The Fast That Comes Back

At twenty to six the kitchen is the only lit room in the house, and he is standing at the counter with the calendar off the refrigerator in his hand.

Water in a glass. The stove clock. His daughter's cereal bowl left out from last night, and a heel of bread in the bag that he has looked at four times in ten minutes. Day four. He knows day four the way a man knows a road he drives every week. Days one and two are a headache and a short temper. Somewhere in three, something clears, and the house gets quiet inside him, and he can pray again without arguing. Four is the good one. Four is close.

He has done this eleven times in six years, and every one started the same way, which is that the doubt came. Not a crisis. Nothing anybody would notice. Just the flat, quiet suspicion, usually on a Tuesday, that all of it happened to other people and not to him. And every time it comes he stops eating, because that is the one thing he knows how to do about it.

That is not the trouble this morning. The trouble is the calendar in his hand.

He put small marks on it, out of habit, the way he marks oil changes. And standing there at twenty to six he has counted them backward, and there is a pattern in it he cannot unsee. He fasts, and it clears. He eats, and for a week it holds. And then, on day nine or day ten, it comes back. Not sometimes. Every time. The doubt comes back on the same schedule as the food.

He puts the calendar face down on the counter, which does not help.

You know the calendar. Yours might be a reading plan you restart every January, or a stretch of five in the morning starts, or a month with the phone in a drawer, or a purge of everything in the house that ever pulled at you. And you know the arithmetic nobody has ever said out loud to you, which is that the thing you have been doing to make it real has a shelf life, and you have started to be able to read the date on it.

Touch not, taste not, handle not

Put the glass down and come sit at the table, because Paul wrote a letter about exactly what is in your hand, and he wrote it to people who were sincere.

Colossae had teachers coming through with additions. Not sin, not idols, not scandal. Rules. Extra ones. Do not touch that, do not taste that, do not handle that. Sincere men, serious about holiness, adding requirements out of what looked to everybody like devotion. And Paul takes the whole apparatus apart in four verses.

Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, touch not; taste not; handle not; which all are to perish with the using; after the commandments and doctrines of men? Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh.Colossians 2:20-23

Hear the exact charge, because he is careful and I want to be careful too. He does not call the practices filth. He does not call the men who taught them frauds. He says they have a show of wisdom, which is an admission that they look right, and then he names the one thing they do not have, and the one thing is power. Severe treatment of the body has an appearance of wisdom and no actual force against the thing it was aimed at.

You are not being scolded for eleven fasts, and there is not one word of contempt anywhere in that passage for a man who was trying. That is Colossians 2 read as it stands, and it is the Spirit who takes a letter written to a small city under pressure and sets it down on a kitchen counter at twenty to six.

What Paul is doing is taking a load off a shoulder that was never built to carry it. He is not saying you did wrong. He is saying the thing cannot bear what you hung on it, and the proof is on your refrigerator, in pencil, in your own handwriting.

Nobody was ever born by trying

Now let me put the actual mechanism in front of you, because it is in the first chapter of John and it is unusually blunt.

Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13

Three denials in a row, and each one closes a different door. Not of blood, so it does not come down a family line. Not of the will of the flesh, which is the body doing everything it can do, and there is nothing the body can do harder than go without food. Not of the will of man, which is decision and resolve and gritted teeth, the thing carried to that counter at twenty to six. Every human input is named and ruled out, and then one source is given, and it is God.

You are looking at a birth that is not of blood, not of the will of the flesh and not of the will of man, and that list was written down to close the exact door you have been knocking on. John 1 says it in one verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who moved John to write three denials instead of one, because He knew somebody would try the third door at five in the morning.

And Paul asks the same thing of the Galatians, in a sentence that has a shake in it.

Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?Galatians 3:3

Begun in the Spirit. Being finished by the flesh. That is the shape of what is happening in your kitchen, and Paul does not call those people unbelievers for it. He calls them foolish, which is what you call somebody you love who has picked up a load that is not theirs.

You were never the one doing this, and Scripture says so in the same breath it says who was. The word gives the source plainly, and it is His Spirit who begins that work and His Spirit who carries it, and neither half of it was ever waiting on a fourth day.

Then why did the Lord assume you would fast

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because I am not going to hand you a relief that empties your life out.

Jesus did not say if you fast. He said when.

Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret.Matthew 6:16-18

When, not if. He assumes it. He fasted Himself. So fasting is not the problem in your kitchen and I will not let you walk out of here believing it is, because the day after you decide fasting is nothing, you will have lost something real.

Look at what He attaches it to. Your Father, who is in secret. Not a result. Not a certainty you can carry out of the room. A Person, and time with Him, unobserved. Fasting in that sentence is a way of being with your Father. It is not a lever and it was never a payment, and the difference between the two is not what you do with your mouth. It is what you expect to be handed at the end of it.

You have a Father who wants you in the room and has never once put a price on the door. That is Matthew 6 as He gave it, and the Spirit of adoption, Paul says in Romans 8, is not the spirit of bondage again to fear, which means the fear you have been managing every ninth day is not coming from Him.

So keep the fast if it is His. You will know the difference by what is attached to it. One of them is company. The other one has a bill on it, and you can feel the bill, and the bill is the part I am asking you to set down.