Abundant Mindset 21 Day Fast Intro (Sunday Jan 16)
Welcome to Bridge Church’s Abundant Mindset Devotional. We’re honored you want to take this journey with us as a church.
I want to encourage you to track along with the sermon series. Maintaining a connection with others in the body of Christ is important as you move through this time.
We’re going to be fasting and praying together for 21 days.
If you’ve never fasted before or just need some healthy reminders about fasting, let me offer you some insight on how to make the most of this time. A lot of these ideas come from Dr. Bill Bright’s “Personal Guide to Fasting and Prayer.”
Pick a Time to Set Aside Each Day
Receiving God’s best blessing from a fast requires solid commitment. Arranging special time each day with God is absolutely crucial in attaining intimate communion with the Father. You must devote yourself to seeking God’s face, even (and especially) during those times in which you feel weak, vulnerable, or irritable.
Focus on God
Read His Word and pray during what were mealtimes, or times on social media or whatever you’re fasting from. Meditate on Him when you awake in the night. Sing praises to Him whenever you please. Focus on your Heavenly Father and make every act one of praise and worship. God will enable you to experience His command to “pray without ceasing” as you seek his presence (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18).
Be Aware of the Enemy
As you enter this time of heightened spiritual devotion, be aware that Satan will do everything he can to pull you away from your prayer and Bible reading time. When you feel the enemy trying to discourage you, immediately go to God in prayer and ask Him to strengthen your resolve in the face of difficulties and temptations.
The enemy makes you a target because he knows that fasting is the most powerful of all Christian disciplines and that God may have something very special to show you as you wait upon Him and seek His face. Satan does not want you to grow in your faith, and will do anything he can, from making you hungry and grumpy to bringing up trouble in your family or at work to stop you (1 Peter 5:8). Make prayer your shield against such attacks.
Don’t Make It About You
Do not become so caught up in praying for yourself and others that you forget about simply reverencing and praising God. True spiritual fasting focuses on God. Center your total being on Him–your attitudes, actions, motives, desires, and words. This can only take place if God and His Holy Spirit are at the center of your attention. Confess your sins as the Holy Spirit brings them to your attention and continue to focus on God and God alone so that your prayers may be powerful and effective.
Check Your Expectations
A renewed closeness with God and a greater sensitivity to spiritual things are usually the results of a fast. Do not be disappointed if you don’t have a “mountaintop experience,” as some do. Many people who have successfully completed extended fasts tell of feeling a nearness to God that they have never before known, but others who have honestly sought His face report no particular outward results at all. For others, their fast was physically, emotionally, and spiritually grueling, but they knew they had been called by God to fast, and they completed the fast unto Him as an act of worship. God honored that commitment.
Your motive in fasting must be to glorify God, not to have an emotional experience, and not to attain personal happiness. When your motives are right, God will honor your seeking heart and bless your time with Him in a very special way.
Remember you’re not just fasting from something, you’re fasting for something. Our corporate fast will focus on John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
Both our sermon series each Sunday as well as our fasting devotional will detail what an abundant life is. We pray that in 2022 you move from being overwhelmed to living in the overflow.
In Him,
Pastor James T. Roberson III
Bridge Church
