Fasting: Finding God to be Our All-Sufficient Source

Fasting can narrowly be defined as the spiritual discipline of abstaining in some significant way from normal food for spiritual purposes.   Unfortunately fasting may seem very foreign and strange to many of us, because we are not used to doing without food or drink, and we are not interested in voluntary discomfort. 

Fasting has been practiced by men and women of God throughout the ages.   Moses, King David, Elijah, Esther the Queen, Daniel, Anna the Prophetess, Paul, those in the early church, all these fasted.  Jesus fasted.  Church leaders such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, David Brainerd all regularly fasted. 

My first real encounter with fasting occurred on my first mission trip  - a trip to South Korea.  I was a fairly new believer and there I encountered the work of the Holy Spirit, and saw the reality of revival in ways that I had never seen, and have not seen since.  There I met and served briefly alongside a diminutive man who as a spiritual giant.  Pastor Cho pastored a small church in southern Korea who in the course of his ministry had completed 2 forty-day fasts.  God was using him in powerful ways there in his community and throughout South Korea.  Fasting was a regular part of every believer’s walk that I met in South Korea.  The connection between fasting, prayer and the manifested power of God was visible and clear.

Fasts in the Bible vary greatly in length, in content and in purpose.  We see that fasting was employed to strengthen prayer, to seek guidance, to express grief, to seek deliverance, to express repentance & return to God, to humble oneself before God,  to overcome temptation, and to express love to God. 

The Bible shows us that fasting and prayer changes our hearts concerning sin, God’s judgment on sin and how He calls us to deal with sin by setting everything else aside so we can seek Him.  (Joel 2:12-16)

The Bible shows us that fasting and prayer changes our circumstances as we focus on the person of God, his promises, his power and gives us eyes to see him working in supernatural ways.   (2 Chronicles 20)

In the book of Acts we see how fasting and prayer changes our world  (Acts 13:1-4)

As individuals and as a group the New Testament church fasted.  In Acts Luke clearly wants us to see a connection between the worship, prayer, and fasting on the one hand, and the decisive guidance of the Holy Spirit on the other.  This teaches us the value of worship, fasting and prayer in the earnest pursuit of God's will for our lives and the life of our church. Fasting, prayer and worship created a fertility in the heart of the New Testament church into which God planted the seeds of sacrifice, generosity and a passion for missions, and the world was forever changed.

Dallas Willard, in The Spirit of the Disciplines wrote, “Fasting teaches us a lot about ourselves very quickly.  It will certainly prove humiliating to us, as it reveals to us how much our peace depends upon the pleasures of eating.  Fasting confirms our utter dependence on God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.  Through it, we learn by experience that God’s Word to us is a life substance, that it is not food (bread) alone that gives life, but also the words that proceed from the mouth of God.”