Quick Route to Fasting

Yesterday (Jan 18), our second week lesson of learning to live into our "single word" for the year was on fasting.

Seriously?  Fasting?  Yuck, right?

It's possibly one of the least popular topics we can imagine, and ranks even lower than making sacrifices because of it's apparent lack of return on results.

Yet Sunday wasn't a drag at all.  Not even because of my preaching, the lesson it was simply powerful and engaging.  Fasting turns out to be a lost art and practice that once was as common as prayer.  Additionally, it's one of the primary components we must practice if we truly wish to see our word for the year flourish in our lives.

Because fasting is so important, it only seems fitting to provide some additional resources and guiding thoughts below:

Fasting Definition:

Fasting is abstaining, for a designated period of time, from a comfort, need, or habit for the sake of renewing or redirecting one's spiritual focus.

Fasting is NOT a practice of morality in which we stop doing harmful or hurtful things.  That's called following Christ.

Fasting simply means interrupting typically harmless routines, regimes, and other habits so that our hearts, bodies, and souls wake up from their slumbers of monotony and remember to focus spiritually.  It is choosing to put prayer, scripture, or spiritual meditation in the holes that are left.

Fasting is NOT giving something up completely (like in the season of Lent).  It is interrupting or altering your use or participation in it for the sake of greater spiritual focus.

Fasting is most traditionally associated with abstaining from food, but can include other things to reach the same goal.

Fasting is NOT a form of dieting or self-improvement.

Fasting may result in physical, emotional, or social suffering.

Fasting in the Bible:

• Deuteronomy 9:9-18
• 1 Kings 19:4-8
• Ezra 10:7-17
• Daniel 1:3-15
• Acts 13:4, 14:23
• Luke 2:37, 5:33
• 1 Corinthians 7:1-5

Fasting Suggestions:

• A meal, consecutive meals, a food or beverage
• Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, other routine/habit-forming social media outlets
• Candy Crush, Trivia Crack, video games, other routine gaming habits
• Television routines or specific programs
• Recreational/ritualized shopping 
• Over-working
• Worrying patterns
• Over-planning habits

Fasting Examples:

• Drink only water for 1 or 2 meals consecutively per week.  Increase number of meals as practice develops (see resources before beginning).
• Refrain from nightly television habits or phone-game habits certain nights of the week.
• Draw boundaries around amount of time spent on Facebook and at what times during the day
  (i.e. refrain from looking at Facebook first thing every morning)

Fasting Resources:

• http://www.cru.org/train-and-grow/devotional-life/7-steps-to-fasting.html 
• http://www.ihopkc.org/about/fasting-guidelines-and-information/
• http://www.allaboutgod.com/christian-fasting.htm

Be safe in your fasting practices, especially if you choose to abstain from food.  And please, feel free to share your practice or experiences with me at jason@horizonschurch.org.  

More to come!


Jason <><

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