Learning to Fast
My intention is not that my fasting would "be seen by others (Matthew 6:18)" but rather to encourage others. When I fast, I will do so "in secret" and seek the Lord. But as I feel the liberty to do so, I will speak of what I learned and of the Lord's reward (Matthew 6:18). If by doing so, I would forfeit any future reward so that others may experience the power of God, it is worth the cost.
Attached is a message I brought to Liberty Baptist Church after a recent fasting experience. I would count this as a pivotal moment in which I figured out how to fast and what I was doing wrong. I'll share more about what I've learned about fasting the wrong way in the next post.
As rewarding as this experience has been, I feel like I'm only ankle-deep into this and that there is much more to come as I swim out from the shallows. More has happened since. These experiences encourage me to fast more. The Lord is good.
Not only do I want to share my experience with fasting as a testimony to the power of God, but I also want to do so because you'll find relatively little published about this spiritual discipline compared to other aspects of the Christian life.
Ask someone about a book they might recommend on leadership. You'll get an armful of them. Ask someone to tell you about their favorite book on fasting. You'll starve.
Google "Biblical fasting." Read the posts. Most of them say the same thing. The search results will return lists of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, . . . points about fasting. Something I've learned about fasting is that it's relatively simple. There's no real secret to it. So I'm not going to say something new, but I don't want to say it the same way. I don't want to give you a list to follow but instead, give you a testimony that might fan the flames of your faith.
If you want to follow along, I will post under the category "Learning to Fast."
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