Yesterday I started what I hope to be a 15 day fast that may end up being 30 days (My wife is already on her 8th day). Drew Goodmanson just finished his and it inspired me to follow suit. We are doing (along with about 35 others at Kaleo) the Master Cleanse and I’m specifically doing this to seek the Lord and hunger after God and His glorious Gospel. My wife and I have been reading Octavius Winslow’s great devotional called Morning Thoughts to our daughter, Madison, each morning. It is rich in Gospel beauty as shares with us deep, heart-warming, and inspiring Gospel truths. I thought during this time of fasting I’d put up a few thoughts from His work. Perhaps this is more for my memory than it is for anyone else, but I pray it blesses those who read it. Of course I can’t post the whole chapter, just some highlights that moved my wife and I.

May 7

“For I know that in me (that is in my flesh) dwells no good thing.” Romans 7:18

The Lord will cause His people to know their perfect weakenss and insufficiency to keep themselves…With regard to the way which the Lord adopts to bring them into the knowledge of it, it is varied. Sometimes it is by bringing them into great straits of difficulties, hedging up their path with thorns, or paving it with flints. Sometimes it is in deep adversity after great prosperity, as in the case of Job, stripped of all, and laid in dust and ashes, in order to be brought to the conviction and the confession of deep utter vileness. Sometimes it is in the circumstances of deep prosperity, when He gives the heart its desires, but sends leanness into the soul. Oh, how does this teach a godly man his own utter nothingness! Sometimes it is by permitting the messenger of Satan to buffet, sending and perpetuating some heavy, lingering, lacerating cross. Sometimes by the removal of some beloved prop, on which we too fondly and securely leaned, putting a worm at the root of our pleasant spreading gourd, drying up our refreshing spring, or leading us down deep into the valley of self-abasement and humiliation.

Be not thou cast down, dear reader, if the Lord the Spirit is teaching you the same lesson in the same way; if He is now plowing up the hidden evil, breaking up the fallow ground, discovering to you more of the evil principle of your heart, the iniquity of your fallen nature, and that, too, it may be, at a time of deep trial, of heavy, heart-breaking affliction. Ah! Thou art ready to exclaim, “All these things are against me. Am I a child of God? Can I be a subject of grace, and at the same time be a subject of so much hidden evil, and such deep, overwhelming trial? Is this the way He dealeth with His people?

Yes, dear believer, thou art neither solitary nor alone; for along this path all the covenant people of God are traveling to their better and brighter home. Here they become acquainted with their own weaknesses, their perpetual liability to fall; here they renounce their former thoughts of self-power and self-keeping; and here, too, they learn more of Jesus as their strength, their all-sufficient keeper, more of Him as their “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.”

Cheep up then, for the Lord thy God is leading thee on by a safe and right way to bring thee to a city of rest.