Prayer & Fasting: Stilling

TO START

This week, we jumped into the first part of a series called Prayer and Fasting, a series that unpacks what it means to enter into a season of fasting both individually and communally, very much like that of Israel and Moses in the past. The hope is that this series will help us to learn or relearn the fundamentals of responding to God’s action in our life in specific ways. 

  • What’s your relationship with fasting? Do you know what it is? Have you tried it before? Do you do it regularly?

  • What’s your relationship with prayer? Is prayer a consistent part of your life? Is it hard or easy for you? Are there certain ways of praying that best help you to connect with God? OR do you find yourself often only seeing prayer as a listing of things for God to fix or solve?

Read Exodus 34:27-35

  • Why do you think Moses’s response to God’s words in v.27 was to pray and specifically to fast for 40 days?

In the sermon, Zane points us to the reality that when Moses comes down from being in God’s presence on the mountain, something of God’s splendor and presence stays with him and yet he’s not fully aware. In light of this, Zane contends that what came from Moses' words in prayer and what comes from our words in prayer may not be as important as the person who arises after a time of prayer thanks to God. 

  • Do you notice physical, emotional and/or spiritual changes when your life is filled with moments to withdraw in prayer and/or fasting? What do those changes look like?

To close, Zane told the story of Susanna Wesley, a teacher, friend, mother, wife and follower of Jesus who attributed her resilience to prayer even as she rarely found time alone or in quiet. Instead, she would just put her apron over her head as a prayer room to be still before the Lord. 

  • So, where’s your apron? Where is your place, your time in the day, your space in which you can truly get still before the Lord? OR do you already have that place?  

TO CLOSE

This week, as we kick off this series of prayer and fasting. We want to invite you to create space for 30 seconds of silence before praying as an opportunity for everyone to have a moment before God that settles everything. Then we invite you to pray the following prayer: 

Still our hearts so that we may know that you are God

That we may know that you create and sustain our every breath

Still our hearts knowing that you want our lives to flourish 

That you desire for us to experience joy, hope and peace

That nothing falls outside of you love and care

Still us that we may know that you are God alone.

Matt DeLano