- Commit to a specific time each day to devote to prayer. Find a place where you can be free of distractions and be alone with God.
- Use the prayer points and Scripture in this guide to focus and fuel your praying. Write the Scripture and prayer point on a card and carry it with you, post it on your social media, make it the screensaver on your phone—whatever you can think of to keep these prompts in front of you. Use them throughout the day and invite others to join you in praying.
- You can take it a step further by journaling your prayers each day, simply writing out your prayers to God. It’s a great opportunity to hide God’s Word in your heart, working to memorize the verses as you meditate and pray.
- In addition, you may consider ways to pray with others during this season. Set up a Zoom call with friends or members of your small group. Pray together as a family. Invite others to join you on this journey.
- Memorize- if you choose to memorize John 15, here are a few options in how you could
do that:
- Memorize a verse a week- instead of doing the whole chapter, do one verse from
each week. That could be picking one from Week One, Week Two, and Week
Three. Our suggestions would be John 15:5,8,15.
- Memorize John 15:1-8 -we spend a lot of time praying through the first eight
verses, so you could just focus your memorization on just this part.
- Memorize the Whole Passage- maybe for some of you, you feel led to memorize
all of John 15. If you do this, break the passage down into week to week chunks
and memorize a verse at a time. Pace yourself. Continue to review each day as
you add more verses to your memory.
- Here are some tips for memorizing verses, “Why Memorize Scripture When YouCan Google It?”, and an app that can be helpful Bible Memory App.
Fasting
Why do we fast? Fasting is a way to deepen our hunger for God and to grow in holiness and hunger for God. More than any other discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us.(Richard Foster) And so it confronts us with our need to
surrender to God. It is not a way to manipulate God or coerce him to hear and answer our prayers, but rather it acknowledges our complete dependence on him. It humbles us and awakens us to our great need for and reliance on God. As you consider
fasting, we want to encourage you to listen to the Holy Spirit. Ask God to lead you in this time of seeking his face. Whether you choose to fast for one day, several days, or the entire 20 days, the point is to humble yourself in a new way and
draw near to God. Here are some ideas of what you could choose.
- You might choose a selective fast, eliminating certain things from your diet. Eating only fruits and vegetables, what some might call a “Daniel fast,” is an example of this type of fasting.
- Another option is a partial fast, which is refraining from eating for a set period of time each day. You could choose to fast from a single meal or from sunup to sundown.
- Some of you may feel led to engage in a complete fast, refraining from eating and only drinking liquids for particular days or even an extended period of time.
- If fasting from food is not possible, you may feel led by the Lord to fast from something else, such as social media, television, or certain times or activities on your cell phone.
Additional Resources