40 Days Fast and Prayer

We have just started on a national 40 days fast and prayer organised by NECF "Church The Transforming Agent". One of the daily meditations in the booklet (Day 35 theological education) grabbed my attention. It was written by Rev Loh Soon Choy, maybe it is because I am on a week-long series of night classes on ecclesiology (doctrine of church) and eschatology (doctrine of the last things), it hit home: "For the seminary to follow the dictates of the church uncritically is to forfeit its intellectual and prophetic witness to the sanctity and unity of all truth. Yet not to relate closely to the church makes the seminary an irrelevant ivory tower without pastoral base".

As we embark on this journey together, I hope these meditations on the meaning of fasting/prayer would be helpful from the book "A Hunger for God: Desiring God Through Fasting and Prayer":

"Beholding the glory of God is not only a private experience on a mountain as he passes by. It is also a public experience as he multiplies plagues in the land of Egypt, and divides the Red Sea, and swallows the family of Korah into the earth, and turns water into wine, and raises the dead, and causes selfish men to lay down their lives for the sake of love, and turns the hearts of kings toward the cause of Truth.

There is a hunger for God that goes beyond the desire for private experience. It longs for the public display of his glory in the world. It longs for the great dishonors against our God to be set right. It is not content to hope for private revelations of his saving help, as precious as they are. It yearns for the open triumph of his hand in the establishment of God-exalting truth and righteousness—in universities and courts of law and advertising agencies and political debates and all the media of television and radio and newspapers and magazines and movies and
the Internet. It is driven by a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples."

Read on: Chapter 1
Chapter 2-4
Chapter 5-6
Chapter 7 & Appendix

PS: The NECF REPORT ON THE STATE OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN MALAYSIA FOR THE YEAR 2006 is now available for download. Dr Leong Tien Fock's audio presentation on Building the Second Generation Christian Youth – Teaching Biblical Truths to post-Modern Youths is also available at the NECF Youth Workers Consultation.