Our church is in the midst of a 40-day fast of consecration. We're not promoting a book; we're not starting a new ministry. There is no reason to fast other than to experience more of Jesus in our lives.

Biblically, we are called to fast so that we might draw near to God. We remove that which distracts us and fill our human soul with the divine.

Members of our church family have given up many things in this season: movies, Internet, sports, food, eating out, to name a few. As is biblical, we replace these things with the things of God. This is one purpose of Christian fasting.

First, it shows us what controls us. After that thing is removed, it allows us to instead fill that emptiness with God.

Most of us have no idea how much we are controlled by our appetites until they are removed. Try to go a day without eating. Or a week without coffee. How about a month without television? Don't visit the Internet for a season and see what happens. Are you having withdrawals? Yes -- you are addicted. The frightful thing about this is that it has more control over you than God does.

Fasting combats our medicated mind-set. John Piper says that the simple pleasures of life are often more detrimental to our love for God than the poisons of evil. Biblical followers of Jesus are called radicals, aliens, strangers; we are the pilgrims on this earth. We live with a "homesickness for God." Yet this simple mark of eternity upon us is threatened by our appetites for things that make us feel quite at home here on earth, if not numb and apathetic to the things of eternity.

To go without Internet, movies or football for any length of time is, to most Christians, a foreign and even offensive notion. Yet fasting these things reveals the measure of mastery they have over me. It is very easy to fill my waking hours with as many distractions as possible -- anything to conceal the weakness of my hunger for God. I have nibbled long at the table of the world; my soul is satisfied with small things, and there is no room for the great.

This is the journey, an intentional embargo of the world, and an open, loving embrace of Jesus. Come into my life, Lord, and may my heart beat with these words of David Brainerd, written centuries ago: "God was so precious to my soul, that the world with all its enjoyments was infinitely vile."

THE REV. JEFF MILLER IS THE PASTOR OF VINEYARD COMMUNITY CHURCH IN AUGUSTA.