How to fast in a way that pleases God

Fasting is the most powerful spiritual discipline that allows a believer to take eyes off the things of this world and focus completely on God. This is achieved especially when the body becomes weak, which allows the Holy Spirit to take over.Usually, fasting is the abstaining of food for a certain period of time.

Many people in the Bible fasted, including Moses, David, and Daniel in the Old Testament Anna, Paul, and including Jesus Christ in the New Testament. If done in a proper way, fasting works on a much grander scale and helps gain a new perspective and a renewed reliance upon God.

Before beginning His ministry, Jesus Christ fasted forty days and forty nights. Forty days and forty nights is quite a lot of days therefore Jesus must have been very weak in the physical which made His spirit to be very strong. At the beginning of Mathew 4, we are told that He was led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. This justifies the great need of fasting as He was to come face to face with the devil. I strongly see the great need to fast here and we see that He was able to defeat the tempter.

The Bible tells us in Daniel 9:3 that Daniel set his face unto the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes. Daniel was seeking God for deliverance of Israel from this seventy year captivity as was promised by the Lord. Daniel completely separated himself and just focused on God and took his eyes off the things of this world as the word tells us that, he set his face unto the Lord God.

By taking his eyes off the things of this world, he was able to successfully turn his attention to God therefore letting God change him and the people to be delivered.

When the Disciples were not able to cast out the demon in Mathews 17, Jesus told them that the type of demon they were dealing with could only be cast out by prayer and fasting. This reveals that when fasting, it is very crucial to pray which is achieved when we just focus on God alone.

The Holy Spirit is always there to help us in these prayers, and reveals so many things because our dependency is on God. We are not trusting on what we can do, or any of our works but just God.

The intention of fasting by Jesus Christ and Daniel was to let the flesh die of them and be strong in the Spirit.“God is Spirit and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth”(John 4: 24).Man pray and worship God through his personal spirit, which is moved upon by the Holy Spirit; otherwise God will not accept such.

This is why it is important that as believers when we fast, these basics have to be known otherwise fasting without knowing what is exactly happening will not yield any result at all. I know there are people who just fast because everyone else in the church is fasting when they cannot have not even a minute to read the word of God, let alone pray and worship. This is just starving yourself to death because it is not doing anything. It is not about fasting making us receive things from God, but letting God change us and be able to connect with us in a powerful way.

Therefore, let us fast in a right way and we will see God move in our situations. This can be achieved by separating our self, reading the word of God, praising, and worshiping God, while avoiding things that may not please God during the entire time.

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