Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11117. Fasting in secret is the standard Jesus sets for His disciples, and it is one of those instructions that sounds simple until you actually try to live it out among people who inevitably notice when you are not eating. Matthew 6:16-18 gives the clearest teaching on this question anywhere in Scripture, and it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11116. Fasting and health are not competing concerns, whatever the intensity of some fasting teaching can suggest. Your body was made by God and belongs to Him, and caring for it wisely while fasting is not a lack of spiritual seriousness. It is simply taking seriously another thing Scripture plainly teaches: that the body…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11115. The length of fasting is nowhere fixed by Scripture as a single required duration, which frustrates believers looking for a straightforward rule but also frees the practice from becoming a legalistic box to tick. The Bible records fasts lasting anywhere from a single meal skipped in genuine distress to forty days of complete…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every fast recorded in the Bible looked and functioned the same way. I want to walk through the main categories Scripture actually records in some detail,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11054 The connection between fasting and prayer appears throughout Scripture, and many Christians sense intuitively that combining the two should make prayer more powerful. But does fasting actually increase the effectiveness of prayer? The question requires careful handling, because the answer must honour what Scripture teaches without sliding into a transactional view of God…