Influencing God with Prayer & Fasting? - What does the Bible Say About That?

Should we fast — and does fasting somehow make God pay more attention to our prayers? Is it a way for God to test the sincerity of our petitions…and if so, are there wrong ways to pray and fast? But then, why even pray at all when God is sovereign? How can our petitions change His eternal decree about what will come to pass?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

And welcome friends to Generations Kevin Swanson with you today. Another segment of What Does the Bible Say About That? And Joshua Schuisso in studio with me today. He's our production manager for the Generations Ministry. And today we want to answer this question, partially because somebody asked the question about the importance of fasting, which is important and something that's been somewhat lost in American evangelical culture. I will say that I don't participate enough in fasting or prayer as I ought to. Prayer, and here's the real question: what does the Bible say about prayer and fasting as it impacts God, as it influences God? Is it possible to influence God? Is that right? Are we in any way influencing God's purposes, God's mind towards us, God's uh attitude and relationship towards us, and any other aspect of God's God's treatment of us? Will prayer and fasting affect the way in which God helps us to do this or that, to overcome an obstacle or what have you in our own lives? And that's the question here today. Um I think it was Leonard Ravenhill who said, preaching impacts men, prayer impacts God. Okay, so is that true? How can God be sovereign and prayer still have an impact on God? Before we get there, let's be sure that we address the import of prayer and the significance of fasting. What is it and why do we do it? It turns out it's all the way through scripture. So we do it because it's in scripture.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Prayer and fasting.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Both prayer and fasting. Now it's interesting, we're commanded to pray, but I'm not sure we're commanded to fast as we are commanded to pray without ceasing.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Yeah, there is some distinction there. I was reflecting on the fact that in the Old Testament, there's only one prescribed fast in the Old Testament ritual system, which was the Day of Atonement. Now, there were other occasions where God's people would fast. You think of Ezra and Nehemiah as they're returning from exile, they're repenting, they're seeking the Lord's grace and mercy. They weren't commanded to do it, but they did. Um, and similarly, we find throughout these scriptures that fasting is brought out on certain occasions. Jesus says, when you fast in Matthew 6, uh, but again, not nearly so many commands in terms of uh as compared with prayer, though they're both important.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Well, fasting is uh a way in which we express humility before God, Psalm 35, 13, I humbled my soul with fasting as well. Uh fasting is a way in which you know repentance is demonstrated amongst God's people, and in the case of Nineveh. Nineveh uh fasted, the people of Nineveh fasted and repented, and Jonah 3, 5 through 10, Joel chapter 2 as well refers to that.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, it says, return to me with weeping and fasting and mourning. Uh, and then it says towards the end that you know who knows whether the Lord will repent uh relent and bring a blessing to his people. And the it actually is a command of God there. It says, Now return to me, says the Lord, with weeping, fasting, and mourning.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

And then you also remember the prayer and fasting that the apostles did prior to sending out missionaries in Acts chapter 13. I think that's another great illustration, Josh, how we want to be uh careful when we lay hands on somebody, bringing a new elder into the church, for example, probably should be attended with some real concerted prayer and fasting. Yeah. So what are we doing? Gaining the attention of God? Are we, you know, is God more interested in our prayers? Are we increasing our own sense of focus in the prayer? Does that is that are we added uh something of a of an intensity to the prayer if we dedicate some time to fasting before uh we bring these petitions to God?

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah, there does seem to be uh an intensifying of earnest desire and seeking after God. We're also, I think, signaling uh through that action that our need for God is much greater than food. Right? We're saying, Lord, I need your help more than these other things. And we can wrongly view prayer or fasting if we think of it as some sort of meritorious act whereby we can uh make God more pleased by us intensifying things. Like, you know, Jesus, of course, warned against the repetitious prayers where they thought they would be heard by God because of their many petitions, right? That's that kind of stacking up prayer. And similarly, fasting could be wrongly done if it's not consistent with our heart. I think of Isaiah 58, where the Lord actually says, You're fasting, but that's not the fast I want, because you're fasting while you're fighting with people. You're fasting while you're doing unjust, wicked behavior. I want repentance, right? So, insofar as fasting is a true heart expression of actual repentance and seeking God, that's what the Lord is is calling for.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

And yet you find passages like James 5 where the fervent prayers of a righteous man avails much. So it does appear that the fervency and the hotness of prayer does uh provide something of a leverage, as it were. You know, it it apparently God pays more attention, as it were, when there's increased levels of sincerity, increased levels of fervency in the prayer to God.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

And uh Jesus gives us the parable of the um the unjust judge and the widow, right? The persistent widow, we sometimes call it. And the picture that Jesus gives us is the one that kept knocking. She kept asking, she kept insisting, as it were, and the prayer or the request was eventually granted in the in the parable, which would teach us by application that there are times where the Lord wants us to keep on knocking with uh intensity and fervency and and persistence in order to have that.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Last week I picked up a uh vagrant, uh young man who evidently didn't have a car and he needed some help. And so I talked to him for 20, 30 minutes, and uh in the conversation, you know, his problems showed up. We talked about his drunkenness, we talked about his sexual sin, things like this. And I said, Well, we're all sinners, you know, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but uh there's the grace of God that saves, and that we cry out to God and he saves us from our sins. And he said, Well, I have prayed to God, I have asked him to save me from my sins. I said, Well, have you ever run into somebody who's kind of faking it? You know? And he said, Oh, yeah. And I said, Well, you know, God's as concerned about that as we are, and certainly even more concerned, and he knows our hearts, he knows the sincerity of our hearts. It's possible you are not sincere and asking God to save you from your drunkenness. It could be you still like your drunkenness. Right. You still like your sexual sin. You don't really want him to save you from your sins. I said, Well, you know, at the end of the day, you need to keep praying, keep asking, keep knocking. If you're sincere, you're gonna cry out with come with increasing levels of sincerity, increasing levels of fervency, and at some point the door will open. God will give you the thing that you're asking for. Yeah. But he's testing the sincerity of your heart, he's testing your faith, you're he's he's pushing on you, he's pressing on you some.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

So I told him to keep praying. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad you had that interaction with him. That was a fascinating opportunity, wasn't it? Yes. Yeah, so so why pray? Why pray? We talked about why fast, but why would we pray? Yeah. Well, and there's a variety of uh simple answers we could give to that. The most simple that people will say is God told us to, God commanded us to, and that's actually a very good answer. But uh also we can add that this is a God-ordained means of bringing about his purposes in the world. Just like other things are a God-ordained means. You know, for example, in farming, um, you plant seeds and you till the ground and you take care of that crop as a God-ordained means to bring forth increase, which God must bless, though, if it's going to work. Similarly, prayer is a means of uh asking God to do things. And the scriptures teach us quite plainly that prayer does things. Uh, there's no doubt about that in terms of the efficacy of prayer and the needfulness of it.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Well, I think the first and foremost is that we are needy people. We we need we need help. We need help. We we need to be the beggars. Blessed are the beggars. Right. Uh we need to be those who are extending our hands to God. And if we're so proud and so self-sufficient and so confident in our own self and just do not want to humble ourselves before God, acknowledge ourselves to be beggars and so needy, needy needy before God, then you know, we're not gonna pray, and God's not gonna give us anything. In fact, uh James 4 speaks of that, says, you know, why why don't you why do you lust after all this stuff? And the answer was what?

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Well, he says, uh, you do not have because you do not ask. There's that, which is just saying, you're not even praying. You're not even asking. But then he also adds, but you do ask sometimes wrongly. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. So it's possible actually to pray wrongly if out of accord with the will of God, right? We're seeking the wrong things, we're asking God to give us things that we're gonna misuse on our own passions, and so the Lord says, not that. I'm gonna give you something else, or I'm not gonna answer that petition in that direct way. But fundamentally, James says, you don't have because you don't ask, you're not you're not seeking these things the right way.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Right. And the reason that people don't pray is that they're too proud to pray. Or they're unaware of their burdens. I think sometimes they're not even conscious of the fact that they have such needs, or there are needs around them, or there's spiritual needs in their family. Uh there are desperate needs all around us, and we need our children saved. Yeah. I mean, how how badly do you want your children in heaven when you get there? Well, I think there's a little bit of this pressing in. You know, I mean, that Syrophoenician woman that came to Jesus and asked that Jesus would take care of this, you know, demon and her daughter, Jesus kind of pushed her off a bit. You know, he didn't immediately answer. He said, Well, you know what? The the food's for the children, not for the dogs. And uh yet she's you know comes back and says, Yeah, but a few crumb crumbs for the table. I mean a dog that way. It would be very nice. Right. And uh and then Jesus relented and Jesus gave it to her. But I think he was testing her faith, her sincerity, her willingness to press in. Right. And and so prayer is an insistence. Prayer should be with some degree of persistence, and it should come with fervency and faith. Amen. And believing that God is good and God will answer our prayers in his time and his way.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Right. There's a confident hope that comes from knowing the God that you're speaking to. And that's why I think it's so important that our prayers include those kinds of things, you know, praise and adoration and awe of who God is. And that's why you find that in the prayers of Paul, right? He'll speaks of the the majesty of God even as he asks for these petitions.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Yeah. So, friends, we're asking the question today uh why pray when God is sovereign? And and do our prayers have an impact, an influence upon God? Um, and you read, I think, from the Jonah passage in which God relents. God relented. And so here, God relents, God turns, God shifts direction, God shifts in terms of his ways in which he interacts with these people, he's on a trajectory towards judgment, right? That was the trajectory that that history was was taking in the time of Jonah. Nineveh was right on the edge, brimstone and fire, this close. And so he, but God sends Jonah with a message, they repent, God relents. So, what's the deal with this? Does this compromise the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in that you know God purposes whatsoever comes to pass? But now, what's going on with this? Did he purpose that he was going to bring judgment? Absolutely, but it turned out they repented, and so he had to kind of step back on his eternal purposes, his decree, and then go a different direction in terms of his relation with these people in Nineveh. And of course, my answer is no to that. I I believe that God has a purpose, but God also has uh a shifting in the way he is is relating to these people.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

And and if you trace out that uh Nineveh situation, you think about the different means that God used. The thing that was uh given to Jonah was to go preach to the Ninevehes about the judgment that would come, which didn't technically in Jonah's proclamation seem to have any qualifications to it, right? In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown. It doesn't have any statements there of qualification. Um, but then that was one of the means to bring about their humility, their repentance, their fasting and prayer, and then the Lord relents, which was his intended purpose.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

So would it be accurate to say that the message was effectively this? If if Jonah had you know been very specific and careful about his language. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

And we might only have a summary in Jonah. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

We didn't get the whole message, but let's take the whole message into consideration. The message would have been, uh, hey, y'all, God's judgment is hanging over you. If you don't repent within 40 days, God's destroying this place. Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

And that would have been true if there had been no repentance.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

It would have been an if-then else.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yes, exactly. You believe. Uh yeah, and Jeremiah 18, you know, directly speaks to these scenarios where the Lord says, if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it. So his word's going out. I'm gonna he's declaring he's gonna do it. And if that nation concerning which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. I intended to do. And then verse nine actually does the reverse. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. So either one are you know, these scenarios, the response of the people to the word changes the dynamic from a human standpoint of the outcome.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

And yet you would still hold to the fact that God determined that he, you know, from all eternity, he he understood, he looked ahead, he saw what was going to happen, and he purposed that there would be no destruction of Nineveh during the time of the prophet Jonah. Yeah, yeah. You would have to delay until later on when Babylon would take out Assyria.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Yeah, there was an immutable council of God that was not going to change, but from the human standpoint, there's a sequence. For God, there's not this sequence of time where, you know, uh, step one, word of God is preached. Step two, people either repent or don't. Step three, what does God do in response? There's sequence for us as human beings, but not for God. He he sees all these things at once.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Let's answer the question in the practical sense. How does this keep us from falling into the trap of the hyper-Calvinist? Now, the hyper-Calvinist is the guy who's not going to follow through on discipling the nations, evangelizing, and bringing the good news to the nations, because he says God will save whoever he will save.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

And so whatever I do will not have an impact upon God's eternal decree in bringing about the salvation of these people. Therefore, I'm not going to evangelize. Now, there's the hyper-Calvinist farmer as well who does not plant seed and just waits for God to bring forth a harvest. Now, what happens to him? He doesn't get much of a harvest. I would guess most farmers would probably acknowledge, those listening would say, if you don't plant seeds, you're not going to get much of a harvest. Now, in God's good providence, he might send a crow overhead, the field, and the crow might poop poop poop a seed upon the field, and that corn seed might yield uh, you know, one corn plant. So he may actually yield a single corn plant in the providence of God, but not the bumper crop.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

That he was praying for. Yeah, he God had a particular way in which that would have might have might have been achieved.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

And what do we call that? That's the means that God has assigned to bring this about. Right. Right. So the hyper-Calvinist farmer doesn't plant a seed and just waits for God to bring forth a harvest. Well, the problem, as I see it, is this, and I'm going to summarize it this way: God is God because why? What makes God God? God is God because God is the ultimate authority. And God is the determinant of truth, of ethics, of what is right and wrong and what we should do, as well as reality, and that is what happens in his sphere of influence, which happens to be the entire universe. So God is God over all things, over entire universe, because God is the source of truth, the source of ethics, determining for all of us and telling us and having the right to command us as to to do this or that and not to do this over here. God determines what we are to do by his ethical authority over all of us, and God is over all of reality to the extent that he will determine what will happen over his reality. So God is sovereign over truth, ethics, and reality. Now, the hyper-Calvinist then sets the divine prerogative of ethical authority against the divine element of sovereign control over reality, submitting to the one while not submitting to the other, acknowledging that God is God in the area of reality while denying that God is God over the area of ethics and thereby not submitting to his ethical responsibilities to God. So the hyper-Calvinist farmer sets one divine prerogative against another divine prerogative instead of receiving both of them simultaneously. On the other hand, the biblical farmer submits to God's ethical authority, responsibly planting seeds in the springtime while submitting to God's sovereign control over reality by trusting God to supply the increase during the harvest time. Does that make sense? So in the springtime, he's faithful to his prerogative or to submitting to God's prerogative as ethical authority over him, to take dominion over the field, to work and to plant the seeds and do the things he's supposed to be doing, while at the same time submitting to God's prerogative as controlling the harvest at the other end and trusting that God will bring forth the increase. So same thing for for the pastor, same thing for the father and mother who plant the seeds, water the seeds, their faithful farmers in the lives of their children, you know, day by day, week by week, year by year, uh teaching them the word of God, discipling them over 18 years, and then they look to God for the harvest. You know, God brings forth the increase in their kids' lives. So God has assigned the means of planting corn seeds as his means that has been determined to yield a harvest, and yet he's still 100% in control of the harvest. Same thing applies to discipling our kids.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Yeah, absolutely, Kevin. It reminds me as we draw out this whole agricultural imagery that the apostle Paul uses that in 1 Corinthians 3, where he says, I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. But you notice that Paul did things, Apollos did things, but we're all resting in God's increase. Um, and so they bring that together beautifully.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Draw that into prayer. Draw that into prayer. How does it apply? Prayer is a means to accomplish something, much like farmers plant seeds to accomplish harvests. Yeah. What does prayer do?

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Yeah, well, I I've always been fascinated by this verse in Philippians 1. Uh, this is Paul is in prison, right? And he's writing to the Philippians, and in verse 19 of chapter 1, he says, For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance. And I love that verse because it the Spirit of Jesus Christ is usually a reference to the Holy Spirit. Uh, and then the prayers of God's people in Philippi and the Holy Spirit come together as a means to bring about Paul's deliverance. And he doesn't know whether it's deliverance through death and being with Jesus, or if it's deliverance and getting out of prison. But I just found that fascinating that wow, prayer is important, apparently. Paul is saying your prayers and the Holy Spirit will bring about this deliverance.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

So it is critical that we are in prayer.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

And prayer is a means of bringing about good things in our lives and our families and our churches. What good things do you want for your family and for your church?

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Why don't we pray? Why aren't we praying? Why don't we pray enough?

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I mean, our like you said earlier, our our lack of neediness, you know, Pastor H. B. Charles said the things that we don't pray for are the things we think we can handle on our own. Like we signal that we think we can handle it on our own by not praying. So there's that. There's also our lack of faith in the power of God, where we're not really believing that God can or will, perhaps will do these things, um, and uh perhaps even a lack of zeal for the kingdom, too, in terms of the vision that we should pray for. And I wonder if it's a lack of love. And a lack of love for others. Yeah, we don't pray for others because we pray for them. Yeah. Those are some of the reasons.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Well, may God wake us up to these things. I think prayer is also a means by which we uh express faith in God. It's one of the most important means by which we step out. We believe God is there, we believe He's there. rewarder of those who diligently seek him and therefore we diligently seek him in our prayer life. And that's so key for our for the Christian life. It is is key to our relationship with God. I mean it's talking to God. So we haven't talked about this very much, but there's a relational element to pray.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Okay, my friends, well today we answer the question why pray? And why pray if God is sovereign? I hope this has been helpful for you. And if there's a farmer listening, he understands this. Yeah. Because he does it every year.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Be helpful to make it all be farmers and the way that we do things, right? Have a farmer mentality.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

That's right. They tend to have a balanced perspective of things. Yeah. They absolutely realize that food does not come from Safeway at the grocery store. They they know, yeah, they plant seeds, but it's God who brings forth a harvest. They don't have control over all of the different things that you know could get in the way of a good harvest.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

But farmers work really, really hard they sure do to accomplish that.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Yeah exactly. So be a good farmer my friends. I think that's the solution or the final conclusion to this program. Well today we've been talking what does the Bible say about that? If you've got additional questions please email them to mail at generations.org. And this is Kevin Swanson as well, Joshua Suiso, inviting you back again next time as we continue to lay down a vision for the next generation This has been a production of the Generations Media Network. For more information go to generations.org slash media