Scripture:
"Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day - things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ." - Colossians 2:16,17
Fasting in a context of glut or saturation seems foreign and perhaps unnecessary. Yet it is for those very reasons the church of Jesus Christ must fast. Fasting enables the church to take a time out from the “rat race” formed by its complexity. It equally seeks to rescue the church from drowning in a sinkhole of the unimportant.
Our Western world seems to move at a pace where we rush from one activity to the next without ever resting, pondering and considering the significance of each moment and how God moves life in an intentional and purposed pattern.
God cries out to us through the shadow. Yet we become slaves to the shadow; failing to see and hear and feel Him. We lose God in the avalanche of cultural clutter.
At the end of the day all that truly matters in your relationship with God and His Church, your relationship with your immediate family and then how those relationships are lived out in your immediate world.
Fasting helps to put things right where they are either wrong or forgotten or simply off kilter. How can you tell when things are off center? It is like placing an object on a potter’s wheel. If you are not on center, when the object is spun it will wobble and then fall off and potentially do much harm. Life is like this. As your life spins from all of the elements present, the wobbling openly says “you are off center.”
We encourage you to check your center. Take time out during your daily fast to seek God through His Word and Prayer. Hear Him through His Word and speak to Him through your prayer. God longs to meet with you each and every day. He wants you to see and hear Him in the shadow. If you find yourself off center, pull away, put off and go back to the simplicity of only knowing Him.
- by Pastor Pat Griffiths
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