Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Pastor Ken…
Well, good morning, everyone. Hello. Those of you joining us online from across the U. S., perhaps, or around the world, wherever you’re plugging in and connecting with us from, we’re so honored to have you with us today. If you don’t already know, my name is Ken.
“Contact With God: The Amazing Power of Prayer” by Jeanne Wilkerson…
I want us to reflect on something here and then I want us to pray for Israel in just a bit. Let me share something just to start with from a book I’ve been reading from a lot lately, which is a book entitled “Contact With God: The Amazing Power of Prayer.” The author is Jeanne Wilkerson, who I’m pretty sure has gone home to be with the Lord. But Brother Kenneth Hagin spoke really highly of her through his years of ministry as an intercessor and a pray-er, who knew how to elicit a response from heaven. I’ll put it that way. She was a true intercessor and understood some deep and intimate things in the heart of God and how to commune with the Father, but also how to co labor with Him.
We are priests in the household of God…
And so I thought I would just start by sharing just a passage here that has to do with our priestly ministry. How many of us are reminded that we are priests in the household of God. Kings and priests, in fact. And one of our priestly duties is to be ones that intercede that work on behalf of others and other situations, to broker a deal, that deal being God’s will in the earth to make it possible for God’s will to be established in the earth… make it possible for others, individuals, that is, whole cities, communities, households, to know God. Because there’s so many things in the heart of God that will not unfold, will not become reality unless there’s someone interceding, someone praying. And there are other things in the enemy’s plan that do happen. If the church is prayerless, if we’re not at our post, if we’re not up on the wall of the outpouring watching and praying.
Jeannie writes regarding this priestly ministry of the believer…
“As a believer, you should know how God ordained the priesthood in the Old Testament and then for the early church in the New Testament. It was first established for the Jewish people. Therefore, we Gentiles have a hard time understanding it sometimes because we don’t know everything about the law of Moses. You see, the Levitical priests were called to duty by divine appointment. Believers should be on call today. If the church were operating as she should, with everyone filled with the Spirit and hearing the voice of God, the Holy Spirit could select a member from the body to pray for someone else and eliminate that person’s need to call for others for help. The believer-priest would get his or her assignment to pray from God. The body of Christ should be a universal intercession network.”
Pastor Lynne taught…
… through the years that we shouldn’t have to go to the newspaper, or social media, or to a particular news outlets website to find out what to pray about. I’m not saying that we don’t get informed and we aren’t prompted at times from that, but we should be so filled with God… so filled with the Spirit, so aware of what’s happening on the inside of us by the Holy Spirit that we’re picking up on words and phrases and we’re seeing things… we’re perceiving things of and by the Holy Spirit before it ever ends up on a website or posted in someone’s social media feed.
The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth…
The Bible says that howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for he shall not speak or guide on His own initiative, but He’ll simply say and speak and show us what’s on the Father’s heart. And it goes on to say, “And He will show you things to come. The future is not a limitation to us, to the believer-priest.” That’s you. That’s me.
“God is endeavoring to get our attention to say, Hey church, stop putting limitations on My unlimited ability in you. Even the future is not a boundary for us.”
I was just reminded last night as I was focusing on this morning a little bit. And I was thinking about the different times in my life and in my spiritual journey when I’ve taken the initiative, or it was just a little prompting on the inside of my heart to ask God, “Hey, Lord, I would love to know this,” or “It’d be cool if you could show me where I’m at in your timeline of your purposes for my life.”
In other words, I just kind of took it upon myself to begin to ask, as the Bible says, inquire of the Lord. And I stuck with it. And as I thought there for a moment over the timeline of my previous years, I recognized, “Wow. He actually did show me that.”
I remember one day, years ago, sitting on my floor, just meditating on the Word or listening to my heart and I began to journal. And the Lord wrote down through my hand, through my pen, some very specific things about the plan of God in the coming days. And guess what? They all came to pass, even down to the day or a particular period of time. And I thought of numerous accounts where that has happened. Because don’t you know that God grants prayers and sometimes those prayers aren’t so much an intense intercession or a particular articulated prayer. Sometimes it’s just a desire. “Lord, I’d like to know more about your kingdom.” “I’d like to know, Lord, when I’m going to step into that season, that aspect of my dream that I see in my heart.” “I’d like to know, Lord, what is the future hold for the church?”
In one way, He grants prayers as He drops just a desire in your heart. He’s able to will in you to do His good pleasure for you individually, but for the greater plan of God and how you are to engage with it. So don’t overlook those little promptings. The Lord will just put a cue card sometimes in your heart like “Ooh, I wonder if I should pray for this.” or, “I always want to know more about how faith operates or this particular aspect of the plan of God for my life.” Well when that shows up, be aware that the Holy Spirit is coaching you on an ongoing daily basis for you personally, for your household, for your finances, for future challenges that may arise that the Holy Spirit knows that you need some preparation, that you need to get some prayer going into your future. Because you can pray forward. In other words, you can take out some things of the enemy, you can take out his sneaky ways, his strategies for the future to try to attack you in some way. You can take that out before you ever get there.
The lance of prayer…
It’s called the “Lance of Prayer.” In the Roman army, 2,000 years ago, there was such a thing as a lance. It was a javelin type weapon. And you could hurl the javelin from a distance to take out the enemy before he ever came in close contact with you, where you’d have to fight the enemy in close quarters. And the Bible describes something called the Lance of Prayer. Paul does. And it’s our ability to pray forward, pray into our future, to take out enemy entrapments, pitfalls, things that could be a problem for us before they become a problem. Prayer is our ability to pray out into the future and put provision in store for the time ahead. Prayer is our ability to download the supernatural wisdom of God regarding the future. So that you have a sense in your heart, “You know, I think I need to pay off my bills.” And then two years later, five years later, there’s a rough season in the economy. But guess what? God had prepared you and your household financially to navigate through that season of economic challenge. And so there’s just so much happening when we yield ourselves over to the Spirit of God.
Jeannie goes on to say…
“The body of Christ should be a universal intercession network. The Holy Spirit knows when there is a need in the body of Christ. And He wants to meet it. The Holy Spirit speaks to the one He knows will pray it through. The S.O.S., He gets from the intercessor goes directly into the presence of God. The distress call sets heaven into operation. And the Holy Spirit goes to work on the problem.”
Just imagine that for a moment this morning. All of heaven stands at the ready to work with and through the church. But heaven responds when earth cries out, “On earth, Lord, as it is in heaven.” That is so true. I mean, the more I ponder these things and meditate these things, the more I’m stirred in my heart to give myself to prayer. Whoo, glory to God!
“So you see an intercessor is to pray because of a divine call on his or her life. The Holy Spirit will answer the call of the believer who is filled with Him. That is how it ought to operate. The reason it doesn’t always work and we don’t always get answers we need is that we’re faulty in our operation. The whole body of Christ should be filled with the light of Jesus Christ. As New Testament priests, we’re supposed to minister on behalf of others.”
And can I just point out a secret in the way God rolls? If you go back to the Old Testament, I don’t have the reference handy right now, but it talks about how Job was going through a very challenging season, an ongoing season of adversities. And the scripture reads that Job one day had it in his heart to pray for his friends. He interceded for other people that maybe had even lesser problems than he did. And the Bible goes on to recount that as he prayed for his friends, God delivered him, set him free and restored all that the enemy had stolen over the previous years by him simply stepping into his office to intercede.
Job interceded and God turned, the Bible says, his captivity. How many more things would fall into place? How many more things would God be freed up to do for us if we would spend less time working on our own problems and more time taking up the mantle of prayer. Realizing He’s cloaked us with a high calling, a priestly calling no less, to work on behalf of others in the Spirit, in prayer. And as we do that, and as we step into that, it actually frees up God and His Holy Spirit to work on your deal over here. Where you couldn’t solve it, where you couldn’t figure it out, where you couldn’t make it happen, where the door didn’t seem to open for you. God is able to swing wide doors. He’s able to burst through enemy strongholds and bring you into a new season and phase of life and ministry and abundance and blessing. If you’ll simply take up His offer and call to pray.
So many things so easily fall into place and begin to flow and work for us. I’m preaching this morning when we take up what is on the Father’s heart. This life of faith was never to be about what’s in it for me. Me getting more of this and more of that. Yes, God is the author of abundance. And He is willing that you prosper and be in health even as your soul prospers and is in health. But His way of operation, His M.O., or modus operandi, is that we would focus on His call, His purpose, that we would give our hearts to what’s on His heart. And that frees Him to fulfill what’s on your heart for your particular situation, family, or life.
“So you see an intercessor is to pray because he or she has a divine call on his or her life to pray. As New Testament priests, we’re supposed to minister on behalf of others. First John 5:14 says, “We can have confidence when we stand in the ministry of a priest through prayer.”
That’s a good reminder this morning. You’ve been equipped with the confidence. You can know that you have been stamped with the blood of Jesus. You’ve been clothed with the righteousness of Jesus. The right standing before God. To have confidence before Him. That you can make a difference in the affairs of mankind. That you can make a difference in what’s going on in Israel.
Yes, little old you, little old me.
Because in the Spirit, you’re not so little. You are somebody. And if you will stand up and open up your voice to heaven in worship and in praise and in prayer and in proclamation under the inspiration of His Word and His Spirit, your voice shows up on the radar screen of heaven. And you step into the place of who God’s called you to be, a giant, a priest in His household. And this is the confidence, again, John says, 5:14, that we have in him that if we ask anything…”
Somebody say anything this morning! Anything according to His will, He hears us.
Remember, the Word says to come boldly into God’s presence. Hebrews 4:16. “Therefore, if we know God hears us when we pray, we know that we have the petition we ask for.” The answer that we ask for, in other words.
And she says this, “That is the ministry of a true priest. To be one who knows how to pray.”
A true priest is to be one with the One who knows how to pray…
And when I read this last night, okay, I didn’t read it, I read it several times last night. It was late. I give you that. It was quite late. I was at another long volleyball game with Maranatha girls watching my daughter play volleyball, and so it was probably past midnight last night. And I read this over and over, and you know what I read? I feel like it was the Holy Spirit. I know Jeannie wrote here that the ministry of true priests, or pray-ers, she says here is to be one who knows how to pray. But what I kept reading, and I didn’t even realize it this morning that I had read it wrong. I think I was hearing it in my spirit. The Holy Spirit was writing on my heart that the ministry of a true priest or a pray-er is to be one with the one who knows how to pray.
I kid you not! I’m like, wait, did that get rewritten overnight? Because I kept reading and hearing in my heart that the calling or the ministry of a true priest and a pray-er is to be one with the One who knows how to pray! Let me finish this.
She goes on to say…
“You see, without prayer, not much will happen. For example, the two men in the scriptures who committed spiritual suicide were men who never prayed. They were Saul, the first king of Israel, and Judas, the man who carried the money bag for Jesus and traveled with Him for three and a half years. There is no record in scripture that either of these men had a prayer life. Consequently, they committed spiritual suicide. The hour in which we’re now living will force us to make many important decisions. “The church, too, will have to make these decisions as the Holy Spirit begins to call.”
A word for somebody online…
He’s calling. Somebody online, He is calling you this morning. And He is waiting for a decision. A simple decision of your heart. He’s calling. Jesus is calling. Will you respond to Him? Will you turn your life over to Him? Will you surrender that situation to Him? God did not create us to work out our own problems. He created us to surrender ourselves and our problems to Him. And then be in a pursuit to know Him and let Him lead us to the victory side of those problems.
She goes on to say…
“The church too will have to make these decisions as the Holy Spirit begins to call in these last days intercession is going forth and God is raising up people to pray as I have never seen in the last 25 years. Let the Holy Spirit show you how to pray. Let Him flow through you. He is an expert, and He is skilled in the art of petitioning the Father.”
That simply means He is able to skillfully coach and lead you and me and the church in effective prayer. In prayers that are immensely powerful. The effectual, fervent prayer, James writes, of a righteous man or woman makes much power available, dynamic in its working. Either we believe that or we don’t. And I’m sorry, I’m just too far gone. I’ve just seen prayer work time and time again, going back decades. And yeah, there are days when you just have to go another day. And maybe you don’t see the answer, or you don’t see a lot of light or a lot of hope. But that’s when prayer is essential because prayer strengthens you on the inside. Prayer is your ability to see when there is no natural light or no proper perspective because of the chaos that’s swirling about you or in the world about us.
Prayer is your ability to see that, in fact, the days are bright that are before us, that the answer has already been granted, that you can come boldly, and you do have the petitions or the authority to ask and simply receive whatever it is the Word of God promises, whatever it is God has put on your heart to ask for.
Glory to God. Thank you, Father.
