Orlando, FL 2010: While fasting may transform everything into something appetizing, such self-denial in the faith with a pure heart aims to weaken the disciple so that God’s perfection may be manifested within that weakness. Counterintuitive, fasting stands as one of the nuclear options available to disciples of Jesus.

From Trent Ling:

The Scriptures make much of training (Hebrews 12:11 and 1 Corinthians 9:24-27), and no doubt, the spiritual landscape remains littered with corpses that set out one day to fight without necessary preparation or sobriety.  To that end, true disciples of Jesus train hard and gain the victories promised from such.  Along these lines, Dave, my fellow worker in the faith, has run the brotherhood hard over the past several years in the crucial area of fasting.  He has shown us how, when, where, and why.  Surely, I have followed and grown as a result of Dave spearheading these extraordinary efforts.  I am trained in areas previously untested, and I will be forever thankful to Dave for that and more.  May I carry and employ all that I have learned and become as I now graduate from our lengthy and memorable season of training fasts.

“The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Stand up!  What are you doing down on your face?’”  Joshua 7:10.

Not all troubles or challenges call for faces to the ground or stomachs to the hunger.  Sometimes, in fact most times, God calls for action not for collapse.  Thus, while fasting provides a wonderful weapon and option in the arsenal of a disciple of Jesus, the customary course should be one of living out what one knows, building toward one’s commitments, and growing in ways befitting the Blood and the Spirit.  At some point in the faith, each disciple must individually work out these nuances.  That time has now come for me.

On my own in this regard, I look forward to longer strides in the work and deeper digs out of the desperation.  Rather than flailing amidst the fits and starts of the past few months, I must Honor My God, and get on with the wild race marked out for me (Hebrews 12:1).  Not because I must, but because I am willing (1 Peter 5:2).  My past training should prove its own genuineness going forward.

Jesus was asked, “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”  Matthew 9:14.  Jesus essentially answered that fasting must ultimately be attached to a proper occasion.  Out of training and into the real game, this Jesus standard now comes to my life at a time when I must go heavy upon the gas pedal.  Perfect timing.  Alert and active, ready and reloaded, I now set out to live under the bursting parameters available to training graduates.  In none of this are my convictions convenient.

As is fitting in the Lord, this marks an advance, not a setback.  May the Lord prove it so, while also continuing to avail his limitlessness to each and every.

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