At ITOWN, prayer has always been the foundation. We love to start each year with intentional time in prayer and fasting for 21 days.
We join together as a church on Friday mornings from 6:00-7:00 AM at the Olson Farms campus, Mudsock Campus, the Foundations building in Bluffton, or live online. We hope you'll join us and see how God can move in your life in a big way.
How do we make prayer a part of our everyday life? We can learn from three things that Jesus did…
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Mark 1:35 NIV
A CERTAIN TIME
Jesus got up very early in the morning to spend time with His Heavenly Father. In order for prayer to work, we should do the same. Make a daily appointment with God and keep it.
Ask yourself: When will I pray?
A CERTAIN PLACE
Jesus had a prayer place. Your prayer place needs to be an undistracted environment where you can pray out loud and perhaps have some worship music playing in the background.
Ask yourself: Where will I pray?
A CERTAIN PLAN
Go into your prayer time with a plan. If it changes that’s fine. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He gave His disciples a prayer outline. We call it the Lord’s Prayer. This outline along with several other tools are available on the ITOWN app.
The goal of fasting is to draw nearer to God. Biblical fasting always has to do with eliminating distractions for a spiritual purpose; it hits the reset button of our soul and renews us from the inside out. It also enables us to celebrate the goodness and mercy of God and prepares our hearts for all the good things God desires to bring into our lives. Remember, 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.
COMPLETE FAST:
In this type of fast, you drink only liquids, typically water with light juices as an option.
PARTIAL FAST:
This fast is sometimes called the “Jewish Fast” and 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.
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.
