How to succeed in fasting?
It is accepted, in the Christian community, that fasting and prayer compels God to intervene. This drives many Christians to engage in this practice which causes a lot of damage without receiving the desired grant because they do not know not the meaning of true fasting.
1- What Christian fasting is not
- Fasting is not a vain deprivation of food: it is not the fact of not eating that makes the fast. It takes certain special provisions of the heart to speak of fasting.
- Fasting is not necessarily a panacea against difficult situations: it is not an automatic action that compels God to act.
- Neither short-term fasting nor long-term fasting erases sins: it is only the blood of Jesus that erases sin.
- Fasting is not penance: one does not make one’s body suffer in order to have God’s favors.
- Fasting is not Lent, which is not Christian. It does not appear anywhere in the Bible.
2- True fasting or fasting according to God
Why fast?
- One can fast on the Lord’s note: God Himself sometimes commands us to fast for a given problem. This was the case of the Lord Jesus who was brought to the desert to be tempted for 40 days and 40 nights (Matthew 4v1-2). This fast was imposed on Him since there was nothing to eat in this place.
- The Christian must bear the burden of his master. Indeed, God walks with us as a man which is why to solve certain problems, He seeks one or more intercessors (Ezekiel 22v30, Isaiah 6v8, Ezekiel 3v17-19).
- We can fast to solve a personal problem or a problem of our neighbor. This is the case of Joshua after the defeat to Ai (Joshua 7v6-10), of Esther in the face of the threat of extermination of the Jews (Esther 4v15-17), the case of the apostle Paul who fasted for the Church ( 2 Corinthians 11v27-29) etc.
What is true fasting?
True fasting must begin with the fear of God and total obedience to his word (Psalms 119v9-10 , Isaiah 58v2- 1 , Samuel 2v30). All this has for the first time a personal communion with the Lord Jesus Christ to whom his whole life has been handed over. It is therefore a permanent process in the life of the Christian: the transformation of the inner being, the search for resemblance to Christ, … Thus, true fasting consists of moving away from all that is sinanded and works of the flesh, that is, living in sanctification and seeking the will of God (Jeremiah 15v19). It is also to love God with all his heart and to love his neighbor (share his bread, help the needy, do good around you, forgive and forget the offenses of his neighbor (Isaiah 58 verse 6 and 7, Matthew22v37-40). Fasting is also a time of humiliation of the soul in which one deprives one of all that rejoices the flesh to care for spiritual things, in order to be pleasing to the Lord (Isaiah 58 verse 5). This is in order to beg him to relieve us of a burden, of a problem that causes us bitterness in the soul. And it is this bitterness in the soul that drives the Christian to deprive himself of food for a given time.
