INTRODUCTION

As you heard Pastor Steve mention this weekend at our worship services, Leave A Mark Church is about to undergo a 40-day spiritual focus of prayer. We will begin Monday,February 8, and finish Friday, March 19.

We will model our prayers according to the Lord’s Prayer found in Matthew 6. The Lord’s Prayer demonstrates adoration, submission to God’s purposes, supplication, and repentance. We will cycle through the Lord’s Prayer six times. For the first five weeks, we will focus on a particular phrase of the prayer each day. The last five days of prayer will compress the Lord’s Prayer.

We will pray for servants, leaders, material needs, spiritual needs, and God’s glory in our church and neighborhoods. If you are able to spend extended times in prayer during the forty days, by all means, expand your prayers beyond the daily theme. However, if your time requires short prayers, let us express our unity as a body and dependence on God to focus our prayers each day on a daily theme.

This prayer time also includes corporate fast days – days 9, 17, 25, 33, 39, and 40. During these days, we will express, in a focused way, our hunger for God to move in our city and our dependence on Him to do it. Fasting does not require abstaining from all food and water for the entire day. If you choose to fast, abstain in a way that your conscience and your physical circumstances permit. As an example, you could fast for breakfast and/or lunch. Fasting can also mean abstaining from other things. You can fast from watching TV, using the internet, or engaging in physical fitness. The important thing is to take the time you would have spent doing those things and use it to pray.

Also, you could meet with your friends or Small Group members to pray together when you’re fasting. You may want to try prayer walking. Visit a park, a place where businesses are concentrated, or a particular street in your neighborhood and pray while you are walking around. You can take turns praying out loud if done in a group, while others are observing and praying silently.

Enjoy your time in prayer with our Lord during these 40 days. Know that as a church, we will be unified in our prayer requests – and we are excited to see how God will bless that!