Teaching Resources
Additional Resources
FASTING
Choose a Fasting Plan
Your personal fast should present a level of challenge, but it is very important to know your body, your options, and, most importantly, to seek God in prayer and follow what the Holy Spirit leads you to do.
Types of Fasts
SOUL FAST
This fast is a great option if you do not have much experience fasting food, have health issues that prevent you from fasting food, or if you wish to refocus certain areas of your life that are out of balance. For example, you might choose to stop using social media or watching television for the duration of the fast and then carefully bring that element back into your life in healthy doses at the conclusion of the fast.
SELECTIVE FAST
This type of fast involves removing certain elements from your diet. One example of a selective fast is the Daniel Fast, during which you remove meat, sweets, and bread from your diet and consume water and juice for fluids and fruits and vegetables for food.
PARTIAL FAST
This fast involves abstaining from eating any type of food in the morning and afternoon. This can either correlate to specific times of the day, such as 6:00 am to 3:00 pm, or from sunup to sundown.
COMPLETE FAST
In this type of fast, you drink only liquids, typically water with light juices as an option.
What is Fasting?
Biblical fasting, frequently practiced in the Old and New Testaments, especially by the early church, is voluntary abstinence from eating or drinking certain foods for a specific period of time. When someone fasts, they intentionally stop something in their diet or restrict their diet as a way of humbling themselves, revealing a complete dependency upon God.
We are inviting the CedarCreek Church family to come and unite in a fast together. It is purposefully denying the flesh-our natural cravings, the things that we desire most.
Why Fast?
Fasting increases our spiritual alertness and provides an opportunity to seek God for specific things individually and as a church. Fasting turns attention from ourselves and focuses on God. When we make God our priority over food and drink or other things that we desire, it gets His attention!
We are inviting the CedarCreek Church family to come and unite in a fast together. It is purposefully denying the flesh-our natural cravings, the things that we desire most.
How to Fast?
We are asking each participant to consider fasting, to change something in your eating rhythm. This can be complete meals or certain foods or drinks that you love but are willing to give up temporarily such as meat, sweets, caffeine, soft drinks, alcohol, etc
If you have a medical condition that prevents you from altering your eating habits, then consider the other fasts that aren’t food-related.
This can include abstaining from an area of entertainment. The majority of people consume a lot of entertainment, so by restricting some of our entertainment options or the amount of time we spend on entertainment, we can replace that by intentionally connecting with God.
This can include certain recreational activities, social media, technology, television, etc.
Find a partner or a group to fast with. If you are part of a household and have roommates or family members, there’s value in fasting at the same time so that you can encourage and support each other (lessen the temptation!) and pray and seek God together.
Share Your 21 Days of Prayer Story
We would love to hear how being a part of 21 Days of Prayer has impacted you.
