Intro
New Year Prayer and Fasting 2025
Thank you for choosing to take part in our New Year prayer and fasting journey! We are pressing in as a church family to seek God without distractions and to hear from Him about the new year. Every day we will have a scripture for you to meditate on and pray through. I encourage you to start every day with God. Pray, read and meditate on God’s Word, journal and pray!
Follow along with our devotional guide on this blog. Each day, there will be a devotion and an encouraging video about the daily Scripture.
For the fast portion of our journey, ask yourself if there is a substance or an activity that you might sense the Holy Spirit calling you to fast from so that you will be more free to engage in prayer and seek the Lord. Consider fasting from a certain meal each day, or from watching TV, or social media scrolling, or a certain kind of food or drink. You could determine to elevate your fasting uniquely during SEEK WEEK (Jan. 12-16), or otherwise choose a 3 to 5-day period where you engage in a more intense fast, such as liquids only for 3 days if you feel prompted by the Spirit to do so. As you commit to a fast, be sure to seek medical advice about fasting if you have any health conditions, and if your fast includes any food or drink items.
When we fast, we set aside common things that tend to consume us as we consume them so we can enter into a deeper communion with Jesus Christ. In Matthew 6:6-17, Jesus teaches on prayer and fasting and he uses the phrase “when you fast…”. His teaching indicates that this is something He anticipates that we will do as we follow Him. Acts 13:2 indicates that the believers in the early church did this, as it says ‘while they were worshiping and fasting…’ When you fast, you are essentially giving God your appetite and desire; there is an element of sacrifice, discipline, and self-denial. Fasting can be challenging as the desire for that food or activity wells up in us. The deliberate choice to give that up as an act of honor for God is, in itself, valuable. But, we also take advantage of the margin of extra time that becomes available as we fast to specifically engage in a greater degree of prayer. This is often when the breakthrough blessing of our fasting comes.
Here are some other ways to fast: Abstain from food, but drink only water and fruit juice. In my experience, this kind of fast should not go on for more than 3-5 days and is something you should only attempt if you’ve worked up to it. Another alternative is to do a “Daniel fast,” where you abstain from meat and “pleasant foods”—dairy, desserts, soda, etc. (See Daniel 10: 2-3, where this kind of fast is described.) You could simply fast from desserts, junk food, or some other type of food you really enjoy. Again, if you have health issues and cannot fast from any kind of food, or if your work requirements make it unhealthy or unwise to fast from food, please choose an alternate fast from something such as TV or social media. The point of this kind of fast is to take all the time you’d spend doing these things and spend it instead in God’s presence in prayer and worship. As you fast, please don’t take it on legalistically or with any sort of magical thinking. If you’re fasting, but you come to a point where you cannot continue, it’s okay! There can be many practical reasons why concluding your fasting or changing it is reasonable. And we are not fasting to get God to do something, and He is not a tyrannical deistic being out there, He is our good heavenly Father. I believe he’ll be delighted to meet with you in such a special way as you engage in fasting, and I believe He’s glad to walk with you in blessing as you need to adjust or conclude your fast. At the same time, I am hoping that we will all try to persevere through our time of fasting because it offers us such a unique way of getting in touch with our hunger, our desires, and our suffering—which can help us then turn our hunger towards the Lord!
Blessings,
Pastor John