Quotes About Fasting

Who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you" (1Chronicles 29:14). This is the way we should speak of fasting. There is no ground of boasting here. Who am I that I should be able to fast? Nobody. There is nothing in me that would choose this for your glory apart from your transforming grace.

God responds to prayer because when we look away from ourselves to Christ as our only hope, that gives the Father an occasion to magnify the glory of his grace in the all-providing work of his Son. Similarly, fasting is peculiarly suited to glorify God in this way. It is fundamentally an offering of emptiness to God in hope.

Might God not ordain that his fullest blessings will come to the church when we prevail in prayer with the intensity of fasting? That kind of intensification of prayer is what fasting is. It's a physical exclamation point at the end of the sentence, "We hunger for you, O God, to come in power." It's a cry with our body, not just our soul: "I really mean it, LORD! This much, I hunger for you. I want the manifestation of you yourself more than I want food.

it would be a great mistake to think that the awakening of desire for the Bridegroom would produce a wave of monastic withdrawal into the fasting and prayer of passive waiting. That is not what the awakening of desire for Christ would produce. It would produce a radical, new commitment to complete the task of world evangelization, no matter what the cost. And fasting would not become a pacifistic discipline for private hopes, but a fearsome missionary weapon in the fight of faith.

If you want to fight sin by taking bread away from your own mouth, then put it in the mouth of the poor. Then we will see if you are really fasting for righteousness'sake.

Mahatma Gandhi was known for walking hundreds of miles barefoot. Over time, he developed incredibly thick calluses on his feet, stronger than the soles of many boots. He also ate lightly and fasted often, which left him frail and gave him chronically bad breath. And do you know what this made him? A super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

For the rest of the day I fasted and my body began to get rid of toxins

If you are serious enough to take up the discipline of fasting, you can expect resistance, interference and opposition. Plan for it, insofar as you are able. Do not be caught unawares. Remember that you are attempting to advance in your spiritual journey and to gain ground for the Kingdom. That necessitates taking ground away from the enemy - and no great movement of the Holy Spirit goes unchallenged by the enemy. (Intro)

Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed.

What is the benefit of fasting in our body while filling our souls with innumerable evils?

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

To say this once again, the focus of the Bible on fasting is not on what we get from fasting or on motivating people to fast in order to acquire something, but instead lands squarely on responding to sacred moments in life.

Overall, then, fasting is how Israel responded when God's glory was dishonored, when God's will was thwarted, when God's people suffered defeat, or when one of God's people experienced sickness, tragedy, or death. God's people, in effect then, took up the posture of God toward grievous events when they fasted.

As the priest and Levite thought they could follow the Torah and not offer aid to the stranded, dying man (Luke 10:25–37), so Isaiah's community thought they could abstain from food and pass by the needs of others on their way to God. Fasting never stands alone. Fasting, if it is genuine, brings us into a communal spirituality because it is a response to the lack of justice in the community.

Wesley declared, "Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it.7 In studiously avoiding the one, let us watch against the other. The much more prevalent error of our day is an easy indulgence which permits us to pamper the flesh when we should buffet it; to feast and enjoy ourselves when we ought to fast and to pray.

The fact still remains that "to fast" means primarily "not to eat."1

It meant abstaining from all food, solid or liquid, but not from water.

There is nothing to suggest that true fasting involves abstaining from sleep. God may call us to do this for very short periods, such as giving up a night's sleep. Paul speaks of "watchings" as distinct from "fastings" (2 Cor. 6:5; 11:27, KJV).

The normal fast, then, involved abstaining from all forms of food, but not from water, and must be distinguished from the other two forms, the absolute fast and the partial fast, which we must now consider.

We have a few examples in Scripture of what we have called the absolute fast, that is, abstaining from drinking as well as eating. Normally this was never for more than three days

She called this absolute fast because desperate situations require desperate measures.

I ate no delicacies, no meat or wine entered my mouth. Daniel 10:3 The emphasis here is upon restriction of diet rather than complete abstention.

The partial fast allows a great many variations which have been tried with blessing and benefit. There is the method of living exclusively on one type of food for the duration of the fast.

Others have partially fasted by omitting a certain meal each day, thus strictly limiting the quantity of food consumed.