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FASTING SERIESTHE IMPORTANCE OF
FASTING
We are going to look at what the Word of God says about
fasting. It is an important key in the Christian life and prayer. We will
specially focus on different aspects of fasting in relation to prayer and the
whole of the Christian life. What does His Word say about fasting? Turn to
Gen. 3 where we see the serpent tempting the woman and the woman was with the
man as they were standing there before the tree of knowledge of good and
evil. Remember it was a physical tree. But God has given His Word and God
Word says, “Don’t eat of that tree. In fact, God has created many other trees
in the Garden of Eden. It just like the devil makes you forget about the
million of things that God has given and makes you focus on the one thing
that you think God should do and has not done. There are hundreds and
millions of ways that God has poured on us His love and blessing. God said I have
given you every tree for food. And here is the silly old devil coming through
the serpent and told Eve to look at that one single tree out of all the many,
many other trees in the Garden of Eden. And here they are all paying
attention to one insignificant little tree. And that is the way the devil is.
That is the devil’s nature. And I encourage you not to keep looking at those
things that should be done and should have not been done. You must count your
blessings one by one and then you would see what God has done. Don’t forget
the many blessings that He has given onto you. And when you look at one
another and relate to one another don’t look at the one tiny point in the
other person that is the flaw or the character or weakness and forget about
the other things that God has placed in his or her life. Each one of you is
beautiful. Turn to one another and say I like you even though sometimes you
are nasty I still like you because I see more good in you than any other
things. That’s the nature of God. God sees some things in your life that is
worth redeeming. He sent His Son all the way to redeem you and I. He saw
something in us to make something beautiful out of all of our ugly confusion.
In the Garden of Eden, here was the woman with the man.
And this is what the serpent said in Gen. 3:1 Now the serpent was more
cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said
to the woman. “Has God indeed said, “You shall not eat of every tree of the
garden?” God did not say that. But the devil was trying through the
serpent to get the attention of one tiny tree. And the woman said God has
said that you shall not eat of this tree of knowledge of good and evil which
is in the midst of the garden. The woman said God said don’t eat and don’t
touch. She added to God’s words. God
just said don’t eat. She said God said don’t eat and don’t touch. As usual,
the snake always gets longer. In verse 6 So when the woman saw that the
tree was good for food. Now the woman saw that the tree was good for
food. Her appetite was drawn out. Her flesh came out. If you sin its because
of your flesh. Her flesh got pre-eminence over the commandments of God. So,
when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to
the eyes. That means it must be quite a lovely looking fruit. Some
fruits look very lovely; some fruits don’t look very lovely. This was one of
the fruits that look nice. And a desirable to make one wise. Now that part was a deception. The devil told her this
would make you wise. So, she reasoned within herself. Now observe how the sin
came into the world. Her action followed. She saw, she liked it and she ate
it. She acted on what she saw. She took that fruit and she bit it with her
physical mouth. And the moment it entered her system it was not because of
the fruit alone but the act of eating. Do you know sin came into the world by
the mouth? The woman ate and her dumb husband was next to her didn’t rebuke
the devil. God said to them to take authority over everything, including that
creep. He didn’t take authority. He was standing there next to the woman. The
woman took the forbidden fruit and gave it to her husband. The husband ate it
and sin came in immediately. Sin came into the world through the act of
eating. The act of eating caused disobedience to God’s command. It was a
natural command broken. It was a spiritual command broken. God says that I
have given this command to prove your obedience to Me. So, sin came into the
world through eating. The organ of eating has been an opening for sin to come
into the world. Many thousands of years later Jesus came along the scene.
He came to redeem the world. When He started His ministry, the same old devil
came to Jesus and he has not changed through the ages. And Jesus has fasted
for 40 days and 40 nights without food. Jesus had fasted, spent His time with
God and the 40 days fast was over. Here comes the devil, now through the 40
days of fasting He was also tempted. Now at the conclusion, He was still
tempted. And this is where the devil came in Lk. 4:2 Being tempted for
forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterwards
when they had ended, He was hungry. He was physically hungry and here
comes the devil, the same devil. It was the different place and a different
time and with a different person but it was the same temptation. He told
Jesus to turn these stones into bread and eat them. It was the same
temptation of the physical body. For some of you the devil will come while
you are in the wilderness praying 40 days and 40 nights. After the end of
your 40 days and 40 nights, you come out looking like a piece of bamboo. The
devil comes and says turn this stone into a hamburger. It was the same
temptation, but for some of you he may have to refine his temptation. Some of
you God told you to fast. And then you came and the devil said turn this
strings into spaghetti. I remembered the first time I fasted 3 days and 3 nights
without food and water. The Lord told me to do it. I was in a small town in
the Baptist church there. The Lord told me to fast 3 days and 3 nights. I had
the impression coming. Now I want to make it clear to you that the Lord did
not appear to me in a vision. He did not send a thunderbolt down and said to
me to fast. He did not send an angel to me, unroll the scroll and say, “Thus
says the Lord of heaven, fast.” He did not say all these things to me. He did
not give me a dream about fasting. All I had was a tiny still small voice
inside my heart that says fast 3 days and 3 nights. You know what I did. I was
young in the ministry I said, “Devil get thee behind me.” You know the Lord
can be persuasive but if you choose not to obey Him, He is not going to hang
on your back forever. But if you keep on resisting Him He will move off. I am
talking about the Holy Spirit wanting to bring you into something and if you
refuse, He won’t push you, He leads you but He won’t push you. And there was
another Baptist brother and he was staying in the church with me. He was from
a town further down. He used to come and spent the weekend in the church
where we had meetings. He used to seek the Lord together with me. And he was
staying in the same dormitory with me in the church, when I said no to the
Lord, I did not want to obey that. I have never done it before and I know that
it’s going to take some determination to pull through that kind of fast after
all the nice food around. And it happened that the chef was a super cook.
When I said no to the Lord, the Lord went over to this brother and the Lord
whispered in his spirit to fast for 3 days and 3 nights. He had that
impression and it came to him. One of us had to do it. I want you to know
that if you don’t obey God, God is going to get somebody else. Nobody is
indispensable. God can choose His own people. If you are not going to obey
God and receive blessing God is going to choose somebody else. He was going
to obey God. He came down and the first thing his eyes fell on was the fried
rice. He succumbed to that delicious fried rice and that was the end of the
fast. How sad the Lord must be. He was trying to get us to do simple things
like that. He had to struggle with us. When he gone down and ate the fried
rice I was still upstairs in my dormitory room. When he disobeyed the Lord,
the Holy Spirit came back upstairs and said, “Fast 3 days and 3 nights.” So I
checked within myself and asked, “Is that you Lord?” I heard the answer, “Yes.” You want me to
fast 3 days and 3 nights?” “Yes.” So I came downstairs and I saw the same
fried rice, but something held me back. I sat down with them and I said, “The
Lord told me to fast 3 days and 3 nights. I want you brothers and sisters to
help me.” The moment I said that, the brother who was eating his fried rice
almost got chocked. He was repenting away to the Lord and finally we all got
it and said to him that he was the one who was supposed to fast. And I
decided to obey God and all of them supported me. And it was during the third
day I was weak; no water, no food touched my lips. They used to come and pray
over me. And that was in that time of my fast that I had the vision of the
two mountains that I used to share about. When the devil comes, he always attacks you in the area
of your flesh. When Jesus Christ was facing the devil, the devil said, “Turn
these stones into bread.” The first Adam was in the garden with all the
lovely fruit trees. He was tempted by the devil to eat. He ate and he fell.
The second Adam Jesus Christ came He was in the wilderness, He was tempted,
He did the opposite thing He fasted, and He came out victoriously. Fasting
will deal with your flesh. Let me emphasize that unless you have victory over
your flesh you will not be able to demonstrate victory in your ministry, in
your life, in any other areas of your life. Unless a man or woman takes
authority over their own bodies, how can they take authority over other
people’s bodies and command sickness to come out? Unless you overcome your
own flesh you can never overcome the flesh the devil may work in others. Unless
you overcome the flesh, the world and the devil in your own body, you cannot
overcome the flesh, and the world in other people. So, Jesus Christ knew the
importance of fasting. He knew how important fasting works to the success of
His whole ministry. You do not find that God told Him to fast. You only find
that God told Him to go into the wilderness. Fasting was His personal
decision He made with God. He knew that the way and the things of the Spirit
are through the avenues of fasting. It’s the opposite way from the Garden of
Eden. And there is a place in the perfect will of God where you
will never enter unless you fast. Every one of us got the will of God in our
life. The perfect will of God for your life, the reason why you are born into
this world, the reason why God made you, you even before the foundation of
the world He knew you before you knew Him. In the total will of God for your
life there is an area of the perfect will of God that you will never enter
into unless you overcome the flesh with fasting in your life. Lets say, this
dark blue carpet here represents the will of God for your life. But as long
as you never learn fasting in your life, you will always be down here, year
after year after year. And there will be many times in your personal Christian
life that you will always wonder why can’t you enter further. There will be
something inside your spirit that says, “I know there must be something more
to my life than this. I know that there is something more that God is asking
me to do before I meet Him face to face. But I don’t know how to go about it.
I don’t know how to enter into it.” Brethren the only way to enter into the
divine perfect will of God in your life is to fast. When you fast, you began
going into that area. You are moving into that realm of the perfect will of
God that God wants you to have in your personal life. There is no other way
you can enter into the fullness of the perfect will of God unless you learn
the secrets of fasting and praying. Jesus Christ was perfect. He was perfect in spirit, soul
and body. But yet, He has to do the same things. He was our Savor and our
example. He has to do the same things that we have to do. He has the perfect
soul and body and yet He has to fast. The bible tells us here in Lk. 4:1 Then
Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit returned from the Let me give you another verse Rom. 8:3 For what the
law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh. Let consider this
for a moment. What the law could not do. Why did the Old Testament
people failed? It is because the law did not overcome the flesh. Look
carefully Rom. 8:3 For what the law could not do. That is talking
about the Old Testament. For what the law could not do in that it was weak
through the flesh. The law could
not deal with the flesh only the Spirit can. Only the law of the Spirit of
life can overcome the flesh not the letter of the law. And so, the reason why
Jesus received the filling of the Spirit was to overcome the flesh in His
life. That was His first task Let’s continue reading God did by sending
His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. Jesus had to go through those temptations
but blessed be God He did not fall. So here He was in the Notice in Lk. 4:1 the Holy Spirit did not tell Jesus to
fast. It only says that He was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the
devil. It did not say that He was led into the wilderness to fast. Even a
cross reference of Mark and a cross reference of Matthew 4 will tell you that
He was led or He was driven into the wilderness in order to be tempted. It
did not say that He was led inside in order to fast. Then the question is,
why did He fast? Jesus knowing the laws of the Spirit knew that the only way
to deal with the flesh, to chasten the flesh and our soul is through fasting.
So by His own choice He chose to fast. And He fasted for 40 days and 40
nights, which I do not recommend that you start there. Don’t try to be a
hero. Some people are desperados. They think that they can jump. The bible
never says to ump in faith. The bible says walk by faith not by sight (II
Cor. 5:7.) So you walk you do not jump. I heard of one brother who was formerly in the Baptist
ministry, though now he is in the independent ministry. He is in Lets look at Paul when he was converted you know what he
did in Acts 9. The first experience of the Lord was fasting and praying. Acts
9:9 And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank. For three days, Paul fasted without food,
without water. He was in such a condition, stunned by the revelation of Jesus
and the first thing he did in his ministry was not to cast out devils. The
first thing he did in his ministry was not preaching. The first thing that he
did in his ministry after he was born again was to fast and pray. He sought
God with fasting and praying. And when fasting and praying comes, the Lord
comes. As I was reading this Holy Bible and came across this fact, I asked
God, “Lord, why is it that in the early church they seem to have more
demonstration than the present church? Remember nothing comes without sowing
in the Spirit. They sowed in the Spirit. They dedicated themselves to the things
of God and God moved. Let me show you, you just concentrate on the book of
Acts and some of the miraculous things that God did simply because they
fasted. The early church was a fasting church. I think today’s church is not
fasting enough. Today’s church sounds like eat, drink and be merry and then
be buried. The early church seems to be fasting and praying all the time. I
am saying that the whole So here, in the book of Acts one of the greatest
ministries that ever arose in the New Testament was the apostle Paul. He
wrote one third of the New Testament. Think of the anointing of God on his
life. But he started fasting and praying. I have never met a man of God used
mightily by God today who has not learned fasting and praying. Yet, I am
surprised that people are not taught to fast today. It is so important and
yet it is a mystery why many Christians are not taught to fast. They fasted
not because they are taught not, for the doctrine of fasting comes by hearing
and hearing by the Word of God. So, we have Paul fasting and every time they
are in trouble, they fasted. Every time they are not in trouble, they also
fast. Lets look at Acts 10:44 While Peter was still speaking
these words, “the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word. These
people were not even born again. And it was the first time they heard the
gospel. Imagine a miracle took place. They were born again and baptized in
the Holy Spirit in the same moment. That was a power anointing that God put.
Peter did not even have time to lay hand. In fact being a Jew with the
Gentiles, he probably wouldn’t think of doing that. But there is more than
just a sovereign act of God. Some time people just take the word sovereign
and abuse it. They say God is sovereign. But what they are saying is that God
does it whenever He feels like it. That is misuse and an abuse of the term,
the sovereignty of God. God is sovereign but there is something that He asked
us to do and says, “If you do it I will bless you.” I said wouldn’t it be nice if this same
anointing comes when the presence of God just fills the atmosphere and people
who are not born again just born again they didn’t even have time to pray the
sinners prayer. The preacher was still preaching and the Gentiles got born
again and get baptized in the Holy Spirit. We could lead millions to Christ
that way. The altar wouldn’t have space to contain them if they came forward
if that kind of anointing comes. The Holy Spirit helped me see what Cornelius
did. Look at the price he paid for the revival in his home. If you want God
to send revival to your home, fast and pray. If you have been praying for
your home to be changed and nothing seems to be happening fast and pray.
Cornelius was fasting and praying his whole life. In chapter 10:2 a devout
man and one who feared God with all his household, who gave alms generously
to the people, and prayed to God always. He was a very devout man but he
was not born again. An angel came to him. When he saw the angel he said,
“What is it Lord?” The angel said in
verse 4 Your prayers and your alms have come up for a memorial before God.
But this passage didn’t say that he fasted but I want you to read on.
When Peter came to his house Cornelius said this to him in verse 30 So
Cornelius said, “Four days ago I was fasting until this hour and at the ninth
hour I prayed in my house, and behold, a man stood before me in bright
clothing. That was the angel of God. Cornelius was a man of fasting and
praying even though he did not know God. But one thing is marvelous is this.
The angel told him even though he was not born again your prayers and your
alms have come before God. But he was not born again so what did God do? God
sent him the gospel. He was so hungry for God that he was like a magnet that
the gospel had to come to him. If you would fast, pray, and seek God
sincerely you would see a greater demonstration of the power of God in your
family, in your home fellowship, in the meetings that you minister. Turn to Acts 12:5 Peter was therefore kept in prison,
but constant prayers was offered to God for him by the church. Constant prayer means that they had
round the clock prayer without food continually praying. When Peter was
released, he went to the house they were still praying. They went deep into
the things of God. They dug deep into
the realm of the Spirit. And God sends an angel. Why didn’t God send more
angels today? People are not fasting and praying like they should. They
should get hungry for God, get on their knees before God, pray and fast onto
the Lord. He will make you powerful in the prayer closet. Now they did not
just fast and pray when they were in trouble. It seems to be a regular thing.
I don’t want to give you the impression that they fast and pray whenever they
are in trouble. No, they were a church that has a disciplined fasting and
praying. Acts 13:1-2 Now in the church that was at Let me cross reference to other scriptures in I Cor. 7
even though it seems as if Paul was talking about another subject. Verse 5 Do
not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give
yourselves to fasting and prayer. Here he is not talking about a crisis,
a problem, he is talking about a continual fasting and praying. And through
experience, I find that it is better to have a regular fast where you seek
God and love God and minister to Him than to have desperado attempts.
Although according to your needs, at times you can go for those. But you must be a regular faster and a man
of prayer. God wants more of that. II Chron. 20:1 It happened after this that the people
of It seems some of the biggest mountains moved in my life
when I fasted. Sometimes, you have done all you can. You have confessed the
Word. You have put on the armor of
God, you are standing on the Word and the mountain doesn’t seem to move. You
asked, “What more can I do? Let me tell you, fast and pray. Some times, I got
down on my knees and I told God, “Lord, I am not going to move from here for
food or anything else until I hear from You.” I said either the mountain move
or I am staying here. See the mountain seems to be immovable but sooner or
later, one has to move. So, the devil comes to you. You come against it:
stand firm, fast and pray. The mountain surrounded them. “What shall we do
Jehoshaphat?” All his military officers said, “Jehoshaphat, bad news,
terrible news; we all better prepare our funeral services.” “No, there is a
way, fast and pray.” When they fasted, they sought God. It was for their
lives. The Spirit of God came down, not by might, not by power but by My
Spirit. But you prepare yourselves for the Spirit of God to come down. When
the Spirit of God came down the Spirit of God said, “The battle is not yours
it is Mine.” And in the end, Jehoshaphat said praise God we received the
answer. How did they receive? Through fasting and prayer. And when they
fasted and they prayed the bible tells us in II Chronicles that they sent the
singers in front of them. Instead of sending their soldiers with swords they
sent the singers and the singers playing the harps sang, “Bless the Lord. He
is merciful, His loving kindness remains forever.” All the enemies got
confused the Bible says in II Chron. 20 that God send ambushes that all they
have to do is worship God, rejoice in God. They fasted they prayed and they
praised. By the time the worship service ended, the devil also was finished.
Isn’t it better to spend your time in the presence of God? Don’t lean on your
own understanding; don’t lean on your own strength. Turn to the Lord with
fasting and praying and He will hear you. Fasting is the key to the
impossible. If you have ever faced a situation that is classified impossible,
there is one special key that God gives: the key of fasting and praying. The disciples asked Jesus in Matt. 17, “Why could we not
cast that demon out?” Why couldn’t we cast the demon out when You have given
us authority (Matt. 10)? We are supposed to have authority but it is not
working. What shall we do?” Jesus said, “This kind does not go out except by
prayer and fasting. You guys are eating too much. In other words, you also
got a lot of unbelief inside you. And because of your unbelief, it’s blocking
the power of God from manifesting. Fast and pray.” Unbelief is caused by an
unrenewed soul. The bible tells us in the book of Psalms that fasting
chastens the soul. The Psalmist says, “I chasten my soul with fasting.”
Fasting deals with the soul so that God could deal with your life. Fasting
and prayer will draw grace from God. You have heard the grace message: God
gives grace to the humble. The bible in the study of humble and humility you
will find the humility and fasting goes together. And fasting and prayer is
so powerful even though you and I may not be good or worthy enough. You are
not as bad as king Ahab. You know king Ahab was a bad king. Jeroboam was the
first king of the Israelites of the
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