You Offered Him The Thing You Love Most

She made the offer on a Tuesday, walking, with headphones in and no music playing.

That is the small strange detail she remembers. She had put the headphones in so nobody would talk to her, and she had not bothered with the music, and she was going past the same row of shops she goes past every day, and she said it in her head as clearly as if she had said it out loud.

God, if You do this, I will give up the singing.

The singing is the thing. It has been the thing since she was six. It is the reason she is in that building on a Sunday and the reason she is on a stage on a Thursday and the reason she is, most days, a recognizable version of herself. And she offered it up like a piece of collateral, walking past a phone shop, to a God she has known most of her life.

She has been strange with Him ever since. She could not have named it for weeks. Then one night she worked out what it was: she is afraid He might take her up on it, and she is more afraid of what it says about her that she is afraid.

She has prayed the ordinary way as well. Loudly, in a room with a hundred other people. Quietly, in the car. She has prayed the prayers with all the good words in them, and she has prayed the short ones that are really just please, over and over.

And on Sunday somebody who loves her, who has never once done her any harm, said: have you thought about fasting for it?

She said she would pray about it. She has thought about very little else. And what came up in her, standing there with a cup of squash somebody had handed her, was not hope. It was familiarity. Here was another thing she could put down as security.

If you have offered God something you would hate to lose, come and sit down here a while.

There is no shame in that Tuesday

Let us clear the ground first, because it needs clearing before anything else can be built on it.

There is nothing disgraceful about what you offered walking past those shops. Hannah offered. Jacob offered with a stone under his head. It is what love does when it has exhausted everything it can actually control, and it comes up from the same place as the best praying you have ever done.

You are not in trouble for it, and you were never once assessed on the phrasing. That is not a kindness said to a woman with a paper cup in her hand. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit read what was really happening on that pavement, which was not a negotiation. It was somebody who had run out of things to try.

So there is no telling off coming. There is something better, and it starts with what has already been handed over, by Him, without anybody asking.

Look who moved first, and how far

There is a sentence in Romans that settles the direction of the traffic between you and God for good.

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?Romans 8:32

Take the two halves in order. First what He has already done, which is the largest thing there is. Then the argument Paul builds out of it, which runs from the greater to the lesser and leaves no room to stand anywhere else.

It is not a promise that you get whatever you name. It is a statement about the character of the One being dealt with. A God who has already given at that scale, unasked, is not a God who is standing behind a counter waiting for you to produce something before He becomes generous.

You are dealing with the most generous being in existence, and you have been trying to buy from Him. I am not putting that sharply to make you feel foolish: it is exactly the argument the verse itself makes (Romans 8:32), and it is His Spirit, not this paragraph, who takes it from a line you have heard preached into something that changes what a Tuesday walk feels like.

So what is fasting for, then

Here is the honest answer, and it is much smaller than the one that has been circling you.

Fasting is not a payment and it is not security and it is not collateral. It is not the missing piece and it is not a stronger version of what you offered on that pavement. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and walks with silent headphones in, turning toward God with empty hands.

And here is the trap laid for somebody like you, so let us name it. Do not let it become the next thing on the table. A person who has been trading will reach for whatever is nearest: sincerity, effort, intensity, a purer motive, a better week. You are not asked for any of them, and not one of them was ever the currency. Scripture says it is not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:9), and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief in the body rather than a doctrine in the head.

Now something said here in the open rather than in a footnote. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because a doctor said no. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once arrived in a smaller measure in anybody's life on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a way around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.