Value 6- Week 2 Fasting
It appears that we are losing our ability to be self-reflective. It may be related to the pace of our lives
(why Sabbath is an important discipline), we stay busy so we don’t have to look
closely at ourselves or allow God to “search our hearts”. Or it could the result of our submission to
self-indulgence (the reason gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins). As long I yield to every desire, I rarely see
what power those desire hold over me. At
any rate, for many of us, self-examination is not one of our strengths. One of the principle purposes of fasting is
self-examination. Prior too many medical
examinations and testing we are required to fast for a certain length of
time. The purpose is to allow the exam
or the test to get a clear view of what cannot be seen from the outside. We fast for lab work so that the result are
not masked or skewed by what we have taken into our system. A fast for spiritual purposes carries much
the same logic. When we choose to deny
ourselves something for a period of time, one of the first things that is
revealed is how much power it has over us.
In a fast from food, we quickly find that our body rebels and begins to
demand to be indulged. The interesting
thing is how the body begins reacting to what time it is (mealtime, snack time,
etc) as opposed a real nutritional need.
What we discover is we do many things without thinking about them. If we fast from television we quickly
discover how much time it occupies and how much we depend on it to “entertain
us” without effort. A quick and
interesting experiment for those of us controlled by time and the pace of life
is to simply leave our watch off and see how often we ourselves looking at our
wrist. An intentional fast from “gossip”
or being “judgmental” may reveal how much we focus on the flaws and failure of
others. We are unconsciously under the
power of many things. To fast is the first
step in self-examination and the revealing of strongholds in our lives. Only when the things that control us are
indentified can we begin the process of breaking free. Often our strongholds are spiritually rooted
and we naively think about things as simply bad habits or a lack of
self-control. The Bible speaks of
fasting as a weapon in spiritual warfare.
“Why could we not cast it out? He
said to them, ‘This kind can come out only through prayer and fasting’.” (Mark
9:29) One of the keys to Jesus success
in the spiritual life (doing the will of God) was the regular practicing of the
disciplines of abstinence. Through them
he was able to see more clearly not just outward actions, but inward motives
and to therefore to live freely into the will of God for his life. The same is true for those who follow him.
Prayerfully ask God to search my hearts and begin to reveal things that
have power over my life. Pick a fast
from a certain practice or action, write it down and carry it where I will
regularly be reminded. See how often I
find myself instinctively drawn to that action or habit.
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