Its used in both the Old and New Testaments. If you do a word search in the New Testament you'll be surprised how often its referred to. People only think of the 40 day fast of Jesus in the wilderness but its mentioned so many times. Yet today we almost never hear of Christians fasting. Curiously, if you look at how most Christians look today in the western world, they could clearly do with a bit of fasting. They're just as overweight as non-Christians. Shouldn't we set a better example? Being overweight equals a much shorter lifespan. Obituary photos demonstrate this stark reality all over the world. Also it guarantees far more physical pain and disease. We strive for spiritual health. Why not physical health as well? Most Christians don't have a much better diet than non-Christians it seems. Is this setting a good example?
And if fasting is used its usually done in the most unhealthy way possible with no knowledge of the fasting process at all. The necessity for purified water, not cold, consumed often, an absence of exercise and the breaking of the fast with pure, unprocessed food. One church had a fast and broke it with pizza. The sheer ignorance of that is just beyond comprehension when there is so much free information available on this subject.
I guess most of us extract from the Bible what we want and avoid the less comfortable areas. Water fasting can be awkward, difficult and socially unaccepted. But isn't our faith the same at times? How many people in the Bible did socially unacceptable things putting God first? I'd say almost every single prominent person in the Bible did! Satan is very adept at using social norms and conventions to constrain us.
Resting while fasting might be necessary for people who live continually in scarcity, but people who are well-fed six days a week can easily carry out normal activities for 24 hours without food. A 26-mile marathon burns only 3/4 of a pound of fat. Most of us are carrying a lot more than a pound of excess fat and most of us don't run a marathon every day.
When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. --Matthew 6
Nobody is even supposed to know that you're fasting. Your daily activity should not change.
The current understanding of Jewish practice in the first century is that Jesus and the people around him probably ate only two meals a day: A mid-morning break-fast and a supper at dusk. Notice that no other regular daily meals are mentioned in scripture. The concept of eating three meals a day wasn't developed until the 1700s among prosperous Europeans.
Native hunter-gatherers only ate one meal a day in the evening. We know that because hunter-gatherer populations today still eat only one meal a day. They do their hunting and gathering throughout the day and come together in the evening for a single family or tribal meal for the day.
My point is that what we call "intermittent fasting" (skipping all snacks and one or two meals a day, but eating at least one hearty meal a day) was what ancient people did
all the time. One or two meals a day with nothing but water in between is how God designed us to live. The liver, pancreas, and several other organs
need long spaces of time with
no food in order to carry out their functions healthily.
In the US today, many people barely go an hour through the entire waking day without eating (and that includes snacks, sodas, and sugared coffee, all of which is a "meal" as far as the body is concerned). The body is not made for that.
What I've discovered--and all the information is out there--is that "prayer and fasting" are not only effective for spiritual health, but are also
necessary for optimum physical health. It's what we've
got to do. It's the way the body works...and the medical community is beginning to realize it.
When we are stressed, the body releases hormones (primarily cortisol) that prepare the body for powerful activity to deal with the cause of the stress: To fight or to flee. But in our modern life, our actual physical response to our stressors...is merely to sit there at our desks.
And worse, when stressed we are likely to
eat for comfort--the very
opposite of what our bodies are preparing to do. The body is prepared to eat when we are relaxed, not when we are stressed. It releases an entirely different set of hormones (including insulin) to handle eating. When we eat while stressed, the hormonal confusion causes the body to store food that it otherwise would have burned.
The bottom line is that eating while stressed makes us fat. Even if we're counting calories, eating while stressed will still make us fat. The proper response to stress (if you can't run around the block or go a round in a boxing ring) is prayer and fasting. Don't eat--
pray. In the secular world, they say "meditate," but for Christians, it's prayer. And fasting..skip that meal and pray instead.
Look again at the practice of the ancients of Jesus' time. They ate their big meal at dusk after work. First, they spent quite a bit of time washing feet and hands. Then they spent quite a bit of time in prayer--meditating. By the time they actually began eating, they were relaxed and their bodies were prepared to receive food with the correct hormones flowing.
In fact, that's how people around the Mediterranean Sea still eat. It's not so much what they eat (the so-called "Mediterranean Diet" is very different from place to place around the Mediterranean Sea), it's
how they eat. They eat when they are relaxed.
Jesus was always "fasted and prayed-up" to deal with demons any given day. We should be "fasted and prayed-up" to deal with our own demons of the day. Fasting should be a drop-of-the-hat thing for Christians.