The same principle applies to the matter of eating. Many times our Lord went without food for the sake of His work. He did not make His eating a priority. But this does not mean that our Lord never ate. He could eat well at ordinary times. But when the need was before Him, He could forsake eating. This is to put the body under subjection. We are not so dependent on food that our work has to stop if we have to go hungry. Unfortunately, in the Lord's work, many cannot function without food. We undoubtedly need food, and we have to take care of our physical body, but the body must be trained to go without food when special circumstances call for it. Remember the occasion when the Lord sat down at noon beside Jacob's well to rest while the disciples went to get some food in the city. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and the Lord asked her for a drink. At the same time He opened up the matter of the living water to her. In the end the woman did not give Him anything to drink. It was high noon, the time for a meal and a drink, but the Lord patiently explained to this spiritually thirsty and suffering Samaritan woman the word of life and the meaning of the living water (John 4:5-26). This shows us how one can carry on God's work without the interruption of food. If we arrive at a certain place and cannot do anything until we have had a meal, our body is not serving us as it should. We should not be extremists, and we should not skip our meals all the time. But when there are special demands, we should be able to forego our eating. Bread is not the most important thing. We should be the master of our body. When we need to go without a meal, our body should obey us. We should not be overcome by our body's insistent cries for food. This is what it means to make our body our slave.

In Mark 3 the Lord was surrounded by such a multitude that He had no time to eat. His relatives reacted by seeking to drag Him away from the crowd, for they said He was beside Himself (vv. 20-21). Yet the Lord continued with His work. He was not beside Himself, but the multitude had their pressing needs. He was able to forego His food and drink for the sake of the work. If we can never forego our own needs when the work demands our immediate attention, we will have little effective work. At critical times we have to push ourselves a little to the extreme; we have to be somewhat beside ourselves. When the need calls for it, we should be able to bridle our body and ignore the demands for food and drink. We should not consider these demands to be mandatory.

The Bible plainly states that Christians should fast when occasion requires. The meaning of fasting is to temporarily put aside the legitimate demand of the body. Sometimes a special need calls for serious prayer. At these times we should fast before the Lord. We do not advocate fasting three or five times a week. But if a man has been a Christian for eight or ten years and has never fasted once, something is not right. The Lord spoke of fasting in His teaching on the mount. If we have never fasted, we lack something in our experience. The purpose of fasting is to make our body our slave.