Fasting

I am one of those people who sticks a flag on what I don't understand. I have had many flags up in the Bible. I usually put these before the Lord and leave it up to Him and His timing to give me the revelation. When I hear teaching on a particular subject I listen to see whether it answers my questions. I have heard a lot of teaching on fasting and not much has really answered my question about it.

My question is simple, Why? From my own experience it does nothing more than make a physical suffering as if to say that this physical suffering, although self inflicted, will get God's attention more readily! This is also the answer that I have received from most teachers.

1, Why is it right to have self-inflicted suffering?
2, Does the "all-knowing" God need something to get His attention?

Anyway, yesterday I heard a teaching that blew my mind. It also did my favourite thing of changing the way we have been taught to read a certain passage!

Let's change subject for a while and talk about "unbelief." How many kinds of unbelief are there? Let's have a basic stab and say there are three:

1, Ignorance, if we don't know we wont believe.
2, Wrong teaching, same as number one.
3, Natural unbelief concerning supernatural things.

So, how do we get rid of this unbelief? How do we make each one go. The first to go through patient teaching. Providing a person is ready to receive and the teacher has the right teaching, then it follows that ignorance and wrong teaching can be replaced with the truth.

But how do we get rid of our natural unbelief? Jesus actually tells us, however, with a few added words from the translators we have missed the meaning.

"When they came to the crowd, a man came up to Jesus, falling on his knees before Him and saying, "Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and is very ill; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. "I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him."And Jesus answered and said, "You unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me." And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured at once. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, "Why could we not drive it out?" And He said to them, "Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting." Matthew 17:14-21

The last part of this passage is one of those "Not in early manuscripts" passages. However, that doesn't give me a problem. The point here is that the subject of what the disciples ask Jesus about is the demon. The subject of what Jesus talks about is their unbelief!

If "this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting" when did Jesus pray. I could kick myself because I had spotted that before, but hadn't spotted it in connection with "what goes!" Jesus immediately told the demon to go and it went. He didn't do what He said needed to be done to get rid of it (if He was talking about the need to fast to get rid of the demon!)

The "kind" that goes, is the kind of natural unbelief in the power of God. Now that fits with my problems. We are not trying to get God's attention through fasting, we are driving out our unbelief. We are starving it. We are denying the flesh the opportunity to be able to have its boastful stand. If we are prepared to starve our bodies for something then that something has to be important to us. If it is important to us then it follows that we are believing in it more strongly than if we aren't prepared to put ourselves out at all over it.

Of course, if you have strong belief in an area then you probably don't need to fast.

The only thing that pleases God is faith. There is no more sacrifice that we can do except believe. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Therefore we believe what the Bible tells us and what the Spirit tells us, testing it with Scripture. Acting on these is faith. However, what if we act on it, but don't fully believe what we are acting on? For example, we pray for healing, but somewhere deep down inside we don't believe it? How can we get rid of that unbelief. Pray harder? Shout? Pound our fists on the floor? Jesus says "This kind goes out only through prayer and fasting!"