On Good Friday, Mercy Church will observe a day of prayer and fasting as we prepare for our Good Friday worship services that evening at 6 pm at our Providence Road and Northeast campuses. We’ve written a short guide to help lead you through observing this day well.

Our consumerist culture often keeps us from wanting and waiting on God. If we need something or want something, there is usually a way for us to get it. If we need an answer, we are one quick Google search from finding it. If we are hungry or thirsty, we are usually a few short steps from something to eat or drink. This has led our world to believe we have everything we could possibly want or imagine. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth, making it imperative as Christians that we remind ourselves that only God can truly satisfy the longings of our hearts. Throughout the scriptures, we see God’s people, including Jesus, wanting and waiting on God through fasting and prayer.

Some of you may be familiar with the spiritual practice of fasting, and for others, this may be an entirely new idea. Either way, this is a great opportunity for us to fast together as a church.

Fasting is forgoing food for the purpose of expressing our dependence on God as we seek him in prayer. Fasting without purpose only leaves us hungry from skipping a meal. However, fasting with purpose turns our hearts towards God and teaches us to look to him as the giver and sustainer of life.

Fasting is forgoing food for the purpose of expressing our dependence on God as we seek him in prayer.

Fasting is a spiritual discipline that trains our hearts to love God and His glory above anything else this world could offer. Spiritual disciplines are not commendable or power-generating in themselves, they simply help connect us to God’s power. As Puritan John Owen says, “Fasting, memorization, meditation, and Bible reading have their place in order…but they are to be looked on as the streams, whereas we often (mistakenly) look on them as the fountain.” When we love God with a pure heart, God can pour out His blessings in an unfettered way on us (James 4:1–2; 5:16; Isaiah 59:1–2).

Most importantly, fasting should always be practiced in response to God’s grace and never as a means to earn His favor. As children of God, you could never be more loved than you already are.

As children of God, you could never be more loved than you already are.

So Mercy Church, join us this Good Friday, March 31, as we pray and fast. Our fast will consist of replacing breakfast and lunch on Friday with a time of prayer and scripture reading. We’ve provided a resource to help guide your time below. We encourage you to break your fast by sharing a meal with your Community Group or family before or after our Good Friday service. I believe you will be blessed as you spend time with the Lord in this way.

 

Prayer & Fasting Guide

Morning Prayer Time – Living Out of Our Adoption

As you begin your time in prayer, turn to the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:9-13.

 

“Our Father in Heaven”

One of the most assumed and therefore neglected doctrines in the Christian life is the doctrine of adoption. According to Scripture, we were once orphans who were under the guardianship of the law. The law wasn’t our parent, the law was a guardian. It was there to tell us what was right and wrong but not able to give us the relationship we need as children. When Christ came, the scripture says he made a way for us to be adopted as sons and daughters of God. We are no longer orphans under the guardianship of the law, we are children of God!

• Begin your time in prayer thanking God that he is your father through faith in Christ. Talk to him candidly like a child would. Tell him how much you love him and how thankful you are to be his child.
• Ask him to help you trust him as a child would. Confess to him areas where you still aren’t trusting him.

 

“Hallowed be Your name”

This is the call for God’s name to be made holy in our lives and among the nations.
Pray first that your life would look more like Jesus today than it did yesterday. Ask that his name would be more valuable to you than anything else. Prayer is about going to God for God. Tell him you want to know him and you want your life to be about him above anything else.

• Pray for God to save the lost! Pray for the names on your “Little Blue” prayer card – people who are far from God but close to you.
• Pray for the nations to come to know the saving name of Jesus.

 

“Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”

To pray this part of the Lord’s prayer is to surrender your life completely to God. This prayer is inviting God’s agenda to supplant your own. This prayer will only ever be said truthfully if it comes from a place of security in God being your father who loves you.

• Pray to him like Christ in the garden, “God not my will, but yours be done.” Ask him to relieve bitterness and anger where certain things haven’t gone according to your will. Ask him to heal you in those spaces with the peace that comes from trusting him.
• Ask for the Holy Spirit to show you, clearly, what steps you need to take to follow God’s will and not your own today.
• Pray for Mercy Church – that God would give us collective wisdom and unity around his will for our church this year.

The second half of the Lord’s prayer will be the focus of your mid-day prayer time.

 

Afternoon Prayer Time – Trusting in our Provider

The first half of the Lord’s prayer focused on the vertical relationship between us and God. Now, the second half of the Lord’s prayer will lead us to turn and seek God’s help by looking horizontally at the world around us. By this time, you may be feeling a little bit hungry. Fear not…that feeling is an opportunity to draw near to God! When we fast, we withhold the food we are normally dependent on. In the moments of hunger during a fast, we are to turn our hearts and minds to the Lord and pray for him to sustain us and to be enough for us (Matt 4:4). Often, the greatest obstacles in our intimacy with God are his blessings that we have transformed into our obsessions. So as we fast, ask the Lord to reveal where we are depending on something other than him. This means prayer will function like a conversation with God where you talk some of the time, but you also listen and allow the Spirit of God to assess your life.

 

“Give us today our daily bread”

To pray for daily bread is to ask God to provide enough to strengthen us to accomplish his will and purposes for us today. It’s to acknowledge God as the provider and to believe that what he has provided is sufficient for us. Depending on your life situation, this prayer will strike different tones. For those prone to self-sufficiency, ‘daily’ bread is a prayer against excessiveness and greed. It is a prayer for contentment in the sufficiency the Lord provides. For others, this is the cry of faith that believes the Lord can provide food and shelter and clothing and bill payments when we can’t see how. For all of us, it is the call of a child who does not know or care how our Father provides, only that he does.

• First, go to God! Pray that he increases our hunger for him as a church!
• Go to God with your needs. Tell him what you feel like you need right now. What is in front of you that is overwhelming? Tell your father who loves you!
• Pray for the needs of your family, friends, and community group members.
• Go to God with your self-sufficiency. Tell him you want provision from him, not from yourself. Surrender to him as your provider.

 

“Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors”

This is a prayer asking for God to restore us to a right relationship with him. To restore what was broken by sin. It’s the prayer of one who knows their sin creates a debt to God that only God can pay. It’s the prayer of someone whose understanding of the gospel is made apparent by their willingness to forgive those who have sinned against them. This is no small prayer.

• Repent of your sin to God and receive his forgiveness in Christ
• Ask God to soften your heart to those who have sinned against you to the point where you can see them the same way Christ sees you.
• Ask God for the strength to forgive those who have hurt you.

 

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”

This closing prayer is a prayer for deliverance! It is the prayer of children who know there is an enemy but do not know where and when the enemy will strike. It is a prayer of dependence by those who know they need a deliverer.

• Ask God to protect you from the temptations of the enemy. Pray that today would reveal areas where the enemy is tempting you to trust something other than God for your rest, security, and satisfaction.
• Ask God to protect Mercy Church from the attack of the enemy. Pray God would keep the wolves away and would deliver Mercy Church from following any plans motivated by any desires that the Holy Spirit does not give.