Best Year of Your Life!

2015_BestYear

• Want this year to be the best year of your life? Well it absolutely, positively will be IF (Don’t you hate when that little two letter disclaimer is thrown in there?). Let me say it again…This will be the best year of your life, IF… Ready? Here it comes…”IF it’s the best year of your life spiritually!” I said this several years ago and I believe it more today than ever! And it’s backed up over and over again scripturally. One of the clearest examples is found in the sixth chapter of Matthew. You can read it here (vs. 19-34).
• Last year I decided to do something I’d kicked around for years—the 21 day Daniel Fast. You can read more about it here. The long and short of it for me is that it changed the entire trajectory of my life! And even though the amazing things that God showed me and promised me have taken months and months to come to fruition, they have been well worth the wait!

It’s not too late to give God the first fruits of your year and join us on the Daniel Fast—You’ll be so glad you did! At the end of the post today I will give some links that should help you get started. But please don’t blow this off! It may sound a little strange—maybe even ancient and outdated, but those who believe that are missing out on tremendous blessings from God!
• I spoke at a church once where, when I opened it up for Q&A…some of the questions (at this supposedly mature church) exposed a dangerous foothold in the Bride of Christ today. Several individuals had read my blogs on fasting and were insistent that it was “not for today.” They went on to use the tired old Christian argument of millions of lethargic religious people all over the world (but mostly in the USA) which I call,

“The Least Common Denominator Approach to Life,”

And these folks proudly presented their judgment that most (if not all) spiritual disciplines were legalistic and of no value for today. And then…wait for it…came the slogan of proud Pharisees everywhere,

“That’s Old Testament. We Live under Grace and the New Testament.”

They say this as though the Old Testament were written by a different God altogether and therefore utterly useless for us today. But Jesus never said that He came to punt the Pentateuch! He didn’t come and tell everyone to lose the Law. In fact, He said pretty much the opposite. He said that He came to “fulfill the law!” (See Matthew 5:17) . He went on to explain the purpose of the law and how it merely pointed the way to Him. The law was just a shadow. Jesus is the shadow caster!

Listen, the “least common denominator,” might actually be helpful in mathematics as it represents the least common multiple of the denominators of a set of fractions and therefore simplifies adding, subtracting, and comparing fractions; however, in living the Christian life our goal shouldn’t be to find the most comfortable, uninvolved, uninitiated and uninvested way to coast into eternity. Our goal should be to become more and more like Jesus. In this the spiritual disciplines are awesome! And fasting might just be the most powerful discipline of them all. If that’s not enough to convince you then maybe the following list of New Testament Fasters will: Peter, Paul, the rest of the disciples, The entire church at Antioch (Ac 13:1-3), The entire church at Galatia (Ac 14:21-23), All those gathered at the prayer meeting for Peter, and most of all…JESUS! (Mt 4:1-9; Lk 4:1-2). If you want to do more investigation into prayer and fasting in the New testament there are a lot of good resources on the Web. Here is the one I used to get you started.

Some helpful links: