Fasting with Others

September 18th, 2015

fasting-with-others

Fasting with others is different than fasting by yourself. When you fast by yourself, it is harder to remain focused because you are alone. If you are tempted to eat, you don’t have anyone to hold you accountable. Even if you’re alone, though, once you’ve made the decision, through an act of the will, you can always follow through. It hasn’t been a problem for me to sin by breaking my promise to God to set aside the day to fast. It was sin for Jesus to eat a piece of bread before the end of His fast, and He replied to Satan’s temptation that “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4 NASB)

Actually, when you are desiring food, it shows just how little you desire God. Your soul then yearns more deeply for God, to trump the pain of hunger. This is how you draw nearer to God, and why He draws nearer to you.

When I’m fasting alone, I often tell my mother or a close friend so that they can pray with me over the phone in the afternoon and help me to get through the final slump of the afternoon, when it’s the hardest to finish the fast. My energy takes a nosedive after the noon hour. When they pray with me, it suffuses me with strength and enables me to finish the fast.

If someone else fasts with me, I feel a huge difference. When I’m praying and someone else is praying at the same time, there is a power that’s similar to electricity. One time I was praying for the salvation of the husband of one of my friends, and I felt that deep spiritual electricity for three hours. I felt released at 10pm to go to bed. The next day when I got together for a prayer meeting at noon, another one of the ladies who was fasting felt prompted by God to pray intensely from 10pm to midnight. I was so shocked that at the very moment my electricity stopped, it was passed to another woman who was fasting for the same thing. When we all gathered at noon, the five women who had fasted got on the floor and wept before the Lord for this man to come back to Christ.

The Holy Spirit would have never prayed so intensely through me for three hours if He never intended that man to be saved. Because it was the Spirit praying, I knew that my will was God’s will, and that I would be getting the request. (I John 5:14) It’s just a matter of time.

The Spirit can intercede through you. This electricity is not normal. Most of the time I feel nothing. I just fast and pray and choose to put God first. Don’t be disappointed if nothing spectacular happens. When I fasted with my husband about his insomnia, I had no electricity or anything. It was just a lot of hard work of praying. But God answered miraculously by having someone from the church pay for the sleep study. So God honors your fast, even if it’s just drudgery and you don’t seem to be connecting to God. Don’t be discouraged. Continue to press in to God, and He will reveal Himself to you more and more.

This is especially true at first, when we start to pursue God wholehearteldly. There is so much sin that we don’t know about in our lives, that we can’t really connect to God until we ask God to remove it little by little. So it might take several fasts to get to the point where you can actually feel the Holy Spirit interceding so strongly inside of you. I can’t remember how many times I had to fast before I actually experienced this. Also, don’t pursue an experience; pursue God Himself. Who cares about experiences? I want God!

You can also physically get together with another believer who is fasting for the same thing, and it can be a wonderful time of communing before the Lord. What God reveals to one person is confirmed by the other person because you can both hear God because you are emptied of self with no unconfessed sin, pressing into God for an issue that God has placed on your heart.

Here is the audio that explains how fasting with others can be better than fasting alone (to download, right click, choose Desktop, and save)

Have you missed one of our posts about fasting? Follow our “Hunger for God” Fasting Series. (One will be posted each Friday):

To keep up with my prayer posts, follow my Prayer Page, where you will find exclusive prayer videos to help you hunger for God and establish a prayer life that is truly alive!

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Posted in Prayer | 26 Comments »

The Hiding Place Summary

September 16th, 2015

the-hiding-place-summary

My son wrote an interesting summary of The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom.

The Hiding Place Summary

by Bryan Evans, age 14

Once upon a time there was a Beje (don’t even ask me what that means). In it lived a family called the Ten Booms. I don’t know what’s weirder, the name of the place they lived in or their last name. There was Corrie, and Betsy, and Father (yes, that’s his first name). They sold watches (evidently you can sell watches at this thing called a Beje). Everything was just great… except that German weirdo who punched old people. But then the Germans took over Poland and ruined everything! They confiscated the radios and telephones and gave people ration cards and smashed random places and took all the stuff and arrested Jews and *gasping for air*–where was I?

The Beje turned into a hiding place for Jews who didn’t want to die (another thing you can do with a Beje), and also a hiding place for fake ration cards. The watch business actually did well because those rude German soldiers wanted their watches repaired. Suddenly they realized that everyone knew about their top secret base of operations, and sure enough, German soldiers barged in. “Where are the Jews?” “What Jews?” (Apparently Corrie had a terrible memory). “I know they’re in here!” So they tied her to the wall and searched all over the place and somewhere in the middle of it all the phone got knocked off the hook. And do you know what it said? I’ll tell you what it said!

“Corrie! You are in grave danger! Any minute now German soldiers will barge into the Beje and search everywhere! You must warn the Jewish man who’s coming at 4:30 and the Jewish mother with her baby who are coming at 6:00! You need to evacuate the Beje, Corrie! I think they’ll suspect that you’re hiding Jews in your house! You need to get rid of all the fake ration cards and hide the radio!” All this time a German soldier was writing this down.

Soon they took Corrie and a bunch of other people to a prison with tiny gray rooms, and they all went insane! Except for Corrie… You know why? She found a few ants, and they have anti-insanity properties. Don’t believe me? Ever seen an insane ant? I thought so. One day, someone gave her some colorful paper and a Bible. Reading the Bible was just about the only thing she could do, other than stare out the window with bars on it.

After a few months they were taken out of prison and shipped to a concentration camp. Apparently the Germans’ favorite color was gray. (I mean, of all the colors, they could have painted everything in sight.) None of the prisoners could leave because of a barbed wire fence. They had to sleep on fermented rotting straw full of lice. During the day, Corrie worked on relay switches. She did so well, a friendly guard broke some of them and said, “Now fix them again, slowly and inefficiently. You’ve already made your daily quota! Don’t you know German fighter planes are gonna use these? You don’t want them to work perfectly, do you?”

The Germans decided it wasn’t depressing enough, so they took all the prisoners to Ravensbruck. This was another concentration camp, one that treated its prisoners notoriously badly. To get there, they took a train that could hold 40 people. However, they stuffed 80 people in there, killing dozens of people standing in the middle for no reason. The trip was days long. They finally made it to Ravensbruck. Not only was the concentration camp gray and surrounded with barbed wire, but there were no living plants in sight. Everything was miserable. When they went to bed, not only was the fermented rotting straw they slept on full of lice, but fleas as well. Betsy was sick, but they had a small bottle of pills. Miraculously, day after day the bottle didn’t run out of pills. It got to the point where it became obvious that it was a miracle. After what must have been years, they were finally released, but not before Betsy died.

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Posted in History | 16 Comments »

Modern History Notebook

September 14th, 2015

modern-history-notebookThis post contains affiliate links. I was compensated for my work in writing this post.

Today I will be showing you our modern history notebook that we put together during our study of American history. We made two notebooks for the year: one for the Civil War and one for the true modern culture starting at the turn of the century. In our series on modern history, I have shown you many hands-on activities, field trips, and themed parties that help to bring this time period to life. Now I will focus on the written work.

all-american-history-notebook

We used the charts and maps from All American History, Volume II. I liked the fact that my kids had to color and cut out the flags of the different countries involved in the wars. World War I and World War II are especially important to keep separate and are often taught in the schools one after the other. I purposely spent longer than a week (3 weeks!) on World War I so that the kids understood trench warfare and early airplanes. I did NOT want the two world wars to blur together  in their minds.

World-War-II-map

As you can see in the demonstration video at the bottom of this post, we decorated the cover of the modern history notebook with 3-dimensional stickers from World War II. We divided the binder into different sections:

Take a look at our finished Modern History Notebook:

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How to Fast

September 11th, 2015

how-to-fast

When God commanded His people to fast, the fast would always start at sundown and end at sundown the next day, since God counts each day beginning at sundown: “Evening and morning, the first day.” (Genesis 1:5) The evening begins the day. They had food in their stomachs before sundown. So they did not have to go to bed with absolutely nothing in their stomachs. The next day they were released at sundown, so they could eat before going to bed. It was just the daytime when they had to go without food and seek the Lord with ALL their hearts and humble themselves before God and confess their sins (Leviticus 16:29-31; II Chronicles 7:14).

I started with a juice fast because I was scared of clonking my head by falling down. If you are diabetic or anemic, you might not be able to do a fast with water only. Regardless of the fast you choose, you must give up food. I drink coffee to not get a headache on the day I have set aside to fast and pray. So now I do water and coffee. You can do a minimum of juice, if you feel like you’re about to faint. Even with juices, your stomach will hurt really badly, and this will be what causes you to be emptied and stripped of all else before the Lord.

You can also do a half-day fast. In the morning, you would not eat breakfast. Most of the days I’ve done a half-day fast, it has been when I have a prayer meeting at noon. If all the people in the prayer meeting fast, they will be emptied and ready to cry out to the Lord together for one purpose. It is usually a very specific request, like the salvation of my friend’s husband, that God would bless our women’s retreat, or that a convicting sermon would cause a change in the lives of a worldly congregation. We were able to pray fervently as a result.

When you begin the day, cry out to the Lord in humility. Rest in God’s presence. Don’t watch any TV. Don’t do any entertainment or reading, unless it’s Scripture or a Christian book that is dealing with the issue you are fasting about. Many times words from Scripture have popped off the page during a fast, and it was God answering me. Also, I take more seriously what I’m reading, because I’m in pain.

I sometimes go outside and take a walk while praying. This clears my mind and enables me to continue if I feel like I can’t make it through the day. If your energy dips in the afternoon like mine does, I call a friend who is aware of the specific prayer request I have laid before the Lord, and we pray together over the phone. I always feel refreshed for the final stretch of the fast after I have prayed over the phone with a friend.

It’s even more joyful if you are able to pray in person with another believer during the fast. If you are asking for wisdom about a decision, or wisdom to find the root cause of a problem in your marriage, the other believer can lay hands and pray over you on the day you fast, that God would reveal it to you. Sometimes there is a demonic component that will be cast off at the laying on of hands, and the demonic blindness would remain otherwise.

I’ve cast off a demon from my own body without anyone around. It was when I was 15 years old. I asked God to be set free from my oppression in the name of Jesus, and this huge weight lifted off my chest and I was free. I did not know it was demonic until after the fact. But I was set free, and another believer was not in the room. So don’t lose hope if you are alone and don’t know any true believers who can lay hands to pray for you in this way. God honors your personal walk with Him, and He will hear you.

Hopefully this has given you a general feel for how to fast. Don’t eat food. It’s that simple. Dedicate the day to God to pray and try to do nothing else. You can do laundry while you are praying, or take care of small children. Do whatever God requires of you, but be focused on prayer throughout the entire day.

For more details on how to fast, here is a free audio (to download, right click, choose Desktop, and save):

Have you missed one of our posts about fasting? Follow our “Hunger for God” Fasting Series. (One will be posted each Friday):

To keep up with my prayer posts, follow my Prayer Page, where you will find exclusive prayer videos to help you hunger for God and establish a true prayer life!

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Posted in Prayer | 16 Comments »

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