I welcome you to Day 1 of our 40 Days of Prayer and Fasting, and to the first of our five days of waiting. 
I want to start here, before anything else, so your heart and mind are prepared, so that nothing God is doing in this season passes you by. If you don’t understand the purpose of a season, you can’t align yourself with it. 

At our Mid-Year Camp, God announced that we are stepping into a season of building. The more accurate word for it is wilderness. I know what that word usually brings to mind is “something bad, something hard”. And I recently heard a preacher caution that when you’re in the wilderness, it isn’t because God put you there; don’t use “the wilderness” to excuse your own failures. I understand what he meant. To be fair to his argument, I believe he was addressing people who use “I’m in a wilderness season” as a way of accepting a hard situation instead of fighting for change. That is a real danger, but that is not the wilderness we’re talking about here.

At the camp meeting, we studied something important: biblically, the wilderness is a Motif; a consistent pattern or theme that repeats throughout Scripture, and it doesn’t only represent judgment. It can also represent good. 
Look closely at the Bible, and you’ll notice people end up in the wilderness for different reasons. Sometimes it’s a consequence. When people sin, they’re exiled to the wilderness, a place outside the perceived presence of God. Life is hard there. There’s no food. It’s dangerous. It cannot sustain you. 
However, God Himself leads people into the wilderness, which is strange, because God is good. 

Exodus 13:17-18 
New King James Version
17 Then it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, “Lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt.”
18 So God led the people around by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea…

There was a shorter road: eleven days from Egypt to the Promised Land. God did not take it. Scripture says God led the people around by way of the wilderness. That is not Israel wandering off course or being punished. That is God, deliberately, for a reason the text itself gives us, choosing the desert road for a people He had just delivered. Nobody sinned to get there. God took them there. He needed to fix their hearts before they entered the Promised Land with the wrong mindset still intact.

This is what the wilderness does. It teaches us to let go of what we hold dearest so we can hold on to what God holds dearest. It forms in us a complete trust in God. It strips away our reliance on self and rebuilds our reliance on Him. The wilderness is where character is shaped. It is there we learn, in the deepest way, to trust God’s wisdom over our own.
This is why Elijah was taken to the wilderness for his protection, and there, God fed him and prepared him for the challenge ahead. It is why John the Baptist lived in the desert until the day he was revealed, and it is why Jesus Christ Himself, before beginning His earthly ministry, was led into the wilderness to be tempted and tested for 40 days, echoing the 40 years Israel spent being tested.

Our number of days is no coincidence either. It is a supernatural symbol: we, too, are aligning and surrendering to God across these 40 days to be prepared. Where Israel failed the test in the wilderness, Jesus faced the same test and passed. There is a real parallel between what Israel had to release in the wilderness and what fasting asks us to release now. When we intentionally deprive ourselves of the comforts and riches of this world, when we set apart a period to empty ourselves, we step into a similitude of what God does to people in the wilderness. And that is really what I want us to focus on in this devotion: what God does in the wilderness.

In the natural, people go to the hospital for one of three reasons. 
Firstly, emergencies; where a problem built up unnoticed or struck suddenly and now the situation is exigent and can be fatal.
Secondly, signs and symptoms; where something like a recurring headache or unexplained weight loss signals that a deeper issue is at play.
Thirdly, preventive care; going simply to ask questions and catch a problem before it becomes a crisis, something we rarely do, especially as Africans.

These same three categories exist in the spirit. There are signs and symptoms that reveal something is spiritually wrong long before it becomes a crisis. There is preventive care in the spirit too, a way to catch the warning signs early, rather than waiting until you’re crying out from an emergency. 
It is far easier to maintain what you’ve built in the spirit than to rebuild it after it has collapsed. Sometimes, when you keep trying and things feel stuck, it isn’t failure; it may be God Himself holding you in that season to prepare you for something ahead. Sometimes, seasons like this time of prayer and fasting are exactly that preventive care. A chance to see the signs early and say, “Something is off. Let me get better before it costs me.”

A body doesn’t collapse without warning. Long before the crisis, there are vital signs; small, easy to ignore. It could be you resenting correction, making decisions without asking God first, drifting into quiet self-sufficiency, needing God less and less as things go well. 
Nobody wakes up one morning suddenly proud, suddenly self-reliant, suddenly deaf to God. It happens slowly. 

What if many believers are living with these signs right now and don’t even recognize them? It takes time for a heart to grow numb to God’s instruction. If God is no longer correcting you, that itself is a vital sign, a problem, not a comfort. Over these 40 days, we’re entering a season of intimacy and vulnerability, a journey where we say to God, “Make me Yours again. I want to be that open again”.

Pray this way:
Father, I bring myself to You in these 40 days. I have seen the signs, and I surrender myself. Lord, do a work in me.

With Love,
The Catalyst,
Pastor Michael Ipaye