40 Day Bible Feast: Preparing the Meal

Two days to go! Let's start cooking.

1. Prepare your work area: This may involve recycling or boxing up magazines or other reading materials which may tempt you to deviate from the real Feast (think of them as "fast food"). If you subscribe to a newspaper, consider canceling or holding the subscription for the next 40 days. If you get your news online, consider removing the bookmarks from your favorite sites to remove the "one click away" factor. How radical you get with the preparation is up to you, but sometimes a little preventative maintenance can help us through the times when our desire and self-control is at its lowest. Remember, the enemy does not want to see us reading God's Word, much less committing ourselves to read only His Word for 40 days. Be on guard for attacks of temptation.

For me, the hardest thing will not be reading the blogs of people I've come to know and pray about (pray for my accountability here!). It feels like it will be abandoning them, but I need to keep reminding myself I can still pray for them even if I don't know what's going on in their lives and that God won't abandon them.

To enliven the preparation with some fun, consider whether you want to designate a special room, area or chair in your home for you to read the Bible or maybe even a special (quiet) place outside your home. Think about what you might like in place to create the atmosphere (such as keeping the candle or prayer shawl/blanket nearby which I referenced in the last post)

Since we're involving our small children in this, we'll be packing up the children's books which aren't biblically based. This may sound extreme, but I'm believing God to work through the "out of sight, out of mind" principal. To help them get excited about the 40 days, we're countering the boxing up of their books by bringing in some new bible-story books for them to read.

I'm gathering Scripture passages to study and possibly memorize. To help me with this, I found some small journal books at Target for $1 each - I like to be organized and get excited about filling blank pages with the Words God gives me.


2. Slicing, dicing and stirring the ingredients. Hmmm...this is going to stretch my imagination a little more. Let's see if this works with the analogy - writing out a goal of what you want to read each day or week of this feast can be helpful. The purpose in writing it out is not to stress you out if you aren't able to read as much as you intended, but to provide a little structure to keep you motivated to stay on track. I'm constantly amazed how writing something down helps increase my motivation and it feels more real than if I keep things in my head. Also, if you're planning on reading through a longer book of the Bible, slicing it into smaller pieces might help it feel more manageable. I'm going to be mixing things up quite a bit, so keeping track of the various "dishes" I'll be sampling will help keep me organized.


3. Cooking it up. Whether it's on the stove top or in the oven, cooking helps blend the flavors, join the ingredients together and (as in the case of a cake) make for a tastier confection. This is where prayer comes in. Spending time in prayer over the next couple of days will help solidfy all the preparation you've put in place since feeling led to take on this challenge. Some things to pray about:

• That God would continue to increase your hunger and thirst for His Word and that you will know the satisfaction of being filled when you do feast upon His Word.
• That He would help you in the final preparations - in your heart, spirit or physical environment - before the Feast begins.
• That He would continue to bring people alongside you/us to join in the Feast.
• For each of us who have committed ourselves to the Feast - that we would find the strength in God to bring us through the 40 days and have the ability in Christ to cast down any temptations thrown our way.
• That God would grow in us perservance and we would see the fruits of the Spirit manifested in our lives, especially the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, faith, and self-control. (Galations 5:22-23)
• That we would emerge from the 40 days knowing what it means to have the crown of life (James 1:12) bestowed upon us.

That's it, my friends. I hope to "see" you back here Wednesday for the first day of our feast. While I won't be reading blogs during this 40 days, I will be writing some posts as God leads and enables and I hope you will feel free in the Spirit to share how you are doing as well.

Love in Christ,
Andrea