While fasting it’s easy to become focused on the natural side of things. You will feel hungry, you might miss a certain food or activity, and your body will be uncomfortable. However, the act of fasting should not be the focus of fasting, nor how you feel or the things you are abstaining from. Keeping your focus clear will keep you strong, and help you have a successful experience.
God clarifies the focus of fasting in the following passage of scripture.
Isaiah 58:5-7
“Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? will you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord: Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out to your house? when you see the naked, that you cover him; and that you hide not yourself from you won flesh?”
The focus is clearly not us, nor what we are doing, but what is being accomplished. Avoid focusing on what you are doing, and rather focus on what the Lord is doing in you during this time. Imagine the Lord using you in the very ways described in the verses you just read; to loose bands of wickedness, to undo heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and to break yokes.
An important outcome of fasting is that wrong things be made right, and it’s not that something magical happens to the people around us or to God. Something does happen to us though, and when the right things are happening in us, the right things can then happen through us. Wrong things can be made right. The hungry can be fed, the poor can be helped, the naked clothed, etc. Fasting then helps to open our spiritual eyes, so that we can see things the way they are, and therefore see what needs to be different. We can then be the ones whom God uses to bring change to our world.
Fasting changes us, so that God can bring change through us.
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