God’s Chosen Fast by Arthur Wallis

Author:Arthur Wallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CLC Publishing

16

To Buffet the Body

I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. 1 Corinthians 9:27

There are those who are seemingly oblivious to their bondage to food and to the fact that there is here a leakage of spiritual power. They mistake the lust that enslaves them for a natural and healthy appetite. Others are aware but show no alarm that they are slaves of the stomach. The truth that Christian discipleship involves self-discipline in this realm has evidently not penetrated their conscience. Their desire and capacity for food is a big joke. “I can resist anything but temptation,” they say.

Many who have fasted would admit that it was the call of God to abstain that found them out. As Martin Luther, an inveterate faster, quaintly expressed it, “the flesh was wont to grumble dreadfully.”

In his biography of Rees Howells to which we have already referred, Norman Grubb records how God first dealt with His servant along this line:

It was at a time when he had a great burden for a certain convention, which was being disrupted by assaults of the enemy. The Lord called him to a day of prayer and fasting, which was something new to him. Used, as he was, to a comfortable home and four good meals a day, it came as a shock to realize that it meant no dinner, and he was agitating about it. And would it only happen once? Supposing God asked him to do it every day!

When midday came he was on his knees in his bedroom, but there was no prayer that next hour. “I didn’t know such a lust was in me,” he said afterwards. “My agitation was the proof of the grip it had on me. If the thing had no power over me, why did I argue about it?”

At one o’clock his mother called him, and he told her he wasn’t taking lunch. But she called again, as a mother would, and urged, “It won’t take you long to have it.” The goodly aroma from downstairs was too much for him, and down he came. But after the meal, when he returned to his room, he couldn’t get back into the presence of God. He came face to face with disobedience to the Holy Ghost.

“I felt I was like the man in the garden of Eden. I went up the mountain and walked miles, cursing that old man within me.” . . . He didn’t take dinner for many days after that, but spent the hour with God. As he said later, “The moment I got victory in it, it wasn’t a very big thing to do. . . . It is while you still want a thing that you can’t get your mind off it. When you have risen above it, He may give it back to you; but then you are out of it.”1

Where there is a failure to deal with this lust for food, the life is opened to attack along other lines.

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