Prayer + Fasting
Prayer
A teaching by Brandy K.
How does prayer affect us in 2022?
What if I told you that prayer will be the most powerful thing you do this year!
Do you ever feel like your prayer life is stagnant or lacking? That it’s not everything it could be? Or maybe you find yourself praying only when you feel like it or need something? I know I am guilty of this at times. But what if I told you prayer will be the most POWERFUL thing you can do in 2022?!
As we are beginning our 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting this week, I hope you will use this opportunity presented to you, and get involved. And not just get involved because that is what our church and PTB is doing, but to see what it could do in your life and in your relationship with God! Prayer is such a powerful tool, and I would argue it is the most important thing we can do in our lives! Think about it: Prayer is our direct communication with God. It is our conversation with Him. Through prayer, we have access to deep encounters with the heart and mind of Our Heavenly father. We are going to need that more than ever this year! But we need to change something in our prayer life. We can’t just pray when we feel like it!. Corrie Ten Boom said “Don’t pray when you feel like it. Have an appointment with the Lord and keep it. A man is powerful on his knees.”
God’s word calls us to pray and gives us examples of how and when Jesus prayed.
Matthew 14:23: After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone,
Mark 1:35 Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.
Luke 5:16 MSG:
As often as possible Jesus withdrew to out-of-the-way places for prayer.
Matthew 26:36 Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.”
Jesus himself prayed to God often, but we especially see examples of him praying alone.
So how do we pray? And can we really hear God speak to us through our prayers? The Bible gives us examples and instruction of how to pray and shows us that prayer was the most important thing in the life of Jesus. One instruction that most people are familiar with is when Jesus’ disciples asked him how they should pray. Jesus directs them by leading them through The Lord’s Prayer. He says “When you pray”... I’m going to read from the message version.
Matthew 6:6-13 (MSG): 6 “Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.
7-13 “The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this:
Our Father in heaven, (recognize who God is)
Reveal who you are. (praise him)
Set the world right;
Do what’s best— (do what you will according to your will)
as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals. (Ask for our daily bread)
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. (repent from sins)
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.
You’re in charge!
You can do anything you want!
You’re ablaze in beauty! (all glory goes to you)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Some of the most helpful advice I have received on how to pray was from Pete Greig during the Prayer Course, when he says “Keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up”. He says “your prayer life is at its best at its simplest”.
And in line with that, Nicky Gumbel in “Bible in One Year” says “don’t be repetitious, but persist in prayer”
And through prayer, we really can hear God speak!
Mother Teresa said, “Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.”
“The value of persistent prayer is not that God will hear us, but that we will finally hear from God” -William McGill
And the Bible says He will speak to us when we pray, we just need to listen.
Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”
How amazing is that? We have to believe that! The Bible says it's true.
Do you think your life could be changed by prayer this year? Wouldn’t it be amazing if THIS year of prayer was more meaningful and powerful than ever before? Start by making it your number one priority! Join us for the next 21 days of prayer and fasting. Don’t just go through the motions, but desire to focus your attention on God and open your heart to what He would reveal to you.
Fasting
A teaching by Daniel M.
What is Fasting? Simply put, as seen in scripture, fasting is the spiritual discipline of abstaining from food (usually from sunset to sundown) as a physical expression of acknowledging their dependence on God. It is the denial of what sustains us, for greater dependence on the One who sustains us.
What are you craving? What are you hungry for? Better yet, what is it that you hungry are for? I ask this because we all know, what you hunger for, is what you will seek.
I ask this because we already understand this concept. See when you are hungry for steak, you are going to go and eat steak. If you are hungry for lobster, you are going to go and eat lobster. If someone were to offer you anything else, sure you may SETTLE for it, but it isn’t what is going to satisfy your craving.
So, what are you hungry for? And what would it look like if what you were hungry for was more of God?
Think about this story – we all know that moment in Matthew 4, where Jesus is out fasting in the desert shortly after He is baptized. Scripture says “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” He was hungry – to which Jesus responds with one of His most well-known declarations, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
See, Jesus was hungry. But here’s the thing – what was he hungry for? You see, Jesus could easily have made the stones turn into bread, but what was it that He was truly craving for? What was more important to Him? Bread? Or to be with the Father? What the world had to offer? Or what His Father had already given to Him, according to His promise?
You see, often times hunger, as defined academically, comes from a place of lack -a deficiency or an urgent need of some nutrient or food that is necessary to continue with life. But sometimes this hunger, or craving, starts a different way. It comes from a taste, a sample, some sort of exposure. Some of us, we haven’t sought God in a long time, therefore we are probably starving - hungry for His presence whether we know it or not. For others, we may have tasted of His sweet goodness, and we know that we want more of Him.
But here’s the thing – to say Yes to God sometimes means sometimes saying no to something else. And as we enter this period of fasting, I think it is important to know why we fast. Cause fasting in itself is a lot less about the food we give – cause we can give up food and not pray, not trust, not depend on God, that’s just called a diet. But rather, it is about depending on the One we depend on. To say YES, I need food, and yes, food is absolutely good and essential to our lives; but even more essential and important to us – is God.
As a church, we have this culture of helping people become who they were born to be. That we would become the church that we were created and purposed to be. That can and only will done when we realize that above everything we need, we need Jesus more; that apart from Him we can do nothing. That the food that we eat may temporarily satisfy us for a moment, but Christ will satisfy us for eternity.
In John 6:35 Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never go thirsty.”
I encourage you to reflect on this question – During this fasting season, what are you hungry for? Because what you hunger for you seek.
Let’s be a people who hunger and seek for God, not just during 21 Days of prayer and fasting, but day-to-day for the entirety of our lives.