Does fasting actually make our prayers more powerful or efficacious? Yeah, that’s a great question. And the answer would be, yes, it has the potential to do that. And the reason is because James 5:16 says the prayer of a righteous man avails much. The holier we are, the more fruitful our prayers will become.
Why? Because the holier we are, the closer we are in union with Christ, who’s ultimately the source of the fruitfulness of our prayers. Does fasting help us achieve those higher degrees of holiness? Yes. And so therefore, fasting can contribute and help the fruitfulness of our prayers. Hence the reason why, as you were stating, fasting for the sake of the sanctification of the clergy with the intention to help the clergy in their spiritual lives. Fasting definitely can allow for the prayers to be more fruitful. I’m thinking of our Lord here, you recall Dr. Staudt, when the apostles are trying to drive out a demon and they can’t.
It’s right at the time of the transfiguration, right?
So Jesus is out being transfigured on the mountain and they’re down dealing with this demon who’s possessing a boy and they’re like, Jesus, what happened? We couldn’t deal with this. Yeah, we couldn’t cast it out. And so our Lord says to him, this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. So there we have our Lord himself saying fasting contributes to efficacious prayers. And within this, in this regard, it’s exorcism. So if fasting can bring about a greater effect of exorcism, within exorcisms, then so too in prayers, intercessory prayers in general. And I think there’s a simple logic here, right?
It’s Lord, please do this. Lord, please do that. Lord, please heal me of this. But when you fast, it’s like you have skin in the game, if you will. You know what I mean? You’re pouring yourself into your prayer. And I would even say you’re making your body, as Paul says in Romans 12, a living sacrifice.
Amen. Your suffering, your sacrifice here becomes the prayer itself. That’s right. And what’s most profound about that is that you’re now conforming to he who sacrificed himself for the redemption of the world, the ultimate one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ.
So just simply offering up an intercessory prayer, that’s a way in which we can imitate Christ, the heavenly high priest in the heavenly sanctuary, always living to make intercession. But whenever we intercede by way of sacrifice there, we begin to model and imitate our Lord in a more perfect way because the ultimate form of his intercession is his death on the cross.
And so absolutely the sacrifice is going to enhance the power and the fruitfulness of the intercessory prayer because we’re being Christian. We’re being Christ like.
