Piper on Fasting

“Desires for other things”—there’s the enemy. And the only
weapon that will triumph is a deeper hunger for God. The weakness
of our hunger for God is not because he is unsavory, but
because we keep ourselves stuffed with “other things.” Perhaps,
then, the denial of our stomach’s appetite for food might express,
or even increase, our soul’s appetite for God.

--John Piper, A Hunger for God, available at http://www.desiringgod.org/library/onlinebooks_index.html#hfg

Fasting Results

I've been fasting since Saturday night after supper. Any kind of drink is OK. No food. Spend meal times reading/praying. Why? I want to "get aholt of God." I want Him "to walk with me and talk with me and tell me I am His own." I don't know if I've ever had such a sense of God's presence before. I constantly struggle with doubt. So, this is a dedicated time of focusing on Him and trying to find Him.

In addition to my daily TTB reading, I felt compelled to read James. As of now, I just got started. Need to read/study it more.

Here are some thoughts that have occurred to me during this time.

-James defines his identity in light of spiritual relations, not physical. And how he identifies himself: "SERVANT of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." Servant! Owned one. Worker. Slave. Onesimus.

-What God requires is 100% surrender to Him. Not exactly sure what that means. It means being a doer of the Word. My big new question is, "Which Word?" At the time of James, the Scriptures weren't complete. Should I expect that God still speaks in addition to the Scriptures? Jimmy Dodd thinks so.

-Got to be a doer of the Word. That requires coming to the Scriptures often, and then doing what we find contained therein without equivocation [like that word?]

-(Not from James) My fasciculations are my greatest thorn in my flesh. Constant reminders of my frailty. Evidently incurable. "The messenger of Satan to buffet me." (2 Cor 12:7-10)