Pastor Kim is going to teach you how to fast.
Luke 18:1:“And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.”
That is important when you are praying. You should not be fainting.
Now go to the book of Mark 8. This is the problem with people. It is good that you want to fast and pray, but you are going to make a big mistake where you actually go off the deep end and then say, “I’m going to do it forty days and forty nights like Moses did.” Actually, that is not what God wants. God does not want you to faint when you are fasting.
Mark 8:2-3: “I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat: And if I send them away fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way: for divers of them came from far.”
Jesus is not against people who fast to a point where they faint. That is why in verse 2 He wanted to give them something to eat.
Remember, men always ought to pray and not faint. If you faint when you pray, then the prayer does not work. As a matter of fact, if we are going to talk health-wise, nutritionally speaking, when you start off fasting you are going to experience a little bit of dizziness. Then you lose lack of concentration and focus. It is important that you do not fast so much to a point where you faint.
Take Care of Your Health
When you do fasting, it is important that you actually research yourself. Pastor Kim could probably give you some health tips, but the best person who knows better about your body is actually you because you know how you feel, you know how you focus, and you know how you think. The best advice is that you take care of your own health yourself.
God does not want it when you hurt your own health when you fast, because your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. You are supposed to take good care of the body.
Acts 27:9: “Now when much time was spent, and when sailing was now dangerous, because the fast was now already past, Paul admonished them,”
These people were observing some fast ordinance, and because of that, when they were sailing, they were going to hit a storm. It became a dangerous point because their health was in danger. They did not have the health to fight through the storm.
Acts 27:33-34: “And while the day was coming on, Paul besought them all to take meat, saying, This day is the fourteenth day that ye have tarried and continued fasting, having taken nothing. Wherefore I pray you to take some meat: for this is for your health: for there shall not an hair fall from the head of any of you.”
Research online on how to fast, and there will be tips on how to fast and how to take it gradually, step by step. Pastor Kim knows you want to be a prayer warrior and say, “I fasted for forty days and forty nights like the Lord Jesus Christ,” which is unrealistic because Moses and Jesus did it through the supernatural power of God. Realistically, you cannot survive without water for three days.
How to Begin Fasting
Fasting is not where you die of thirst. You should be drinking a lot of liquid during your fasting. Fasting can come down to a point where you do it without food and water, but you can only do it for an extended long period of time when you gradually reach that more and more, when you get used to it more and more. Actually, you should be drinking a lot of water during your fasting, and you should eat selected portions when you start out.
Daniel 10:2-3: “In those days I Daniel was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled.”
Notice what Daniel did in fasting. He ate no pleasant bread. Neither came flesh nor wine into his mouth. It never said water, and it never said fruits and vegetables. It was talking about more solid substances of food. That is fasting. In fasting, how it goes is by selected meals, so it is a selected diet.
You have to look at your diet and select it. Start it out that way. In time, you can do it more and more. There are people who accomplish thirty to forty days. There are some people who did that.
Start With Short Periods
To do fasting, start out as small, short amounts. You do not have to do it for a couple of days. Start it in short amounts and then increase it. You might say, “Is that properly fasting?” Yes.
Short duration, short periods, are counted as fasting to the Lord. Did you know your pastor fasts a lot? Yes, Pastor Kim fasts often, but it is not where you think he is such a prayer warrior because he fasted for a couple of days and weeks.
Judges 20:26: “Then all the children of Israel, and all the people, went up, and came unto the house of God, and wept, and sat there before the LORD, and fasted that day until even, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the LORD.”
Notice that they fasted until even. Fasting can go for short periods of time. Start out that way. That is how you can properly fast. Then you can increase it more and more. Then you can act like a Pharisee amongst the church and say, “I fasted fifty times throughout my life,” or, “I fasted hundreds of times throughout my life.”
The Pharisees and a Routine of Fasting
Pharisees are actually acknowledged by Jesus Christ to be some of the most righteous people, but they turned out to be the most prideful, arrogant, and hypocritical people that Jesus realized. However, Jesus recognized that they were a role model in righteous standards and practices. Notice this example. Pharisees even knew that following the most righteous example involved a routine throughout a week.
You can have a fasting routine. It is not like you champion out for the Lord for several days. Go by a routine, like twice a week.
Luke 18:12: “I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.”
Why would he brag about that if fasting twice in the week is not really a big deal? So it is a big deal.
God is not looking for some type of Moses coming out of Mount Sinai or Jesus coming out of the wilderness forty days and forty nights without food and water. You die. They only survived that way because they had the supernatural power of God.
Now we go by a routine.
Be Careful of Wrong Teaching
Leonard Ravenhill, God bless his heart, was given as a primary example on prayer, which Pastor Kim highly recommends you listen to. But because people get so infatuated with this prayer routine, he gave an example of a man who prayed so hard that the floor beneath him actually bent beneath his knees. Pastor Kim compliments that and says, “That is a blessing.” But the man prayed so long, where the floor bent beneath his knees, that he died there. That is not something where the Lord sees it as the height of spiritual epitome.
Fasting twice in the week is considered pretty good to the Lord. Do not think that you are so deep in your prayer life. Some people can get so deep devotionally, so deep into the prayer topic, that they nevertheless teach something wrong.
You have to realize, like Pastor Kim has told you a long time ago in videos, that unless you are a Bible-believing Christian attending a Bible-believing church, knowing King James dispensational truth and attending with these kinds of people, you will not know as properly, and you can fall less prone to errors.
Have a fast routine, and the Lord will bless it.
Do Not Satisfy the Flesh After Fasting
Psalm 109:24: “My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness.”
Do not satisfy the flesh. What does Pastor Kim mean by that?
After you finish fasting and praying, the tendency is to go for a nice big pizza and chocolate and ice cream and dessert. Actually, some Christians and some people who practice fasting recommend that. That is not what you want to do because then you bloat up your stomach and your health.
Here you are at a spiritual plane and height that you have accomplished by diminishing the feast of the flesh. But what did you do when you bloated your flesh up again? What happened to that spiritual height? That is so important. You do not want to go back into that. After you finish fasting, you should not simply say, “Okay,” and return to satisfying the flesh.
Even people who practice fasting, secular lost people who do it in a physical, fleshly manner, know that they cannot just go back to eating fatty food immediately afterward.
In Psalm 109:24, fasting is where the flesh fails. When you finish fasting, obviously it is not that you do not eat anymore or drink anymore. Just go back to your normal routine.
Do Not Replace Food With Other Fleshly Things
Here is another thing.
When you are trying to fast and pray, people make it up with not just fleshly food to make up for it. They will do fleshly things to make up for fasting. Maybe watching a lot of television, getting on social media a lot, or, God forbid, some people get into drugs. Secular music, going outdoors with people and fellows, trying to make up with social gathering, and stuff like that are all ways of feeding the flesh. So you do not feed your flesh.
Just go back to a normal routine.
This is not college where you put all your hard work and effort into an exam, and once the exam is over you are going to party, eat a lot of food, and hang out with your buddies. You are just going back to a normal routine. Gradually build it up.
Fasting and Marriage
In the book of Exodus, when God was going to meet the people and talk to them—remember, prayer is like talking with God—when God was going to communicate face to face with them, He told the husbands not to sleep with their wives. He told them to abstain. Why?
So that the communication could be holy with Him.
It is true that God says the marriage bed is undefiled and holy, but that is between you and your spouse. That is the privacy of the two of you. But then when you come before God, when it is a relationship between you and God, especially when you communicate with other people, obviously they do not want to know what you did the day before with your loving spouse. There is something, to be honest, that is unclean about it. When you communicate with the Father, He wants that actually separated.
Do not let the devil distract you.
1 Corinthians 7:4-5: “The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.”
This is speaking in the context of the husband and wife together.
1 Corinthians 7: 4-5 says that a man and a wife should have a relationship with each other. Do not defraud the marriage bed from each other. You should be together. However, when it comes to fasting and prayer, God says that is the exception. You get away from that in fasting and prayer. Basically, the marriage bed—abstain, abstinence.
If some of you are already single, then that is not a problem for you. If you are single, you can practice this. But if you are married, here is the thing: if you are going to practice fasting and prayer, some preachers may not know this, and some Bible believers do not know this.
Pastor Kim is not going to say this is 100% doctrine, that if a man does not sleep on the couch in the living room that night when he fasts and prays, then God is not answering that prayer. He is not going to teach it that way. But if Pastor Kim is going to come to his own preference and conviction, he thinks that is the case.
So, if you are a Bible-believing preacher or even a Bible-believing person and you are married, that is something you might want to think about, where you might have to sleep in separate rooms. If Pastor Kim is going to fast and pray, if he fasts and prays, he is going to practice that.