Fasting = A Hunger For God

Wednesday May 11th is the next Day of Prayer and Fasting for Pompey Community Church. We’ll culminate that day with a Concert of Prayer at 6:30 PM. In preparation for that day, I have been reading about the Christian discipline of fasting. In all honesty, fasting has never been part of my Christian life up until now. I have been asking the Lord to teach me about fasting, and to help me weave it into my life in a way that glorifies Him and makes me more usable to Him. The book I have been reading and just finished on this subject is John Piper’s A Hunger For God: Desiring God Through Fasting and Prayer. (You can find that book at Christian Book Distributors or other book sellers.) In this post I am simply laying out for you the quotations from Pastor Piper that most impacted me.

First, one of my concerns about fasting has been that I have seen people who seem to use fasting as a ‘tool’ or ‘technique’ to get God to listen to and answer their prayers, making it really a form of ‘works-righteousness’. This has really stifled my desire to explore the practice of fasting in the past. But Pastor Piper addresses this well, as seen in these following quotes:

• Paul warns that there is a fasting that is a ‘self-made religion’ (Colossians 2:23). In other words, this fasting is a “will-power religion” that actually stirs up the spiritual pride of the flesh even while mastering its physical appetites… Christian fasting does not bolster pride, because it rests with childlike contentment in the firmly accomplished justification of God in Christ, even while longing for all the fullness of God possible in this life. (page 45)
• The question is not of earning or meriting or coercing anything from God. The question is: having tasted the goodness of God in the gospel, how can I maximize my enjoyment of him, when every moment of my life I am tempted to make a god out of his good gifts? …We are so constituted as fallen human beings, Jesus says, that “the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things [even innocent things like food] enter in and choke the word,” which is meant to reveal to us the glory of God (Mark 4:19). therefore the fight of faith and the battle to behold the glory of the Lord day by day is fought not only by feeding the soul on truth, but fasting, to put our appetites to the test, and if necessary to death. (pages 62-63)

So why do we fast? What is it we’re seeking by fasting? Pastor Piper speaks to me about this when he says:

• The reward we are to seek from the Father in fasting is not first or mainly the gifts of God, but God himself. …Matthew 6:9-13 begins with three main longings that we are to hope for from God. First, that God’s name be hallowed or revered; second, that God’s kingdom come; and third, that his will be done on earth the way it’s done in heaven. That is the first and primary reward Jesus tells us to seek in our praying and our fasting. We fast out of longing for God’s name to be known and cherished and honored, and out of longing for his kingly rule to be extended and then consummated in history, and out of longing for his will to be done everywhere… (page 78)
• The supremacy of God in all things is the great reward we long for in fasting. His supremacy in our own affections and in all our life-choices. His supremacy in the purity of the church. His supremacy in the salvation of the lost. His supremacy in the establishing of righteousness and justice. And his supremacy for the joy of all peoples in the evangelization of the world. (page 79)

I’ve also been impacted by what Pastor Piper has to say about what fasting does for us personally, and I’ve been convicted that I very much need this:

• Hunger for God is spiritual, not physical. And we are less sensitive to spiritual appetites when we are in the bondage of physical ones. This means that fasting is a way of awakening us to latent spiritual appetites by pushing the domination of physical forces from the center of our live. John Wesley expressed this as well as anyone I have read… “It cannot be expressed what an effect a variety and delicacy of food have on the mind as well as the body; making it just ripe for every pleasure of sense, as soon as opportunity shall invite… Here is another perpetual reason for fasting; to remove the food of lust and sensuality, to withdraw the incentives of foolish and hurtful desires, of vile and vain affections.” (page 90)
• Is our fasting really a hunger for God? We test whether it is by whether we are hungering for our own holiness. To want God is to hate sin. For God is holy, and we cannot love God and love sin. Fasting that is not aimed at starving sin while feasting on God is self-deluded. It is not really God that we hunger for in such fasting. The hunger of fasting is a hunger for God, and the test of that hunger is whether it includes a hunger for holiness. (pages 135-136)

Finally, Pastor Piper makes a strong case for how fasting brings God glory:

• God is committed to rewarding those acts of the human heart that signify human helplessness and hope in God. Over and over again in Scripture God promises to come to the aid of those who stop depending on themselves and seek God as their treasure and help… God rewards those acts of the human heart that signify human helplessness and hope in God. The reason for this is that these acts call attention to God’s glory. (pages 178-179)
• “Whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). …fasting [with prayer] is peculiarly suited to glorify God in this way. It is fundamentally an offering of emptiness to God in hope. It is a sacrifice of need and hunger. It says, by its very nature, “Father, I am empty, but you are full. I am hungry, but you are the Bread of Heaven. I am thirsty, but you are the Fountain of Life. I am weak, but you are strong. I am poor, but you are rich. I am foolish, but you are wise. I am broken, but you are whole. I am dying, but your steadfast love is better than life (Psalm 63:3).” When God sees this confession of need and this expression of trust, he acts, because the glory of his all-sufficient grace is at stake. The final answer is that God rewards fasting because fasting expresses the cry of the heart that nothing on the earth can satisfy our souls besides God. (pages 180-181)

I do plan on fasting on this upcoming PCC Day of Prayer & Fasting on May 11th. I’ll keep it between me and the Lord how I’m going about doing that, because I believe both the decision to fast and the decisions about the form and duration of how to fast are matters for each of our individual Christian consciences. You can fast from food for a meal, an entire day, or more. If your physiological condition is such that it is not medically prudent for you to fast from food, you can fast from media (abstaining from watching television or going online) or by forgoing the fulfillment of other ‘appetites’ that are part of your normal routine. I encourage you to do your own prayerful study on fasting and ask the Lord to lead you to whether and how you should fast.