Joel 2:11,12; Daniel 9:3-6,19
The day of the Lord is very terrible; and who can abide it? Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning.
I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes: and I prayed unto the LORD my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love him, and to them that keep his commandments; we have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments: Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets, which spake in thy name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land…O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee. To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him…O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not, for thine own sake, O my God: for thy city and thy people are called by thy name
WILLIAM S. PLUMER (1802-1880): To prayer it is often proper to add fasting…In every age pious men have united fasting and prayer in times of distress.
MATTHEW HENRY (1662-1714): Fasting is of use to put an edge upon prayer; it is an evidence and instance of humiliation which is necessary in prayer, and is a means of mortifying some corrupt habits, and of disposing the body to serve the soul in prayer. Their fasting was to express their humiliation―and it signified the mortifying of sin and turning from it, “loosing the bands of wickedness,” Isaiah 58:6,7.
JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564): With respect to sackcloth and fasting―those who lived in ancient times resorted to these exercises when any urgent necessity pressed upon them. In the time of public calamity or danger they all put on sackcloth, and gave themselves to fasting, that by humbling themselves before God, and acknowledging their guilt, they might appease His wrath…Although we may reckon the wearing of sackcloth and sitting in ashes among the number of the legal ceremonies, yet the exercise of fasting remains in force amongst us at this day as well.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES (1899-1981): For Evangelicals, this whole question of fasting has almost disappeared from our lives and even out of the field of our consideration. How often and to what extent have we thought about it? I suggest that the truth probably is that we have very rarely thought of it at all. I wonder whether we have ever fasted?
CHARLES SIMEON (1759-1836): Many there are, it is to be feared, who―instead of “fasting twice a week,” have never fasted twice, nor even once, in their whole lives, for the purpose of devoting themselves more solemnly to God…Fasting is grievously neglected amongst us; and all are ready to excuse themselves from it, as unprofitable to their souls―The truth is, that we are as far from observing those other duties, of “weeping and mourning,” as we are that of fasting: and hence it is that fasting is so little in request amongst us.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: Has it even occurred to us that we ought to be considering the question of fasting?
CHARLES SIMEON: Our Lord indeed intimated, that there would arise occasions which would call for solemn fasts; and He gave directions for the acceptable observance of them. Note Matthew 6:16―“When ye fast.”
LANCELOT ANDREWES (1555-1626): This very “when” shows Christ’s liking of it, that there is a time allowed for it, else He would allow it no “when”―no time at all.
JOHN CALVIN: Fasting is a subordinate aid, which is pleasing to God no farther than as it aids the earnestness and fervency of prayer.
CHARLES SIMEON: But why should it not be as profitable to us as it was to the saints of old?
SAMUEL MILLER (1769-1850): We have no less reason for fasting and humiliation than our fathers of former ages. Let us not imagine that there was some special character either in the men or the events of ancient times which rendered the exercise in question more needful to them than to us. It is to be considered as an occasional, or perhaps, more properly speaking, a special duty, which, like seasons of special prayer, ought to be regulated, as to its frequency and manner of observance, by the circumstances in which we are placed.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): Why, at this moment we have sin rampant among us almost beyond precedent!
SAMUEL MILLER: Think of the abounding atheism and various forms of infidelity, the pride, the degrading intemperance, the profanations of the Sabbath, the fraud, the gross impiety, the neglect and contempt of the gospel, and all the numberless forms of enormous moral corruption which even in the most favoured parts of our country prevail in a deplorable degree.
JOHN ANGELL JAMES (1785-1869): There have been times when some one object has seized with a more absorbing power, and a more giant grasp, the intellect of the nation; such as a season of the prevalence of the plague, or other forms of pestilence.
JOHN CALVIN: Pestilence, and other scourges of God, do not visit men by chance, but are directed by His hand.
JOHN GILL (1697-1771): This being one of His sore judgments―judgments upon a wicked world.
CHARLES SIMEON: But we must remember that there is a moral “pestilence” raging all around us, and sweeping myriads into the pit of destruction.
JOHN CALVIN: When God, therefore, calls us to repentance, by showing us signs of His displeasure, let us bear in mind that we ought not only to pray to Him after the ordinary manner, but also to employ such means as are fitted to promote our humility.
MATTHEW POOLE (1624-1679): Deep afflictions call for deep and solemn humiliation.
JOHN ANGELL JAMES: Have our senators before they have gone to the place of legislation, and our councillors and aldermen, before they have entered the civic hall, fortified themselves by fasting and prayer, with the spirit of piety?
ALEXANDER MacLAREN (1826-1910): What would you think of a man that had a specific for some pestilence that was raging in a city, and was contented to keep it for his own use, or at most for his family’s use, when his brethren were dying by the thousand?
HENRY FOSTER (1760-1844): The times are awful. In such times Scripture characters fasted and prayed. The old Puritans did so.
JOHN WESLEY (1703-1791): Have you any days of fasting and prayer?
HENRY FOSTER: I have not. Yet I think we ought to.
C. H. SPURGEON: Be awake, Christian, and be aware of God’s design, for the trumpet is sounding, and when the trumpet sounds the Christian must not slumber.
JOHN TRAPP (1601-1699): They that fast not on earth, when God calls to it, shall be fed with gall and wormwood in hell―they that mourn in a time of sinning, shall be marked in a time of punishing―and as they have sought the Lord with fasting, Ezekiel 9:4-6, so shall He yet again “be sought and found” of such with “holy feasting,” Zechariah 8:19, as He hath promised, and performed to His people in all ages of the Church.
