Is Intermittent Fasting Sacrilegious?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:02.000 | New year, new diets, new focus on health. And today we look at intermittent fasting.
00:00:09.860 | The question has come to us from several listeners. I pulled two. Here's a listener named Sharon.
00:00:14.720 | "Pastor John, I have always thought of fasting as a special spiritual discipline between me and God,
00:00:19.880 | a plea for dependence on Him as I pray about specific things.
00:00:23.740 | But there's a new weight loss craze called intermittent fasting.
00:00:27.640 | It's everywhere and people are losing weight, feeling healthier and living happier lives.
00:00:32.160 | That's great, but for a believer is intermittent fasting sacrilegious if it's done merely for weight loss purposes?
00:00:39.820 | When is fasting not fasting for the Christian?"
00:00:44.040 | And a listener named Emelyn writes in to say she has tried it with some success toward the end of weight loss,
00:00:50.240 | but now she wonders if it's appropriate for Christians to separate the physical discipline of fasting from its spiritual point.
00:00:57.000 | She asks if "the regular discipline of intermittent fasting should be used by Christians merely to lose weight,
00:01:03.880 | or does this goal prostitute a spiritual discipline and hijack it and turn it into nothing more than a physical body hack?"
00:01:11.200 | Pastor John, how would you answer Shannon and Emelyn?
00:01:15.400 | My short answer is that fasting without any explicit Christian associations,
00:01:23.440 | simply for the possible physical benefits of it, is not a prostitution of a Christian practice
00:01:29.600 | and need not be any more of a sin than exercise or dieting.
00:01:35.880 | Now, here's my thinking behind that answer.
00:01:38.160 | Fasting was not a Christian creation.
00:01:44.120 | In other words, the practice was not ours to begin with.
00:01:49.720 | As a religious practice, it already existed among Jewish people in the Old Testament,
00:01:54.880 | but also among other religions, as is clear from the Old Testament.
00:02:00.480 | We get a taste of what it meant for the Old Testament saints from Ezra 8.21, where Ezra says,
00:02:06.600 | "I proclaimed a fast there at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God
00:02:14.680 | to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and our goods."
00:02:20.040 | So, fasting was seen as a humbling of ourselves before God,
00:02:25.480 | because it put the person who's fasting in the position of a person with hunger,
00:02:31.000 | a needy position, a dependent position, symbolically as if we were poor,
00:02:38.040 | the people with no food, and the aim was to intensify the cry to God for help.
00:02:47.240 | It was the embrace of physical hunger to express with greater earnestness the spiritual hunger
00:02:55.080 | for God, just like I need food, I need you, oh God.
00:03:00.840 | But as significant as it was, the practice did not originate with the people of Israel.
00:03:08.360 | It appears that it was present in most other religions,
00:03:12.760 | and we can see a few glimpses of this in the Old Testament.
00:03:15.720 | For example, the Assyrians of Nineveh called for a fast when the prophet Jonah preached to them.
00:03:22.600 | Darius the Mede fasted when he threw Daniel into the lion's den.
00:03:29.480 | There's nothing distinctively Christian or Jewish about going without food for religious purposes.
00:03:37.880 | Therefore, it wouldn't be accurate to say that non-religious fasting
00:03:44.840 | is a prostitution of a Christian practice.
00:03:49.000 | It might be in the mind of some particular irreligious person.
00:03:56.920 | They might intentionally start with an awareness of the Christian practice and then consciously
00:04:06.040 | strip the practice of Christ and strip the practice of God and prayer.
00:04:11.880 | That would be a kind of prostitution of fasting in their particular case, but that's probably
00:04:20.440 | not what's going on for most people who fast for dietary purposes.
00:04:27.160 | I think what we need to be alert to that's more serious than a simple physical practice
00:04:35.720 | for the sake of health, which has a parallel with Christian practice for spiritual reasons,
00:04:41.640 | more serious than that is when a Christian practice is taken over and treated by unbelievers
00:04:51.720 | as though it were simply physical bodily benefit, but really, really, there is a subtle spiritual
00:05:03.000 | dimension to it, which they say claims benefits coming from some higher power through the practice.
00:05:11.320 | This may, in fact, be what's happening with some non-Christians in the practice of fasting,
00:05:19.800 | though I'd be slow to say it's the main thing that's happening.
00:05:23.160 | So, let me illustrate what I mean by this from Paul's letter to the Colossians.
00:05:27.880 | In Colossians, as in the rest of the New Testament, humility, lowliness, is a good thing.
00:05:35.880 | It's a beautiful virtue.
00:05:37.400 | The Greek word, which will matter in just a minute, is tapinophrosyne.
00:05:41.880 | Paul says in Colossians 3.12, "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and loved,
00:05:49.560 | compassionate hearts, kindness," tapinophrosyne, lowliness, humility.
00:05:56.840 | But there were false teachers in the church at Colossae that used this word tapinophrosyne
00:06:04.360 | similarly and yet subtly differently and made it part of their pagan practices
00:06:11.880 | that they insinuated then into the church.
00:06:14.760 | So, in Colossians 2.18, Paul says, "Let no one disqualify you, insisting on tapinophrosyne."
00:06:24.360 | And it's translated in English as asceticism, a mistreatment, a lowly treatment of the body.
00:06:30.440 | "And worship of angels, going on in detail about visions puffed up without
00:06:35.720 | reason by their sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head, Christ."
00:06:40.680 | In other words, the false teachers were treating this Christian disposition of
00:06:46.120 | self-humbling as part of their pagan way of worshiping angels.
00:06:53.480 | And then Paul goes on to say, it gets right to the heart of the matter in verse 20, following,
00:06:58.840 | "This has an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and tapinophrosyne,"
00:07:08.280 | asceticism, lowliness, self-humbling, "and a severity to the body, but they are of no value
00:07:16.120 | in stopping the indulgence of the flesh."
00:07:18.200 | Now, the reason I call that getting to the heart of the matter is that
00:07:22.600 | here we have a non-Christian use of a Christian virtue, and it has the appearance,
00:07:31.640 | Paul says, the appearance of wisdom, and particularly wisdom in showing severity to the
00:07:39.000 | body, kind of self-denial, probably including even then fasting, but while being hard on the body,
00:07:47.560 | Paul says, it does nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh.
00:07:52.840 | In other words, a physical practice taken over from Christianity may have benefits physically
00:08:01.640 | and look like wisdom, but in fact may feed right into the flesh, that is, the proud,
00:08:09.080 | self-reliant, self-exalting aspect of human nature.
00:08:15.400 | Now, that's what I think we need to be alert to.
00:08:19.320 | Secular fasting as a physical practice to gain physical benefits, I don't think we should be
00:08:25.800 | on a crusade against that, but I think we should be alert to those cases where that practice is
00:08:33.720 | sliding over into the spiritual expectation that this really will make me a better person,
00:08:42.280 | maybe even make me more pleasing to God, and if we detect that in somebody we know
00:08:49.640 | and we're talking to, say, about this issue, it may become a real, a really good opportunity
00:08:57.320 | to make the gospel clear, that is, to show people how gospel self-denial is really different
00:09:07.080 | from worldly self-betterment through asceticism or through fasting.
00:09:11.560 | In the gospel, we can share this.
00:09:14.360 | Right in this context, we can share that in the gospel, Jesus does the decisive work of forgiving
00:09:22.600 | our sins and accepting us through faith alone so that all our improvements after that are not a
00:09:33.720 | regimen of self-betterment, but instead a humble reliance on his grace to bring about our change
00:09:44.040 | so that even our fasting can then be seen as a pursuit of more of him.
00:09:51.080 | Fascinating points here, Pastor John, distinguishing holy asceticism from self-righteous asceticism.
00:09:58.120 | That's fascinating.
00:09:59.000 | Thank you for that.
00:10:00.440 | And if you want more on this topic of fasting in general, see a very popular episode that we
00:10:04.440 | recorded. It's APJ 789, "Why Do Christians Fast?" APJ 789.
00:10:11.240 | Well, thank you for joining us today, and you can ask a question of your own.
00:10:14.440 | Find APJ 789 or subscribe to the podcast all at askpastorjohn.com.
00:10:20.280 | We now break for the weekend to worship with our churches, and Monday we're back to look at
00:10:26.440 | how to get that Sunday morning worship vibe right.
00:10:30.440 | How do you set the mood from the outset of the church gathering?
00:10:33.640 | Pastor John has put a lot of thought into this and how to do it on Sunday mornings,
00:10:38.280 | and he'll explain how he did it next time.
00:10:41.240 | I'm your host Tony Rehnke.
00:10:42.840 | We'll see you back here on Monday.
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