The Discipline of Fasting
12 Spiritual Disciplines • Sermon • Submitted
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SO FAR WE HAVE LEARNED
8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. 9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
THE main Ministry of the church, Making Disciples/Apprentices
True Apprentices Dwell in the Master
Christians throughout history have learned how to dwell in the True Vine by the practice of Spiritual Disciplines
Over the rest of the year we will be in these divided into 3 sections
Inner, Outer, Corporate
Meditation, Prayer
These disciplines help us
In the rush and noise of life, as you have intervals, step home within yourselves and be still. Wait upon God, and feel his good presence; this will carry you evenly through your day’s business.
William Penn
Meditation is to listen, reflect, and observe God
Prayer is to respond, learn, and rely on God
And now we have reached the Spiritual Discipline of Fasting
I have seen a lot of my desires and work as a Christian manifested in what I would call sin management. I am constantly asking myself, how can I best love my neighbor? How can I best serve my community and my family, and on and on. These are all fantastic questions and heart postures to go out into the world with, but God in Christ through his Holy Spirit extends the invitation for us to be apprentices to the master. To be students under the great teacher with the sole purpose of becoming more like him. So the subtlety can be found within not seeking sin management, but rather seeking Christlikeness. And that is what these disciplines primarily are for. And this is best done in community, and because we know that the community of Christ is to be one with many members, before I share a little on fasting I wanted to ask, how has God been at work in your life this season? Has God impressed upon you in some way something that you think another person in this room, or all of us, need to hear from your walk with God?
2 Without being combined with prayer and the Word, fasting is little more than dieting.
Jentezen Franklin
In a culture where the landscape is dotted with shrines to the Golden Arches and an assortment of Pizza Temples, fasting seems out of place, out of step with the times. Culture also consistently tells us that if we do not have three large meals a day with several snacks in between, we are on the verge of starvation. And we live in a society where it is a desired virtue to satisfy every appetite we hold. It has made the idea of fasting almost obsolete.
But Scripture has so much to say about fasting that we would do well to look once again at this ancient Discipline. The list of biblical personages who fasted reads like a “Who’s Who” of Scripture: Moses the lawgiver, David the king, Elijah the prophet, Esther the queen, Daniel the seer, Anna the prophetess, Paul the apostle, Jesus Christ the incarnate Son. Many of the great Christians throughout church history fasted and witnessed to its value. Fasting is not only a Christian discipline either, it has been utilized by countless cultures however bogus the means. What it should do at the least is cause us to pause and reevaluate this discipline through God’s word.
As I have done in the past months when looking at the other disciplines, I’m going to look at 3 things that fasting is. This is not an exhaustive list by any means of course, but my prayer is that by breaking it down to 3 specific ways of seeing the discipline it will help us to know what it is for, why it is beneficial, and what God intended it to be. So number one:
Fasting is for God
“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
This is from Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, the finest sermon ever presented from the Master Himself. This is just after the teaching that we looked at last month concerning prayer and just before His teaching on not being able to serve both God and money. So if the teaching of Fasting is sandwiched in between Jesus teaching on praying and giving, why do we not give fasting the attention that we give those two? Richard Foster suggests, and I believe rightly so that, “Perhaps in our affluent or well off society fasting involves a far larger sacrifice than giving or praying.”
“Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted?
God tells us that fasting must be first and foremost dedicated to Him. We will have other benefits that stem from performing the discipline, but the reason forever must be centered on God. It must be God initiated and God ordained.
By fasting, the body learns to obey the soul; by praying, the soul learns to command the body.
William Secker
REPEAT
So by praying we command our body to fast. And by fasting our body learns to obey the soul. Which brings us to the next point:
Fasting is practiced
We are walking through Spiritual Disciplines, but they can very well be called Spiritual practices. The mindset being, that this is not something I try just once and realize its hard and quit. The purpose of practice is what pastor Dhati Lewis posits in his theory Passion over Passivity.
Passion is a willingness to endure the pain for something greater than the pain.
Passivity is when love for self crowds out the ability to love others.
To retain passion requires practice, passivity is allowing lesser things to overtake us because we feel sorry for ourselves when things get hard. Constant happiness and the desire for comfort is a relatively new concept in the history of the world. Things are hard. We must practice to look past the hard things to the greater things beyond them.
Junior Seau who used to play football for the Chargers was as intense on the practice field as he was during actual football games. It actually started annoying other players because of how it made them look. When asked why he went so hard at practice Seau said, "...I get paid to practice. I play the game for free." Seau said that any player could feel the adrenaline rush of a game atmosphere and play in a fired-up state, but that it took a particular and special kind of player to practice at game speed and with game intensity.
We don’t fast because it’s easy, but through meditation and prayer it is a way that we can practice eternity and practice time in God’s presence to be ready for the game, for if we are truly believers we have already been called into the game.
Fasting is feasting
4 But he answered, “It is written,
“ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”
When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
Jerome
St Jerome meant that it is easy to give things up when you have an abundance, but we see in Scripture
mark 12:41-44
41 And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. 43 And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. 44 For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
Fasting examines, what really sustains us. Yes we need food to eat. Yes we need shelter. Yes we need certain amenities, but to consume them constantly makes you a slave to food, our clothing, our homes, our amenities. Our God shows us through fasting the true feast we receive from our Father. For he is the giver of all good things. So to give up the necessities of life in order to focus on the giver of all who fully depend on him is to not only know that God is good, but it is to taste and see that our God is good.
Meditation is to listen, reflect, and observe God
Prayer is to respond, learn, and rely on God
Fasting is for God, practiced, and feasting.
Christian fasting, at its root, is the hunger of a homesickness for God.
John Piper
An intentional look at eternity. An intentional look at the new thing that God is creating. Without this purpose in mind, fasting can be a miserable, self-centered experience. Fasting is a look at God who will turn our fast into a feast and our misery into a joy.
LET’S PRAY
Sunday: The example of Christ / Luke 4:1–13.
Monday: God’s chosen fast / Isaiah 58:1–7.
Tuesday: A partial fast / Daniel 10:1–14.
Wednesday: A normal fast / Nehemiah 1:4–11.
Thursday: An absolute fast / Esther 4:12–17.
Friday: The inauguration of the gentile mission / Acts 13:1–3.
Saturday: The appointment of elders in the churches / Acts 14:19-23.
1. Check your first reaction to the thought of fasting:
_____ ugh
_____ hmmm
_____ wow!
_____ ok
_____ freedom
_____you have to be kidding
2. How does Christian fasting differ from the hunger strike and health fasting?
3. What is the primary purpose of fasting?
4. How can fasting reveal what controls your life?
5. What is most difficult about fasting for you?
6. Fast for two meals (twenty-four hours) and give the time saved to God. Record anything you learn from the experience.
7. Try fasting from the media for one week and see what you learn about yourself during that time.
8. What is the one thing you desire most from fasting? Is it to lose weight? Is it to self discipline? Is it to lay down what you consider necessary to live, in an attempt to attain the one thing that Jesus says is necessary? (Luke 10:38-42)
9. Consider whether fasting is a cultural expression of Christian faith only or whether it is an expression of faith for all cultures at all times.
10. In his day, John Wesley required that every minister ordained in the Methodist Church regularly fast two days a week. Discuss the implications that such a requirement would have in our day.