From Fasting To Feasting-Mark 2:18-22; Matt. 9:14-17; Luke 4:33-39

Jim Canady

Liberty Chapel

The Gospel According to Mark • Sermon • Submitted 4 years ago

Jesus defends his disciples for not fasting

0 ratings

· 39 views

Jesus came to establish a new faith, not based on observence of the Law but on Grace.

Notes

Transcript

Handout

Last Sunday morning in our journey through the Gospel according to Mark, our passage was Mark 2:13-18 in the message entitled: Jesus, Friend of Sinners. As we studied the passage together, we discovered that Jesus turned the Jewish religious system upside down with His Scandal of Grace. That had no issues calling, as one of His closest followers, even a hated tax collector, who was very much an outcast in the eyes of the Jewish Nation. It also became clear that Jesus saw in Matthew, that tax collector, what no one else could have seen, in The Immediate & Costly Obedience of the Outcast. Who Scripture tells us in Luke 5:28 “Immediately left everything to follow” Jesus. Jesus saw in Matthew a heart that was ready, willing and desirous of being transformed, the kind of heart He still seeks!

Moving forward we watched as the Pharisees, appalled at Jesus for eating and associating with vile sinners, confronted Him through His disciples for not following their lead. Jesus let all present there that day know that He was The Great Physician, and like all physicians, He came not to make the well, well, but for those who were sick. Of course as He was saying this, He saw into the hearts of the evil Pharisees, and understood that they were far more sick and wicked than Matthew and his crew. Jesus understood that when it came to sin, there were Two Types of Diseased, those who acknowledged they were sinners in need of a Savior, and those who refused to acknowledge that reality, yet still needed His healing touch. The truth of the matter is, as powerful as the grace of God is, it only extends to those who seek it, those who choose to ignore God’s grace, are dying from a deadly disease they refuse to admit to having.

As we closed out our passage last week, Jesus and His disciples were enjoying a great feast with the joyful Matthew, as well as his friends, who up to that point in time had been living lives of slavery to their own sinful desires. We don’t know for certain, but it appears that right there in the middle of the feast, or perhaps right at the end, some disciples of John approached Jesus with a question. That is where we pick up in this mornings passage.

Would you please stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word. Next Slide

Mark 2:18–22 ESV

18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” 19 And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. 21 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.”

Please be seated

Here we see the religious doing: Next Slide

The Right Things For The Wrong Reasons. Mark 2:18; Matt. 9:14; Luke 5:33

As many of you may recall, we spent some of 2018 and the first part of 2019 doing a study of the Spiritual Disciplines, and one of the Spiritual Disciplines is Fasting. Fasting is a very important discipline in the life of the believer, but it is of no spiritual value if done for the wrong reason. The Old Testament only speaks of one required fast. It was the annual fast on The Day of Atonement and is found in Leviticus 16:29-31. There we see that God declared that on the Day of Atonement, the Nation of Israel was to participate in a corporate fast. This was a sacred day that included an annual sacrifice for the sins of the people. Which was, from the very start, meant to look forward to the sacrifice that Jesus Himself would make once and for all. Well sometime between the days of Ezra and Nehemiah and the birth of Jesus, the Scribes, Pharisees and Teachers of the Law had added hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of additional man made laws that went well beyond the Law that God had given to Moses. Many of these man made laws were what the religious leaders of the day regularly confronted Jesus on during His ministry. Fasting was one of those man made laws. They had determined that instead of just an annual fast, it would be better to have a twice a week fast. As a result, on Monday’s and Thursday’s there was now a required fast and if you wanted to be considered spiritual, well then this fast was a must!

When looking at this Biblical account in the Gospel of Matthew, we find out the the ones who approached Jesus concerning this fast were the disciples of John the Baptist. For some reason, some of John’s disciples had yet to begin to follow Jesus, even though John, himself, had made it very clear of Jesus that “He must increase, and I must decrease” even though he had said of Jesus that “I am not fit to loosen the strap of His sandal”, still, for some reason some of his disciples had not yet embraced Jesus as the Messiah.

These disciples approached Jesus with a question, by the way, chances are that for the disciples of John, this was a sincere question, but for the Pharisees, this was more of a challenge than a question they were seeking an answer to. The question; “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?”.

Jesus gives 2 different answers to the question, one in the form of a parable for the disciples of John, and another, in the form of 2 parables for the Pharisees. All 3 of the parables would have been easily understood by all those present that day.

For the disciples of John, He told: Next Slide

The Parable of The Bridegroom. Mark 2:19-20; Matt. 9:15; Luke 5:34-35

As I said, this was likely specifically geared towards the disciples of John. John had literally thousands and thousands of followers, and it is probable that many of his followers had not yet heard about John’s statements concerning Jesus. What they knew is that when they became followers of the teachings of John, they had turned their backs on the sins of their past and had made wholesale changes in their lives. For some of them this meant rigid adherence to religious rules and regulations so as to live transformed lives. As I mentioned a moment ago, John made it clear that he was there to “prepare the way for the Lord”.

In those days, and in some cases even in this day and age, Jewish weddings were a picture of the relationship between God and the Nation of Israel. The Nation of Israel was the bride, God was the Bridegroom. The same holds true of the Bible believing churches and Jesus. The church is the bride, Jesus is the bridegroom.

At the time, Jewish weddings lasted for up to 7 days, and the entire time was a time of great celebration and feasting. Since weddings often lasted for an entire week, the law permitted the participants in the wedding to ignore the 2 weekly fasts during the time of celebration. Another key thing to note regarding Jesus answer here is, after a couple was engaged, the bridegroom would then leave and return home to prepare a home for the 2 of them. The bridegroom would usually be gone for several months and the bride had no idea when he would return. The bride was to remain ready and waiting at all times for the return of the bridegroom. Once he showed up on the scene, the celebration began.

In answering John’s disciples in this way, Jesus was doing 2 very important things for them that day. One was that He was declaring to them that He was God in the flesh. You see every instance in the Old Testament when the term Bridegroom was used in relation to God, it was pointing to God as the Bridegroom. In using this parable that day, Jesus was clearly proclaiming to all there that He was God in the flesh. Secondly, He was letting them know that He was the long awaited Messiah, He was the Bridegroom the the entire Nation had been waiting for since the days of Abraham. This was not a time to fast, this was a time to celebrate. Jesus, the Messiah, the Bridegroom, God in the flesh had come.

In the next 2 parables, we see what I believe was Jesus addressing the Pharisees in:

Next Slide

Out With The Old, In With The New. Mark 2:21-22; Matt. 9:16-17; Luke 5:36-39

Here, Jesus uses two parables that again, everyone present would have understood very clearly.

Let’s take a moment and look at these verses:

Mark 2:21-22; “21 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.”

Jesus teaching in these 2 parable is progressive, one leads into another and the second one strengthens the message of the first.

He begins with the parable of new patch being sewed into an old garment. In our day and age, when we purchase new clothes, the clothes we purchase are either made of fabric that doesn’t shrink, of fabric that is pre-shrunk. That was not the case in Jesus days. As your clothes aged and holes began to appear, often times you would need to patch the holes. They couldn’t just run into JC Penneys or Kohls and buy new clothes. More often than not, what they wore was made by the ladies of the household. The wife, mom, grandmother, sister…whomever. When the holes would appear, they would use patches and thus prolong the use of the garments. One thing you learned quickly was that when you patched a garment, the cloth you used needed to be the same age as the piece of clothing, it also had to have been washed, otherwise, if you washed it for the first time after using it as a patch, it would shrink, and the initial hole you patched would be even worse than it was before you patched it. The other problem with using a new piece of cloth in an old garment is that the colors would not match. Making it clear that you were mixing the old with the new. That may be stylish today, but it wasn’t stylish in those days. The new fabric which Christ brings cannot be interwoven with the tired fibers of old religion; it will simply tear it apart.

The second parable He uses here for the Pharisees, is a picture of putting new wine in an old wineskin. In those days wine was poured into wineskins. Wineskins were often made of goatskins. Once the goat was killed, they would use the entire hide for wineskins. First they would tan the hide, then stitch most of it closed. They would hang it upside down by the stitched legs. The necks would be used as spouts for pouring the wine. Once filled with wine, they would tie the necks closed and allow for the fermentation of the wine. As the wine fermented, a gas would be released that would stretch the goatskin which had some natural elasticity. After a goatskin had been used once in the fermentation process, it could never be used again, otherwise the gases that were released during the process would stretch it until it literally bursted, destroying both the goatskin as well as the wine. Neither were of any use any longer.

Mark 1–8: The MacArthur New Testament Commentary Some Clarifying Analogies (2:21–22)

Like the first illustration, which demonstrated that the true gospel cannot be attached to a false system of works-righteousness, this analogy exemplified the fact that the legalism of Judaism could not contain the message of salvation by grace. In the same way that new wine was incompatible with old wineskins, the true gospel is antithetical to any system of salvation by works (Rom. 11:6; Gal. 5:4). Jesus’ point was that the good news of salvation could not be poured into the brittle, cracked wineskins of apostate Judaism. Nor is it compatible with any other man-made or demonic religion.

Shortly after the Armistice of World War I, Dr. Donald Barnhouse visited the battlefields of Belgium. In the first year of the war, the area around the city of Mons was the scene of a great British retreat; in the last year of war it was the scene of the great German retreat. For miles to the west of the city, the roads were lined without artillery, tanks, trucks, and other equipment of war which the Germans had abandoned in their hasty flight.

It was a lovely day in spring. The sun was shining, and not a breath of wind was blowing. As he walked along examining the German war material, he noticed that the leaves were falling from the great trees which arched above the road. He brushed at a leaf that had blown against his chest; it became caught in the belt of his uniform. As he picked it out, he pressed it in his fingers, and it disintegrated. He looked up curiously and saw several other leaves falling from the trees. It was not autumn. There was no wind to blow them off. These were the leaves that had outlived the winds of autumn and the frost of winter, yet now were falling, seemingly without cause. Then he realized that the most potent force of all was causing them to fall. It was spring. The sap was beginning to run, and the buds were beginning to push from within. From down beneath the dark earth, the roots were taking life and sending it along the trunk, branch, and twig until the life expelled every bit of deadness the remainder from the previous year. It was, as a great Scottish preacher termed it, “the expulsive power of a new affection.”

When Christ fills the wineskins of our lives, the swelling life within stretches us to new limits. The inner pressure expels unneeded things and fills every aspect of life. Those who have not had Christ take up residence in their life can scarcely imagine how fully they will be filled; how every aspect of their humanity from their intellect to their emotions will be changed. So dynamic is the new life that the old wineskins of previous religious structures must give way.

Practically speaking, our old selves (our previous experiences, our present level of growth, our intellectual formation, our cherished customs, our prejudices, the familiar, the comfortable) apart from Christ tend to be old wineskins. We have to allow Christ to modify all these areas or we will burst. You may be one who needs to do this today – – to say to Christ, “take my intellect, my customs, my prejudices, the familiar, the comfortable, and renew them to hold your wine. I want all I can get.” (Mark Volume One-Jesus, Servant And Savior: R. Kent Hughes)

The point of our 3 parables this morning is that Jesus came for the purpose of transforming all those who call upon His name. Not to transform us based on following a system of religious do’s and don’ts, rules and regulations, dotting every religious “I” and crossing every religious “T”. But to transform us from the inside out as He Himself, through the Holy Spirit of God is poured into us like wine into a new wineskin. While the new wine of Holy Spirit stretches us, Jesus strengthens us as the New Creations He declares us to be. The end result is the transformed life of the bride of Christ.

If you haven’t already, today is the day to surrender to Him, that He might make you new.