Today at Amana we are starting a fifteen day period of focused listening to God. Some are calling it prayer and fasting; but that’s too confusing. Most people think that means going on a diet and praying God will get you through it. The success of this 15 days won’t be measured by how much weight you lose, how toned up you get, or how much you tell God you need. All that is way too self focused. This is about focusing on God.
Why now? 15 days into the year is a good time to do this. You probably have gotten all those self focused resolutions broken. You know the ones: lose weight, exercise more, read my bible more, be nicer to Nick. We know all those are broken and lying by the way side. Time to get focused.
Why fifteen days? Because it will probably take that long for most of us to just shut up. We think about prayer and we start talking and asking and thinking about everything we think we need. The problem is we don’t know what we need. That’s why we have a period of listening to God. So He can show us that what we need is Him. So just shut up and listen.
Why fasting? Fasting isn’t a good word for it. We don’t need to fast we need to focus. Some of us are way too focused on food, so we need to watch that. I guess you could call that fasting. Or we are too focused on TV, so we need to stop watching that. The point is to identify the distractions in our lives and set them aside so we can hear from God.
How do we do this focused listening? I suggest we model our efforts on the Kairos Motto: Listen, Listen, Love, Love. Spend some time in a quiet place of minimal distraction, just listening. When that gets hard, try loving God. Just think about all He’s done and all He is. That should take you into Thanksgiving, and Praise and worship and back to listening.
Don’t judge the next 15 days on any physical changes. Base success on what you hear and how you are eternally changed.
Forget what you know about “prayer” and “fasting” just focus and listen and be blessed.
Nick
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