The Power of Fasting in the Christian Life

One of the two greatest commandments, under which all the other hang, is loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. By prioritizing your devotion to God you may start loving Him with your heart. And when your soul gets filled with plans of life to have this and do that, then you may filter the ideas through the will of God. Hence prioritizing to please God you may keep on loving Him with your soul. And then, while following God you may find it too costly to pursue Him more because you might have to sacrifice some things in order to experience Him tangibly. This is because the more you spend time with God the more you know that God can reveal Himself to you, thereby your life gets changed for good as you keep holding Him. It is a lifetime pursuit, and you will decide to love Him with all your strength because the more you seek Him the more you experientially know and have Him.

But what about loving Him with all your mind? The mind is where thoughts are processed and actions start to be implemented. Our conscious interactions with God and people are undertaken by the involvement of the mind. Before getting into actions, what the mind usually does is analyze thoughts. Some of these thoughts run in the mind unwillingly and even if we want to put them off we may not be able to. And some other thoughts are sharp as if they have pointed edge that pierces through the soul to hurt the heart. Once they run in the mind their effect lingers in the soul causing brokenness in life. So to guard your mind from such different kinds of harming thoughts, you will need to put on Christ through His Spirit who will fill your life with peace and enthusiasm. But such life is built through hard work and it will take time and regular devotions.

So as you run your race to hold your victory over this world it will be important to humble yourself before God through fasting. It will ease the pain of the adventurous struggle against the opponents. As you fast your mind will be able to praise God in a tranquilized manner and it will be able to subdue the heart and the soul to God. The power of the enemies will be weakened as it tries to meddle in the soul. Fasting also helps the mind receive the wisdom of God. And once you receive this enlightenment you are one step above your enemies. And as you keep on growing in knowledge and wisdom then you will live in freedom and authority, Proverbs 8.

In the book of Esther you can see that Esther went into the inner room of the King uninvited which normally might cost life. So Esther decided that fasting would give her advantage over the king's reaction. And she was right! His opinion of her changed for the better because she had fasted.

Fasting is to deliberately abstain from eating and drinking in order to show your humbleness before God thereby entreating His favour. To avoid eating because of lack of food is something different. But to have food and depriving yourself of it to help you connect with God is fasting. In Matthew 6:18 Jesus advised His disciples how to act 'When' they fast. This suggests that we should fast on a regular basis. At least it is wise to fast once a week.

We humans need food to survive, to keep our health, and to keep our beauty. People have different dispositions about food. Some care a lot about their diet so much that they don't even want to miss a meal. Such thoughts and cares for food affect one's psychology. Our confidence and freedom might be considerably dependent on how we daily feed ourselves. But by remembering God and humbling oneself before Him through the way food is consumed, it will be a great advantage to go through the challenges of life with minimized cost. This is because we will be literally inviting God's help into our situations which otherwise would be more difficult.

We have tried to see how loving God with all one's heart, soul and strength is related with daily life. But loving God with all the mind can be out of control because what come and go into the mind are sometimes not volitional. And that is where fasting plays a great role because it can weaken the power of unwanted thoughts that are sometimes like arrows that drive to evil actions. When you fast the mind gets control over thoughts thereby getting the power to love God with it. Fasting hence helps one to worship and praise God with the mind by volitionally subjecting it to only willful thoughts. It drives away the cosmic powers and the egotistic old self which continually try to feed the mind their voices which can be powerful enough to drive one into unnecessary and harmful actions.

So it is undeniable how powerfully effective fasting can be to renew our life to strong personality accompanied with purity and self-control. Once convinced of fasting, you might try to go through long days fasting as you get desperate to reap the fruit. And after you fast, maybe for few weeks, you will witness the change and appreciate the effort for the tangible change you experienced. But after that you may say ok this is all the change I can get from fasting, I should try another way. I said this because many of us have fasted at least a couple of times in life, but might have let it go because of different reasons. But we can make it a regular thing, such as twice a week. The mind will get power and control in these two days over the unstoppable enemies that always try to kill softly. So with the regularly renewed power the person can run the race of life with enhanced health, victory, and safety.

You know that the will of God is always trying to get into our ears. And we hear it after it costs us something. But through fasting we can increase our hearing capability so that we can continually hear God's guiding voices with minimized cost. We are, among many things, soldiers of Christ. And this implies that as His proxies we will have to face His enemies. And this will in turn include fighting and dying daily. The purpose of the enemy is to make us divert our ways from the will of God. But with fasting we can get strong to ignore the deceptive and disturbing voices that come to the mind.

In your pursuit of God, never depend on only one devotion. Once you learn about fasting, do not assume that fasting alone will get you to your destiny. The same with prayer — it is not enough to pray only. But the most effective thing you can do is divide your time into different tasks and give every task its own ⏲️ ⏳️ Then your wholeness will sprout without flaws. If you have a long hour of prayer time today then tomorrow let it be a time of studying the Bible. And fasting could be done twice a week. Then you may spend some virtuous time during the week with people purposely, such as family. And then once in a while you may need to visit your spiritual mentors to be in harmony with them because such close intimacy does energize the soul and it does order wonderful things.

So in such optimized lifestyle you will take advantage of every resource at your disposal so that you can make every side of life flourish forward. Because you don't need to lag economically or leave your family unsupported while you pursue your spiritual goal. Lack of knowledge does indeed result in perishing or losing while you assume everything is according to God's good will. God is not interested in your sentimental and delusional love but He wants you to be equipped with both knowledge and love. Before King Solomon left his earthly life he concluded the whole duty of man saying, "Fear God and Keep His commandments." His commandments for you can be revealed to you every day because He has multitude of them on every aspect of your life. So to get this revelation of commandment is the key to the ultimate success. Your prayer, fasting, reading the Bible, benevolent actions, Church devotions — they have all two sides. One is their life edifying feature, and the other their ability to reveal to you God's will. In this context God's will is not about what God is planning for your life or what He likes and dislikes. But what it means is His counsel about how you should implement His spiritual gifts, and also how you should live other aspects of your life. For example you may be having hard time in balancing your job and your spiritual devotion. But once you hear His voice to understand His will, you will be able to optimize your time for best result by living according to His counsel.

Conclusion

Fasting is a powerful devotion that can transform your character, tranquilize the mind, and even give the body a better health. But to effectively reap its fruit it is important to do it together with prayer and Bible study. The Holy Spirit will divinely empower your life as you partake in His word and prayer.