Weekly Encouragement
Every Wednesday a video and a readable copy will be added to this page to serve as an encouragement, a reminder, and to offer suggestions on how to develop a hospitality mindset toward those in your sphere who don't follow Christ.
Week 2
Starting on March 12th
Prayer, Fasting, and Hospitality
Last Week:
We focused specifically on what fasting is, what it looks like in scripture, and how we were going to fast. During the weekwe prayed for God to put someone in our hearts to either start or continue an intentional relationship with them in hopes that it would lead them into right relationship with God.
This Week:
This is not about starting something that ends on Easter Sunday. It’s also not a judo move from Providence to boost Easter attendance. We are truly taking intentional time to sacrifice and ask God to help us love as He loved and be hospitable to others in an effort to glorify God and make, grow, and unleash disciples of Christ.
- Don’t Make This Goal Oriented To Easter. Sometimes when we bullet point people and relationships as a task we are doing, it is felt by the person receiving it. We all know what it’s like to receive a phone call from someone selling something. Usually, it is not successful… This is more about starting new habits of sacrifice and prayer, specifically for the lost world around us. We are asking to be changed by God, not just hit a number.
- Practical Hospitality Goes A Long Way. As you continue to pray and fast over who God has laid on your heart, be confident that you can do this! This is as simple as inviting someone to live life with you. It’s actually sharing your life with someone else and inviting them to do the same. Simply, be a follower of Christ, who is intentionally creating relationships with others who are lost.
- Get Your Family In On It. Invite your family to join together in prayer and fasting. This is a great way to exercise loving accountability instead of accountability that discourages. Pray together. Fast together. As God lays someone on each heart, write those names down and put them somewhere in your house where your family can pray for those names in private and together. How beautiful would it be to find your family developing a habit of praying together for lost people BY NAME!
I Don’t Have Anyone Yet? That’s totally fine. Whether you are introverted or you are just unsure of who to be intentionally hospitable with, for Jesus’ sake, that’s ok. I would challenge you to not be too specific with it. Anyone who is lost and God has placed in your sphere of influence is a candidate for you to show God’s love consistently and intentionally.
I Do Have Someone! Amazing! Here is another reminder… Don’t make the relationship goal-oriented to Easter. Just begin inviting them into your life. Have them over for dinner. Go shopping with them. Share a hobby or sport with them. Meet for coffee before work. Use your story to connect with theirs.
Cool. What Do I Do Now?
- Today, if you don’t have anyone, pray and ask God to reveal someone in your life who needs to experience His love. If you do, be bold and reach out to them with an invitation to connect.
- As you go through your week, commit to praying daily in private and with your family for the lost, writing down specific names, and intentionally looking for ways to show them Christ’s love through hospitality.
Past Weeks
What is Fasting and Lent all about?
- Fasting is both an appeal to God for him to listen to my prayer and a tool to intensify my desire for the right things.
- A fast is when I give up food for some amount of time to help re-order my own desires away from worldly things and toward what God cares about.
- Why food and not something else? There are a lot of good things that I might benefit from sometimes denying to myself, but food is unique. I won’t die without social media, movies, a daily latte, or news consumption. But I will die if I don’t eat. Fasting from food hits a part of my being that nothing else can.
- Hunger is one of the ways God describes the way I should desire him. To experience physical hunger is a direct way of saying to God “I want my hunger to be for you,” and saying to myself “You need God even more than you need food.”
- Jesus put this in the simplest possible terms when he was in the middle of a long fast himself. When the tempter suggested he satisfy his hunger by proving his divine power and turning stones into bread, Jesus answered by quoting Deuteronomy 3:8, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matt 4:4)
- Where did Lent come from? The name “Lent” is a reference to springtime, when the days are lengthening. As early as the second century AD, Christians started to prepare for Easter by imitating Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the wilderness in preparation to begin his public ministry. As Easter became the pinnacle of the church’s yearly life, taking time to prepare for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection made sense.
- So, what we’re doing is taking this 40-day practice that Christian history has handed us, and instead of simply using it for personal preparation (which is good), we’re using it together to prepare relationships for discipleship through hospitality. For some of us, practicing hospitality itself may feel like giving something up! If you’re a homebody who likes to keep your schedule simple, inviting someone over may feel like a sacrifice. This is good!
Cool. What Do I Do?
- Today, try foregoing one meal and using that time to pray, asking God to give you the heart desire to start or continue a relationship with someone who needs him. (if you have health concerns that prevent you from fasting from food, feel free to abstain from something else that you would normally place attention on.)
- As you go through your week, ask God who that might be, and then listen. He may show you in surprising ways!
Why?
We want to use this year’s Lent season for a slightly different focus. As you know, Easter is one of the two times a year that many people will go to church. This creates a huge opportunity to invite people into discipleship – following Jesus, being changed by Jesus, and being on mission with Jesus – who might otherwise just get a taste of religion and return to life as usual after Easter. The last thing those folks need is for one of us to invite them to Providence and for them to have that short-lived experience here, as opposed to somewhere else.
So here’s what we want to do: As a family, we want to enter a season of prayer, and if you want to, even fasting, asking God who he has placed in YOUR personal sphere of influence, and how you can invite that person, or people, into your life. Notice: that didn’t say “how you can invite them to church on Easter.” That might be where it ends up, but this is really about your home. Coffee hangouts. Dinner. Shopping together. Finding out what’s going on in their life, meeting them in it, and inviting them into your life.
How Is It Going?
Type an update on how your intentional hospitality is going and how we can pray for you!