(Day 2) Seeking God Through His Word, Prayer, and Fasting

2 Samuel 12:16

The potential to fall is in everyone of us. We should never presume that we are above failure when it comes to living for Christ. We are warned in scripture; Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall (1 Cor. 10:12). When we consider someone like King David whom God testified of that he is a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfill all my will (Acts 13:22); he is a reminder for us that the potential to go astray resides in us all. This man David, the mighty warrior and worshipper of God, fell into a downward spiral of adultery and murder.

This time of fasting should include deep introspection and contemplation as we examine ourselves through the lens of God’s Word, asking Him to show us ourselves and all the areas in us that are not pleasing to Him. Repentance and confession of sin empties us of the things that interrupt our fellowship with God. As we reverently approach God by prayer, reaching to Him with our requests, God is reaching into us, accomplishing inner healing and deliverance.

We read in 2 Samuel 12 that God struck the baby that was born through the adulterous relationship between David and Bathsheba with sickness. This act of God, that was very traumatic and gut wrenching for David, was the very means through which God would accomplish deliverance for David. God oversees the episodes of our lives and often uses our trials to produce sincerity and true worship in us. As David fasted and prayed for his child, God was washing him thoroughly, creating in him a clean heart, and purging him with hyssop. Psalm 51, that vividly details for us how David poured out his heart to God in repentance, was written as a result of him praying and fasting, laying before God for his sick child.

On the seventh day, the child died. David agonized in prayer and fasting asking God to heal the child of its sickness. Did David fast and pray for nothing? Was the seven days of seeking God in vain? After all, God didn’t do what he requested; what he was asking God to do, He didn’t do. There’s a difficult lesson in this account. Many times, what we’re praying to God for, He won’t do. There will be times when we won’t get the answer we want, or God won’t prevent what we want Him to stop. We know that He can, we have the faith to believe He can, but for reasons known only by God, He may not. It’s in those times that He wants us to submit ourselves to His care and trust Him to bring about what’s best for us.

David’s response to getting the news that his baby had died was confusing to his elders who tried to lift him from the ground and get him to eat. As he saw his servants whispering, he perceived that the child had died and asked them if it was so. After they confirmed the child was dead, David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat (2 Sam. 12:20).

Seeking God through His Word, praying, and fasting, is never in vain! Even when we don’t receive the things we’re asking God for or if He doesn’t move the way that we desire. What’s most important is the work that’s being wrought in our hearts through the power of the Spirit. On the seventh day, after God had completed what He desired to do in David, although the child died, God had restored David. Upon hearing of the death of his child, his mind was to wash himself, change his clothes, and go into God’s house and lift worship to Him. In explaining his actions to his servants, he said, while the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? (2 Sam. 12:22).

We fast and pray because we know that God can turn any situation. He is full of mercy, love, and compassion. Whatever He does on our behalf is right. Our prayer is that He will give us the grace to accept His will and the strength to continue to serve Him and worship in spirit and in truth.

From the heart and hand of Pastor Reginald Reaves