40-Day Corporate Prayer and Fasting

Prayer and Fasting - Builds an Appetite for God’s Righteousness: Hunger for God is spiritual, not physical. We are less sensitive to spiritual appetites when we are in the bondage of physical ones. Prayer and Fasting is a way of awakening us to latent spiritual appetites by removing the domination of physical forces from the center of our lives. Our goal in prayer and fasting is to have a real hunger for God. We test whether it is by whether we are hungering for our own holiness. To want God is to hate sin. For God is holy, and we cannot love God and love sin. Fasting that is not aimed at starving sin while feasting on God is self-deluded. It is not truly God that we hunger for in such fasting. The hunger of fasting is a hunger for God, and the test of that hunger is whether it includes a hunger for holiness. Fasting is a spiritual discipline that involves abstaining from food to focus on God and cultivate a hunger for His presence. A genuine hunger for God is tested by whether it also includes a desire for holiness, or a hatred of sin. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled” Matthew 5:6 (NKJV).

The reward we are to seek from the Father in fasting is not first or mainly the gifts of God, but God himself according to Matthew 6, which begins with three main longings that we are to hope for from God. First, that God’s name be hallowed or revered; second, that God's Kingdom come and third, that His will be done on earth the way it’s done in heaven. That is the first and primary reward Jesus tells us to seek the Father in our prayer and our fasting. We fast out of longing for God’s name to be known and cherished and honored, and out of longing for his kingly rule to be extended and then consummated in history, and out of longing for his will to be done everywhere. "In this manner, therefore, pray:  Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen” Matthew 6:9-13 (NKJV).