Practical Faith

Do you want so badly to be wholly devoted to Jesus?  And yet, you constantly feel like you are at war with temptation and sinful desires?  I know I do.  What can we do about it?  How can we close the gap between who we are and who we want to be?

In the previous episode, I challenged our younger listeners to get to know God NOW, as early as you can! On today’s episode, I want to talk about how to do that. How do you get to know God, personally?

There is a repeated theme all throughout the Bible that I don’t want you to miss.  And this is it: don’t wait until you’re all grown-up to get to know God personally, for yourself.  Don’t wait until you are an adult to become a passionate and fully-devoted follower of Jesus!  You don’t have to wait!

God knows each one of us, personally and individually.  You are not distant from, unknown to, or forgotten by God; You are remembered & personally known by Him. He holds you very close in His heart!

The Almighty God and Creator of the universe is not a cold, distant, and impersonal God.  He could have kept Himself hidden from humanity if He wanted to, but instead, He has made Himself known to the world! – most perfectly through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of His Son Jesus, and then in the Holy record of the Christian Scriptures known as The Bible.

There is a huge difference between actually knowing God vs. only knowing information about God.  But God is knowable! He has made Himself known to humanity in a variety of wonderful ways, and we can know God...

Things for us drastically change when the real-but-distant God becomes close, personal, and known to us in a relational, friendship kind-of-way... 

Today, we will wrap up this series on fasting and its role in the life of a Christ-follower with just a few suggestions for you to consider and a few precautions for you to be aware of as well:

Four things happen when we fast with prayer: 

Fasting is never a stand-alone activity. If you were to search out every instance of fasting in the Bible, you would find that fasting is always accompanied by prayer, or some other means of connecting oneself more deeply with God.