Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher.

This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith,

ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.

You don't have to settle for water down Christian teachings, and if you're ready to go deeper,

God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.

Today we're going to talk about fasting. You know, I have only fasted personally a few times

in my spiritual life. All of those were very short periods of time, but I think fasting

is a practice that I want to make a part of my own spiritual life on a regular basis,

partially because of what we see in scripture and the example of fasting that we're going to talk

about today, but also through the rich history of this practice in the lives of believers that I

want to emulate. So of course, we have the biblical examples, but when you look through church

history, you can't help but see this legacy of people whose spiritual lives included prayer and

fasting. Now, of course, there are other religions that practice fasting as well, but in Christianity,

fasting serves a purpose of lament, of drawing to repentance, and mostly of coming to the Lord

in humility and recognizing that he is God and we are not. Some of the people who are known

for fasting are John Wesley. He was known to integrate fasting into his spiritual life.

John Knox, one of the things I think is fascinating about Knox is that Queen Mary is said to have

made mention of his spiritual life saying that she feared Knox's prayers more than the armies of

Scotland because he was known to fast and pray on a weekly basis. Now, obviously, we aren't

these amazing spiritual leaders of church history, but what we do know is that each of these people

were normal humans who had a supernatural capacity to accomplish what God had called them to do.

And I would argue that the reason that they had that capacity is because of the time they spent

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