Fasting for Spiritual Breakthrough: A Guide to Nine Biblical Fasts (34 page)

Your journal should include a variety of entries. Some days your journal entry may represent a personal testimony. Other days it will include insights from that day’s Scripture reading, a sermon you heard, an article you read or a Bible study you attended. Often your journaling will reflect your daily prayer requests, or praise to God for answered prayer.

Record the insights you receive from God during your fast. Before you begin writing, take time to consider things that happened on your fast day and the lessons you have learned. Some of these insights will be significant and obvious, and you will have little difficulty recognizing and recording them. At other times, God may use subtle means to reveal Himself to you and to share important lessons you need to learn.

Those involved in the ministry of writing quickly learn the importance of research in the writing process. Before an article or book is written, much time is spent by the writer studying the subject and learning the content that will eventually be part of the article or book. Journaling is also aided by prayer and meditation. If you have difficulty writing a journal entry, it may be because you have not invested enough time with God. During your fast, take extra time to read the Scriptures, pray and study. As you do this, you will gain insights you will want to record in your journal.

After your fast, take time to review your journal entries. As you recall the insights you gained during your fast, thank God for revealing Himself to you and giving you a tool for recording these insights. When you begin to experience the value of having a record of your spiritual experiences during a fast, the value of maintaining a daily spiritual journal all the time will soon become apparent.

How many of last month’s insights from the Lord have you already forgotten? Fortunately, some of those insights may be marked in books or the margin of your Bible so they can be reviewed again and again. Unfortunately, some may be lost forever. Someone has said, “A short pencil is better than a long memory.” By taking time each day to record your insights in your journal, you can preserve the important lessons
God is teaching you. Then your journal will provide a way for you to periodically review God’s work in and through your life.

Many people recognize the value of journaling and begin with good intentions, but within a month or two they find they have abandoned this discipline. Keeping a spiritual journal can quickly become another duty for which there is limited time. In his leader’s guide to the popular discipleship course
Experiencing God
, Claude King lists 10 questions designed to help people recognize God’s work in their lives.
¹
If you have difficulty finding things to record in your journal, you may wish to use this list to guide you as you write.

1. What has God revealed to you about Himself?

2. What has God revealed to you about His purposes?

3. What has God revealed to you about His ways?

4. What has God done in your life or through your life that has caused you to experience His presence?

5. What Scripture has God used to speak to you about Himself, His purposes or His ways?

6. What particular person or concern has God given you a burden to pray for? What has He guided you to pray for in this situation?

7. What has God done through circumstances that has given you a sense of His timing or direction concerning any aspect of His will?

8. What word of guidance or truth do you sense God has spoken to you through another believer?

9. What adjustment is God leading you to make in your life?

10. What acts of obedience have you accomplished this week? What further steps of obedience do you know God is wanting you to take?

Not everyone who keeps a journal makes daily entries. Your schedule may cause you to miss a day or two each week. Occasionally, you may find yourself making both morning and evening entries in your journal. Don’t quit in frustration if you miss a day. Begin again the next day and keep writing. Just as you stumbled the first few times you began walking, so you may experience ups and downs as you develop the discipline of journaling.

Make your study of
Fasting for Spiritual Breakthrough
more meaningful by maintaining a weekly spiritual journal of your personal fasts for the next nine weeks. Doctors generally agree that most people can fast one day a week without any negative side effects. Some argue that specific health benefits are associated with a weekly one-day fast. If you have a specific medical problem or are currently taking medication, consult with your family physician before fasting.

In this book you have been introduced to nine functions of fasting. For the next nine weeks, determine to fast one day each week, and to focus on one discipline of fasting in each fast. Follow the guidelines suggested in each chapter as you prepare for that particular fast. On your fast day, take time to review the chapter and read any significant Scriptures associated with that fast. During the nine-week period, you may want to commit to memory Isaiah 58, a key passage about fasting, or memorize other verses listed in
appendix 5
. Use your fast day to learn and reinforce the principles of that fast.

At the conclusion of your fast, take time to make a journal entry recording the experiences and insights you encountered during your fast. You may wish to use the 10 questions previously listed to help you reflect on what God is doing in your life. Begin writing with the statement, “I have just concluded (name of the specific fast). During my fast....” Then record the events and insights associated with your fast. Take time to describe what you did on your fast day and what God taught you. Use your journal to record any commitments made as a result of the lessons you have learned.

Shortly after you have concluded your ninth daily fast and recorded your journal entry, set aside time to read your journal entries. Do you see a pattern or trend in what God has been teaching you? Is there something specific you need to do in obedience to what you have been learning? Journaling provides a beneficial look back over several weeks and exposes the big lessons God is attempting to teach you. What has God been teaching you as you practice the discipline of fasting? Your answer to these and other questions will help you recognize God at work in your life.

Perhaps God has used your fast to teach you lessons that can be an encouragement to others. Share with others in your small group or with
your prayer partner how God has been working with you during your fasts. Ask your close Christian friends to hold you accountable for keeping the commitments you believe God would have you make.

May God use your spiritual journal to accomplish His goals in your life.

1
. Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King,
Experiencing God
(Nashville: Broadman Press, 1994).

Spirit of Fasting

Is it a fast that I have chosen, a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord? Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh? (Isa. 58:5-7).

Fasting to God

Say to all the people of the land, and to the priests: “When
you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months during those seventy years, did you really fast for Me—for Me? When you eat and when you drink, do you not eat and drink for yourselves?” (Zech. 7:5,6).

But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly (Matt. 6:17,18).

To Chasten the Soul

When I wept and chastened my soul with fasting, that became my reproach (Ps. 69:10).

To Humble the Soul

Then I proclaimed a fast there at the river of Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from Him the right way for us and our little ones and all our possessions (Ezra 8:21).

But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth; I humbled myself with fasting; and my prayer would return to my own heart (Ps. 35:13).

To Seek the Lord

And Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. So Judah gathered together to ask help from the Lord; and from all the cities of Judah they came to seek the Lord (2 Chron. 20:3,4).

To Prepare for Spiritual Warfare

However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting (Matt. 17:21).

When Facing the Judgment of God

So it was, when Ahab heard those words, that he tore his
clothes and put sackcloth on his body, and fasted and lay in sackcloth, and went about mourning (1 Kings 21:27).

Consecrate a fast, call a sacred assembly; gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord (Joel 1:14).

“Now, therefore,” says the Lord, “Turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.” So rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm (Joel 2:12).

And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day’s walk. Then he cried out and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them (Jon. 3:4,5).

During Periods of National Mourning

Now when the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men arose and traveled all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth Shan; and they came to Jabesh and burned them there. Then they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days (1 Sam. 31:11-13).

And they mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son, for the people of the Lord and for the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword (2 Sam. 1:12).

And when all the people came to persuade David to eat food while it was still day, David took an oath, saying, “God do so to me, and more also, if I taste bread or anything else till the sun goes down!” (2 Sam. 3:35).

And when all Jabesh Gilead heard all that the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men arose and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons; and they brought them to Jabesh, and buried their bones under the tamarisk tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days (1 Chron. 10:11,12).

When Communion with Christ Is Broken

And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast” (Matt. 9:15).

And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days” (Mark 2:19,20).

And He said to them, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them; then they will fast in those days” (Luke 5:34,35).

When Concerned for the Welfare of Others

But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth; I humbled myself with fasting; and my prayer would return to my own heart (Ps. 35:13).

When Challenged by Personal Concerns

Then Nathan departed to his house. And the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child, and David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. So the elders of his house arose and went to him, to raise him up from the ground. But he would not, nor did he eat food with them (2 Sam. 12:15-17).