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Midweek Prayer is a time we gather each week to pray and worship according to scripture using the “ACTS” model – Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

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During Wednesday Prayer, we follow the A.C.T.S. model of prayer, Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication, adoring and praising God, confessing our sins to God and to one another, thanking God, and supplicating God, bringing our petitions to God. During our time of supplication, we pray through passages of Scripture. The reason for that is that, according to 1 John 5:14-15, “… if we ask anything according to [God’s] will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” When are prayers in accordance with God’s will, He hears and answers all of our requests. A foolproof way to pray according to God’s will is to pray the Scriptures, since the Bible is God’s revealed will for us. Everything we need to know to be saved, and everything we have to know to be complete Christians, equipped for every good work, is already revealed in the Scriptures (2 Tim. 3:16-17). So during Wednesday Prayer, we’re teaching people how to use Scripture as a guide and a springboard for their prayers to God.

Time and Location: 7-8:30PM every Wednesday Evening at Shawn and Hanna Woo’s home (262 Monsignor O’Brien Hwy #310 Cambridge).

Please note: During Prayer & Fasting week (the fourth week of every month), our Wednesday Midweek Prayer Service occurs from 5-7PM at the Community Room of the Cambridge Police Station (125 6th St, Cambridge).

Check out the #prayer channel on slack for more information and for key code to access the building.

Alabaster Prayer is a time we come together to pray in an open, less-structured and free-form way.

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We believe it is important to have a designated space or time for people to come and bare their souls and pours out their hearts before God in a free-form way. What we have in mind is something like what Hannah does in 1 Samuel 1:4-18:

“On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and daughters. But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb. And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, ‘Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?’ After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the Lord. She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly. And she vowed a vow and said, ‘O Lord of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head.’ As she continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli took her to be a drunken woman. And Eli said to her, ‘How long will you go on being drunk? Put your wine away from you.’ But Hannah answered, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for all along I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation.’ Then Eli answered, ‘Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made to him.’ And she said, ‘Let your servant find favor in your eyes.’ Then the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad.”

Hannah was pouring out [her] soul before the Lord” “out of [her] great anxiety and vexation.” You don’t necessarily have to be dealing with some great anxiety and vexation, but we all, as Christians, need time and space to pour out our souls before the Lord, and that involves conversing with God personally and intimately, at an emotional level. Fundamentally, emotions reveal what we love. We feel anger, because what we love has been wronged. We feel fear, because what we love is threatened. We feel grief, because what we love has been lost. We feel guilt and shame because we have offended or been alienated from something or someone we love. And if we’re not pouring out our souls before God and sharing the loves of our hearts with Him, then we haven’t gone beyond a formal and superficial relationship with Him. So we need to pour out our souls before God. While it is possible to do this during our other corporate prayer times as well, it’s sometimes helpful to have an open space and an extended time to do this without an agenda. You might ask, “Well, if I’m not praying corporately with other people and there is no agenda, and I’m simply pouring out my soul to God personally, then why can’t I just do that on my own at home?” There is the helpful analogy of working out at a gym to describe prayer times like this. Sometimes, our prayer times are more structured, like attending a Zumba class or a Pilates class, where there’s an instructor giving directions and everyone’s doing the same things together. But other times, our prayer times can be more free-form, like doing your own personal exercises at a gym where other people are also working out. Of course, you can work out on your own at home also, but going to a gym has the benefit of eliminating distractions, providing access to more equipment, and fostering a sense of community, since there are other people who, like you, are trying to stay fit and healthy. In a similar way, the prayer time we are envisioning would eliminate distractions that you might deal with at home, provide prompts that can aid your personal prayer time, whether that’s through interspersed Scripture readings, songs, and/or prophecies, and foster a sense of community, since you’re praying alongside other people, recognizing that we’re all broken people who desperately need God’s help. Just as when sugars are broken down by enzymes of microorganisms, it creates fermentation, pouring out our souls and opening up our hearts to the ministry of the Holy Spirit in this way can create a spiritual ferment, where we can also be more vulnerable with, and receptive to, one another also. So these free-form prayer times can lead to spontaneous times of praying for and ministering to one another as well.

Time & Location: 5-7PM every fourth Wednesday during our Prayer & Fasting Week, before our Midweek Prayer Service, at the Community Room of the Cambridge Police Station (125 6th St, Cambridge).

Prayers of the People – our corporate time of prayer as a congregation – occurs every Sunday during our service after the Preaching of the Word. As a church we pray out loud together for for expanding categories of people, which we call a concentric circle prayer model. First, we pray for our local church, second, we pray for our neighbors, third, we pray for other area churches, and fourth, we pray for the nations.

We also have Pre-Service prayer before our service every Sunday at 9:30AM in our the cafeteria outside of our meeting area.

This Month’s Prayer Guide:

Prayer helps us align our heart and mind to join the free and sovereign work of God for fruitful ministry.

Time and Place

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, [Jesus] departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

There are many Christians who believe that prayer is important, yet do not pray, simply because they have not implemented their intention by deciding exactly when and where they will pray. Jesus chose a time, “very early in the morning,” and a place, “a desolate place,” to pray, and this was his habit (cf. Luke 5:16; 6:12; Matthew 14:23).

A recent study confirms the importance of this principle. In this study:

  • The Control Group was asked to exercise once in the next week. 29% of them exercised.
  • Experiment Group 1 was given detailed information about why exercise is important to health, and then asked to exercise once in the next week. 39% of them exercised.
  • Experiment Group 2 was asked to commit to exercising at a specific place, on a specific day, at a specific time of their choosing. 91% of them exercised.

Commit to a time and place for prayer, and build a habit that will sustain you for a lifetime.

Prayer and Scripture

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14).

For people who struggle to establish a substantive prayer life, meditation on Scripture is often the missing piece. As we can see in Psalm 19, David’s prayers were not merely his words, but his meditations. Thomas Manton explains:

Meditation is a middle sort of duty between the word and prayer, and hath respect to both. The word feedeth meditation, and meditation feedeth prayer. These duties must always go hand in hand; meditation must follow hearing and precede prayer. To hear and not to meditate is unfruitful. We may hear and hear, but it is like putting a thing into a bag with holes. … It is rashness to pray and not to meditate. What we take in by the word we digest by meditation and let out by prayer. These three duties must be ordered that one may not jostle out the other. Men are barren, dry, and sapless in their prayers for want of exercising themselves in holy thoughts.1

This is why our Prayer Guides begin with Scriptural reflection. Even when our hearts are indisposed to prayer, meditating on God and his wonderful works can stir our hearts into prayer.

1 Thomas Manton, The Works of Thomas Manton (Worthington, PA: Maranatha Publications, n.d.), 272-273 as wtd. In Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2014), 88.

What Is Fasting?

To “fast” is to abstain from food and/or drink as an act of individual or corporate worship (Luke 2:37; Acts 13:2). The ordinary fast involves abstaining from all food and drink except for water. Describing Jesus’s fast, Luke 4:2 specifies that he “ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry,” but it makes no mention of drinking or being thirsty (cf. Matt. 4:2). Some fasts impose dietary restrictions (e.g. “delicacies, … meat or wine,” Daniel 10:3), but not complete abstinence. Historically, some Christians have observed partial fasts by eating only a few simple foods or much smaller portions of food than usual. Other fasts call for abstinence from all food and drink, including water (Ezra 10:6; Est. 4:16; Acts. 9:9). The absolute fast appears to be limited to particularly dire circumstances. The biblical examples restrict the absolute fast to three days, and this is consistent with the fact that abstaining from water for more than three days is physically perilous. One exception to this is the supernatural fast, in which people like Moses and Elijah fasted from food and drink for forty days and forty nights (Deut. 9:9; 1 Kings 19:8). These examples, however, are supernatural, and not to be followed apart from clear and specific divine directive.

The self-denial at the heart of fasting can rightly be extended to abstinence from things other than food and drink. Paul writes:

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.  For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Cor.7:3-5).

The husbands and wives, therefore, may fast from sex, “for a limited time, [in order to] devote [themselves] to prayer.” This principle of fasting from something in order to devote oneself to prayer has numerous applications. Fasting from TV, social media, phones, smoking, eating out, etc. can check compulsive behaviors that compete with our exclusive devotion to, and affection for, God.

Why Fast?

Though fasting is not mandated by Scripture, numerous examples do commend it, and Jesus said, “when you fast” (Matthew 6:17), not “if you fast,” and his instructions concerning fasting reveals his expectation that his followers would fast.

Prayer and fasting often appear in tandem throughout the Bible, because fasting aids our prayer (Neh. 1:3-4; Dan. 9:3). Each hunger pang or growl of the stomach is a reminder to pray, and the time normally spent eating can be devoted to prayer. But more than that, fasting feeds our earnest intercessions and supplications before God in the following ways:

Jesus taught that some who hear the word of God “are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). In another place he said, “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:19).” These parables illustrate how inordinate desires can prevent gospel growth and fruitfulness. Fasting is a discipline that curbs our physical appetite and sharpens our spiritual senses (Dan. 9; Acts 13:2). “Our human cravings and desires are like rivers that tend to overflow their banks; fasting helps keep them in their proper channels.”1 By subduing our appetite for food, we can restrain other appetites that threaten to control us, whether it is a minor obsession with coffee or serious addictions to cigarettes, alcohol, or pornography. Andrew Murray’s comment is insightful, “We are creatures of the senses: our mind is helped by what comes to us embodied in concrete form; fasting helps to express, to deepen, and to confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, to sacrifice ourselves, to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.”2 By fasting, we declare that our hunger for God is greater than our hunger for food—that we do “not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

Depriving ourselves of what we normally take for granted and feel entitled to has an humbling effect on the soul, so it is said that David “humbled [his] soul with fasting” (Ps. 69:10). God inclines his ear and looks toward the humble (Isa. 66:2; Prov. 3:34; Jas. 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:5), and prayer and fasting are both ways in which we humble ourselves before God.

1 Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 56.

2 Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Dickinson, ND: Revival Press, 2016), 56.

When You Fast…

It is inadvisable for pregnant or nursing mothers, people who are diabetic or anemic, prone to anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders, and people who have other special health conditions to fast. If you are unsure about your fitness to fast, you should get a physical exam. If you are taking any medication, you should also consult your doctor before making changes to your dosage.

If you have never fasted before, you should start slowly, perhaps fasting for only a meal or two, with juices and/or chicken stock to assuage the hunger. If abstaining from drinks other than water, you should stop drinking coffee and tea at least three days before a fast to avoid withdrawal headaches during the fast. It is unwise to “stock up” by eating large meals before the fast. In fact, smaller portions for a day or two leading up to the fast are more helpful. Dressing warmly, resting sufficiently (~8 hours of sleep), and hydrating frequently (4-8 glasses of water throughout the day) are important during a fast.

At the end of your fast, you should take care not to overeat. This is a great opportunity to evaluate your eating habits and implement a more disciplined diet.

Why Pray?

Fruitful ministry is never the calculable result of correct strategies and plentiful resources, but the free and sovereign work of God. This is why we believe that all our ministries should be birthed out of, and bathed in, prayer. Even when confronted with the pressure of genuine, ministerial need that required the fullness of Spirit and wisdom (Acts 6:3), the Apostles delegated the task to others in order to “devote [themselves] to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). This account reveals the utmost priority of prayer and ministry of the word in the life of the church. As John Piper writes in his book Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, “Most … interruptions and most of our busyness are ministry related, not ‘worldly.’ The great threat to our prayer and our meditation on the Word of God is good ministry activity.” There are many great things that we can do as a church, but none of them are more important than prayer and ministry of the Word. So please join us every Wednesday from 7-8:15pm for our Mid-Week Prayer Services, and also at the end of each month, as we take a break from Community Groups in order to fast and pray for three days leading up to the last Prayer Service of the month.

Time and Place

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, [Jesus] departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

There are many Christians who believe that prayer is important, yet do not pray, simply because they have not implemented their intention by deciding exactly when and where they will pray. Jesus chose a time, “very early in the morning,” and a place, “a desolate place,” to pray, and this was his habit (cf. Luke 5:16; 6:12; Matthew 14:23).

A recent study confirms the importance of this principle. In this study:

  • The Control Group was asked to exercise once in the next week. 29% of them exercised.
  • Experiment Group 1 was given detailed information about why exercise is important to health, and then asked to exercise once in the next week. 39% of them exercised.
  • Experiment Group 2 was asked to commit to exercising at a specific place, on a specific day, at a specific time of their choosing. 91% of them exercised.

Commit to a time and place for prayer, and build a habit that will sustain you for a lifetime.

Prayer and Scripture

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14).

For people who struggle to establish a substantive prayer life, meditation on Scripture is often the missing piece. As we can see in Psalm 19, David’s prayers were not merely his words, but his meditations. Thomas Manton explains:

Meditation is a middle sort of duty between the word and prayer, and hath respect to both. The word feedeth meditation, and meditation feedeth prayer. These duties must always go hand in hand; meditation must follow hearing and precede prayer. To hear and not to meditate is unfruitful. We may hear and hear, but it is like putting a thing into a bag with holes. … It is rashness to pray and not to meditate. What we take in by the word we digest by meditation and let out by prayer. These three duties must be ordered that one may not jostle out the other. Men are barren, dry, and sapless in their prayers for want of exercising themselves in holy thoughts.1

This is why our Prayer Guides begin with Scriptural reflection. Even when our hearts are indisposed to prayer, meditating on God and his wonderful works can stir our hearts into prayer.

1 Thomas Manton, The Works of Thomas Manton (Worthington, PA: Maranatha Publications, n.d.), 272-273 as wtd. In Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2014), 88.

What Is Fasting?

To “fast” is to abstain from food and/or drink as an act of individual or corporate worship (Luke 2:37; Acts 13:2). The ordinary fast involves abstaining from all food and drink except for water. Describing Jesus’s fast, Luke 4:2 specifies that he “ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry,” but it makes no mention of drinking or being thirsty (cf. Matt. 4:2). Some fasts impose dietary restrictions (e.g. “delicacies, … meat or wine,” Daniel 10:3), but not complete abstinence. Historically, some Christians have observed partial fasts by eating only a few simple foods or much smaller portions of food than usual. Other fasts call for abstinence from all food and drink, including water (Ezra 10:6; Est. 4:16; Acts. 9:9). The absolute fast appears to be limited to particularly dire circumstances. The biblical examples restrict the absolute fast to three days, and this is consistent with the fact that abstaining from water for more than three days is physically perilous. One exception to this is the supernatural fast, in which people like Moses and Elijah fasted from food and drink for forty days and forty nights (Deut. 9:9; 1 Kings 19:8). These examples, however, are supernatural, and not to be followed apart from clear and specific divine directive.

The self-denial at the heart of fasting can rightly be extended to abstinence from things other than food and drink. Paul writes:

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.  For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Cor.7:3-5).

The husbands and wives, therefore, may fast from sex, “for a limited time, [in order to] devote [themselves] to prayer.” This principle of fasting from something in order to devote oneself to prayer has numerous applications. Fasting from TV, social media, phones, smoking, eating out, etc. can check compulsive behaviors that compete with our exclusive devotion to, and affection for, God.

Why Fast?

Though fasting is not mandated by Scripture, numerous examples do commend it, and Jesus said, “when you fast” (Matthew 6:17), not “if you fast,” and his instructions concerning fasting reveals his expectation that his followers would fast.

Prayer and fasting often appear in tandem throughout the Bible, because fasting aids our prayer (Neh. 1:3-4; Dan. 9:3). Each hunger pang or growl of the stomach is a reminder to pray, and the time normally spent eating can be devoted to prayer. But more than that, fasting feeds our earnest intercessions and supplications before God in the following ways:

Jesus taught that some who hear the word of God “are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). In another place he said, “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:19).” These parables illustrate how inordinate desires can prevent gospel growth and fruitfulness. Fasting is a discipline that curbs our physical appetite and sharpens our spiritual senses (Dan. 9; Acts 13:2). “Our human cravings and desires are like rivers that tend to overflow their banks; fasting helps keep them in their proper channels.”1 By subduing our appetite for food, we can restrain other appetites that threaten to control us, whether it is a minor obsession with coffee or serious addictions to cigarettes, alcohol, or pornography. Andrew Murray’s comment is insightful, “We are creatures of the senses: our mind is helped by what comes to us embodied in concrete form; fasting helps to express, to deepen, and to confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, to sacrifice ourselves, to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.”2 By fasting, we declare that our hunger for God is greater than our hunger for food—that we do “not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

Depriving ourselves of what we normally take for granted and feel entitled to has an humbling effect on the soul, so it is said that David “humbled [his] soul with fasting” (Ps. 69:10). God inclines his ear and looks toward the humble (Isa. 66:2; Prov. 3:34; Jas. 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:5), and prayer and fasting are both ways in which we humble ourselves before God.

1 Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 56.

2 Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Dickinson, ND: Revival Press, 2016), 56.

When You Fast…

It is inadvisable for pregnant or nursing mothers, people who are diabetic or anemic, prone to anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders, and people who have other special health conditions to fast. If you are unsure about your fitness to fast, you should get a physical exam. If you are taking any medication, you should also consult your doctor before making changes to your dosage.

If you have never fasted before, you should start slowly, perhaps fasting for only a meal or two, with juices and/or chicken stock to assuage the hunger. If abstaining from drinks other than water, you should stop drinking coffee and tea at least three days before a fast to avoid withdrawal headaches during the fast. It is unwise to “stock up” by eating large meals before the fast. In fact, smaller portions for a day or two leading up to the fast are more helpful. Dressing warmly, resting sufficiently (~8 hours of sleep), and hydrating frequently (4-8 glasses of water throughout the day) are important during a fast.

At the end of your fast, you should take care not to overeat. This is a great opportunity to evaluate your eating habits and implement a more disciplined diet.

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