How is your appetite this morning? I’m not referring to the consumptive society in which we live where more food is thrown out each day that half the rest of the world has to eat. No, I’m talking about your Hunger for God. How is it?
1. In the Old Testament we see Biblical Fasting is an urgent call to get serious about Knowing God.
2. In the New Testament we see Biblical Fasting is an ancient spiritual discipline to reschedule my life with God at the center instead of dining, relaxing, amusing, accumulating, advancing, securing, and a multitude of other things that are not wrong – just deadly to intimacy with the Almighty.
3. This morning we narrow our focus to this one thought, How did the Early Church of Acts and the Epistles demonstrate this Hunger for God? We shall see that their Hunger shaped their lives, their ministry, their worship, and their outreach. In the Early Church, we see Biblical fasting is a powerful way to yield every part of my life to God’s supremacy.
4. So we can study and learn about Biblical Fasting in God’s Word: in the Old Testament, in New Testament, from the Early Church, and then tonight as those who live for Christ in 21st Century America. In Tulsa Y2K we see Biblical Fasting is an immediate way to declare your allegience to God’s way and glory in every day of your life!
How are you doing in the Total Yielding of your life to Christ this morning?
Most of us would say as we look around at our life and others, that we are all right. But Jesus gave a different test. He said don’t look around at others, look inside. He asks, "Does your hungering after God cause you to choose to abstain from food?" This practice is called fasting.
Fasting, or the voluntary abstinence from food, is a spiritual discipline, which has fallen upon hard times in modern Christianity. In fact, a look at the Library of congress computerized list of all books known to be published in America shows that not one Christian book on fasting was published from the 1860s or Civil War era to the start of the Space Age in the late ’50s! That is a Century in the English-speaking world that neglected entirely the discipline Christ said would characterize His Church’s hungering after God.
Isn’t it amazing that perhaps the greatest tool to grow intimate with God, and dispel spiritual apathy is so neglected?
Isn’t it tragic that what may be the key to seeing wayward children and grandchildren come back to God, is so neglected?
Isn’t is hard to believe that God’s described way to see Him move upon oppressed and afflicted in a liberating way is so neglected?
Probably we don’t think about fasting, hear about fasting or practice fasting because we are indulging ourselves in America like no nation has ever done in the history of the planet earth! And that is the very reason we need to fast.
(NR1-29; 000723AM)
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