Fasting isn't about earning God's love or even His favor or blessing. It's an act of humility and a desperate reach for Him. It's a child crying out in need. In fasting, we position ourselves to experience more of Him by embracing voluntary weakness.

1 Corinthians 14 is a gold mine of Paul’s teaching on tongues. Let's look at this chapter and dig out some of the nuggets that can strengthen your prayer life as you engage in the gift of tongues.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul refers to "various kinds of tongues" (verses 10 and 28). We can see several different kinds of tongues in Scripture and our own experience today confirms this. You could probably make a case for more, but for now I'll break it down into three categories:

A few years ago during my senior year of ministry school, one of my teachers gave us an assignment to only pray for our own souls for three full days. No praying for other people or outside circumstances at all. That's not an easy assignment to give a community of intercessors! I don't think I realized when I started how hard it would be.

One of the most powerful ways that I use writing to interact with Scripture is paraphrasing chapters. Whenever I find myself in a funk in engaging with the Word, paraphrasing is one of my top go-to tools to help me focus and talk to God through a passage.

After I lead a prayer meeting with a worship team, prayer team, or both, I always take some time to debrief with them-- to encourage each other, clarify confusion, etc. I always like to be able to tell my team that we did it; we had a successful prayer meeting.

So what makes a prayer meeting successful?

If you've been tracking with this series for a while now, you know that I wholeheartedly encourage praying the Word--actually turning the words of Scripture into your own prayers. Many verses can become powerful, intimate prayers, but there is one particular set of verses that is especially useful. We call them the apostolic prayers. Apostolic prayers are prayers that were prayed in the New Testament by Jesus and the apostles.

Several years ago, I fell in love with reading the Bible at a whole new level. One of the things I started doing during that time was discovering and applying verses that promised God would open my eyes to understand His word. The first one I found, which is still my favorite to pray, is Psalm 119:18, which is a prayer for God to reveal "wondrous things" in His Word. As I continued on this journey, I realized that there were so many more verses I could pray for this same thing!