Footprints of Faith
Week 3: The People of God
March 21-27, 2010
The end of this week will mark the halfway point for our time of 40 days of prayer and fasting. This week we will focus on “The People of God.” We invite you to be in prayer this week so that we may embrace the promise that His faithfulness will continue through all generations, that this body at Glenwood will be a testimony to God’s unending love, and that we will be the face of Jesus to our community.
We heard from Wayne Propst and Dewayne Manning the first two weeks about being still and listening for the voice of God. As people of God, one way to discern God’s will for us is through some of the spiritual disciplines. One of these is fasting. We invite those who are able to include fasting with your prayers. But a question might be asked, “Why fast?” One reason is simply to empty ourselves so that we can focus on God.
Deuteronomy 8:3 says, “God humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord”
In the book, “Soul Feast” by Marjorie Thompson, she answers this question very well. Like the noise we have become accustomed to, or the frenetic busyness of our schedules, food is taken for granted as a constant in our lives. The very idea of intentionally being without it even for one day may threaten some of the unconscious assumptions on which our lives are built.
This is why fasting remains so relevant for people of faith today. In a more tangible, visceral way than any other spiritual discipline, fasting reveals our excessive attachments and the assumptions that lie behind them. Food is necessary to life, but we have made it more necessary than God. How often have we neglected to remember God’s presence when we would never consider neglecting to eat? Fasting brings us face to face with how we put the material world ahead of its spiritual Source. We will comprehend little of how we are nourished by Christ until we have emptied ourselves of the kind of sustenance that keeps us content to live at life’s surface.
May God bless all of us as we seek His discerning voice for our vision.
For the Elders,
Reggie Howell
