Day 12 – The Debt of Love
You say, “Oh great another debt!” that is not what you need to hear! This debt is nothing like any other debt you have ever experienced. Listen in and enjoy!
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Day 11 – The Sacrifice of Love
The God kind of love requires a sacrifice. Not exactly what you might think – listen to today’s commentary to see what He says about the sacrifice of love.
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Day 10 – The Security of Love
In a world filled with uncertainity one of the things which is sure is the love of God. Listen to today’s Bible passage and commentary on the Security of God’s love.
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The Risk of Love
Love can be risky. God took a risk in His relationship with you. Check out today’s podcast to see what that risk was and how you figure in.
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Day 8 – The Example of Love
Follow along as we explore the example of love which Jesus set for us. Caution – this may be life-changing!
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Day 7 – The Difficulty of Love
Loving others as God wants us to and as Jesus has set an example for us can be difficult. Here is some practical advice on how to get that task done.
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Day 6 – The Laws of Love
Rules for love? You have to be kidding – right? No kidding – there are really laws for how we are to handle God’s love. Listen in and find out for yourself.
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Day 5 – The Foundation of Love
Today see the foundational nature of God’s love.
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Why Should You Fast
January 13, 2010 by pastor
Filed under 2010 Fasting Manual
WHY YOU SHOULD FAST
Fasting allows us to focus in upon God. Throughout the scriptures you will find many different reasons why a fast was called. Sometimes fasting was called for to accompany corporate repentance. At other times it is as simple as a regular part of Jehovah worship. Still yet at other times fasting is called for in situations where the outcome of current events seems hopeless, “desperate times call for desperate measures” type situation. It is in this last way we must exercise extreme caution. In times of distress we make our appeal to God and He provides for us help in our time of need. One can erroneously surmise that it was the fasting alone which forced God into action. As if He was not paying attention at the time or did not want to help and was forced to, just because we were missing a few meals. Sounds a little silly when you put it like that! We must always be careful to focus our attention on God and who He is. The reasons will always vary but the purpose will always be the same, to draw closer to God!
“But wait”, you say, “Jesus himself taught that fasting would help us overcome our lack of power and lack of faith.” Both of these two issues can be traced to our trust in God and that is directly relative to our closeness to him. For instance, if you do not believe that Jesus can save you from your sins, you will not trust Him as Savior and make Him Lord of your life. Your faith in Jesus is based on your relationship with Him and that alone determines to what extent you will obey Him. To trust in God with out any reservation in every area of your life requires you to have a working relationship with Him based on the past and the present leading you to a conclusion about the future. It is that kind of relationship that causes you to have the attitude of Job, “. . .the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord!”
If you miss this simple concept about fasting you open yourself up to corrupt doctrine, which can easily lead you astray, and at the very least cause you to miss your focus on God. The better we know God, not just more about Him, we are in a better position to be used by Him to accomplish His purpose in this world. Remember, the church was left in the world to change the world not so that they could bask in the wonderful things God was doing through them.
There are some things, which can be accomplished through fasting which can not be accomplished any other way. We are in the midst of a society that needs to be set free from many addictions and blinding bondage. God has anointed us to be among those who bring deliverance to the captive and to mend the broken hearts around us.
Just as the disciples could not deliver the one young man from a demonic possession without fasting and prayer, we must fast and pray to set our society free. Every one of us could use more power in our lives to effectively work the work for which God has saved us. It is not the power of God that is lacking but we are the ones who are carriers of far too little of it. The whole earth groans to once again see the genuine power of the living God restoring order to that which is confused without Him. We in the church have somehow traded in the elementary steps that lead us to God for a dazzling vapor that is only an indicator of where He has been. The works of God in yesteryear and even yesterday are wonderful examples of His concern for His creation but they are not sufficient for the evil of today. Isaiah says the God is doing a new thing. It becomes necessary for us to take the slow meticulous steps methodically and repeatedly over and over until we once again walk full of the power of God. Until our shadows, like Peter’s, have a life changing affect on those in whom we come in contact. God does not need another generation to bring a new light into the world, He needs the present generation to shake off the works of darkness and step onto the hill so the light of Jesus shining through us has the most effect. It is time to awake those who are asleep and roll back the drooping heads, for the time of our coming Savior is at hand. It is time for the church to go into the world and expose the works of darkness, but we cannot do that with a dimly lit torch. Only through the awesome power of our All Mighty God are we going to be able to change those around us.
It is at this point the challenge is issued to you, this is personal. How much of God in your life do you want (watch it, it is a trick question)? The answer is that you have exactly the amount of God in you right now that you have been willing to reach out and obtain. Your desire for God is the only limit to what you can accomplish for Him. It is easy for us to speak with our lips our wishes, but it extracts a price from us to see those things come about with our eyes. Abraham was promised every place on which the sole of his foot stepped for an inheritance. What a promise! The only requirement was that he had to do some serious walking, hundreds of miles of walking, in order to see the desire of his heart fulfilled. What prices are you willing to pay to be a carrier of the presence of God in a greater way than you are now? Does your heart begin to race as you think of your neighbors getting saved, your friends being healed, your church being filled with hungry God seekers instead of “satisfied saints”? Does it cause your imagination to work overtime as your spirit man thinks of those “things” that are to grand for us to dare to dream? The answer, my friend, comes to those who will challenge the Lord at His word. Those who will draw near to Him are the only ones who will ever see what happens when He moves close to mankind. The discipline of fasting, when performed properly, will transport you into the throne room as nothing else can do. As this author writes of these things there is such a presence of the Lord in this room, it is as if God is bidding me to provoke you into good works. Not the works made with the hands of man but the works that propel you into those long lonely hours spent on your face before the Omnipotent God. Those works that send you into His presence. Not to get some new revelation, or a sermon series but so that you might understand the heart of God. Those sessions with God which force you to put this book down and slip from the chair in which you are sitting to the floor and spend time with your Lord and Savior. How many more books are you going to have to read, how many more tapes are you going to have to listen to before you catch on to the idea that God created you for communion with Him? Take some time right now to stop and listen to Him. He is ready to fellowship with you.
Perhaps there is some old baggage from your past, or even some sins you are carrying right now that are obstructing your view of God. There is no time like right now to ask God to forgive you and to reestablish a right relationship with Him. Put this book aside for a few moments and spend some time with your Heavenly Father. All of the instruction which follows will be lost time for you if you do not first make the commitment to deepen your relationship with God.
The Philosophy of Fasting
January 13, 2010 by pastor
Filed under 2010 Fasting Manual
The Philosophy of Fasting
The philosophy of fasting is that it expresses repentance and it uncovers the life to God. It is the voluntary disuse of anything innocent in itself – it is the forsaking of the good for the best – with a view to spiritual culture. It does not apply to food alone, but to everything which a man may desire.
The more we watch the lives of men, the more we see that one of the reasons why men are not occupied with great thoughts and interests, is the way in which our lives are overfilled with little things. It is not that we despise the highest hopes and interests of our immortal nature that you neglect them so, it is mainly that your passions crowd so thick about you that you’re entirely occupied with them. It is untrue picture of the lives of many of us if we imagine ourselves that is, our wills, standing in the center, and close about each man a crowd of clamorous passions and eager lusts, while outside of them there awaits the higher claimants of our time and powers; truth and charity and religion. A man sometimes puts out his hand, parts and pushes aside this clamorous crowd, physical appetites, and secular ambitions. He says to them, “stand back and, at least for a few moments, let me hear what truth and charity and religion have to say to my soul.” Then up to the emptiness that he has made there pours the rich company of higher interests, and they gather for a time around the soul which belongs to them, but from which they have been shut away.
Pride, doubt and then a conscience, among the men and women who live easy, thoughtless lives, is started and someone looks up and says, “Is it wrong? Is it wicked to do this?” And when they get their answer, “No certainly not evil!”, then they go back and give their whole lives up to doing their innocent little pieces of uselessness again. The question is not whether that is weakness, God will punish you for doing that, the question is whether that thing is keeping other and better things away. And with it, the vast privilege and dignity of duty is hid in a stance between God and your soul. Put aside everything that hinders the highest from coming to us, and then call to that highest who is always waiting to come; fasting and prayer, as the habit of life, it is noble. As an occasional deference it is real and earnest, it makes the soul freer for the future.
What then is fasting? If our souls are sinful and are shut, let us, at least for a few days; proclaim by soberness and quietude of life that we know our responsibility and how often we have abandoned it. By some small symbols let us bear witness that we know something of the solemnity of living, the dreadful mistakes, and the struggle of repentance. Our symbols may be very feeble, our sack cloth may be lined with silk and our actions scented with the juice of roses, but let us do something that breaks the mere monotony of complacent living, which seems to be forever saying over to itself that there is no such thing as sin, but to live is light and easy work. Perhaps as we tell God of what little sorrow for our sins we have, our sorrow may be increased, and while we stand there in His presence the fasting may give us a truer reality of repentance behind it. And as we realize that our redemption is rooted in divine self-sacrifice, we abandon human self-indulgence.
Saint Bernard is quoted to have said: “Who so the holy place would enter in, must pray and fast for steadfast to grace, to turn from all that hides the father’s face; must fast from every sweet that tends to sin.”
Fasting is an expression of hungering after God, of grief that we know Him so little, though we might know him so well. Fasting is a seeking after God without whom we cannot live. It is the abandonment for a time of lesser blessings that we may strengthen the appeal which we make for the higher. Our fasting is to be the fasting of love, and the blessing that we seek to buy it is the fuller knowledge of God himself. But after all it is but a help in the quest. The Word says, “Turn towards me with all of your heart.”
We are to turn to God as an actual living person. It would not be enough to turn from our sins, we must turn to God, and be restored to right relationships with Him. In our best moments we say I will arise but we do not add and go to my father, and so even be, rising comes to little or nothing. We must make a new effort to have a communion time with God. Though turning to God means more than turning from sin, it undoubtedly involves that, and it will fail unless the turning from sin is real. “Turn to me with all of your heart.” The heart includes much more than the affections, it includes all that is within us that is the will, which is of primary importance. To turn to God with our entire heart is to turn to him with the one desire of doing His whole will, and doing nothing else. What has been the main cause of our sins in the past? Not that we were obstinately set upon what was definitely evil, it was that we were what James calls double minded. We desire to do right, if it did not cost us too much. But we were not willing to make the sacrifices of pleasure which doing right demands. To turn to God with all our hearts is to turn to him with the deliberate intention of doing his will, whatever it may cost, whatever we may have to abandon for it. So let us offer our intentions to God during this time of fasting and regard them not primarily as a self discipline, but as a spontaneous expression of love and sorrow which we could not abandon without necessity.
Are there any dangers in fasting that we ought to guard against? The fast must be the free action of the individual, without external obligation, so that it may really be his own will, which is required to own the blessing spoken of by our Lord. Again a man must not allow into his motives any doubt of the all embracing sufficiency of God’s love and of Christ’s sacrifice. A man must not see the act of fasting as a business transaction, for by doing so he can lessen the building of the relationship with God. In similar fashion no man must imagine that there is any virtue in the mere fact of undergoing pain or that there is any pleasure to God in seeing us in its grip. On the other hand a fast may be a legitimate expression of penitence, a means of helping us to realize the hideousness of our sin. If the one who fasts esteems himself as more spiritual than another who does not, if he looks upon his fast as a more pleasing offering as compared to others and parades his own fasting, then that man will have his reward. There is another side to that truth. A time of fasting may at the very least remind us that Christ does call us to something higher and more noble than physical comfort. For the Christian in this exercise of fasting, we prove that to fast, the one thing they need involves the letting go of other things which are desirable and that in thought, as well as in action, he must steadily narrow his way for exchanging the good for the best.
The deeper we go, the wider the possibilities of us entertaining a profitable fast. We dare not pour out our hearts on altars by the wayside chosen at our own pleasure. God Himself points to the place where our sacrifices must be offered up. To Abraham, his Friend (Jehovah) said,” take out thy son, thy only son … and offer him upon one of the mountains that I will tell thee of.” As God Himself must be the supreme object of our spiritual surrender, so God Himself shows us that our sacrifice must be complete not only in motive but in detail. He who claims the offering must also choose the altar. And the willing surrender of our will to His becomes a part of our ever building relationship with God, without which we cannot be made perfect. A general known only to me by the name of General Gordon, penetrated to the root of the whole matter when he said, “I learned that to be like Christ, we must not only have our will subordinated to his, but we must be delighted to have it so.”
