Many times, people react to the idea of fasting a meal: “I can’t do that!”  Their reactions are often even stronger when it is suggested that they fast for an extended period of time.  While fasting in the most traditional sense, and the sense in which it is used in Scripture, always involves missing meals, there are other ways to fast. 

There are, however, a few good guidelines for what makes a good (non-food) fast. 

First of all, fasting is a discipline of abstinence, undertaken for a period of time.  It is often coupled with prayer, since abstaining from an activity or from a certain dietary item should give us more time to engage in other spiritual disciplines. 

Several categories of activities fall into good fasting techniques.  If we are seeking to share in Christ’s self-emptying, we should consider fasting from some luxury item or activity.  While all our advertisements invite us to indulge, we will refrain.  Luxury items could be food-related, such as fine wine, sweets, snacks or meat.  Other luxuries could be certain forms of entertainment with which we are blessed.  Driving our car to work may be a luxury if we could just as well walk or ride the bus.  Luxury items might be the little “extras” upon which we spend money.

We might also consider fasting from things that distract us from our life with God – things that may be “indifferent” activities (those that neither harm nor help our relationship with God).  In our Western media-saturated culture, we could consider turning off the television, cell phone or radio, reducing Internet usage, or otherwise reducing our dependence on entertainment.  These are the things that consume much of our time, while being of only marginal benefit to us. 

Fasting also engages in abstinence from something we genuinely need, but can do without for a time, for the sake of drawing closer to God.  Clearly, food falls into this category, which is why it is so basic to fasting.  It is important, however, to make sure whatever we are fasting in this regard is not going to cause us long-term harm by being set aside for a time. 

Fasting can also be a process of controlling the boundaries of certain activities, such as work, sleep, or recreation, that often spill out into other areas of life.  Fasting in this regard leaves the laptop at work, the files at the office, the phone on silent mode.  For certain periods of the day, we leave those things behind to be focused on something else.  This, too, is a fast, which can help us see the appropriate boundaries we need to draw day in and day out. 

Finally, abstaining from activities we should not already be doing is not fasting.  That’s merely obedience.  Forty days of abstinence from hitting on that married woman at work isn’t fasting, that’s merely obeying God’s word.  Abstaining from speeding on the highway for 40 days would also fall into this category.  If we’re on a medically restrictive diet that we’ve been cheating on and we decide to stick with it for 40 days, that’s health and obedience, not fasting.  Calling this kind of behavior fasting is really self-deceptive and over-spiritualizes activities that God has already called us to.

As should be clear by now, fasting can incorporate a variety of approaches.  Fasting can teach us abstinence from sin and give us strength to believe that God provides for all our needs.  What ideas have you come up with?