99 CHURCH

In recent years, America declared loneliness a public health epidemic. We all know what it's like to feel unseen, unknown, and unloved. But this isn't the way God created us to live. We were made to belong. We all want to find belonging, but most of us don't know. This week, we begin a journey of exploring key practices that can help us cultivate belonging in a lonely world.

Jesus didn't come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people come alive. Jesus didn't die on the cross for us to merely exist. He died on the cross so that we can have life to the full. Easter reminds us that Jesus is alive and He is making all things new.

Anywhere you go in the world, you will almost always find some dude on a horse. There's always some conqueror on top of a warhorse memorialized as a statue. Yet, the image of Jesus we remember on Palm Sunday is Him riding on a donkey. In doing so, Jesus was making a statement about the kind of King He was: a humble and meek King, turning the ways of the world upside-down.

There’s a kind of fatigue that attacks the body, but there’s another kind of fatigue that attacks the soul. Many of us are tired. But it’s not just our bodies that are tired, our souls are weary. Yet, we follow a Savior who meets us in the middle of tiredness. We believe in a God who’s powerful enough to give us strength, yet human enough to be tired with us. What does it look like for Jesus to meet us in our weariness and give our souls the rest it needs?

We live in a world where millions of people go hungry every day, while millions more have so much food that they don't know what to do with it. Throughout history, we find that fasting is one of the main practices followers of Jesus have adopted to move in love toward the hungry and the poor. This week, we explore fasting, not just as a practice for personal transformation, but as a means for generosity, service, and justice.

All throughout Scripture, we see fasting and prayer go together. You can pray without fasting, and fast without praying, but there's something special that happens when the two are combined. Fasting is a practice that both amplifies God's voice to us and our voice to God. This week, we explore the power of fasting to help us hear God more clearly, and release His power and breakthrough in our lives.

"Living The Dream"

We want to live comfortable life’s. The idea of self-denial or delayed gratification seems so foreign to our culture. Yet, Jesus once said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves.” Fasting is one of the best ways to cultivate a heart of self-denial. We find that as we fast, we’re able to tap into the Spirit’s power that purifies us and transforms our whole selves. This week, we continue our collection on fasting by exploring fasting as a way to feed the Spirit and starve the Flesh.

Fasting is one of the most misunderstood and least practiced spiritual disciplines in the Church today. Simply put, we just don't fast anymore. But that wasn't always the case. For over a thousand years, fasting was a core practice in the life of the average follower of Jesus. What might we recapture if we began fasting again? What beauty and breakthrough awaits us in this ancient practice? This week, we begin a new collection of teachings centered around fasting.