What is the Purpose of Fasting?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, what is the purpose behind fasting? Richard Foster wrote a book on
00:00:12.660 | spiritual disciplines, and in it he says that probably the most important text in
00:00:20.120 | all the Bible for establishing the importance of Christian fasting--Christian
00:00:29.760 | fasting--that we should do it today is Matthew 9, 14 and following. Let me read
00:00:37.600 | just a couple of verses of that and show you the sentence that I think he's right
00:00:41.920 | about. The disciples of John, John the Baptist, came to Jesus and said, "Why do
00:00:50.200 | the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" So he's not fasting. And Jesus
00:00:59.040 | said to them, "Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with
00:01:06.440 | them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away, and then they
00:01:15.200 | will fast." Now that's the sentence that Foster says, and I think he's right, shows that
00:01:24.920 | in Jesus' mind, when he is taken away--that is, when he dies and ascends to the
00:01:31.760 | Father--there will be fasting. And therefore the context of fasting in
00:01:40.480 | Jesus' mind is longing for the "not yet" of the kingdom. So he's come, and while he
00:01:49.320 | was here, they didn't fast because the bridegroom was present. But when the
00:01:53.240 | bridegroom is taken away to come a second time, there's this "ache" in the
00:01:58.720 | heart of God's people. And I think that's the general statement about the meaning
00:02:03.080 | of fasting. Fasting is a physical exclamation point at the end of the
00:02:11.920 | sentence, "I need you. I want you. I long for you. You are my treasure. I want more
00:02:20.040 | of you, and oh for the day when you would return. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!" And
00:02:26.280 | fasting is an exclamation point at the end of all those sentences. So the heart
00:02:34.200 | of it is longing, and a putting of our stomach where our heart is, in order to
00:02:43.080 | give added intensity and expressiveness to our ache for Jesus, and our longing or
00:02:51.960 | our ache for all the implications of Jesus' power in the present moment that
00:02:58.680 | isn't completely realized. We want to see people healed, we want to see people
00:03:03.480 | saved, we want to see marriages redeemed, and we ache and long for this to happen,
00:03:08.560 | and therefore we ask Jesus to come by putting this exclamation point of
00:03:15.400 | longing at the end of our our desires. Here's one more thing, and I say this
00:03:23.160 | largely from experience, and people can test whether they think it's got
00:03:27.880 | biblical root or not, I think it does. I think fasting is not only a positive
00:03:33.960 | statement of "this much I want you, you're more important to me than food," but it's
00:03:39.760 | also a negative way of exposing latent idolatries. When I'm not being
00:03:46.400 | medicated by food, what comes out of my heart? Anger? Lust? The need for television
00:03:56.160 | and more and more of it, or something like that? People need to know what's at
00:04:01.300 | the bottom. I think Job was a good man, basically, but at the bottom of Job's
00:04:08.640 | life was some latent sin, and when God took away from him health, took away from
00:04:18.200 | him children, in other words, this was a horrible enforced fast from children and
00:04:23.760 | from health, Job got bent out of shape and said some things for which he had to
00:04:30.040 | later repent. And I find, Tony, that if I go without, say, 24 hours of food from
00:04:39.520 | from supper to supper or breakfast to breakfast or something like that, my, oh my,
00:04:44.680 | what is exposed of my heart towards my wife and my daughter? So it is a very
00:04:53.560 | good discipline, not only as a positive expression of longing in prayer, but also
00:05:00.520 | a negative exposure of my heart so that I can deal with these things as they come up.
00:05:06.560 | Thank you, Pastor John, and for more on fasting, see John Piper's book "A Hunger
00:05:11.360 | for God," which you can download for free online at DesiringGod.org. I'm your host,
00:05:15.680 | Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:05:18.600 | [BLANK_AUDIO]