faithrunner

Work as Worship This past Sunday at Legacy Church , I told the story of a running partner who told me how she had sent an email to her office inviting the women in it to a small group she led at her church. Her plan backfired when one of her peers scolded her for using company resources for religious use. She admitted that was a mistake, but invited her to the group anyway. She went on to tell me how the girl had come to the group, grown in her curiosity about God, and that she attended regularly now. As we continued to run she told me more stories about how she leveraged her consulting and traveling as a platform for sharing her faith . (She no longer used company email for invitations to her faith activities.) I complemented her for seeing all of her life as a mission field and her network of relationships as her responsibility in serving others in the name of Jesus. She smiled and said, "I guess I'm a missionary with a corporate sponsor." I agreed, and that...

Fasting is the ancient practice of not eating in order to discipline your body so you can make room in your soul to commune with God . It must be, as Richard Foster writes, " God-initiated and God-ordained ." The spiritual practice of fasting is NOT designed for weight loss or health reasons , although there are physical benefits for doing it. But the primary purpose of fasting is to deny our physical appetite(s) in order to feed our spiritual hunger and thirst for God with the Spirit and Word . During a time of fasting we mourn our spiritual condition or the condition of others, confess our sins , and seek God in prayer (See Nehemiah 1:4-11 ). This is why the practice is "God-initiated." In our relationship with God, we see our lives and the lives of others from his perspective, and he calls us to confession and prayer. Jesus expected that his followers would fast . In his kingdom-inaugurating message we know as the Sermon on the Mount, he addressed the subject b...