Mark 9:28-29 “And when He had come into the house, His disciples asked Him privately, "Why could we not cast it out?" (29) So, He said to them, "This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.”
Fasting impacts our spiritual walk in many different areas. For example there are certain demonic spirits that are able to resist the believer who does not fast, and our Lord revealed that truth to us in the above quoted passage of scripture. The context of this passage is that the disciples had tried to cast out a certain demon and they were not successful, even though by that time that had cast out many demons in the name of the Lord Jesus (Luke 10:17). Our Lord then came along and He cast the demon out. And so when the disciples asked the Lord why they were unsuccessful, He told them that it was because certain demons only obey those who spend time in prayer and fasting. When the disciples walked with the Lord Jesus they spent very little time in prayer and they spent no time fasting, which is why they were unable to cast out this demon. The Lord Jesus on the other hand, had given Himself to spending much time in prayer and fasting, and so had no problem casting out that particular demon. So why did prayer and fasting enable the Lord Jesus to cast this particular demon out? The answer is that prayer and fasting increases the anointing of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And so because the Lord Jesus spent a lot of time in prayer and fasting He carried the full measure of the power of the Holy Spirit upon his life, which meant that no demon could stand against His command.
Psalms 35:13 “But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth; I humbled myself with fasting; and my prayer would return to my own heart.”
Another area where fasting impacts the life of the believer is in experiencing the grace of God. Again we can look to our Lord Jesus as our example to show us this particular truth. The scripture teaches us that God gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). As we have already mentioned, our Lord Jesus practiced fasting throughout His time here on the earth, not just when He fasted for the forty days in the wilderness. The above quoted passage of scripture is a record of our Lord’s words spoken while on the earth. I want you to notice that the Lord mentions that He humbled Himself with fasting, and there is no one who received more of God’s grace than our Lord Jesus. And so we see that what fasting does do is to release the grace of God in our lives. Clearly if the Lord Jesus humbled Himself before God through fasting and thus received the grace of God, then we are no different if we want to experience God’s grace in our lives.
Leviticus 3:16 “and the priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made by fire for a sweet aroma; all the fat is the Lord's.”
Spiritual truths cannot be understood with natural thinking and fasting is one of those truths. Nevertheless if we look at types and shadows under the old covenant it helps us to have some understanding of spiritual truths. Under the old covenant the sacrifices that were offered to the Lord were the sacrifices of animals burnt on the altar. Not always was the whole animal burnt on the altar however, but there was a very specific part of the animal that was always offered to the Lord, which was the fat of the animal. So why was that? The above quoted passage of scripture teaches us that the reason for that was because the fat belongs to God. Fat speaks of the abundance of the Lord’s blessing, and so we see that the abundance of God’s blessing belongs to Him and it this abundance that was always offered to the Lord.
Psalms 109:24 “My knees are weak through fasting, and my flesh is feeble from lack of fatness.”
And so under the new covenant we see that when we fast it serves as a type of our fat being offered to the Lord as a sacrifice. Again we can look at the Lord Jesus as our example in this area. In the period leading up to our Lord’s crucifixion He spent a lot of time in fasting and prayer. We know that to be the case because in the above quoted passage of scripture the Lord teaches us that when He went to the cross that, because of fasting, He had no fat on His body. And so the reason Jesus did that was because He knew that His body was about to be sacrificed and He understood the concept of the fat belonging to the Lord. And so we have clearly seen in this section that fasting is part of our service of presenting our bodies to God as acceptable sacrifices. I also want you to notice that fasting is always linked to prayer, for fasting without prayer serves no purpose in the spirit.
Michael E.B. Maher
Comments