The Start of a Journey
After buying a new house and moving across our city last April, our family made the decision to start attending a new church. We were lucky enough to have a recommendation from my sister-in-law and her husband and we started attending their church. It felt like a breath of fresh air in our spiritual lives! They have an amazing Sunday school program where we can drop off our two-year old son and we were finally able to fully listen to and enjoy the sermons for the first time in two years. Everyone at the church was incredibly welcoming and helpful. They also have an excellent coffee shop (hello chai lattes!). But joining a new church is always a journey in and of itself as you learn about the culture of the church, what sermon style they have, and what kind of events and traditions they have. One of the traditions at our new church is a time of prayer and fasting for the first two weeks of January… I’m sorry, what? I had never done any kind of biblical fasting before and knew nothing about the practice, but I had a feeling of excitement at the prospect.
To give this a little more context, I want to talk about the sermon our pastor gave this Sunday. The title of the sermon was “There is More” and our pastor started off with talking about the feeling we all have where we wish there was more… more in our family, more in our marriages, more in our cities… just more. Hearing that made me think about all of the feelings that have been running through my head lately. I keep feeling like there is more that God wants for me in my life, and the biggest area where that rings true is my personal health and weight. I have been struggling with my weight for nearly two decades and having a two-year old has made that more and more apparent as he becomes more active. It’s hard to run and play with him and it has been weighing heavily on my heart.
In the sermon, our pastor talked about how our God is a God of more and that He wants us to have life in abundance. On the opposite side of that is us as humans and how we often settle for less than what God offers us. We turn to substitutes and idols that replace God in our hearts and we push ourselves farther away from God and His love. Reflecting on that part of the sermon led me to thinking about how much importance I give food in my life, how much time I spend watching videos on YouTube, and how much stuff I try to pack into a day… all while my Bible is gathering dust on a shelf. One of the things our pastor mentioned was that we should all ask God to confront us with what we are placing before Him in our hearts, which was a very sobering thought.
My favorite part of the sermon came next with the introduction of Ephesians 3:20: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” Our pastor went on to talk about how God is able to do more than we ask and more than we can imagine. More than we can imagine. After struggling with my weight for so many years, I have to admit that I stopped even imaging that I could ever be a healthy weight again. Every time I tried, I failed, so why would I bother dream about something I knew couldn’t happen? But yesterday’s sermon gave me hope again. Our pastor challenged us to think, “What might God want to do that we believe in theory, but struggle to envision in reality?” and I knew my answer.
The last part of the sermon talked about biblical fasting which is a spiritual discipline where you withhold something in the physical realm to gain something in the spiritual realm. It’s about giving up something, not to try and impress God and win His favor, but to awaken a hunger for Him. The thought about being hungry for God and hungry for the Holy Spirit is what inspired me to start this blog. One of the things I have never had is the feeling that I have “heard” God speaking to me. I want to be closer to Him and be filled with the Holy Spirit. I am hoping that by doing a fast I can learn to give up my dependence on something physical, start spending more time in connection with God, learn to dream big again, and feel God’s love and how close He is to me.
So here I am! I started this blog as a way to track my journey with biblical fasting as I learn more about this discipline. I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me and what God has in store for my life.
If you want to watch the sermon mentioned above, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv_cVfSTaic