Consumed: 40 Days of Fasting, Repentance & Rebirth

by Dean Briggs

Today is a day of praise. It is a day to focus on the Lord and serve His pleasure rather than your needs. Notice, you do not have to rejoice in your fast. Your circumstance may feel quite barren or discouraging. Thankfully, you are not commanded to rejoice in your circumstance, but to “be glad in Thee.”

We come to Sinai, to the place of testing, revelation, covenant and grace, to learn to worship Yahweh.

If we want to worship in spirit and truth, our lives must be deeply pleasing to Him.

make no mistake, words of praise are simply not enough. We must become worship.

They were no longer slaves, they were children of God. They had to understand how God thinks. They had to see themselves differently in order to see others differently. The only way to break the chain was to become bonded to Yahweh.

Jesus lived to only one song, that of His father. Our worship is to join that song.

We want to do great things, and then we fail at little things. We want to be bold and then we are timid. We want to please God. We want to do our fast well. As has been previously discussed, however, fasting is not about us impressing God. We fast either because 1) we are in need of God; or 2) we have actually grown dull to our need of God, and wish to come to our senses once more.

hunger is the path to recognition, the doorway to clarity, the key to passion.

Fall hard on mercy. Never give up the cry of a broken heart. Never doubt the fierce love of a kind God.

Trust His love for you and keep going. We see the failure, God sees the heart.

You will have weak days and strong days. If you begin to despair, ask for grace, dig into the Word. Hold your ground until the hunger wave or panicked feeling passes. If you’re bored, find a creative outlet in which you can expend energy.

on a physical and mental level, fasting can become monotonous in the extreme. Our spirit must be trained to flourish, to seize the opportunities it is given while the flesh is being tamed. Our mind must practice finding other outlets for creativity and energy.

Wait. Patiently. For Him. It was not yet time to ask for acceleration. A major goal of the inward journey of fasting is entirely circumvented if we grow impatient with the process.

humans hunger in spirit, we translate the urge as requiring immediate satisfaction. We interpret these quiet impulses, these longings, as something to be appeased, be they hungerings for significance, beauty, fascination, love, approval, respect, understanding. Though these deeply human realities are comparable in worth to diamonds, yet we treat them as lumps of coal

The world is all too happy to accommodate our eternal needs with superficial pleasures.

realm of eternal things. There we discover our soul, panting for God. There we find God, waiting for us more than we for Him.

it is a good time to begin feeling the importance of the things the Lord has revealed thus far. You carry promises in the Word, in your bosom. You carry burdens. You seek release. You have tasted defeat in the past, you have mourned and grieved and waited for the tides to turn. They have not turned. At least not yet. Breakthrough awaits.

The Kingdom stands at the threshold, waiting to penetrate our lives with fresh conviction, fresh hope, fresh anointing.

not uncommon to experience a heightened emotional response, as negative emotional habits are accentuated. In addition, feelings attached to past woundings might strangely resurface with a freshness and vitality that may surprise you. While frustrating, this should be viewed as an opportunity to surrender poisoned emotions and memories to the Lord for healing and restoration.

But perhaps their real lightness is best seen by comparing them with the weight of glory which is awaiting us.” — A.W. Pink

Each day of your forty days and forty nights holds the potential for 24 more hours of lovesickness as you learn to long for a beautiful God-man who breaks into human history with stunning kindness and power.

He breaks into your history, mine, the earth’s, because nothing can tame the wild love of this holy God.

As his disciple, do you actively or passively respond to His word?

Do you listen to His voice with a heart of ready, quick obedience, or only when it suits your inclinations without causing any real discomfort?

Those who do not walk in friendship with God will feel His heavy hand as a manifestation of His jealous, redemptive love. It is kindness and severity, all at once.

I was sluggish of spirit, overweight physically, disconnected emotionally, and generally dull to the ways of God. Every day was a day of discouragement.

Though I have felt his heavy hand, it has never been His anger against me. Rather, it is the equivalent of me running into a concrete wall over and over and over again, then finally noticing that I’m sore and bruised and deciding I don’t really want to do that anymore. He has not changed. But I have. And when I awaken to His unmoving, sovereign goodness, when I agree with that, I begin to bless the bruises, for they have in fact helped bring me to my senses.

Meditate on what it means for your warfare to be ended.

Fasting with a pure heart and motives, I have discovered, brings personal revival and adds power to our prayers. Personal revival occurs because fasting is an act of humility. Fasting gives opportunity for deeper humility as we recognize our sins, repent, receive God’s forgiveness, and experience His cleansing of our soul and spirit.” — Bill Bright (1921-2003)

When someone important is coming, you clean house. John cleaned house. Jesus said that John was like Elijah (Mat. 11:14).

What will you do when they slander you? John just kept on preaching, baptizing, eating locust. Social etiquette was not his concern. The message was central. Jesus loved this guy. He talked more favorably about John than any other man in the Bible. And why not? He had found a voice completely loyal to His own. He had found a friend, a man of passion, recklessness, intensity and focus;

the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind.

it demands the emptiness of the faculties, and when the faculties are empty, then your whole being listens.

Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitations and from preoccupations.” — Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

In our own lives, no less across the whole earth, Jesus is committed to clearing a path, removing everything that hinders love. He clears our way by the power of the Holy Spirit,

the Ten Days of Awe (aka ‘Rosh HaShanah’)

How will you seize your moment? You are here, on Day 23, with free access. What should you do?

Use your forty days as an extended house cleaning. Remove clutter and distractions from your daily routine. Ask the Lord, what stands in the way of loving You more?

Is not the neglect of this plain duty—I mean, fasting, ranked by our Lord with almsgiving and prayer—one general occasion of deadness among Christians? Can any one willingly neglect it, and be guiltless?” — John Wesley (1703-1791)

the scope of our cooperation with God in preparing our own highway significantly limits or expands the life of God we operate in, the ministry we are entrusted with, and the impact of our lives for the Kingdom.

I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to receive it. Indeed, even now you are not yet able, for you are still fleshly” (1 Cor. 3:1-3). Implicit in this rebuke is a promise of greater revelation to come when fleshly impulses are sufficiently dealt with. You understand this, you hunger for it,

Now go deeper. Ask God what practical sacrifices He would ask of you, even beyond food. If you have the grace for it, make a Mt. Moriah moment for the remainder of your fast. Lay down Isaac, who was not evil, but good! It was a test of faith.

In a long fast, it is tempting to distract yourself in an effort to minimize the boredom you will experience. Resist this urge. We consume so much garbage in what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. Get rid of it! Let yourself hunger for Jesus and Jesus alone.

Those who weep carry within their very tears the essence of the next surge of mercy from a loving God.

Life happens—sometimes good, sometimes bad, but mercy always flows down from the high places.

We don’t think of weeping and mourning as joyful events for a simple reason, they aren’t. Yet they tenderize and fertilize our souls with the necessary ingredients for the next wave of joy.

Weep! Cry out! Pour out your heart. Just remember, Psa. 84 says you’re just “passing through” this place. Go read it again. You will get to the other side.

The action of grace brings healing. Perpetually wounded forerunners have broken voices and will declare faulty messages. So before God deals with the “high places”, He graciously replaces the pain of our low places. The highway to Zion cannot be full of potholes. Where we have been crushed, God will bring healing. If you feel lost in a place of despair, know this: God is in motion to bring comfort to past wounds and present disappointments. While a forerunner like John the Baptist can only be prepared in a furnace of suffering, it must not turn into bitterness, cynicism or unending despair.

Jesus was bruised and whipped, beaten and pierced, rejected and mocked, slandered and betrayed, forgotten and reviled . . . and then He forgave.

Detachment from the confusion all around us is in order to have a richer attachment to God. Christian meditation leads us to the inner wholeness necessary to give ourselves to God freely.” — Richard Foster