One of the main purposes of fasting is to wean us from our dependence on God’s gifts and enable us to become dependent on God alone. We have a powerful tendency to grasp for ourselves the gifts God gives for the meeting of life’s needs. We constantly succumb to the temptation to become dependent on these things for our well-being and wholeness. Whenever our grasp of something God has given for our sustenance and well-being becomes a destructive bondage of dependence—an idol—a discipline of fasting is needed.
