21 Day Prayer & Fasting Devotional: Closing Thoughts

Lord, Your love is better than life. Your Word is better than food and Your presence is our sustenance. May we fast in a way that brings glory to You.

So let me ask you a question. In your Christian life, is fasting a given? Like as basic to you as praying? As basic in your life as giving? I would say to the extent of which any of those three things are not regular parts of our relationship with God, then we are missing something that is basic, essential in a sense, core to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And I mentioned this with fasting in particular because I think that many followers of Jesus don’t fast. Don’t regularly fast. Set aside food. So when you say fast, there’s so much we could talk about here, but the acrostic we use in our church family, FAST.

So F, so focus on God. You’re not doing this for others. You’re doing this because you want to seek and know and love and worship God more and more and more in your life. So you’re focused on God. You’re not trying to get attention from anybody else. And you’re focused on reward from God, Matthew 6:18 says. So that’s F.

A, you abstain from food to the extent of which you are physically able to abstain from a meal, meals for a day, for multiple days, two, three, four, longer, whatever it might be. So if you’ve never fasted before, just start with a day. Now, some people just physically are not able. Like a doctor would say, you never need to skip a day for a meal. And if that’s the case, then obviously, to think through, “Okay, what could I do? What’s another God given addiction, so to speak?” Because that’s what food is. It’s a God given addiction. Like he’s wired us to want food. So to identify something that is as similar as possible to food in this way.But if at all possible, the picture we see throughout scripture is setting aside food. So that’s the A, abstain from food.

S substitute the time when you would eat with extra time in prayer and extra time in the word. So I love what I learned early on about fasting. Somebody told me, “David, fasting is feasting.” So it’s not just not having these things that you want, it’s having something even better, like feasting on the word of God, feasting on extra time in communion with God. So just because you forget a meal doesn’t mean you fast and just because you skip a meal, doesn’t mean you fasted. You substitute that time with prayer and the word. That’s the S.

And then T, taste and see that the Lord is good. The whole point of fasting is to say, God, you’re better. You’re better than a sandwich or a steak. You’re better than whatever you might want to eat. God, more than I want food, I want intimacy with you. God, I want my hunger to cease. I want your kingdom to come on the earth. And so I just want to encourage you, if you don’t have a regular pattern of fasting to get into a regular pattern of fasting, because this is basic to what it means to follow Jesus.