I want to invite you to join us for a 21-day journey of prayer, personal devotions & fasting. From 10-31 January we will focus on our spiritual lives, putting God first (listen to the podcast from Sunday!).
Jesus’ teaching clearly recommends fasting for his followers. It is the practice of denying oneself food (or in a symbolic sense perhaps other activities or hobbies) for the sake of spending more time seeking God and drawing closer to Him. Pastor Stovall Weems from Celebration Church (which produced much of the fasting material we use this month) says that “prayer is connecting with God; fasting is disconnecting ourselves from the world.” That’s a great way to describe how prayer and fasting work so powerfully together.
If you are new to fasting, we want you to be comfortable, but at the same time stretch yourself! Our goal is to change our normal routine (sacrifice something) and spend that time in prayer & Bible reading. This is an ancient practice that Jesus tells us to do for our relationship with God, not for anyone else’s benefit. Here are two documents that will help you understand what fasting is all about & how you could get started:
How To Get Started on Your Fast
For those of you with children, fasting is something that the whole family can grow from, but should be handled differently for children. Our BridgeKids team will encourage your kids to find ways to fast, but it will be most important that you walk through the experience together, so hopefully this document will help you as a parent know how to talk to your children about fasting:
How to Explain Fasting to Kids
We will also be encouraging everyone to find a prayer partner during this Awakening time, but we’ll share more about that in the next post!
If you have any questions about fasting, or would like to share a story about how fasting has helped you, feel free to post a message right here!
We want to thank Celebration Church in Jacksonville, FL, USA for the great Awakening resources! Here is an FAQ they did that’s really helpful (just scroll down to read it).