While I was in Cuba, Pastor Pat Summers' opening message focused on God's purpose for our lives:  Enjoying God's grace and extending His glory!  As we are just one day away from our church-wide fast, let me urge us all to dedicate the coming week to enjoying God's grace and extending His glory!  While many of us our limiting our intake of food, and our bodies may respond in various ways to that, we can still ENJOY GOD'S GRACE!  As we pray and focus on God more than usual this week, the primary focus of our prayers is to EXTEND GOD'S GLORY!  After all, the prayer focus is being filled with the Holy Spirit so we may offer others God's healing and love; that God will use us to reach our lost friends, family members, acquaintances and all He puts in our path in Jesus' name in unprecedented numbers during this Easter season, and that He will deliver us from the financial "dead-end" we're experiencing right now, and provide the additional funding needed for us to move forward with Phase 1 of His Mission Outpost at 127 Knoch Road, Saxonburg. One last practical reminder about the fast:  Determine today when you will START and END your fast.  Here are a few practical suggestions:  Start this evening after dinner.  Since the Jewish day started in the evening (See Genesis 1, for the days of creation.), they often started and ended their fasts then. If you start this evening, then you'll "break" your fast with dinner on Saturday.  Due to my obligations with worship and CLASS 101, I'm not going to start fasting until after lunch on Sunday.  That means I'll be breaking my fast at lunch time (realistically after the groundbreaking on April 10) next Sunday.  I like the symbolism of that timing, since we'll be celebrating God's faithfulness and "stepping into the water..." (See Joshua 3:15) next Sunday after worship at 127 Knoch Road, and THEN I'll be breaking the fast. 

In the end, don't be legalistic about the start and end, and about the fast as a whole.  All week long we've been emphasizing that the goal of the fast is to focus on God, or as I've put it in this post:  to enjoy God's grace and to extend His glory.  The fast is not about us, it's all about God.  The actual elements of the fast, which we've spoken of a great deal this week, are not nearly as important as our focus on God and giving Him control in our lives, so we may be instruments of His grace and glory!

Starting tomorrow, the posts will focus on Scripture to encourage us during the fast, and specific prayer foci for the week of fasting.