Hey everybody, I'm Tim Mackie, and this is my podcast, exploring my strange Bible. I am a card-carrying

Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you

have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 20 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've

been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission

of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can all be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts and classes about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find all those resources at Bibleproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this

week. All right, well, this episode is part two of a three-part series. It represents a number of

teachings I did back when I was a pastor at Door of Hope about some of the key spiritual practices that have

marked the life habits of followers of Jesus from all spiritual church traditions throughout most

of church history. And that's because they're actually grounded in the life and teaching of Jesus and

the apostles that we find in the New Testament.

And so this is a teaching about the twin practices and habits of fasting that is withholding food from yourself for a symbolic, intentional reason, and period of time, but also the

habit of the opposite of intentional feasting and celebration because of

one's commitment to Jesus. So what are these habits? How do they balance with each other? What do

they each mean? And why is it important to have both going on in some kind of rhythm in your life?

So that's what this teaching explores. I hope it's helpful for you. Let's go for it.

We're in the middle of this series called Spiritual Symmetry, and we take in the second half of the

summer and we're exploring what have been the habits,

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