“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith”
We need Jesus… What if we as a society embraced the basic ideas of Jesus concerning how we should treat each other…
Fasting must be more than a change of diet, or skipping a few meals…
Zechariah 7:2-14
Isaiah 58:6-7
Fasting is good, and should be a regular discipline within our lives if possible, but there was something more that mattered to God than their fasts… They had a form of godliness, but were missing something…
The prophets cared infinitely more about righteousness than rituals…
They were going through the forms of religiousness, fasting here and there… but what God truly desired above all that was genuine transformation…
True fasting is transformational not just a bad diet…
Maybe we’re not “oppressing the widow,” but what about the basic principle… Finding our measure of spiritual health by the forms and rituals of our lives, but not allowing our hearts to consistently be transformed…
Our lives are meant to be lived in a state of continual repentance…
Never waste an opportunity to repent…
• We are to continually turn away from sin and self and turn to Jesus…
• repentance is a posture not a proclamation…
Proverbs 27:6
The wounds of a friend are only faithful when they lead us to repentance, because repentance leads us to life… wounds without repentance only lead us to pain…
We mentor repentance by leading lives of self-examination, more rightly said Spirit-examination, and as the Spirit of God brings issues to our attention, being quick return to Jesus in repentance…
God desires to transform our community and our nation… He does that through us when we get a hold of the heart of God… This allow His heart to become our heart… and as His heart becomes our heart, the things He is zealous about we become zealous about… This is why we fast…
Revival and awakening require two baseline principles:
1. People allow God to get a hold of them… That’s the heart of true fasting…
2. And God’s children meeting people who do not have active relationships with God where they are at…
Matthew 25:35
Both of those baselines are hard, and uncomfortable… and life altering, and worth it…”