Fasting tames beasts, fire, sea, and sin

the mouths of the lions. The fire fasted in the furnace and did not use its fellow servants for food, but having fasted it leaped out of the furnace, yielding to the three because of the fourth (Daniel 3:25).

The sea monster fasted in the sea when it received Jonah into the chambers of its belly. For holding the prophet as a deposit, it displayed the sign of fasting. Becoming a ship for the shipwrecked man, it carried the stranger through sea and depth and great fear, and so that it might not destroy the stranger in the chambers of its belly, it restored the deposit intact, handing it over to the master who had entrusted it (Jonah 2:1-10).

David fasted, and through fasting and repentance God forgave him the sin concerning Uriah's wife (2 Samuel 12:13). Elijah fasted forty days and received the keys of the heavens, and when he wished he withheld the rain, and when he wished he brought it through fastings and prayers (1 Kings 17:1; 18:45).

Our Savior fasted forty days and put the devil to shame—he who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth (Matthew 4:2; 1 Peter 2:22). He fasted to give us a pattern, that through fastings we are able to obtain propitiation of sins.

Let us fast, then, beloved, a pure fast, about which the apostle James says: “Pure religion is this: to visit brothers in their affliction, to keep themselves unstained from the world” (James 1:27). Joshua son of Nun fasted and commanded the sun and the moon (Joshua 10:12-13).

The apostles, having nothing on earth, received authority to bind and to loose, and what was said is fulfilled in them: “as having nothing and possessing all things” (2 Corinthians 6:10). For Peter, it says, and John went up to the temple at the ninth hour to pray. And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was sitting there, who had never walked. He was expecting to receive something from the apostles (Acts 3:1-3).