Tim Chester on Fasting

When we in the western world have emotional needs many of us turn to food for refuge. We self-medicate with food. The result is ill-health and weight gain. The result is an over-consumption of the world?s resources that contributes to the hunger of other people. And every time we miss the opportunity to turn to God. We don?t live by bread alone. We need God in our lives so that life without God is an empty life. And we cannot fill that emptiness with food. Fasting helps re-oriente us away from self-medication through food towards finding refuge in God. We particularly we turn to foods high in sugar, salt and fat. These consitute our comfort foods. We find comfort in sugar, salt and fat. Sugar, salt and fat instead of the living God. We must be mad! Fasting helps restore our sanity.

Jonathon Edwards on Holy Spirit

The state of the times extremely requires a fullness of the divine Spirit in ministers, and we ought to give ourselves no rest till we have obtained it. And in order to do this, I think ministers, above all persons, ought to be much in secret prayer and fasting.

John Piper on Fasting

One of the great effects of fasting is that it assists what it expresses. I mean that fasting is mainly an expression of the soul's hunger for God. It is not a contrived means to make us love God. We love him and long for him. And then fasting rises up as a way of saying earnestly with our whole body what our hearts feel: I hunger for you, O God!
AHFG p89-90

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Discipline

We claim liberty from all legal compulsion... and play this off against the proper evangelical use of discipline and asceticism; we thus excuse our self-indulgence and irregularity in prayer, in meditation, and in our bodily life. But the contrast between our behaviour and the word of Jesus is all too painfully evident. We forget that discipleship means estrangement from the world, and we forget the real joy and freedom which are the outcome of a devout rule of life.
COD p189

John Piper on Desires

Desires for other things - there's the enemy. And the only weapon that will triumph is a deeper hunger for God. The weakness of our hunger for God is not because he is unsavoury, but because we keep ourselves stuffed with 'other things'. Perhaps, then, the denial of our stomach's appetite for food might express, or even increase, our soul's appetite for God.
AHFG p10

John Piper on Fasting

Fasting poses the question: do we miss him? How hungry are we for him to come? The almost universal absence of regular fasting for the Lord’s return is a witness to our satisfaction with the presence of the world and the absence of the Lord. This is not the way it should be. In Luke 18:7–8 Jesus says, “Shall not God bring about justice for His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them?”
. . .This is what is missing in the comfortable Christian Church of the modern world. Where in the West do Christians cry to Christ day and night that he would come and bring about justice for his elect? Where is there that kind of longing and aching for the consummation of the kingdom? It is no surprise then, that the question of fasting for the coming of the Bridegroom is scarcely asked. If the cry itself is not there, why would one even think of expressing it with fasting?