Your Body Was Never The Enemy

He kneels to pray, and about ninety seconds in, his knee starts.

It is not a serious knee. It is the ordinary complaint of a man in his fifties who played too much football on hard ground when he was twenty. But it starts, and then he shifts, and then he is thinking about his knee instead of God, and then he is annoyed with himself for thinking about his knee.

That annoyance has a whole architecture behind it, and he has never once looked at it directly.

Somewhere along the line he picked up an idea. Nobody taught it to him from a pulpit in those words. It came in sideways, in phrases about the flesh, in the way people talk about wanting things, in a general sense he cannot source that the body is the slow, greedy, unspiritual part of a person that the real part has to drag along behind it.

So when he prays, he is trying to leave it out of the room. And when somebody says the word fasting to him, what he hears is not what the word means. He hears a chance to finally get the better of the thing.

That is where he was standing last week when a friend, meaning it kindly, said: this might be one to fast about.

He said he would think about it. And what stirred in him, honestly, was something a bit like appetite for a fight. Here at last was a way to put the body in its place.

If you have been praying against your own body for years without noticing, come and sit at the table a minute.

Where God actually put the body

Let us start with the sentence that undoes the architecture.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.Psalm 139:14

Read what he is praising God for. Not for rescuing him from his body. For the making of it.

That psalm has hands in it and eyes and a frame knit together in secret. The writer looks at the physical fact of himself, kidneys and bones and all of it, and calls it marvelous work, and the marvelous work is not a costume the soul is wearing until better arrangements can be made.

You are one person, and the whole of you is God's own work. I am not saying that to be pleasant to a man with a sore knee: it is what the psalm says out loud about the body it is written from (Psalm 139:14), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this paragraph, who turns it from a verse people read at baby dedications into something that changes what kneeling down feels like.

There is a real thing that Scripture calls the flesh, and it is worth being clear about it, because the confusion here does actual harm. That word does not mean your skin and your appetite and your tired shoulders. It means the whole self organized around itself and away from God, which is a matter of the will and not of the muscles. A person can be entirely fleshly with a spotless body and an empty plate.

So what is fasting, if it is not a war on yourself

Here is the honest answer, and it is a great deal smaller and warmer than the one that has been sitting under all this.

Fasting is not a punishment and it is not the soul finally getting the upper hand. It is not a payment, not leverage, and not the missing piece. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person turning toward God, hands and appetite and knee and all, rather than the tidy part of a person turning toward Him while the rest is held at arm's length.

Notice how that changes the direction of the thing. You are not being asked to defeat anything, and you were never at war with the material God made. Scripture is not shy about it, that the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body (1 Corinthians 6:13), and it is His Spirit who makes that a change in your posture rather than a point you would concede in a discussion.

And this page will not give you a plan. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to build up to and nothing to complete, because the moment there is a method there is a contest, and a contest is the very thing that got into your kneeling in the first place.

Now something said out in the open here 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 further from God because of what a doctor told you. 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 come in a smaller measure to anybody 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 going around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.

The hungers that are not food at all

Here is the part that makes this whole thing available to everybody reading, including the person who will never miss a meal in their life.

You are hungry all day, and not only for food, and every one of those hungers is somewhere God can be turned toward. The reach for the phone at the first quiet second. The hunger to be told you did well. The pull toward the argument you could win, the second look, the noise you put on so the house is not silent, the small pleasure at somebody else coming off badly. Scripture says a man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live option on an ordinary Tuesday rather than a fine sentiment.

Every one of those is an appetite, and every one of them is a place where the whole of you can turn toward God in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

You already have everything you need to pray with your whole self today. That is not a consolation prize handed to somebody whose doctor said no: the word says present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service (Romans 12:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary Tuesday the place where that actually happens.