When God is the supreme hunger of your heart, He will be supreme in everything

books:

	• A Hunger for God: Desiring God through Fasting and Prayer John Piper Crossway Books, 1997 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Instructive and Inspiring

As a Christian, I have a difficult time desiring to fast and then successfully fasting after deciding to do it. John Piper's book has been helpful on both counts. He shows readers why to fast and helps to create a desire to seek God and seek God's will through fasting and prayer. He also provides guidance regarding the correct attitudes and motives for fasting.

His review of scriptures and historical writings regarding fasting are instructive and enlightening. He shows that fasting is much more than just not eating; he provides the parameters that make fasting an effective tool in our Christian walk. He also notes some of the dangers of fasting for the wrong reasons. He offers very solid theology behind fasting.

He includes a chapter on fasting and praying on behalf of unborn babies and writes of the power of God to change hearts of all people in response to prayer. This is a moving chapter that like the others is inspiring.

Overall, Piper leads readers to see fasting as an activity to draw one closer to God and to bring one into God's will and experience. This is a book that has an immediate positive effect on your spirituality.

Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays

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A Hunger For God

John Piper writes about a intricate part of worship that is practiced little in today's christian living. He gives God's view on fasting and prayer. The book is well written.

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When God is the supreme hunger of your heart, He will be supreme in everything

Reading "A Hunger for God" has been a surreally happy experience to me, as Pastor John Piper; one of my most-loved preachers, from whom I have been learning how to be truly happy, expounds on the meaning, the danger, and the blessedness of the often-neglected delightful discipline of fasting, as well as the powerful testimonies of revival and the outpouring of grace in the life of individual saints thereof. One danger or enemy that fasting helps to fight against is the dulling of heavenly appetite, the weakening of holy affections to God, the erosion of desire for a happy communion with God because the body is full of burgers, steaks, fries, pops, and the head is full of sports, TV, movies, among many other things that tend to yield physical irreverence which in turn leads to irreverent frame of mind and irreverent affections.

What particularly causes me not only to be profoundly happy, but also to crave and long for a sweet precious communion and fellowship with the Lord and so to act accordingly is the comments from some prominent saints; past and present, in regard to fasting at the end of the book, some of which that I consider peculiarly powerful are as follows:

- "... it is right to fast frequently in order to subdue and control the body. For when the stomach is full, the body does not serve for preaching, for praying, for studying, for doing anything else that is good." (Martin Luther)

- "Holy and lawful fasting has three objectives... to weaken and subdue the flesh, or that we may be better prepared for prayers and holy meditations, or that it may be a testimony of our self-abasement before God when we wish to confess our guilt before him." (John Calvin)

- Throughout its course, the life of the godly indeed ought to be tempered with frugality and sobriety." (John Calvin)

- "... although these abstinences give some pain to the body, yet they so lessen the power of bodily appetites and passions, and so increase our taste of spiritual joys, ..."(William Law)

- "...Fasting helps to express, to deepen, and to confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, even ourselves, to attain the Kingdom of God." (Andrew Murray)

- "When the flesh is satisfied, it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation." (Dietrich Bonhoffer)

- "Fasting is the most effective help for a religious who has vowed chastity. Fantasies no longer appear during the happy hours of physiological freedom..., and the rest of the time, they are easily controlled and eliminated." (Adalbert DeVogue)

- "... a certain mastery of the primordial appetite, eating, permits a greater mastery of the other manifestations of the libido and agressiveness. It is as if the man who fasts were more himself, in possession of his true identity, and less dependent on exterior objects and the impulses they arouse..." (Adalbert DeVogue)

- "Self indulgence is the enemy of gratitude, and self-discipline usually its friend and generator. This is why gluttony is a deadly sin. The early desert fathers believed that a person's appetites are linked: full stomachs and jaded palates take the edge from our hunger and thirst for righteousness. They spoil the appetite for God." (Cornelius Platinga, Jr.)

and many more profound God-centered views on fasting which I'm afraid if I write further, I might spoil your reading experience. Fasting (and prayer) are a way to be truly happy in God by stripping ourselves of lesser pleasures to gain greater ones, for in his presence is fullness of joy and at his right hand is pleasure forevermore, Amen.

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Excellent Biblical Resource

I have found this to be an extremely balanced biblical study of all relevant aspects of Christian fasting. It is very similar in style to John Pipers "Let the Nations be Glad", but it is more focused and an easier read.

A Hunger for God

Exceptionally well written, page turner and very exciting to get a closer understanding of God!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened. I invite you to turn from the dulling effects of food and the dangers of idolatry, and to say with some simple fast:This much, O God, I want you.

Our appetites dictate the direction of our lives--whether it be the cravings of our stomachs, the passionate desire for possessions or power, or the longings of our spirits for God. But for the Christian, the hunger for anything besides God can be an arch-enemy. While our hunger for God--and Him alone--is the only thing that will bring victory.

Do you have that hunger for Him? As John Piper puts it:If we don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because we have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Our soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.If we are full of what the world offers, then perhaps a fast might express, or even increase, our soul's appetite for God.

Between the dangers of self-denial and self-indulgence is this path of pleasant pain called fasting. It is the path John Piper invites you to travel in this book. For when God is the supreme hunger of your heart, He will be supreme in everything. And when you are most satisfied in Him, He will be most glorified in you.

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