Dear Church Family,

This week I celebrate being a follower of Jesus for 46 years! Thank you for being a part of my journey for the last 19 of them. I treasure your friendship and faithfulness. As we enter the thanksgiving season, it is a good reminder to express gratitude. I found a profound article on fasting I thought may encourage you—

Almost every major turning point in the Bible has someone not eating.

Moses before the law. A queen before risking her life. A pagan city facing destruction. A prophet grieving a ruined nation. Jesus before His ministry began.

Fasting wasn’t a diet or a spiritual hack. It was what people did when something mattered more than food.

Here are seven fasts in Scripture and what each one teaches.

“So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights. He neither ate bread nor drank water.” (Exodus 34:28)

Notice Moses wasn’t fasting to get something from God. He was with God, and food simply stopped mattering.

The first fast of this kind in Scripture isn’t about pressure or petition. It’s about presence.

(To be clear, forty days without water is something the text presents as supernatural. It’s not a pattern anyone should try to copy.)

But the principle stands: sometimes we lose our appetite for lesser things because we’ve found ourselves in the company of something greater.

Moses came down from that mountain with his face shining.

An edict has been issued to destroy her entire people. Esther is queen, but entering the king’s presence uninvited could mean death.

Before she acts, she sends this message:

“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:16)

Fasting came first. Courage came after.

And it wasn’t private. She asked her whole community to fast with her.

Some decisions are too heavy to carry into the throne room alone.

The most surprising fast in the Old Testament wasn’t kept by Israel.

Jonah walks into Nineveh, the capital of a brutal enemy empire, and announces that in forty days it will be overthrown.

“And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.” (Jonah 3:5)

The king himself steps off his throne and sits in ashes.
He even orders the animals to fast.

And then: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented.” (3:10)

A pagan city, with no covenant and no history with God, fasted in genuine repentance and was spared.

Fasting is one of the clearest ways the Bible shows a heart turning around.

Nehemiah has a comfortable, powerful job in the Persian court as the king’s cupbearer.

Then he hears that Jerusalem’s walls are broken down and its gates burned.

“As soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” (Nehemiah 1:4)

He wasn’t in danger. He wasn’t sick. Nothing was wrong with his own life.

He fasted because something was wrong with the place God loved, and he couldn’t eat as though it didn’t matter.

That fast ended in action: Nehemiah went to Jerusalem and rebuilt the walls in fifty-two days.

Sometimes fasting is the beginning of God giving you a burden you’re meant to carry.

Daniel’s best-known fast was a partial one.

“I ate no delicacies, no meat or wine entered my mouth… for the full three weeks.” (Daniel 10:3)

Twenty-one days of praying with no visible answer.

Then an angel arrives with an extraordinary explanation: “From the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days.” (10:12–13)

His prayer was heard on day one. The answer took three weeks to arrive.

Silence isn’t always the same as no.

Sometimes it’s the sound of an answer still on its way.

She appears in only three verses, and most people have never heard of her.

Anna was a widow who had lost her husband after seven years of marriage. Luke says she was eighty-four, and “she did not depart from the temple, worshipping with fasting and prayer night and day.” (Luke 2:37)

Decades of it. No dramatic crisis. No single request. Just faithful, ongoing hunger for God.

Then one day a young couple carried their baby into the temple.

And Anna recognised Him. “She began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.” (2:38)

Some fasts are about one moment. Hers was about a whole life spent waiting, and she was there when He came.

Before preaching a single sermon, Jesus fasted forty days in the wilderness. (Matthew 4:2)

And He assumed His followers would fast too: not “if you fast,” but “when you fast.” (6:16)

The early church took Him at His word. In Antioch, while the believers “were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.'” (Acts 13:2)

They fasted and prayed again, laid hands on them, and sent them off.

That was the start of Paul’s missionary journeys, the movement that carried the gospel across the Roman world.

The greatest missionary expansion in history began in a room where people weren’t eating.

Seven fasts in Scripture:

Moses – in God’s presence
Esther – before courage
Nineveh – in repentance
Nehemiah – from a burden for others
Daniel – with persistence
Anna – as a way of life
Jesus and the early church – before a mission

Notice what none of them were about: losing weight, proving their devotion, or forcing God’s hand.

Every one happened when something mattered more than their next meal.

So the real question fasting asks isn’t “how long can I go without food?”

It’s: what in my life right now matters that much?

Press On!

Mark