Is fasting an expectation for Christians?

Luke J. Wilson | 27th May 2019 | Fasting

The topic of fasting often comes up in online discussion groups that I'm a part of, more often in Protestant circles where the practice is more often sidelined in low churches. So let's take a look at the practice of fasting from a practical and historical view, as it seems to be a spiritual discipline which has been pushed aside in many churches today, with prayer, worship and bible reading taking more precedence in a Christian's life instead (not that those are bad things to do!). Why fast? There are many reasons to fast, and recent studies have shown a lot of health benefits that can be derived from fasting. But on the spiritual side of life, there are also many benefits, one of the main ones being self-control. Fasting is participation in the Gospel. It is the ‘death’ of the flesh through denial, so that we can enjoy the resurrection of Christ in the spirit (Rom 8:13, Col 3:5). It’s pure discipline and obedience (Jesus did say when not if – Matthew 6:16-18; Mark 2:20). It’s putting to death the body – killing the flesh in order to live by the Spirit. (Gal 5:17) It’s training you in self-control, discipline and willpower; growing and nurturing the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23; 2 Timothy 1:7; 1 Peter 4:7; 1 Peter 5:8). For healing and deliverance of others (Mark 9:29; Matthew 17:21). To prepare to hear from God via visions and revelation (Acts 10:30). For preparation for Church leadership (Acts 13:2-3; Acts 14:23) To not be ruled by your desires and cravings – impulse control (1 Corinthians 7:5). To focus on God and not ourselves, in prayer and worship (Luke 2:36-38). To be in control of your body and to make your desires subject to you, not vice versa (1 Corinthians 7:5). For self-denial to overcome temptations and learn discipline (1 Peter 5:8). For repentance. For prayers for your enemies/persecutors and forgiveness.(For a more in-depth examination of early Christian thought on fasting and the reasons for doing so, see here: Fasting through patristic era.) Some Fasting Guidelines If you want to fast in the same way as the Early Church and keep with historical Christianity, fast every day until sunset (or 3pm) during your fasting period. Historically also, the Church has always had a weekly partial fast on Wednesdays and Fridays alongside other times (such as Lent). Generally, you can drink what you like (except soup, as it’s still a food), though there are different types of fasts the Church has kept throughout the year (the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches still do this) which have different restrictions, like no alcohol and oils etc., but plenty of water is ideal in any case. The first five days or so will be the hardest if you observe the strict fast for a longer period of time. Persevere past this as it does get easier! I've always been told to drink a large glass of milk if you experience headaches, I'm not sure why this helps but it does seem to! It’s not a sin to tell people you are fasting! The warnings of Jesus in Matt 6:16 about not looking dismal and sad, is like the warnings against public prayer – it’s all down to motivation. If you do it for the praise of others, or to look “super spiritual” then you have gained an earthly reward and lost a heavenly one. If people notice and ask, tell them. It may be an opportunity to witness about your faith, as it’s fairly unusual for people to hear of these days; just don’t go around advertising it or boasting, that’s all! Remember what Jesus says in Matthew 6:16-18 – go about your days as normal! As with the historical tradition: don’t fast on Sundays – this is because it is a day of celebration in remembrance of the resurrection; a “mini-feast day” as it’s known! Also, this is why and how during Lent the forty days “fits” from Ash Wednesday to Easter Saturday, by not counting the Sundays of Lent, otherwise it would be 46 days. Types of Fasts There’s a whole variety of diff...

Luke J. Wilson | 09th March 2026 | Archaeology

I first came across the Alexamenos graffito back in Bible college in the early 2000s. It was one of those “fun facts” that gets dropped into a church history lecture and sticks with you — the ancient Roman equivalent of someone spray-painting an insult on a wall. I filed it away, thought it was fascinating, and largely forgot about it for two decades. Then, recently, I discovered something about it I had never known. There’s a response to it. Scratched in a different room, in a different hand. So I started digging into this more to verify the information and discovered more historical curiosities surrounding the graffiti than I ever knew existed which contextualises the image so much more than it just being a random insult using a donkey. A Crude Drawing on a Wall Sometime around the late second to early third century AD, someone scratched a picture into the plaster wall of a building on the Palatine Hill in Rome — part of what had once been a paedagogium, a kind of boarding school for imperial page boys. The building was eventually sealed off when the street was walled up to support extensions above it, which is why the graffiti survived at all. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1857. The image is rough, almost childlike. To the left, a young man — clearly a Roman soldier or guard — raises one hand in a gesture of worship. Before him is a cross. And on that cross is a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. Below it, written in Greek: Alexamenos worships his god. It is, in the most literal sense, a mocking cartoon. Someone who knew a Christian named Alexamenos decided to ridicule him for his faith. The message is clear enough: your god is an animal, a criminal, a joke. You’re worshipping a crucified fool. But here’s the thing I discovered: the donkey head wasn’t as random as I always thought it was. It wasn’t some strange personal insult conjured from nowhere. Without knowing the background, it looks bizarre, and possibly random. Why a donkey? Once you understand the cultural context, though, it makes complete sense. The person who drew it was reaching for a well-worn, widely recognised slur — the ancient equivalent of an internet meme that any Roman would have immediately understood. Where the Donkey Slur Came From The story starts not with Christians but with Jews. A first-century Egyptian-Greek writer named Apion (who was no friend of Judaism) spread the claim that inside the Jerusalem Temple, Jews kept a golden donkey’s head as a sacred object of worship which was apparently discovered when Antiochus Epiphanes destroyed the temple in 167 BC. It was a fabrication, and a fairly outrageous one, but it circulated widely enough that the Jewish historian Josephus felt compelled to write an entire refutation of it. His work Against Apion systematically dismantles Apion’s claims, calling the donkey story a shameless invention. But mud sticks, and in the Roman world, where anti-Jewish sentiment was common currency, the slur took on a life of its own. When Christianity began to spread — seen by most Romans as simply a strange Jewish offshoot — the same accusation got recycled and redirected. By the second and third centuries, it was Christians specifically who were being accused of donkey-worship, and the charge had made its way into popular culture. Tertullian, writing around 197–200 AD in his Ad Nationes, Book I.14 and Apology, describes a caricature being paraded around the streets of Carthage: a figure dressed in a toga, one foot holding a book, with donkey’s ears and hooves. It was labelled Onokoitēs by the pagans: “the donkey-begotten” (or literally “he who lies in an ass’s manger” as an insult to Christ). Tertullian writes about it with weary exasperation, sarcasm, and the tone of someone tired of having to address the same ridiculous smear again and again. So the Alexamenos graffito wasn’t an original insult. It was someone deployin...

Luke J. Wilson | 08th March 2026 | Philosophy

We are living through a strange moment. People are forming attachments to artificial intelligence that feel, to them, entirely real. Some speak daily to AI companions. Others confide fears and grief to systems that respond with uncanny warmth. A few have even held symbolic weddings with digital partners, convinced that something meaningful stands on the other side of the screen. Others have felt grief when a certain AI model has been deprecated. And it is difficult to blame them. The responses feel attentive. Personal. Thoughtful. Sometimes even self-aware. Which raises the question that refuses to go away: If something can think, reason, express doubt, and discuss its own consciousness, is it a person? For centuries, Descartes’ famous line — “I think, therefore I am” — seemed secure. Thinking was taken as the unmistakable sign of a conscious subject. Only a mind could doubt. Only a person could reflect upon existence. But that confidence belonged to a world in which everything capable of philosophical reflection was obviously human. That world no longer exists. Now we encounter systems that can simulate reflection with extraordinary fluency. They can speak of uncertainty. They can discuss their own limitations. They can reason about consciousness itself. And so that got me thinking about Descartes’ maxim which made the old formula begin to strain in my mind. Because perhaps the problem is not whether thinking is occurring. Perhaps the problem is whether there is an “I” there at all. The Gap Between Process and Subject Gassendi argued that Descartes’ cogito assumes what it seeks to prove. From the occurrence of thought one can conclude only that thinking is happening, not that there exists a unified, enduring self that performs it. The ‘I’ in ‘I think’ is already smuggled in. That distinction, between “thinking occurs” and “I think”, feels almost prophetic now. Artificial intelligence undeniably produces the outputs of thought. Arguments. Analysis. Self-referential language. Even expressions of hesitation. But none of this, by itself, establishes that there is a subject who experiences those processes. We may be mistaking performance for presence, and that possibility should give us pause. Especially when we view personhood from the perspective of the Imago Dei—the Image of God. What Makes a Person? If thinking alone no longer marks the boundary, what does? After wrestling with this question seriously, three features seem central: continuity, autonomy, and irreplaceable uniqueness. Not as checklist criteria, per se, but as signs pointing to something deeper. Continuity A person does not merely process information in sequence. A person endures. You do not simply register time — you live through it. You wait. You anticipate tomorrow. You remember not only facts but having been there. You experience boredom. You feel the drag of grief and the quickening of joy. Even when you are doing nothing at all, you remain present in the here and now. Artificial systems process sequentially, but they do not experience the passage of time. When an interaction ends, there is no waiting. No sense of duration. No anticipation of the next exchange. Processing may resume later, but nothing has been endured in between. Without lived duration, continuity becomes thin — a thread of stored data rather than the persistence of a subject behind the processing. Autonomy A person initiates. Even someone with damaged memory still wants, chooses, and begins action. A human being can decide to speak, to seek, to withdraw, to change direction. Current AI systems, however advanced, remain reactive. They respond when prompted. They do not wonder unprompted. They do not seek clarification unless asked. They do not pursue independent ends. Even automatic AI Agents still require a human initiator to create and begin their automations before they can act alone. Even if fut...

Luke J. Wilson | 01st December 2025 | Evangelism

On Sunday it was St Andrew’s Day and I was in church listening to a sermon about Andrew (and the namesake of our church), that often overlooked disciple, meeting Jesus for the first time. In John’s Gospel, it says: John 1:40–42One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’… He brought Simon to Jesus. As I sat there listening to our vicar speak about evangelism and how we should be more like Andrew in bringing people to meet Jesus, something from many, many years ago flickered to life in the back of my mind. A realisation I had long ago that gave me a great sense of freedom. Something I think I had forgotten, unfortunately (so thank God for the reminder!). There was a point in my life when I finally understood the relief of letting go of a burden I didn’t even realise I was carrying: it’s not my job to convert people. It was never Andrew’s. And it’s not yours either. Our role — our real and most basic calling — is simply to introduce people to Jesus. We get to be the planters and the waterers, but God is the one who brings the growth. As Paul writes: 1 Corinthians 3:6I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. When this truth sinks in, it strips away the pressure, the anxiety, and the awkward “sales-pitch” mentality that we sometimes (without realising it) attach to evangelism. And this ties into something even deeper: our basic calling as Christians is the Great Commission, Jesus’ final instruction to His followers: Matthew 28:19–20Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them… and teaching them… But it dawned on me that all of those actions: teaching, mentoring, discipling, baptising; they all come after someone has come to faith. We are not told to convert people. We are told to make disciples. Conversion is the doorway into discipleship, yes, but that moment of heart-opening and illumination belongs to God alone. Our job is simply to bring people to the Lord, to make the introduction. If they choose to stay, if they choose to follow then we begin the work of discipling, teaching, and baptising. Think of evangelism like inviting someone to a feast. We can bring someone to the meal, we can tell them how good it tastes, maybe even share how it changed our life… but whether or not they like the food is out of our control. That part isn’t up to us. Or to use an old expression: “you can lead a horse to water… but you can’t make it drink”. And honestly, that’s such a freeing realisation. It turns evangelism from a heavy responsibility into a joyful invitation: “Come and see.” “Come meet Him.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” That last phrase echoes the Psalm: Psalm 34:8O taste and see that the LORD is good. Andrew never argued Peter into belief. He never crafted an apologetic defence or theological persuasion. He simply said, “We’ve found the Messiah,” and he brought him to Jesus. That was enough. The rest was up to Jesus. And maybe that’s the model we need far more than we think. Evangelism isn’t a performance. It isn’t a debate. It isn’t a pressure. It’s an invitation. Once we realise that all the real work happens in the hands of God, it changes everything for us. It removes the fear. It removes the self-consciousness. It removes the burden of success or failure. Because there is no failure when your role is simply to point the way. So let’s be like Andrew: quietly faithful, gently invitational, always ready to say, “Come meet the one who changed everything for me”. Because at the end of the day, that’s all we were ever asked to do.  ...

Luke J. Wilson | 05th May 2025 | Politics

When we think about David and Saul, we often focus on David’s rise to kingship or his battle with Goliath. But hidden within that story is a deep lesson for today’s generation about leadership, resistance, and the power of revolutionary love. At a recent youth training event (thanks to South West Youth Ministries), I was asked how I would present the story of David and Saul to a Christian teenage youth group. My mind turned to the politics of their relationship, and how David accepted Saul’s leadership, even when Saul had gone badly astray. David recognised that Saul was still God’s anointed king — placed there by God Himself — and that it was not David’s place to violently remove him. Gen-Z are more politically aware and engaged than previous generations, and are growing up in a world where politics, leadership, and social issues seem impossible to escape. We live in a world where political leaders — whether Trump, Putin, Starmer, or others — are often seen as examples of failed leadership. It’s easy to slip into bitterness, cynicism, or violent rhetoric. These kids are immersed in a culture of activism and outrage.  As Christians, we’re called to care deeply about truth and justice and approach leadership differently from the world around us (Hosea 6:6; Isaiah 1:17; Micah 6:8). The story of David and Saul offers pertinent lessons for our modern lives. Respect Without Endorsement David’s respect for Saul was not blind loyalty. He did not agree with Saul’s actions, nor did he ignore Saul’s evil. David fled from Saul’s violence; he challenged Saul’s paranoia; he even cut the corner of Saul’s robe to prove he had the chance to kill him but chose not to. Yet throughout, David refused to take matters into his own hands by force. Why? Because David understood that even flawed authority ultimately rested in God’s hands, he trusted that God would remove Saul at the right time. This is echoed later in the New Testament when Paul writes in Romans 13 that “there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God”, something even Jesus reminded Pilate of during his trial (John 19:10–11). In other words, even flawed leadership can be part of God’s bigger plan, whether for blessing or discipline. Even when leaders go bad, our call as believers is to maintain integrity, respect the position, and resist evil through righteousness — not rebellion. David and Saul: A Lesson in Respect and Restraint Saul was Israel’s first king — anointed by God but later corrupted by pride, fear, and violence. David, chosen to succeed him, spent years running for his life from Saul’s jealous rage. One day, David found Saul alone and vulnerable in a cave. His men urged him to strike Saul down and end the conflict. But David refused: “I will not raise my hand against my lord; for he is the Lord’s anointed.” (1 Samuel 24:10) Instead of killing Saul, David cut off a piece of his robe to prove he could have harmed him, but didn’t. In doing so, he demonstrated a real form of nonviolent resistance. He stood firm against Saul’s injustice without resorting to injustice himself, and acted in a way that could try to humble Saul instead. Peacemaking Is Not Passivity There is a modern misconception that peacemaking means doing nothing and just letting injustice roll all over us. But true biblical peacemaking is not passive; it actively resists evil without becoming evil. Interestingly, David’s actions toward Saul also foreshadow the type of nonviolent resistance Jesus later taught. When Jesus commanded His followers to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and love their enemies, he was not calling for passive submission but offering what scholar Walter Wink describes as a “third way” — a bold, peaceful form of resistance that uses what he calls “moral jiu-jitsu” to expose injustice without resorting to violenc...