Moses ascended Mount Sinai to experience the presence of God.  For forty days and forty nights he deprived himself from the basic necessities of this world in order to find the nourishment and nutrition he so desperately needed from another world.  In short, that is the essence of fasting- starving our flesh, while God feeds our faith.

We hear very little of the subject these days; and that’s not really a shock.  We are so enamored with self-promotion, self-fulfillment, and self-advancement that we give very little thought to self-denial.  We have traded the cross-centered life for the consumer-centered cross.  The …