Have you had the experience of feeling like your prayers simply bounced off the ceiling? Or your Scripture reading ceased to feel as  meaningful as it once did? Have you looked back at seasons that felt like lush gardens of excitement, passion, and zeal for the things of God—but now feel more like you’re in the desert, spiritually barren, dry, and lifeless? You might be surprised to know that the doctrine of spiritual desertion was a standard teaching of Protestant spiritual theology for centuries. Spiritual desertion is God’s act to lead his people into experiencing his absence to awaken them to the truth of how sinful and broken they truly are. Why would God do this? God leads you into your weakness to show you his power, he guides you into your desperation to more deeply reveal his grace, and he unveils how deep sin goes in your soul so you can know how much you’ve been forgiven. When God Leads Us into the Desert There isn’t standard language to talk about this phenomenon. Some have used images of the dark night. Others focus on the desert, deadness, or the experience of feeling abandoned. However, one term that eventually became widely accepted is “spiritual desertion.” Spiritual desertion is a work of God to awaken the deep things of the heart to lead a Christian into deeper dependence on God. This teaching emphasizes God’s action and focuses our attention on his objective work seen biblically in the life of Israel, Paul, and, of course, Jesus as the ground of what we experience. Spiritual desertion addresses two errors that consistently plague us: (1) navigating life by the ebb and flow of felt experience and (2) believing we can ignore felt experience. Both are folly. Both lead us to be tossed by the waves of life rather than understanding our experiences in the light of Christ. In spiritual desertion seasons, God is unearthing the false belief that you can fix your spiritual life. You can’t. Any attempt to do so is to turn to self-help rather than to know the “growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19). It’s this fact that the flesh finds so offensive. Israel was led into the desert to be shown what was in their hearts (Deut. 8:2). In spiritual desertion, God leads us to feel abandoned and to feel the weight of how much we seek to live in our own power as a way to call us to himself. In spiritual desertion seasons, God is unearthing the false belief that you can fix your spiritual life. You can’t. Desertion pushes us into the experience of forsakenness to reveal the deep structures of vice, not only of our characters in general but especially in our spiritual lives. Commenting on 2 Chronicles 32:31, Wilhelmus à Brakel, a spiritual theologian in the Dutch Reformed tradition, narrates how God left Hezekiah to try him, so he might know what was in his heart. This is the work we see in Scripture and our own tradition. Yet desertion is a teaching rarely addressed today, and if it’s named (often generically as a “dark night”), we tend to focus solely on the experience of absence rather than the positive nature of God’s developmental maturation. Brakel, in contrast, shows how the Lord matures a soul through childhood, into adolescence, and then into adulthood. The Lord uses various experiences to prod us along this path of maturation. These experiences feel disorienting, but the goal is deeper intimacy, love, and holiness. Developmental Maturation Spiritual desertion isn’t an isolated event but a feature of how God matures us by grace. Charles Spurgeon, for example, narrates God’s work through various seasons of the soul, claiming that “there are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season” and “have basked in the sunshine God has been pleased to give them in the earlier stages of their Christian career” who suddenly find that “instead of ‘green pastures,’ they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of ‘still waters,’ they find streams brackish to their taste and bitter to their spirits.” Spurgeon worries that when this happens, they’ll say, “Surely, if I were a child of God this would not happen.” Spurgeon admonishes the Christian not to think this way, because all God’s saints are led through a “weary wilderness.” Perhaps, he suggests, the Lord met you in your youth and fragility with his kindness and tenderness befitting your maturity, but now has something more for you. “You were a young child,” Spurgeon says, “and therefore he wrapped you in furs and clothed you in the softest mantle. But now you have become strong and the case is different.” We know from Scripture that God doesn’t relate to every Christian the same but addresses infants, adolescents, and adults in the faith developmentally (1 Cor. 3:1–2; 1 John 2:13–14). For both Brakel and Spurgeon, this developmental maturation is why God relates to us differently as we mature. In ways fitting to our stage of maturation, God leads us to himself in our brokenness, pain, and sin to redeem us in the truth. Failing to name and address these realities can lead to vast confusion about what God is doing in someone’s life. It can cause faith to unravel. Spiritual desertion reminds us that sometimes hard experiences aren’t evidence we’ve been duped by false promises; rather, they’re an invitation to draw nearer to a God of love who calls us to be conformed to himself. Pastoral Guidance for Those in Desertion How should pastors counsel those who experience spiritual desertion, who feel that God doesn’t seem present or working in their lives? Puritan theologians have wisdom on this. William Bridge, for instance, counsels a struggling Christian who expresses fear that he never had the grace of God: “I [am] afraid that I never had any truth of grace, because I do not find that I do grow in grace. . . . I do not find any such growth and increase, and therefore I fear that I never had grace at all.” Spiritual desertion isn’t an isolated event but a feature of how God matures us by grace. Bridge responds by wielding the gospel and pointing this struggling believer to Christ, who meets us in our frailty. Because we’re continually tempted to trust in our own graces instead of in Christ, Bridge explains, Christ will “put the sentence of death upon our graces, that we may not trust to or rest on them: Christ and Christ alone, and that as dying and crucified, is the object of our faith.” Likewise, pastors should counsel those in spiritual desertion not to lose heart. Christ is both their righteousness and their sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30). The truth of our pain, brokenness, and sin is an invitation into the forgiveness, mercy, and grace of our Lord. Desertion reminds us that we don’t leave the cross to graduate into our own goodness; we embrace it more. Pastors should apply the gospel ever more deeply to those in desertion, helping them grasp the Lord by faith in this season. When we forget this vision of spiritual desertion and how it’s situated in a developmental spirituality, we can be tossed by the waves of confusion and miss the call to draw near to God in every season. We must learn to continually abide in Christ, knowing our growth is from God (Col. 2:19) and will look different in spiritual infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. We ought to trust that God is shaping us in seasons of profound joy and of severe sadness, when we feel Christ’s near presence and when we only experience his absence. Without a mature grasp of this long-held but little-known teaching, we risk being lost at sea when the waves of desertion hit.

Warnings sometimes need to come before anything else. I remember a high school chemistry class where we worked with silver nitrate. Before we learned about its composition or uses, or even the experiment we’d be running that day, our teacher warned us multiple times not to let it touch our skin. The apparently colorless solution, she told us, would change color after sun exposure. When you have a bunch of teenagers standing in front of chemical bottles and wanting to do anything but learn, you need to hammer home that warning first. (One classmate, of course, blithely rubbed it all over his arms—he was covered with brown splotches for days.) At times, the Bible is heavy on warnings. That’s the case for the topic of fasting. It can be frustrating to those who want a straightforward instruction manual for this spiritual discipline, but Scripture gives more directions about how not to fast than it does positive instructions. So if we want to seek closer communion with God through this often neglected means of grace, we’ll need to start with the Bible’s instructions about the wrong way to do it. Once we’ve been warned off that path, we’ll see the better way. How Not to Fast Here are three recommendations for how you shouldn’t fast. 1. Don’t Avoid It The easiest mistake to make is not doing it. Today, this is the most common approach, at least in my circles. Few evangelicals make fasting a regular practice. I understand why. Amid all the warnings and potential pitfalls, we might feel it’s safer to skip the practice. And in our overindulgent age, where we can order any cuisine to our door with the press of a button, it’s countercultural to intentionally step away from the pleasures of eating. In our overindulgent age, it’s countercultural to intentionally step away from the pleasures of eating. But if you avoid fasting, you’re missing out. Skipping the blessings of food can be counted as a gain when we focus on God and see it as a gift from him—one that believers throughout history have enjoyed. Jesus assumed his followers would fast after he returned to his Father (Matt. 9:15), and the early church engaged in this practice (Acts 13:2–3; 14:23). Don’t miss out. 2. Don’t Boast About It If you take up this discipline, you immediately face a danger: feeling proud that you’re one of the few practicing it. Our sinful hearts are prone to turn even ostensibly good works into reasons for boasting, which strips them of any virtue (as the Pharisee experiences in Luke 18:9–14). Jesus warns against those who, while fasting, moan and groan in public so everyone knows what they’re doing. They want the reward of praise from men—and that’s all they’ll get (Matt. 6:16–18). The great benefits of fasting will do us no good when we see it as a means for our gain and glory. Our Enemy seizes on this evil inclination of our hearts; he wants to keep our eyes on ourselves and what we’ve accomplished rather than on Christ. So, be on your guard. Don’t let skipping a meal be the means by which Satan devours you (1 Pet. 5:8). 3. Don’t Misuse It We go astray when we see fasting as a technique to get what we want from God. As with all spiritual disciplines, we need to be careful how we talk about fasting’s benefits or results. God chooses to act in response to our Scripture reading, prayer, and fasting, but we don’t earn the outcome by our activity. The Israelites are rebuked in Isaiah 58 for thinking their fasting earns them credit with God. King David avoids this mistake after being rebuked by the prophet Nathan (2 Sam. 12). God tells David that as punishment for his sin, his infant son will die. David fasts and prays for seven days, pleading for his son’s life—but the baby still dies. Yet David gets up, worships God, and eats a meal. His fast is an earnest, humble plea, and he accepts the outcome. It isn’t an attempt to twist God’s arm and make him do what he wants. How to Fast So then, how should we fast? I could give you tips and strategies, but your heart is the most important factor. 1. Prayerfully The key feature of any faithful fast is that it’s accompanied by prayer. Fasting is an aid to prayer—in John Piper’s words, it’s the “hungry handmaid of faith.” It isn’t a show of exertion or discipline but an aid to truly feeling our humility, weakness, and need, which have been there all along but are usually clouded by our indulgence and our illusion of strength. It’s this felt need that God responds to. Puritan preacher Arthur Hildersham puts it this way: “This outward abstinence is not the chief part of a true fast nor the chief help to our prayers. The inward humiliation of the soul is far more acceptable to God and has more force to make our prayers pierce the heavens than all this.” A humble heart will help you avoid the traps of seeking others’ approval or manipulating God. The more you fast, the more you’ll feel this vulnerability and need—and the more you’ll see how much you need this spiritual practice. So when you fast, make sure you’re setting aside that time to pray. A pattern I often follow is to fast from breakfast and lunch once a week, and use the time I’d normally spend preparing and eating those meals in prayer instead. 2. Purposefully You’ve probably had the experience of feeling like you don’t know what to pray. You might resolve to pray for half an hour, but once you’ve knelt, said some version of “Our Father in heaven,” and prayed for your immediate needs, you get stuck. Since fasting sharpens my need for God and strengthens my prayers, I want to use it intentionally. I rarely fast without a specific topic or issue in mind to pray about. It could be a sin I’ve been struggling with. It could be a difficult relational issue. It could be a virtue I want to grow in. It could be a need in my church or family. A humble heart will help you avoid the traps of seeking others’ approval or manipulating God. Then I don’t just pray from what’s in my head. I read relevant Bible passages, pray through notes I’ve taken from books, or use another resource. For example, when I’ve sought God for revival in my church, I’ve prayed through Rachel Jones’s little book 5 Things to Pray for Your Church. I like to keep a record of what I pray about. This keeps me focused and gives me something to look back on. After months of praying about the same issue, I’ve been encouraged by reading through my notes and seeing how God has answered. Get Started Fasting is a neglected spiritual discipline. But it has rich benefits if you’ll let it humble and shape you. So as you think about how to fast and how not to fast, remember this main tip: Try it. Start with just one meal. Use that usual mealtime to pray, and let the hunger teach you about your need for God. Do it on your own, or invite a few friends to join you in praying for a mutual need or concern. Call out to God, asking him to use this practice to bring you to prayer. And see how he works.

Mercy is at the heart of the gospel, and as Christ followers, we should rejoice any time we are given opportunities to extend mercy and kindness to those who have sinned against us.  

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