Hello, welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson, and we are here to talk about tips and strategies that you can employ to deepen your faith, improve your relationships, and just get the most out of your life.

Thank you for joining. Let's get started.

Okay, so right off the bat, I need to tell you, this episode is not about 30 days without food.

I feel like I need to get that out there right now or everybody's going to turn it off.

I'm already anticipating.

We usually have about 1,000 people who check out the episode in the first day and a half.

I'm already anticipating that to be half for this one.

People are looking at the title thinking, you know, I'm all in on this ESM deal, but I ain't giving up food for 30 days.

Well, neither am I.

This is not about that.

It is about, if you'll just bear with me for a bit, it's about a 30-day commitment moving into a position where you feel comfortable and courageous to give a 30-day

commitment to something and that something is in the essence of a fast. It represents the

ideology of the fasting of the Bible. So give me a few minutes to explain that. I think it'll be

abundantly clear. And then the last couple of minutes, I'll give you a few personal examples,

and maybe you'll know exactly what to do with it. Okay, so first of all, let me talk about fasting

in the Bible. So far as I can tell, all or nearly all of the fasting in Scripture is the abstaining

from food. They're skipping meals for a certain period of time. A couple of things might surprise you

about that, if I could do a little preaching for a second. First of all, I can't find a single verse, Old Testament or New, where fasting was commanded.

There may have been some ritual associated with the Passover, but it's not even very clear.

Turns out fasting, whatever it is, this idea of giving up something so that you can do something else to draw closer to

God was optional. And I think that makes sense to me. It wouldn't do any good for you to give up

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