When our pastor called our church body to a five-day fast last month, I heard God say clearly: you are doing this, and you will finish. I had never completed a water only fast before. I did do the Daniel Fast several years back, but that was the extent of my fasting experience. Every other solo attempt had failed. But something was different this time; we were doing it as a corporate body. When God speaks that clearly, you don’t negotiate. You obey. And I had my church family right there with me.
What I expected was five days of misery. What I got was the most productive, clear-headed, spiritually explosive week of my life.
I didn’t white-knuckle through it. I thrived in it. I delivered webinars with more fire and clarity than I’d had in months. I signed new authors. I closed deals. I made decisions with a sharpness I hadn’t felt in years. And on day three — empty stomach, nothing but water for seventy-two hours — I picked up Arthur Wallis’s God’s Chosen Fast and cried my eyes out. Not from weakness. From breakthrough. When your body is stripped of every comfort and distraction, your spirit is wide open. There’s nothing left between you and God.
I experienced the opposite of somber. And that matters, because Jesus had something to say about this. In Matthew 6, He called out the hypocrites who disfigure their faces to show others they’re fasting — performing their suffering for an audience. The religious world has turned fasting into something grim. God designed it as a gift. Wallis understood that. And now I’ve lived it. I couldn’t believe I had not pursued fasting earlier in my life!
During that fast, Wallis shattered everything I thought I knew about this discipline. His book — written nearly sixty years ago — is a sledgehammer that smashes through spiritual warfare beyond prayer and reading God’s Word alone. He reveals fasting as the third discipline, the one most believers neglect because it costs us the thing we love most.
And here’s what stopped me cold: the lust of food sits at the root of so much biblical failure. Think about it. In the Garden of Eden, the Fall of all mankind came through food. Esau sold his birthright — his destiny, his inheritance, his future — for a cup of soup. And when God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and rained manna from heaven every single day, what did they do? They whined that the food was better in bondage. God was literally feeding them from His own hand, and they longed for the dinner table of their slave masters.
The pattern is undeniable. From Genesis forward, the enemy has used our appetites to destroy us.
And now I truly understand the meaning of mind over matter. Through that five-day fast, I got a tiny glimpse of what Moses and Christ experienced when they fasted for forty days. Let’s face it — if you are on your knees wrestling with a decision, fasting is the nuclear warhead to punch through into heaven’s throne room.
When people asked if I was getting weak, I laughed. As Wallis puts it, God has equipped the human body with its own “built-in pantry.” On day four of no food, I can confirm: the pantry is real and well-stocked!
But here’s where this becomes a leadership principle — and one of the most brilliant I’ve ever encountered. Leaders purge their souls with retreats, quiet times, prayer, and journaling. We depart from the noise to strip away the externals and go deep. Fasting is the purging of the body.
Wallis points out that the body, mind, and spirit are in a constant state of either assimilation or elimination. That’s why we must protect what goes into our bodies, just as we protect what goes into our minds and hearts. As Wallis writes, “The purging of the soul is reflected in the purging of the body. The deposits of surplus fat, the waste material and the decaying tissues are being digested and eliminated. Because there is no new intake of food, the body can no longer engage in the work of assimilation; it therefore concentrates on the work of elimination.”
Read that again. When there is no new intake, the body stops building and starts cleaning. It purges the waste. It eliminates what doesn’t belong.
That’s not just biology. That’s leadership.
How much of what we consume — information, entertainment, food, noise — is surplus fat? How much is waste material? How much is decaying tissue we’ve been carrying for years because we never stopped long enough to let our bodies, minds, and spirits do the work of elimination? And it’s not just what we consume — it’s what we tolerate. The toxic gossip at work. The unmotivated and contentious employees or coworkers. The relationships that drain instead of build. These are the deposits of waste in our professional lives, and they need to be purged with the same discipline we bring to our bodies.
My father, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, used to say, “Don’t just read to learn, read sometimes to unlearn.” That’s a mental purge. Fasting is the physical one. And repentance is the spiritual one. Body, mind, and soul — all three need the same discipline: stop taking in, and start clearing out.
Just like reading crappy books or watching trash ruins our brains, let’s not dig our early graves with a knife and fork.
It is spring. We prune the garden. We purge the closets. And it is the Easter season — the most sacred time on the Christian calendar — where we focus on the sacrifice Christ made for us. There is no better time to take inventory of what we’ve been consuming and ask ourselves: is this building me up, or is it waste I’ve been too busy to eliminate?
Get this book. Incorporate fasting into your life. And protect the temple of the body. The world needs you to finish the race strong — not just mentally or financially, but physically.
God’s Chosen Fast by Arthur Wallis. Written nearly sixty years ago. It has lost nothing. If anything, our overfed, overstimulated generation needs Wallis more than his own did.
Tremendous.
