Fasting

I'm not a very religious person (I just love God and have a relationship with Him) meaning I do not believe in doing rituals just for the sake of doing. I consider myself a very purposeful being so I need to know the reason for doing something. Throughout my life, I have participated in corporate fasts as well as individual fasts but recently I have been questioning the purpose of fasting and my motives for doing so. I've participated in partial fasts (excluding certain foods); absolute fasts (consume only water) and non food related fasts where I "fast" meaning abstain from something negative.  

Gregory Dickow has a powerful 40 day Fast from Wrong Thinking! This means that any thought that does not line up with God's Word should be rejected!  Another non-food related fast was avoiding anything that consumed too much of my time and did not yield produce results, this can include people, social networks, randoms, etc

I started doing my research and all my search results pointed me to a book by Jentezen Franklin. On Sunday night after my marathon trip to CT, I slept by Sybil, I glanced over at her bookshelf and the first book that caught my eye was Fasting by Jentezen Franklin! I scanned through her copy and the table of contents convinced me that it was something I needed to purchase. So I did. 

Can fasting simply be chalked up to not eating for a few days in exchange for something from God? If it were, wouldn't more people have results? Wouldn't that be a selfish, unbalanced, one-sided relationship? Join me on the journey to learning about a custom that plagues the Bible, if Jesus fasted, I definitely should!