Several years ago I knew God was telling me he wanted me to fast for a week. It started on a Monday and was going to end the following Sunday. I was in the period of my life when I was going through a lot of healing in my soul, healing from past wounds that haunted me and changed the way I saw and did everything. But the type of fast he was telling me to do seemed like it wasn’t going to do the trick… I believed at the time that the more breakthrough you needed/wanted the more cutthroat the fast had to be. In other words, I thought I had to suffer more in order to get greater results.

So the fast went like this: I was already a couple years into not eating sugar or gluten and a whole host of other foods, for physical healing, and so this was just my lifestyle at that point. And God was starting to show me that as my body healed, my soul was beginning to heal as a result. I knew that’s what this fast was about. About healing something else in there that was a mess, something I could’t see, but that was altering my entire life, from a trauma in my past.

I knew I was supposed to cut out TV and then drink only liquids during the day and eat dinner as usual at night, but no dessert. I was obedient against my inner voice that was demanding I suffer quite a bit more for the big results I desired. This fast was so easy in fact, that I didn’t even feel like I was really fasting. The fasts I had done in the past always involved very little or no food to the point where I got all dramatic and thought I was going to die by dinnertime on the first day.

Anyway the legalistic voice in my head was driving me crazy… You aren’t really fasting, you aren’t suffering nearly enough. You think this is going to do anything?

It was torturing me.

But every time I had these thoughts, God would say, Don’t listen to that. Don’t quit. I have you exactly where I want you. Just do what I asked and I will do the rest.   

Every day I heard these two voices and I chose to believe God’s. I had to tell myself over and over again that I believed God was willing to heal me and he didn’t need me to suffer for it. That I was doing exactly what he wanted me to, no more, no less.

This went on for five days. I still felt like I wasn’t really stretching myself that much. But on day six, Saturday, it happened. I had the biggest healing breakthrough in my soul that I had ever had up to that point. I spent all day in and out of these… all I can say is they were like spiritual/emotional labor pains that came and went, came and went, like I was literally birthing something. It felt amazing. I knew stuff was majorly being moved around inside of me. This went on the following day as well.

When it was over I felt like a brand new person. Something, though I do not know exactly what, was completely rearranged in me. Things had healed. Places in me felt like a dirty room that just got a deep clean. Or a dark room that had just had the curtains opened up. The world seemed like a better place. I was renewed.

I learned firsthand that God values obedience more than sacrifice. Sometimes we try to sacrifice more than he is asking us to, we try to suffer more than he is asking us to. We stop listening to him and start listening to that voice of legalism that tries to convince us that the things we need from God must be earned somehow. That for some reason he doesn’t actually want us to have them, but will reluctantly hand them over if the payment we fork out is high enough.

This does not mean we will never suffer, but it’s this twisted belief that suffering is a kind of currency that God accepts as payment for gifts… this can make or break our entire viewpoint of God, and therefore our entire way of approaching God with our needs. It’s so hard not to let this belief bleed into fasting because it does stretch us and we do suffer in it sometimes.

I believe God wants us to first learn how to view things the right way by taking little steps into it with the right mindset and building understanding. And then allowing illumination and maturity and time to lead us deeper into it in a healthy way. In other words, I think it is far more beneficial to fast small and build faith and understanding and break off legalistic thinking, and from there to slowly raise the bar and go deeper. And then it’s not going deeper with the wrong mindset and a damaging experience, (This will only make things worse) but with a renewed mind to the truth of what God really expects of us and why… what he really wants to give us and why.

Fasting is not about us paying a debt by suffering. It isn’t about our striving to impress God into moving on our behalf, or to convince him we deserve a break through. It is not about proving holiness through self-denial. It is a beautiful dance where we push aside another partner and God is there, waiting for this moment, and we take his ever-outstretched hand and we have a special encounter. Like a date with a lover where your attention is fixed in a new way and the resulting intimacy is heightened.

It is about pushing aside something that stands between our awareness and God. It is about stripping away something that distracts us or numbs us from the reality of God that is always there. And then once those things are moved aside, a curtain is parted between our weak humanness and God’s supremacy. And we feel it and see it in a new way and it moves in our lives with less obstruction than before.

This is fasting.

So the number one thing to do is to strip away every thought or belief from our minds that is rooted in some sort of performance anxiety. Any idea that makes us feel like if we don’t dance the right steps then we aren’t going to get touched by God.

I am posting this right now because I (as well as thousands of others that are a part of Substance Church in Minneapolis) am on day six of a 21 day fast. If you are fasting right now, perhaps repeat after me:

“I will not feel like I am striving or trying to carry a burden on my own. I will not feel like I can compromise my healing or fail to receive a gift from God by doing the wrong thing. I will simply, gladly, with a light heart and a joyful spirit, move into a fast like a dance with God. And let him lead. As he smiles down on me and teams up with me to lift a heavy thing, knowing that in the end he will be the one to move it…

And he wants to.”

 

 

 

 

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