Renewal Through Prayer & Fasting

Introduction:

As we continue with our worship of the Lord this morning, and we continue with seeking His face, let us prepare our hearts to hear from the Lord this morning as we look at His word Together.

Let’s Pray Together.

20 We wait for the Lord; he is our help and shield. 21 For our hearts rejoice in him because we trust in his holy name. 22 May your faithful love rest on us, Lord, for we put our hope in you.( Ps 33:20–22.)

5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways know him, and he will make your paths straight.( Pr 3:5–6.)

1 I lift my eyes toward the mountains. Where will my help come from? 2 My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. (Ps 121:1–2.)

All through the Scriptures, we are told to wait upon the Lord. We are instructed to look unto Him. We are told to seek after Him.

We grow weak, and we grow tired. We know that. We know that we are prone to fail. We know that we struggle with waiting for God to move and to act. We like to take things in our own hands and try to figure everything out.

I am 100% completely guilty of this in my own life! It is hard for me to look for God. It does not come naturally to me....and really I do not think that it comes naturally to anyone. We like to be the ones who are in control. We like to be the ones who “figure” it out. And because we put so much stress on ourselves, I don't think that we see what it does to us. When we start trying to run our own lives in our own strength, we get burnt out! This is why.... at least part of the reason anyway.... that we grow weak and weary.

When we start taking our eyes off of Christ, and we start looking at the world around us...... we start looking at our circumstance and what we are dealing with...... we will get to a place where we feel like we cannot go on.

I think that many of us have been feeling this way. I want us to be open and honest about those things....because it is only when we are open and honest about those things that we start seeking help. It is when we come to the end of ourselves and we say… “OK, I give up. I need Renewal in my life....” that we are actually able to heal and be made new.

This is what I am wanting us to see through this series as we finish it up this morning as we start this New Year. We are in a place in our lives that we need to start asking God to do something inside of us. We need God to come and Renew Us.

So, what we have done the last few weeks is walk through some different ways in which this is possible in our lives. We started the New Year with praying for one another. We need our brothers and sister in this life.... and we need them to be praying for us. We talked about having a real desire for God that is satisfied through worship. Then last week we talked about how we can experience renewal through our encounters with the Word of God. We need to make sure that we have a system in place where we are able to read, study, memorize, meditate, on the Word. A great place to start this is to join us on Wed. Night for our Bible Study or to engage with our Sunday School Class.

All of these things are imperative for our spiritual lives if we are going to experience God in a fresh new way in 2023. Not that we are talking about “New” Trendy ideas here. These things are hard work. They take time and effort.... but they are worth it.

Body:

What I want to do this morning as we wrap of this series on Renewal is talk about 2 more points.... but these two points are often seen together in the Scriptures.

Main Point: Renewal Through Prayer & Fasting.

Now, I know that we have already talked about praying a little bit… but that was really more of a praying for one another and taking the time to practice it. What I want to do this morning as we Worship the Lord, is look at His word and see exactly what we can learn about these two topics so that we may be able to use them as we seek after God.

Let’s Start with Prayer.

5 “Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you., 7 When you pray, don’t babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words. 8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows the things you need before you ask him.

9 “Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one., (Mt 6:5–13.)

One thing that is clear from the Scriptures is that Jesus expects that His followers would be a people of prayer. Notice how the passage starts out.... ‘When you pray...” This should not be a surprise to us since Jesus Himself was a man of prayer. We often see Jesus getting up early in the morning to go and pray. Or we see Jesus staying up late at Night to pray. Prayer, for Jesus, was not some optional part of His day that He would do if He had time. NO. Jesus made prayer a priority to His life and He made sure that HE made time to pray.

As we think about prayer, we would do well first to define what we mean by prayer and then talk about what we can do when we pray.

How Do We Define Prayer?

In the past, I have always defined prayer as “Prayer is communication between us and God where we are admitting our inability to do anything about the situation or circumstances that we are bringing before Him.”

This is not a bad definition… but I think that it is incomplete. Prayer can be simply defined as “Communication between us and God.”

I know that this is so simple. This is how a child would explain prayer to someone. It is us talking to God and taking the time to listen..... but when you think about it… is it such a bad thing to have a simple definition? Isn’t this definition more at the heart of what prayer really is? Prayer is more than us complaining to God.... at least it should be. It is more than going to God to ask Him to do something for you.

So, what are to we pray then? If Prayer is communication with God… what are some things that we need to be praying for?

We see many of things laid out in the Prayer that Jesus taught His disciples:

Relationship With God

God’s Glory and Kingdom.

Doing God’s Will

Asking God to Provide.

It is about Forgiveness.

Protection from temptations.

Deliverance from Satan.

You see it is so much for than just asking God to do stuff for us. Are we able to ask Him to do stuff for us.... to take care of things that are out of our control? YES!!! By all means, pour out your hearts to God in this endeavor.....however, is it more than this? YES!! Sometimes it is just coming before God to speak to Him so that you can fellowship with Him. Sometimes it is simply about spending time with God. It is about waiting on Him. Your prayer time is the perfect time to “wait on the Lord and seek His face.” Prayer gives us the chance to see God better.

I know that we have gone through this before, but I want to give it to you again as a reminder. There is an acronym that can help with prayer.

A.C.T.S.

Adoration

Confession

Thanksgiving

Supplication

If we follow these things, they will go a long way in helping us structure our prayer in such a way that we can focus on the right things at the right time.

But it is not only prayer that we need to focus on as we think about seeking after God.

Jesus continues with His sermon and right after prayer, he talks about another spiritual discipline that can be very effective in seeking renewal.

16 “Whenever you fast, don’t be gloomy like the hypocrites. For they make their faces unattractive so that their fasting is obvious to people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting isn’t obvious to others but to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you (Mt 6:16–18.)

Seek God Through Fasting.

Now, fasting is one of those spiritual disciplines that is not talked about that often in churches today, but it is all over Scripture.

Listen to these verses:

4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 After he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 Then the tempter approached him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”( Mt 4:1–3.)

The Lord struck the baby that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became deathly ill. 16 David pleaded with God for the boy. He fasted, went home, and spent the night lying on the ground. 17 The elders of his house stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat anything with them. ( 2 Sa 12:15–17.)

26 The whole Israelite army went to Bethel where they wept and sat before the Lord. They fasted that day until evening and offered burnt offerings and fellowship offerings to the Lord. ( Jdg 20:26–27.)

21 I proclaimed a fast by the Ahava River, so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us, our dependents, and all our possessions. 22 I did this because I was ashamed to ask the king for infantry and cavalry to protect us from enemies during the journey, since we had told him, “The hand of our God is gracious to all who seek him, but his fierce anger is against all who abandon him.” 23 So we fasted and pleaded with our God about this, and he was receptive to our prayer.(Ezr 8:21–23.)

15 Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: 16 “Go and assemble all the Jews who can be found in Susa and fast for me. Don’t eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my female servants will also fast in the same way. After that, I will go to the king even if it is against the law. If I perish, I perish.” 17 So Mordecai went and did everything Esther had commanded him.( Es 4:15–17.)

In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, a Mede by birth, who was made king over the Chaldean kingdom—2 in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the books according to the word of the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah that the number of years for the desolation of Jerusalem would be seventy. 3 So I turned my attention to the Lord God to seek him by prayer and petitions, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.( Da 9:1–3.)

12 Even now— this is the Lord’s declaration— turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. 13 Tear your hearts, not just your clothes, and return to the Lord your God. For he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, and he relents from sending disaster.(Joe 2:12–13)

2 As they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” 3 Then after they had fasted, prayed, and laid hands on them, they sent them off.( Ac 13:2–3.)

There are plenty of more verses and passages that we can look at this morning, but for the sake of time I think that we can see that fasting was a very common practice in both the OT and NT....and yet, as I said earlier, it is something that is not talked about often in the church or practiced. I remember one pastor saying, ‘If you want proof that we do not practice fasting as we should, take a look at the obesity numbers for pastors.”

This is a much larger topic than I can cover here this morning, but I do want us to think about what this might mean for us and start the conversation as to what we can do to take steps toward fasting.

Let’s start with a Biblical definition.

I found this definition and I think that it is helpful...

Fasting is to voluntarily reduce or eliminate your intake of food for a specific time and purpose.

For all basic purposes that does seem to be the case. There are times in Scripture when you are going to see people refrained from eating ALL foods and DRINKS.... and then there are sometimes when people only refrained from eating only while still having water. Then there are other times, in the case of Daniel, when he up only certain foods.

There really is no hard fast rule on what is to be given up when it comes to a fast. In the Bible, more often than not, it deals with giving up food. That does not mean that a person cannot take a fast from something else that might be taking up too much of their time.... or give up something that they really love to express their love for God over and above that item. That is perfectly fine.

That is the idea that I want us to see. Fasting is about giving up something so that we can seek after God. It is saying, “As bad as my body is crying out for food, water, games....or whatever else....God I want you more. I Love You and I desire you.”This has to become the cry of our hearts.

This leads to a another important question that I want us to think about.

How Long Does a Fast Last?

Again, in Scripture we do not see a hard fast rule about what is a fast and what is not. There are some passages that talk about the people of God fasting until evening....so they skipped breakfast and lunch. You see other cases where people fasted for 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 21 days.... Jesus and Moses fasted for 40 days. There is not a number… because that is not what is important. We miss the point when that becomes our focus.

Why Should Christians Fast?

Repentance

Renewal

Direction

Humble Yourself

To Seek After God

To Overcome Temptation

To Advance His Kingdom

These are just a few of the ways that the Bible would direct us when it comes to fasting… and what is so fascinating about this topic is that Jesus expects His followers to do this as a practice

Conclusion:

I know that I have thrown a lot of information out to you this morning. There is a lot here to think about. But, I want to remind you of the main point..

Main Point: Renewal Through Prayer & Fasting.

If we are wanting to experience renewal in our lives, then we have to start putting these things into practice. We have to make time to seek after God. We need to put prayer and fasting as a priority in our lives to where we can get alone with Him and pour out our hearts before Him.

I want to encourage you this week, to take a look at your schedule and set a time for meeting with Jesus. Spend some time in prayer going through ACTS. Also, pick something to give up one day this week. Take a leap of faith and practice fasting. Maybe it is skipping breakfast and lunch one day so that you can read and pray. Maybe it is staying off social media. Maybe it is not watching so much TV. I don't know…but give up something this week so that you can be renewed.

Go and rest in Him this week. Seek after Him. Wait upon Him… for He will restore you.

Let’s pray together.