The Fasting Practice - Week 3
Readings for this week September 30 - October 5
Click here for a pdf of this week’s readings
Day 1 – An Intense Kind of Worship
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – Deuteronomy 15:10
One of the primary ways we offer ourselves to God is in worship. That is part of what following Jesus means. With praise and adoration we bow down before God and offer ourselves unreservedly to him. We worship him as the giver and sustainer of life, as the one – the only one – who is worthy of praise for who he is. We offer God all of who we are. But we also offer him all of what we do. Our actions, activities, occupations, the way we fill our time, the way we navigate through the time and space of our lives – everything we do is a potential offering back to God of the gift of life and breath he has given us. Fasting is also an offering of ourselves that we can make. Acts of self-denial such as this show God that we are serious about proclaiming him as the motivating, sustaining source of all we do, even above the food and drink necessary for life. He is the source of all that we enjoy.
Fasting is a very intense offering of a very intense kind of worship. We give up food we might normally greatly enjoy – that we might even use to celebrate God’s goodness – and possibly suffer the pangs of hunger and all that a missed meal might entail, so that we might honour God and proclaim his name and his reign in our life. We offer ourselves through engagement but also through abstinence, through activity and through withholding. We actively show how we stake our existence on God’s providence and his sustaining power and love.
Question to Consider
What is worship? How is fasting worship? How does fasting engage our bodies in worshipping and praising God?
Prayer
Almighty Father, show me how to give you more of myself, more of my body and soul, more of my thoughts and my actions; show me more ways to honour you in how I live. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 2 – We are Embodied
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – Genesis 1
Our bodies matter. They are important. They are a crucial part of who – and what – we are. When God made us as his beloved children, he made us as embodied creatures. An integral facet of who we are as God-created human beings is that we are made of matter and extend into and occupy part of the physical space in which God has placed us. Of course, we are not only bodies, but our bodies, along with our soul and mind and spirit, are part of the creation that God made and declared good. So honourable and worthy are our human bodies that God himself did not hesitate to inhabit one in the incarnation of Jesus.
Certain strands of Christianity haven’t always known what to make of the body. The image of a bright, shining soul escaping the body upon death, to fly to heaven to live in spiritually disembodied bliss with Jesus, still has a strong grip on a significant segment of the popular imagination. Such thinking often led people to dismiss the need to think about the role our bodies might play in discipleship, and the need to submit our bodies to God’s authority, despite passages like today’s that show the divine origin of all we are, our bodies included. We don’t just have a body, we are a body, and us such, when it comes to offering ourselves to Jesus, our body is part of the package that we offer him and is something that we should submit to him just as much as our wills and desires and passions. He deserves our all.
Question to Consider
How do you offer your body to Jesus? What does this look like practically? How does this shape your experience of God?
Prayer
Loving Father, show me how to see more of myself in you and to offer more of myself to you, in ways both familiar and unfamiliar, ways both thought of and unthought of. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 3 – Because of What He Did for Us
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – Romans 12:1-2
Notice what Paul says in this passage: offer your bodies. Not your hearts, not your minds (although obviously these too! The call is to worship God with everything!), but offer your bodies. Paul had a very healthy theology of the body that saw it as an integral part of who we are, and something that could – and should – be offered to God just as much as our heart or mind or will or desire and so forth. To offer our bodies as living sacrifices – our entire selves: this includes the body as an arena where God can move and work. He longs to transform us; we should long to offer all that we are, body and soul, to him in order for this transformation to take place and for us to become the people he wants us to be.
Why do we do this? “In view of God’s mercy.” We do this for him because of all he has done for us. Think of what he gave for us: his body, his very life, given for us so that we might have new life in him. He gave up everything for us. We give our bodies in devotion. We give up food as a sign of our love and gratitude to him and as a sign that he is the most important thing in our lives. We fast, not to get something from Jesus, but to give something to Jesus: our whole-hearted, whole-bodied devotion to the one who gave everything for us so that we might live. We give him our worship, body and soul. It is the least we can do for the one who gave everything he had for us and who longs to lavish even more of his transformative love on all of us.
Question to Consider
What is the greatest challenge you face in seeing your body as something necessary to offer to God? Why?
Prayer
Gracious God, help me not to settle. Help me not to become discouraged when I think I cannot do it, when I struggle to be a more faithful servant. Broaden my vision for what can be. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 4 – Our Body a Temple of the Lord
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
Not all bodies are the same. Not all bodies can do the same things. Not all bodies work as well as they might, nor as well as they once did. Some of us have bodies that through age or infirmity are failing and weakening in certain debilitating ways; others of us have illnesses, injuries or congenital limitations that make life – sometimes our entire lives – a struggle. There is much about all of us that is imperfect and frustrating. For many people, finding ways to offer our bodies to God takes a little more thought than most, is more of a struggle than it might be for many, and fasting might not be a realistic option for some people.
But whatever our situation, our body matters, not just because it is God- given, but also because it is God-inhabited. Whatever the state of your body, whatever its abilities or limitations, it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. God dwells in you because he loves you and he is thrilled to make his home in you. We are a home for God; therefore, what we do with our bodies, whatever our bodies are like, is important. It matters. God's love has no limits; the limits of our bodies, our minds, our hearts, are not the limits for him that they may be for us. God is about renewal and transformation – maybe not yet, but even in the meantime he takes joy in being with us and dwelling in us. We owe him the tribute of treating our bodies as his possessions and honouring him as the one who has made his home in us.
Question to Consider
What is a struggle for you with your body? How are you laying these struggles at the foot of the cross?
Prayer
Heavenly Father, you are a Good God and you love me beyond my flailing around and my limitations. May I see myself through your eyes and learn to see others the same way. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 5 – The Body’s Discipleship
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – James 2:17
Our body is where our discipleship becomes real. It is where discipleship becomes more than just an idea or a series of intellectual propositions that we assent to, more than just inspiring bible verses hung on the wall which fill us with hope and love, but instead becomes a lived, embodied reality, where faith is stretched, exercised and grown. Where we exhibit the life of Christ in us and where such faithful discipleship is enacted and seen. Where love is put into action, where hands and feet reach, comfort, journey, walk and build. Christ’s love was visibly acted out in his body; our bodies, to be faithful to him, must also act out the movements of love for others in this world.
Fasting can be a powerful addition to the rhythms, routines and practices that allow God to work in us, to shape us into his likeness, and to grow more and more into the image of Christ. It is a way in which we show the discipline necessary to keep ourselves ‘in shape’ for the work he has for us to do, a way in which we let him mould us. We offer God ourselves – bodily – but also our practices and rhythms so that he has the opportunity to shape us. We can’t just pay lip service to God’s call on the entirety of our selves; we need to offer everything about us and that includes the opportunity to work in us but also on us. The discipline of fasting is one of the more profound ways we can show our desire to do this and give God the space in which to move.
Question to Consider
What would you love to see God do in your life or your community through the practice of fasting?
Prayer
Lord God, give me the strength to offer more of myself to you – more of my body and its uses and abilities to you for the things that you would do in and through me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)