Training Hour: Fasting, Praying, Giving 4
Training Hour: Pray, Fast, Give • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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12 And if someone overpowers one person, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.
As Jesus preaches on the Sermon on the Mount, He gives a three-fold cord of living victoriously in this life.
Say, “God wants me to thrive, not survive.”
Jesus gives us the “life hack” of thriving. It is also the duty of every Christian to give, pray, and fast.
4 He answered, “It is written: Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Excerpt from Jentezen Franklin, Fasting:
Our American diets are loaded with sugars, toxins, processed foods, meats, etc. Yet it is possible for us to be eating large meals, be overweight, and still be malnourished. In Dr. Colbert’s book Toxic Relief, he states, ‘We may be actually starving from a nutritional standpoint, while at the same time becoming grossly obese…Sadly, we really are digging our own graves with our forks and knives!’
In that sense, it is easy to see how our physical lives again parallel our spiritual lives. We can become over-nourished on a hefty diet of church programs and activities, religious structure, and traditions of men and yet be severely undernourished when it comes to the deeper things of God. Do you know what Dr. Colbert refers to as the ‘single most effective answer to over-nourishment?’ Fasting. He has found that ‘more than anything else, fasting is a dynamic key to cleansing your body from a lifetime collection of toxins, reversing over-nourishment and the diseases it brings and ensuring a wonderful future of renewed energy, vitality, longevity, and blessed health.’”
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
When you hunger for the deeper things of God, He will fill you. And it will be a good Father’s joy to do so.
“Hungry people are desperate people.” - Franklin
People will overcome any obstacle in life when they are hungry. Throw out the rituals, throw out the ‘decency’, throw out personal pride - hungry people are desperate to be filled.
We have an example in the Phoenician woman in Mark 7:26-30. This woman had a daughter that was possessed and tormented by a devil. The woman was an outsider. She didn’t belong where she was at. But she knew the power of Jesus was there, and persisted. Jesus said No three times, but she persisted. She was hungry, she persisted. She needed a change. Jesus honored her request, and her daughter was healed because of her persistence.
Hungry people are desperate people. The power of God’s presence brings power. So when people get hungry for God, and the things of God, things have to change. When you need His presence, when you need more of His power, when you need His healing, and more of His miracle-working power! ONLY JESUS satisfies that hunger.
Fasting stirs a hunger in your spirit that goes deeper than the temporary hunger you experience in your flesh. When you hunger for God, He fills you. Show God you are serious. We must get to the place where we are desperate for God again. We must begin to desire Him more than food or drink. Be filled with the Bread of life instead of the troubles of religion. Begin to make fasting a regular discipline, and see how God answers your hunger!
Victories are won not in public, but in private.
When we read about Jesus, we see Him praying more often privately than publically. He would often spend the nights alone, praying and being alone with God. From those alone times with God, public demonstrations of God’s power would liberally be given in healings, raising the dead, multiplication, reconciliation, and more. The victory came in the private moments.
Whether we fast corporately, or individually, fasting is a private discipline. It is sacrifice with expectancy - individual, personal faith in God. It is Romans 12:1 ‘reasonable service’ to God. It is a service to Him that God rewards openly.
Fasting in Seeking Something to Give
Job said in Job 23:12
12 I have not departed from the commands from his lips; I have treasured the words from his mouth more than my daily food.
God restored Job’s losses, doubling what he had before. Scripture also says that God blessed Job’s latter days MORE than his beginning, and even gave him more sons and daughters. God publically rewarded Job’s life.
Here’s another aspect of the believer’s ‘trifecta lifestyle of faith’. Those that give while fasting, are sowing seed spiritually, God provides a return on your life. In Joel 2:15-16, the people were so poor and in such a famine that they couldn’t even bring an offering. But God said to “blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly”. After the fast, the threshing floor was full of wheat, the oil vats were overflowing, and they ate in plenty and were satisfied. The LORD brought great financial blessing to people who fasted and prayed.
When fasting is a lifestyle, poverty will not be. As you begin to honor God with fasting, prayer and giving on a regular basis, you will see for yourself the poverty and poverty mentality be removed from your life.
The three wisest people in Scripture - Joseph, Daniel, and Solomon - all began their stories with fasting and resulted in wealth of wisdom and prosperity.
God also said that health and healing would follow fasting. After God directed a fast for Israel, God said, Isaiah 58:8
8 Then your light will appear like the dawn, and your recovery will come quickly. Your righteousness will go before you, and the Lord’s glory will be your rear guard.
Fasting in Seeking Healing
Fasting humbles you and brings clarity, even allowing you to get unforgiveness and bitterness out of your heart.
Some people have tried and tried to truly forgive someone but have never been able to let the matter go. Begin a fast, and trust God to work that forgiveness into your heart.
Fasting will also overcome sexual addictions and demonic powers. Matthew 17:21:
The New King James Version Chapter 17
21 However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”
Judges 19-20 tells of how a spirit of homosexuality had to be broken through fasting. All of Israel came to avenge a man’s fiancee because Benjamites had raped and killed her. After two failed attempts to wage war against the tribe of Benjamin and 38,000 of Israel’s soldiers died before the prophet Phinehas told them to fast and pray. 24 hours later they regrouped and defeated the Benjamites now that the demonic stronghold had been broken. There is an evil spirit behind homosexuality. There is an evil spirit behind pornography. There is an evil spirit behind adultery. There is an evil spirit behind fornication. These evil spirits of perversion prey on people and use them like puppets on a string. Fasting breaks the strongholds of homosexuality, adultery, pornography, fornication, and lust.
Fasting in Seeking Change in Family
God will also deliver your children. God’s Word over your children’s life is Joel 2:28
28 After this I will pour out my Spirit on all humanity; then your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will have dreams, and your young men will see visions.
But they have their own fight and testimony to find as well. We can look at Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh, who was a wicked king. 2 Chronicles 33:1-13. Fasting will lead to breakthrough for your children - when the enemy has drawn them away like setting a hook in their nose, God will break those spirits off of their lives.
Fasting in Seeking Strength
Like other spiritual disciplines, fasting and prayer is learned - learned through practice. As you fast and pray, you sharpen the Word of God in your mouth; that’s sharper than any double-edge sword.
Many Christians quit fighting. They quit, because they’re bruised, hurt, frustrated, and even lethargic in their faith. They try to fight and wrestle with demons with dull blades. As you fast and pray, the Word is sharpened, and you can speak in warfare in a way that cuts the enemy down to size. As you fast and focus on seeking to understand the Word of God through reading, studying and meditating on God’s Word, you please God.
Franklin says, “you release beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Your praising God scatters the enemy before you. You find more patience. You have better understanding of whats to come through the circumstances in your life. Your priorities take on God’s priorities; you loose the messengers of God to bring you what you need, and you have better understanding faster in how to spiritually defend your loved ones and children.
Every time we fast, we need to enter the fast with repentance. Enter into the commitment with pure hands and a clean heart.
6 Isn’t this the fast I choose: To break the chains of wickedness, to untie the ropes of the yoke, to set the oppressed free, and to tear off every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your house, to clothe the naked when you see him, and not to ignore your own flesh and blood? 8 Then your light will appear like the dawn, and your recovery will come quickly. Your righteousness will go before you, and the Lord’s glory will be your rear guard. 9 At that time, when you call, the Lord will answer; when you cry out, he will say, ‘Here I am.’
