Every Saturday we post “Saturdays in the Spirit” on our church’s podcast right here. “Saturdays in the Spirit” is a 15-20 minute guided prayer that is designed to help you practice solitude through listening prayer. It’s a series of prayer prompts, but the real value of it is the long pauses between the prompts that are designed to function as portals for you to meet with God. And, like all practices, it’s not designed to be an end in itself. It’s designed so that all of your life begins to be characterized by a spirit of solitude.
“Saturdays in the Spirit” exists so that your entire week becomes Sunday through Saturday in the Spirit.
You’ll probably hate it at first. When you first begin to practice solitude, it’s very similar to feeling coming back to your fingers after they’re numb from the winter’s cold. The first feelings you experience are negative, sharp and almost unbearable feelings of pain, prickles, and hordes of stabbing needles. But eventually, a healthy feeling returns to your fingers.
So it is with our souls. In the grind of our ordinary lives, our hearts often become numb. When we slow down to embrace solitude, often the first feelings that rush back into our hearts are feelings of pain: regrets, condemnations, and past sins. But by the grace of God, if you can remain in the warmth of solitude and allow God to thaw out your heart more completely, the healthy feeling of being alive in relationship with God will return.
But the most effective strategy that Frontier Church has for helping you integrate this practice into your life is Fighter Groups. There is nothing more helpful than committing to a small group of people following Jesus together, and to ask and listen to how others are being formed by the Holy Spirit through the practice of Solitude.
