STARVE YOURSELF FOR WHAT?😏

Sometime in 2018, I made a post of a statement made by Prophet Nanasei Opoku Sarkodie that said ‘You don’t fast because you think you can do it on your own.’ Sela my treasured friend [please don’t kill me Sela🙈] replied: ‘Starve yourself for what?’ To be fair, we have created a space between us that allows for these kinds of questions without malice. So he explained that he had heard a couple of sermons on the topic but never quite understood its spiritual implications. I don’t quite recall the answer I gave but I have over the years done some studying on the topic. I found Derek Prince’s teaching particularly useful in my understanding of the topic, so the content of today’s piece will be based largely on his teaching.

So really, what has your plate of rice and beef sauce got to do with anything spiritual? Especially if the Kingdom of God is not about food and drink? 😂

What I’d like to do with this post is not to tell you the types of fasts there are or how long to fast for. The purpose of fasting for most of us is to secure an answered prayer, even more so as Jesus Himself identified that certain things only respond to fasting and prayer [Matthew 17:21]. What I hope to do is to establish why we fast to begin with, and take a few examples of the results it produced in scripture. Legoooo!🤓 [The irony of this post is that I’m sipping on a beverage as I write😂 But God is in charge, I promise!😂

The single greatest barrier to our prayers is pride. The God of the Bible is a warm, all-embracing Father until it comes to the proud. The Bible says God resists them but shows favour to the humble [1 Peter 5:5]. James wrote in James 4:10 NLT:

When you bow down before the Lord and admit your dependence on him, he will lift you up and give you honour.

So anything that enables us to humble ourselves, like Derek Prince put it, is a priceless blessing even if it isn’t always enjoyable at the time. And here’s where fasting comes in. It is the God-appointed way a man can humble himself. In Psalm 35:13, David said:

‘But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting.’

What was David talking about? You are a spirit with a soul living in a body. As you may already know from our Eternal Salvation series here, a man’s spirit is saved once and always [Hebrews 10:10], but your soul must be brought into conformity with your salvation while you live in the body [Romans 12:2]. A man’s soul is the egotistic part of him, the self-assertive part of every man. Derek Prince puts it this way: ‘Your soul has 3 main functions – your will, the intellect and the emotion, and it expresses itself in these phrases: I want, I think, I feel. And God says what you want isn’t important, what you think isn’t relevant, what you feel isn’t important. What’s important is my will and if you’re going to align yourself with my will, you’ve got to deal with your soul, and one way to deal with your soul is by humbling it through fasting.’

In Leviticus 16, the Lord gave the Israelites the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar – the Day of Atonement known as Yom Kippur. It was the day the sins of the Israelites would be forgiven through the sacrifice offered by the High Priest. But the Lord gave a command. He ordered in verses 29 and 30: ‘On the appointed day in early autumn, you must afflict your souls [spend the day fasting – NLT] and not do any work. On this day, atonement will be made for you, and you will be cleansed from all your sins in the LORD’s presence. The Lord had provided something that was out of their power to give, i.e. the sacrifice. It was entirely out of grace, although merely a foreshadow, and in His wisdom, He required that as this spiritual exercise took place, their egos, desires, thoughts and emotions would be submitted to Him. And whoever wanted to benefit from this sacrifice had to comply with these conditions.

So am I saying fasting completes the work of Christ on the Cross? By no means!🙅🏽‍♀️ The work of Christ was complete! We cannot add to it or subtract from it! But are we all benefitting in the same degree from that same sacrifice? Certainly not! The difference between a fasted man and an unfasted man is that the fasted man has aligned his soul – his ego, his self-serving nature, his ambitions, the patterns of his thought process, and his emotions – with the will of God. But again, if you anything like me,😅 you’re probably wondering why these things cannot be done while still enjoying your meals? 😂🤷🏽‍♀️

In 2 Corinthians 11:27, Paul talks about his sufferings as an Apostle. He says ‘in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.’ Notice how he separates hunger and thirst from fasting?😂 They are not the same! So to answer the question, fasting isn’t just the starving, it is when you abstain from the things that give your self-nature some pleasure for spiritual purposes; to mute the voice of your ‘self’ for a while and align with the purposes of God for you. It is not allowing your soul to dictate to you what to do, and it starts with abstaining from the one thing that makes a wonderful servant but a terrible, possessive master – food!😁 And in our day, social media!

Let me show you one last thing before this piece becomes a dissertation.😅 The Bible calls Ahab the most wicked king in the history of Israel in 1 Kings 16:30:

Ahab, son of Omri, did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any king before him. He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to arouse the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than did all the kings of Israel before him. In Chapter 21, Ahab had an encounter with the Prophet Elijah. Ahab had asked Naboth to either sell or trade his vineyard to him and the guy refused, so Ahab went home and refused to eat. He went to bed with his face to the wall. So, his darling wife Jezebel got poor Naboth stoned to death and gave the vineyard to Ahab [pretty sure he didn’t even use it🙄]. So of course, God sent the fire Prophet to him with a tough message:

‘This is what the Lord says: Wasn’t it enough that you killed Naboth? Must you rob him, too? Because you have done this, dogs will lick your blood at the very place where they licked the blood of Naboth! I will bring disaster on you and consume you. I will destroy every one of your male descendants, slave and free alike, anywhere in Israel! I am going to destroy your family as I did the family of Jeroboam son of Nebat and the family of Baasha son of Ahijah, for you have made me very angry and have led Israel into sin. The members of Ahab’s family who die in the city will be eaten by dogs, and those who die in the field will be eaten by vultures.

The curses continued, but verse 27 says when Ahab heard these things, he tore his clothing, dressed in burlap, and fasted. He went about in deep mourning. Then another message from the Lord came to Elijah in verse 29: “Do you see how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has done this, I will not do what I promised during his lifetime…”

Same happened for the wickedest city of Nineveh when they humbled themselves and prayed after Jonah’s message from the Lord. Esther asked Israel to join her and her maids to fast, admitting their dependence on God like James 4 put it, thus preserving the entire Jewish nation! We may not have received the Messiah had Esther not fasted! And before you’re tempted to think it was exclusive to the men under the old covenant, Jesus fasted and taught it! In fact Jesus took it for granted that the people who follow Him would fast and pray. In Matthew 6, He says ‘and when you pray’, and ‘when you fast’ as though the question of whether He expected us to pray and fast was already answered.  The Apostles fasted countless times. Paul actually listed fasting as one of the things that verified that he was a minister of the gospel and grace of Christ Jesus, and taught it. James taught it, and we could keep going!

Look at the impact fasting had on the men under the old covenant, on the most wicked men and women, and the most wicked king in all of Israel, imagine what it could do for you under a richer, better covenant in Christ Jesus!

I receive the grace to humble myself in fastings often in Jesus Name!

Love,

Rad!✨