Prayer And Fasting

This will be the 11th straight year that Jackie and I have observed a 40 day period of prayer and fasting which we begin on the first of October. I actually started doing this 2 Timothy 2:1-2 Blog a week after last year's fast, having felt from my time of prayer during the fast that it was something that the Lord wanted me to do.

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Our fasting is relatively minor. We abstain from carbonated beverages, deserts, and from eating anything between meals. This has been a good way for us to fast because it is difficult, it takes a commitment to achieve, and we know we can see it through to the end. In the weeks before we start we each ask the Lord to show us what we should be praying for, and then right before we begin we talk together about the burdens that God has laid on our hearts. Doing this we end up with a common prayer focus. And prayer seems to be more effective when two or more are in agreement.

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About 48 hours into the fast we always get a headache which lasts for a couple of days, apparently cause by the lack of sugar to our systems. After the pain fades we get the dreams. It is the same type of dream every year. I eat a candy bar or piece of pie (my daughter Ceci who also fasts and prays with her husband during this time has numerious M&M dreams), before it occurs to me that - Whoops! - I've messed things up. It's not that there is anything legalistic about not eating what we are fasting from, or even that circumstances might require an exception. But we feel that our annual fast is an important thing for us to do, and we really don't want to compromise it. We praise God, not just for the answers to prayer and for the spiritual growth that comes every year, but also for the goodness of our Lord and Savior, whom we appreciate more because of this time we have spent, unified in prayer and in denying the cravings of our bodies. The results of this time have been much more than seeing God move in the areas that we were praying for. They have shown us that although we may begin and end on a certain day, pre-determined by us, the God who loves us and who knows our needs is outside time.

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For example, our fast begins on the 1st of October and ends at midnight on the 9th of November. On the first year we did our fast Jackie's dad had a major heart attack on the 10th of November. He lived for 6 more days at the critical care heart center on the fifth floor of Borgess Hospital before he went to be with his Blessed Redeemer. Harry was a man of great faith, a gifted teacher of scripture, who prayed with many for salvation, for baptism in the Holy Spirit, for healing and for deliverance. The family would usually look to him to be the leader in praying for healing or for receiving a word from the Lord. His heart attack became a time for many more in the family to learn how to search the scriptures, to cry out to the Lord, and to hear and speak forth the prophetic word.

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One of the prophetic words during that time came from a vision that God gave Ceci. She was with Jackie and some of her aunts and cousins, praying intensely for Harry. They were in a semi-secluded area in the hallway, near the visitors waiting room, on the 5th floor at Borgess. In the vision she saw angels with their swords drawn, coming into the hospital on the 1st floor, and fighting their way up to the 5th floor, and she gave the play by play to the women as the vision unfolded. To me this vision represents the power of their collective intercessory prayer. God is showing that He is in control, and that He does respond, even if the result was not the recovery they were praying for. And one of the things that show me that God is in control is that He led Jackie and I to fast and pray prior to those events, preparing us, and especially Jackie, for the emotional strain of seeing her father die, and for the intense time of prayer and spiritual warfare that the family would be involved in.

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On the next year we ended our fast as usuall at midnight on the 9th of November. Jackie had asked her mom to come and spend the night at our house because it was near the 1st anniversary of Harry's heart attack and she was worried about her mother being alone at that time. Helen wasn't able to make it, but events proved to be very interesting, as I partially shared in an earlier Blog. There was an all day steady wind of between 40-50 mph. That evening it started gusting to 60-70 mph. Occasionally we would hear a "Whomp!", which was the sound of a tree falling somewhere nearby. The power was out before we went to bed, and Jackie and I prayed for protection for ourselves, our 15 year old daughter Becky, and for our house. Shortly afterwards we heard and felt the tremendous crash a tree hitting our house, followed by the scream of our daughter. I grabbed a flashlight and bolted down the dark upstairs hallway to her room, finding her huddled in a ball on the floor. There was a jagged 2 x 4 from the roof truss sticking into the middle of her mattress. Looking up past the wood and drywall and trees I could see the sky. Becky was unhurt and did not know how she ended up on the floor, and Jackie and I both had the sense that an angel had intervened, moving Becky off her bed at the last second. Two rooms sustained quite a bit of damage. The other belonged to our daughter Missy who was away at college. And that was the room where Jackie's mom would have been sleeping if she had come. There were a couple more upsides to all of this. Tarps covered the roof for three weeks before it could be repaired, and it never rained during that time. Being in a woods, our roof was covered with moss, and insurance paid for a new moss resistant roof as well as for all the other repairs. The missing trees opened up a nice large sunny area out back, which Jackie had wanted for a long time. Even though our house got hit, our time of prayer and fasting had prepared us. God protected us physically and gave us more besides.

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Living our lives as Christians is not about religion or religious acts. It is not about if or how we fast or the fervency of our prayers, or the volume of scripture we read. It all has to do with a living Lord, who loves us and who wants to share a loving relationship with us. He desires to be in every part of our lives, and He desires that we share with Him the things that He finds pleasure in. Prayer and fasting help in bringing down the barriers of the world and the flesh that come between us and the relationship that He wants to have with us. I recently read the 8th chapter of Ezekiel during my morning prayer time. In it the Lord gave Ezekiel a series of visions showing the people of Jerusalem engaged in idol worship, spirit worship, Tammuz worship and sun worship. In one of those, Ezekiel digs a hole through a wall to uncover a secret place where seventy elders of the House of Israel were standing, each with a censer filled with incense before walls that had "every form of creeping things and beasts and detestable things, with all the idols of the House of Israel, were carved on the wall around it". Upon reading this my stomach felt nauseous. I became sad because I realized that God loved this people and wanted so much for them, and in return they rejected Him. But of course, this isn't to point a finger at a particular people. I realized that I too can think that I have a secret place where God cannot see. And those things that are kept in a secret place are just as much idols, and just as creepy and detestable to God as were the things worshipped by the elders of the House of Israel. Although I know these things will affect my relationship with Him, the solution is not to bring everything into the light just because things will be better for me. These should also be brought into the light because I understand that my sin hurts the One who loves me.

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The real benefit of a time of prayer and fasting is not just in what we are seeking from Him. The practice declares that He is the Lord of the Universe and that we believe that He is in control of our lives and that we are putting our trust in Him for all things. That trust will help soften our hearts, and a soft heart will bring a closer relationship, and the love of God will give us the strength to conform our lives to the pattern that He, in His love and wisdom, has established for us.