Are you intimidated by prayer and fasting? What do these spiritual disciplines look like practically? In this session of Secret Church 19, Pastor David Platt encourages believers to take one step closer to intimacy with God through prayer and fasting. When it comes to prayer and fasting, it is easy to feel as if you are inadequate and overwhelmed. However, Pastor Platt reminds viewers that we are all inadequate in our pursuit of God and can use help along the way. When we seek God step by step, we can be confident that we will find him.
- Room to Grow
- Diving Deeper
Does Fasting Intimidate You?
When some people hear that this year’s Secret Church topic is on prayer and fasting in the pursuit of God, some might get a bit intimidated in ways that they really might not even want to express, like, I feel like I have so much room to grow, maybe, in some of these areas.
Maybe I’ve been a Christian for a long time and I really don’t think I have a strong prayer life, or I really don’t even know what fasting is or why it would be important for my life. And if you have any of those thoughts, I just want to encourage you that you are not alone. Whether you’re a new believer or you’ve been a believer for a long time, I don’t think any one of us would say, yeah, I pretty much got prayer figured out, pretty much got fasting figured out. I know how this works in my life and I’m doing it totally the way I think I’m supposed to be.
How to Overcome the Intimidation of Fasting
I think we all realize we want to grow in this area of our lives. I do. I want to grow in this area of my life. That’s part of the reason I wanted to do this particular topic. I want to dive into scripture and see all that it says about prayer and about fasting, and learn more and more, and to be able to encourage one another with that. So I want to encourage you as we dive into this topic for Secret Church 19, one, to be a part of it. I can’t think of many more valuable topics than what does it mean to know and pursue God?
And we’re going to dive from cover to cover in scripture and see all that God tells us about what it means to know and pursue him through prayer, through fasting. Hopefully answer some questions like, why pray? How does prayer work? What is fasting? What does that look like practically? So we’re going to walk through scripture, and then along the way, practically think about what this looks like in our lives.
Change Your Lifestyle
What does a lifestyle of prayer and fasting in the pursuit of God, what does that look like, in ways that I hope will encourage you, set you up in a sense, set all of us up, to grow one step deeper in our intimacy with God, our enjoyment of God, our worship of God, our delight in God.
So we’re not going to figure it all out, solve it in a way that, okay, now everything is taken care of. I know everything about prayer and fasting, and I’m where I want to be. But we’re going to take one step closer and I think that is a worthy goal for all of us. One step closer, one step deeper into intimacy with God and the life God has created us to live. I am really looking forward to diving into this topic, hopefully with you, for Secret Church 19.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
