Hi, and welcome to Jesus Over Everything, a five-day-a-week variety show that mixes encouragement,

the Bible, practical how-toes, and fantastic guests for the listener on the go. I'm Lisa Whittle,

and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

So I want to talk about something today that I think people find intriguing, especially in a new year, but also

know is an important spiritual practice, but either don't really understand it or are honestly

kind of intimidated by it, so it's nothing they've ever personally done. I want to take that

intimidation factor out of it in just five minutes. I know that's a lofty goal, but let's dive into

it for a few minutes today at least, so if you're's a lofty goal, but let's dive into it for a few minutes

today at least. So if you're ready, I'm ready, and let's go. You may have already figured

out what I'm talking about, and I'm talking about fasting today. Withholding something from ourselves

for a period of time,

typically either food or something that we find has distracted us away from God and we need to

detox from it and focus more on him. And this is really the thing about fasting. It's not meant to be a

diet plan. It's not even meant to be a way to break a habit and definitely not meant to be a way to show

some type of hyper-spirituality because that's what all the really serious Christians do. The purpose

behind fasting is to deplete yourself of something that you replace more of God with in order that

you might draw close to him, get to know him better, become more holy and

spiritually refined. You say, well, Lisa, do I even need to fast or why do I even need to fast as a

believer? Well, I would say, do you want to be more like Jesus? Do you believe you should

follow his example? And do you think you should follow the word? Because we know

from the word in Matthew that Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights. And we also know for Matthew that

he clearly expects us to fast at some point because of the language in the word. He doesn't say if,

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