The Powerful Practice of Fasting - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, May 2nd. How much do you know about fasting? Today's lesson helps believers understand how this spiritual discipline helps us focus on God. Sometimes do you feel just helpless and you don't know exactly what to do? Or maybe you find yourself in some form of bondage and in spite of everything you've done you just can't break it. Or you're trying to find God's will about something. You've prayed and prayed and prayed and somehow you just, it just doesn't work.

You can't, either you're not hearing Him or He's not speaking or something's going on. Or it could be that you just feel like I need a real cleansing. I just need a, I need a spiritual bath in my life. And yet you have confessed and repented and prayed and you name it. And somehow you still don't have that sense of cleansing and purity you ought to have in your life. Well, there is a solution and there is an answer to this. And I want to give you a little warning in the very beginning.

You're getting ready to have an onslaught of a satanic attack. Because He's going to say to you, as soon as I tell you what I want to talk about today, He's going to tell you why you can't do that. Well, that's for other people but not for you.

You don't know how to do that. That's not going to work in your life. And so I just want to tell you right up front, I want to ask you to open your heart and to tell God, Lord, I want you to speak to my heart today. No matter whether I like it or not, God, I want to hear the truth. And if you will, God will do something in your life. So I want you to turn, if you will, to the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is talking to His disciples about areas of their life that are a vital part of their life. And He says to them, He said, look, in living the Christian life, you're not to do that for show. You're not to do that so people will be impressed.

You're not to do it to impress other people. And here's what He says beginning in the sixth chapter. He says, first of all, don't give to be seen. Secondly, He says, don't pray to be heard. And thirdly, He says, beginning in the sixteenth verse, listen to what He says. Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face, as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they'll be noticed by men when they're fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret.

And your Father who sees what is done in secret, He says, He is the one who will reward you. Now, let's clarify what we mean by fasting and to say, first of all, right up front, fasting and dieting are not the same. There are a lot of people who diet who know nothing in the world about biblical fasting. And if you'll notice, for example, if you go through the grocery line, right before you pay or at the checkout, there's always a group of magazines there.

I guarantee you'll have to look a long time before you go through there without seeing at least one magazine or more. On the front cover is the latest dieting fad. Dieting has to do with the flesh. Fasting has to do with your spirit. And so, we're talking about not simply going on a diet, but we're talking about fasting from God's point of view. And if you'll notice what He says here, this isn't something that was just new to them because if you'll notice how He said it, He said, whenever, that is, Jesus expected it, whenever you fast.

And so, it's very evident what He was talking about. And so, somebody says, well, what do I fast? Because most people think in terms of fasting just the food. But there are four different things that a person can fast. And I mean by that, to fast, it means to abstain from something for the purpose of giving that time to seeking the Lord, His mind, His will, His face in your life. That is, it's a spiritual relationship that's going on. A person can fast food, which is what we normally think about and oftentimes what the Bible refers to. You can fast activity, for example, just laying aside some time to be with the Lord and not just to keep up all the activities and not have any time for Him. You can fast sleep, that is, that you are so burdened and God works in your heart in such a way that you don't even want to sleep. And you don't, and somehow He keeps you awake because you're seeking Him. Or you can fast an intimate relationship or the sexual relationship between a husband and a wife.

And somebody says, well, where in the world did you get that? So, I want to read this Scripture so that there's no doubt in your mind that that's legitimate. So, he says, Paul is speaking here in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians and he says, concerning the things about which you wrote, it's good for a man not to touch a woman, but because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife and each woman to have her own husband. A husband must fulfill his duty to his wife and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

And likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but his wife does. Stop depriving one another except by agreement for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayer and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. And so, when you think about it, it's not just food, but it's all four of these things if they apply to you and doesn't mean that you have to fast all four of them at the same time.

But when we talk about fasting, we're talking about not just setting aside time or not just abstaining from something, but listen, abstaining from it, setting aside that time on the food or whatever it might be for the purpose of seeking God. Lord, I want to hear from you. I want to know you. I want to know what you're saying to me.

I want to hear what you're saying. Maybe you sense a burden in your heart. It isn't just setting aside time. If you just don't eat for a day and say, well, I'm fasting, you may be dieting, but you're not fasting because genuine biblical fasting has to do with my seeking the Lord and the fact that I lay aside these things, whichever one or all four of them may be, we lay aside these things in order to give our attention to and to seek God. And what we are doing is we are removing all of those things that have our attention and those things that would keep us from focusing primarily on Him. And that prayer is not just a normal prayer, but prayer and supplication, which means a deep, strong yearning within my heart, a deep desire that is so important and so strong that I don't want to eat. I'm going to lay aside these other activities in my life because most of all and the most important thing in my life at this point is hearing from God. I want to find out what He's saying to me, what sense of direction, why aren't these prayers being answered and why can't I understand the Word of God and why am I in bondage to this relationship or bondage to this habit in my life and why can't I break that?

And God, I need to hear from You. No one else can tell you when to fast. No one else can say, well, now, you ought to be fasting because the truth is that's something, that's between you and God. And the issue is what are those issues in your life that God is trying to deal with and somehow you're just not getting it and there's some form of bondage. You've talked to this person, you've been to this counselor, you've done this, you've done that, you've done the other and you know what?

You're still in bondage. And so whether it's finding the will of God, hearing God speak to your heart for the first time, when I think about how many people live their entire Christian life and never see fit to set any sign of time whereby God has their absolute undivided attention for a season of time, whereby the only thing that matters in that person's heart is their relationship to Him, what He's saying, what He wants to say, what sense of direction He wants to give them. And they live their entire Christian life and miss out on one of the most powerful experiences of the Christian life. Yet that is exactly what people do. So when Jesus said, whenever you do, what He was saying is simply this.

You know what? It's part of following Me. Now, with that in mind, let's think about what's the purpose of it. So Jesus said, whenever you do, what's the purpose of fasting? Well, there's some misconceptions about what fasting's all about. And one of them is simply this, that surely as I've been talking to God and asking Him about this, and I believe this is what God wants in my life, I'm convinced this is His will, and so since it's not coming to pass as fast as I think it ought to, surely if I fast, and what I do if I'm fasting, then I'm certainly impressing God with my sincerity and my intensity about this thing.

If I fast, maybe I'll get Him to just go ahead and do it. No, you can't speed up God's will by fasting. And so that's not the purpose of it. The purpose is not to speed up God's will. The purpose is, listen, not to deprive myself of something, not to abstain from something for the simple purpose of impressing God, but rather because I cannot help it. That is the desire of my heart.

I want to know what He's saying. I want to know what His will is, and so I don't want anything in my life that would grab my attention and keep me from seeing things the way He sees them. And so I'm not trying to do it for that reason. So I'm not trying to persuade Him to hurry along. Secondly, I'm not trying to persuade God against His will. Now, Lord, this is what I believe, it would be good and this would be right, and so it's not coming to pass. I'm going to fast and somehow if I fast strongly enough or long enough or whatever ways or maybe all four of these ways we mentioned, maybe I can finally get God to see it my way and to come up on my side.

Well, first of all, you're not going to ever get God to violate His own principles, violate His own will, and you're not going to get God to do something just to make us feel good about our relationship to Him because God, listen, you know what He's after? He's after something deeper than just information. And so oftentimes people have misconceptions about what fasting is all about.

And as a result, their purpose is sometimes to please other people or whatever it might be. What I want you to see is this. The two words I want you to remember, and this is the heart of it.

Two words. We said, first of all, we don't fast to persuade God to do anything. We fast in order to prepare ourselves.

So the two words, one of them is persuasion, no persuasion. There is preparation. That's what fasting is all about. It's the, listen, it is a time of the preparation of our heart to be able to discern, to hear God speak to us, to give us direction. It's preparation for God to do this cleansing in our life.

Now, fasting is all about preparation. God is in the process of preparing us to hear from Him. And so when we think in terms of abstaining from those things that would cause us to be distracted in some fashion. And so what we want to do is to set aside some time where the only thing that matters is we hear from Him. And so usually what we will do, we'll take some passage of Scripture or we will begin to read through the Scriptures and God will bring us to some particular area.

And God will be, He may begin to work on us in that area. So what I want you to see happens is this. What happens is when you begin to fast, your mind begins to get sharper. It begins to get clearer.

You know why? Because here's what you've done. You've pushed aside the work, the pleasure, the plans, the food, the relationships. In other words, what you've done you have abstained from. You've laid them aside and now the only thing that you have your focus on, your focus is on God.

And so what is it? It's God preparing us. And what happens is in fasting there is, the preparation part of it is a sense of humility. I begin to recognize how desperately I need Him, that I'm not going to break this bondage any other way except I submit my will to Him. I'm not going to get this information until I humble myself before Him. And so God is getting us ready for something. Now, if I don't care about what God thinks, I'm not going to fast.

If I'm just going to make up my mind, depend upon my own intuition and my own discernment and just say, Well, God, you know, You've given us common sense and anybody can figure this out. Many things in life we can't figure out. But there are some things in life you and I desperately need to know. God, what are You saying in Your Word? Have You said something in Your Word somewhere, Lord, that I need to know? And what's going to happen is, listen, whatever He surfaces in your heart, whatever He tells you, God is going to enable you to do it, whether it's breaking some bondage or whether it's discerning His will or whether it's understanding His Word in some fashion, He's going to do it.

He desires to do it. Giving your attention to Him is one of the wisest, listen, it's one of the greatest time savers. It eliminates a lot of fretting and worrying and anxiety. When you know that you've heard from God, there's nothing so stabilizing, so establishing, so firming up a person's life, it's knowing that you've heard God speak.

Don't neglect one of the most powerful things God can do in a person's life. Most people live troubled. Most people live without peace and without joy in their heart and without a sense of real genuine security and without a sense of contentment. There are always going to be troubles and heartaches and trials in life. So what do we do?

We give up and moan and groan? No, in spite of the troubles and the trials and the heartaches and the valleys and the persecutions and all the rest of the things we have to face in life, there is a way to face those with this awesome sense of confidence and boldness and assurance in your life that is absolutely unexplainable because it is the work of God in the heart of a person whose heart is pure toward God. He's going to grant you exactly what you're looking for if you're willing to give Him time.

Listen, give Him time and let Him work in your heart. Fasting is preparation. Now, there are some cautions that we have to think about, and this is what Jesus was saying here. He says now, when you give, don't give to be seen. When you pray, don't pray to be, He's not saying don't give, but don't do it with the wrong motive. And when you pray, you ought to pray it. He gives lots of verses about prayer, but don't do it to be heard by other people. And He says, and when you fast, be sure that you're fasting. Listen, it's private, that relationship between you and God.

Now, it's fruitless. That is, fasting is fruitless if I am in the process of trying to impress someone else, if I'm doing it to be seen by someone else. Or listen, if I'm doing it as simply as a religious act. If some religions, for example, or some faiths, they have periods where you fast. Well, what's the fasting about? Well, that's what my church teaches. That's what my religion teaches, I fast. And so that's the reason. You know what?

That's fruitless. Unless that person is seeking God, unless that person desires to know Him, just to satisfy a period of time of fasting is fruitless. It's all about God and the person fasting. It's all about their relationship.

It's all about that intimacy. It's all about what God wants to do in that person's life and preparing them to hear from Him. Once you begin to fast, you can expect this to happen. Sins in your life are going to, they're coming to the surface. As we said, hidden things are coming to the surface, things you've swept under the rug, things you've not wanted to think about, things you've rationalized and excused and you just don't think about it.

And when you pray, you just, when God brings them up, you just, you've shut them down to enough that you don't even think about them anymore. And you know what's going to be happening? What's going to be a shock? You're going to be shocked.

Some people, well, not everybody, some people will be shocked by what God surfaces in your life, remembering that fasting is for preparation for God to do a work in your life. And one of the things He has to do is get us cleaned up. Now, I'm going to say that one more time in this message because that is one of the most vital issues. And listen, if God starts surfacing a lot of slime and junk, you say, well, you know, I think I've heard enough.

No. You know what? God just starts digging it up. And I will say this. Any time I've ever fasted, one of the first things God always deals with is me. Always me. No matter what the issue is, what I may be fasting and praying for something else. But you know what? Always starts with me.

No exception then. Always expect Him to deal with you because what's He doing? He's getting us ready to hear from Him.

Now watch this. Most people do not want to even think about facing holy God. They don't want to think about that. And so when you begin to fast, what happens is your mind gets clearer, it gets sharper, you begin to see things the way God sees them, and now holy God is confronting us about our sins and we don't like it. Holy God is confronting us with, listen, with those areas of our life that need to be changed, corrections that need to be made, things that need to be laid aside, thought patterns that need to go, habits that need to be broken. He's going to deal with every single aspect of your life.

You can mark it down. He's not going to leave anything unturned. Why? Because He loves you. Because He wants you to know the truth.

He doesn't want you to be deceived. He doesn't want you making decisions based on what you think from an earthly point of view when He wants to show you what the truth is from a divine holy point of view. And what happens is He has to deal with this whole matter of sin in our lives. And we can call it mistakes and we can call it habits.

We can call it lots of things. Holy God is going to deal with sin because holy God wants us to be holy and therefore He wants the best for us. He knows we're the most effective when we're the purest of hearts, so He's going to deal with sin.

If you don't want God dealing with sin in your life, then don't fast. But suffer the awesome consequences of living your whole life and never knowing what awesome blessings God had in preparation for you. But you wouldn't listen to Him and you wouldn't take the right turn and you wouldn't make the right decision. You just wouldn't listen.

And you know what happens? We're the losers. Because we're too busy with our activities and our relationships and here's holy God in heaven created us for His purpose to accomplish His will and we're just too busy for God. Amen? It's the truth.

You know it's the truth. Too busy for God. More interested in what I'm going to have to eat than the spiritual food that has eternal value to it. Thank you for listening to The Powerful Practice of Fasting. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.