“Fasting is one of the great Biblical disciplines,” said Pastor Randy Thornton, during a recent Sunday morning sermon at Grace Church in Southern Pines, N.C. “But how many would say it has been a top priority of the top three practices (praying, giving and fasting) of the Christian life you’ve actually participated in and done on a regular basis?”
John Wesley said, “Is not the neglect of this plain duty (I mean fasting, ranked by our Lord with almsgiving and prayer) one general occasion of deadness among Christians?”
Thornton, 52, Grace Church’s senior pastor, announced that the church is starting 21 days of prayer and fasting. He connected prayer with fasting, saying prayer changes situations, prayer changes lives, prayer changes a church, prayer changes a city and prayer changes a community.
“One of the things I believe the Holy Spirit is speaking is that there needs to be a renewed interest in prayer,” Thornton said.
He described various kinds of fasting, such as a “Daniel fast,” which involves eating only fruits and vegetables and “no pleasant food.” He said people with medical problems should fast appropriately, not stringently.
“You can fast TV,” he said, adding that a person can abstain from TV or watch fewer programs in order to spend more time praying or reading the Bible. He explained that fasting is not dieting. “Food, among other things has a hold on people. Fasting draws you into a great awareness of God. God wants you to be free. God wants to see his love poured out. Fasting and prayer can help.”
Thornton said fasting, for believers, is like lowering the water level in a lake. When you drain water from a lake, you notice stumps and debris – they were hidden by water.
“God wants to get the stumps and junk out of our lives,” he said.
He read Mark 9:29: “And he (Jesus) said unto them, ‘This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.’”
“Do you have stumps in your life, or silt?” Thornton asked. “Some of us need a supernatural Roto-Rooter or a fresh dunk in Jesus. God is saying in America, ‘Is there a people who will call upon me?’ I don’t want to be a church that just operates in religious performance. The miracle business has never left. God has called us to be fishers of men, but if our ponds are full of stumps…” (he left that sentence unfinished)…Confess ‘the stumps,’ the ‘things’ that have control in your life…God wants to remove the stumps, to restore what we call a ‘sense of innocence.’”
Fasting gives us great sensitivity and removes clutter and confusion, Thornton said.
John Wesley cautioned those who fast to have one motive: “First, let (fasting) be done unto the Lord with our eye singly fixed on Him. Let our intention herein be this, and this alone, to glorify our Father which is in heaven.”
Martin Luther offered this caution: “He (God) wants nothing at all to do with you if by your fasting you court Him as if you were a great saint, and yet meanwhile nurse a grudge or anger against your neighbor.”
“Spirithome.com” gives this summary:
“Usually, the fast is to do without food. Food is one of the great blessings of God in our lives, a true pleasure and a true necessity. But humans tend to be gluttons; we want to eat more. Our hunger can compel us, force our hand, occupy our thoughts. When we have anything in our lives that we don’t or can’t say no to, then it is lording over us. But God is in control. If something else takes up God’s place in our lives, it is an idol, and we are living in something akin to idolatry. Fasting helps to bring it back into enough control for us to surrender it to God so it can be returned to its rightful place in life. Food is the foremost example of such a thing.
“You can fast from some foods, and not others. You can fast from watching television…and buying pleasure items, even from buying ordinary stuff. You can fast from hobbies you crave, places you are unhealthily drawn to, music, books, news, and movies. You might even find it necessary to be fasting from use of the Internet…For most people in North America, and the upper classes all over the earth, the most important fasting may be to fast from being a consumer of goods, for our role as a consumer consumes us spiritually.”
As Pastor Thornton said, fasting can help lower the “water levels” of our lives and let us see the “stumps” that clutter and “junk-up” our lives. Maybe some of those stumps will come out only “by prayer and fasting.”
