Yet he grew all the stronger, the more impossible it appeared. Nothing is impossible to you and to me if we will believe. Nothing is impossible.
We live in the day where God is swiftly coming through in ways that we cannot even conceive right now. To perform His Word and to fulfill Bible prophecy and to see to it that prayer you prayed is fully accomplished in every way.
Quote from Mark Brazee…
In Mark Brazee’s book, I want to read one more thing to you about processing the plan of God through prayer. In his chapter, The Power of Corporate Prayer, he is talking about a passage in Acts 12:5, where the church was praying for Peter who was in prison.
And it says…
“Peter, therefore was kept in prison, but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.”
Mark goes on…
“Thank God for the local church. Thank God for our own company. The church made prayer without ceasing. Sometimes we need to pray things through without ceasing. The prayer of faith will work for us individually. But sometimes for other situations, we need to pray through without ceasing until we accomplish what needs to be done.”
Mark continues…
Now, I’m going to jump to another paragraph here where he writes, “The church was still praying at the house where they had gathered to pray. When Peter arrived at the house, they didn’t even believe it was him. Because he was supposed to be in prison under lock and key by Roman guards. They thought it was an angel, and they kept praying. The church was not going to stop praying until they had results.”
In other words, there’s some things we can learn about the First Century Church and their prayer lives. They gave themselves to prayer. They didn’t have many of the advantages and blessings of technology in modern society. But they did have community. Fellowship with one another. They did break bread, and they did pray often. Regularly, in other words.
“They did understand the essence and the importance of God the Holy Spirit at the center of this new movement called The Way. Because Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the way. He’s able to show you and me the way today, to help us navigate through seasons of ambiguity. Because while it has been the same for a long time, maybe in some deal that you’re endeavoring to overcome and your soul goes back to your days of upbringing and your family as a child, and you can’t see anything different or perceive anything different.
In an instant of time, it can all change in a moment…
But I’m here to encourage you to hold on to hope, to continue to pray, to don’t stop believing. Because it all can change in a moment, even an instant of time. And oftentimes it doesn’t necessarily change in a moment. It’s just that our perception maybe dials into the change that has been occurring all along. We just didn’t discern it.
