Will we continue our journey this morning through the Sermon on the Mount? We're in Matthew chapter 6 and we'll be looking at verses 16 through 18. Today you'll recall that this is the last of three examples Jesus gives to illustrate what true righteousness looks like. He's first addressed righteous giving, then righteous prayer, and finally today he takes up the subject of fasting. What does fasting that pleases God look like?
Well, let's read it together. Matthew chapter 6 verses 16 through 18 and I'll invite you to stand with me in honor of God's Word as we read it together. Jesus says, 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.
Let's pray. Father, you've told us that we are blessed when we hunger and thirst for righteousness because then we will be satisfied. And yet, Lord, how often we spoil our appetite for righteous things by consuming worldly things, temporal things, futile things.
How often our hunger for good things diminishes our hunger for the best things. So help us, Lord, to bring our bodies under subjection. Help us to desire you like the deer pants after water, like the bride longs for her bridegroom, like a young child loves to be with his father. Holy Spirit, feed us from your Word this morning. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
You may be seated. The central topic of our text this morning is a topic that's not emphasized very much in the church today. It's the spiritual discipline of fasting.
We talk about prayer, we talk about evangelism, we talk about worship, but fasting is often one of those neglected subjects. But here it is staring us in the face right in the middle of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. So we're not free to dismiss it or overlook it.
We're not free to just explain it away. We have to come to some understanding, some biblical understanding of this part of the Christian life. So let's go to God's Word today and learn together as we try to discover what Christian fasting is all about. Now there's a problem that we're up against, and that is that our text addresses a very specific aspect of fasting, not fasting in general. And yet if my assumption is true that fasting is not really an integral part of the Christian walk for many Christians, then we're probably going to have a hard time understanding and applying the specific teaching of Christ in Matthew 6. In other words, if fasting isn't even on our spiritual radar, so to speak, we're not going to benefit much from the specifics of what Jesus says regarding fasting here.
We've got to lay some groundwork first, and then we'll be able to better understand and apply what Jesus is saying. So let's take some time first before we get into our text specifically to consider fasting in general, and maybe answer some questions that come up with regard to this topic. Perhaps the first question that arises is whether or not fasting even ought to be a Christian practice. Are Christians supposed to fast, or is this just some kind of legalistic holdover made from the Old Testament ceremonial law, or some kind of ascetic self-denying monk in a monastery sort of way of living the Christian life? I want to suggest that fasting has a place in the life of a Christian. In fact, given our context in Matthew 6, we ought to consider the practice of fasting to be just as Christian as the practice of praying and giving. If then fasting does have a place in the Christian life, why don't more Christians practice it?
First of all, we should acknowledge that there are those within the church across the world that place a very robust emphasis on this discipline, so maybe the question we're really asking is why don't Christians in our circles typically place much emphasis on fasting if it's a biblical discipline? And I think part of the answer lies in the fact that there have been plenty of Christians who have misunderstood and maybe abused the practice of self-denial. They've seen it as a means of earning merit before God. We don't like that because it's a denial of grace, and we shouldn't like that. But man's tendency in reacting against error and abuse and misunderstanding is often to go too far in the other direction.
We often overreact and end up throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. We need to be on guard against letting the abuses of others determine our view of Christian living. If we're going to be biblically balanced in our practice of the Christian faith, we've got to go to Scripture and let that be the standard. So in answer to the question, are Christians supposed to fast, we need to ask, well, what does the Bible say about it? What does the Bible say about fasting? In the Old Testament, there was only one required fast per year.
It was on the Day of Atonement. Leviticus 16, Leviticus 23, Numbers 29, and Acts 27 all describe this annual mandatory fast. Over time, this compulsory fast had multiplied to the point that the Pharisees of Jesus' day were imposing a requirement of fasting twice per week.
God never required this. It was a doctrine of man. Now, with the death and resurrection of Christ, the Day of Atonement, that mandatory fast day, became obsolete along with its mandatory fast. We come into the New Testament and notice that there seems to be at times a negative tone towards fasting. Some examples of this would be Matthew 9, where Jesus is explaining to the disciples of John why Christ's disciples don't fast.
And he says, can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? Or 1 Timothy 4, which rebukes those who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. Paul says, for everything created by God is good, nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. So why are you making fasting a requirement? 1 Corinthians 8 also says, food will not commend us to God.
We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do. You almost come away from reading these verses thinking that the discipline of fasting in the New Testament is somehow irrelevant or maybe condemned altogether. But then there are other passages that prevent us from drawing that conclusion because they cast the practice of fasting in a positive light. Acts 13-3 describes the early church praying and fasting as part of their commissioning of missionaries.
In Acts 14-23, the church is appointing elders through a process which involves prayer and fasting. Paul includes fasting or hunger in a list of things that commend his ministry as an apostle in 2 Corinthians 6-5. And certainly we can't go without mentioning the fact that Christ himself began his earthly ministry with a 40-day fast. So while the New Testament never explicitly commands this spiritual discipline, neither does it explicitly condemn the practice of fasting. In fact, it rather assumes that fasting is taking place in the lives of Christians. Jesus says here, when you fast in Matthew 6-16, not if you fast. I think our only conclusion then must be that there are wrong ways to fast and there are right ways to fast. But fasting as a spiritual discipline certainly has a place in biblical Christianity.
Well, this leads us to our next question. What is Christian fasting? What is its place in the Christian life? Before we jump into a definition of fasting, let's correct maybe some typical misunderstandings. Let's address what Christian fasting isn't. First of all, it isn't part of the normal or general disciplines of a Christian life. General discipline of the physical body ought to characterize all Christians all of the time. There's never a time when we as followers of Christ can justify self-indulgence or gluttony.
There's never a time when it's okay to abandon self-control and restraint of the flesh. These general disciplines are to be an ordinary part of the Christian life, but fasting is extraordinary. It's unique. It's special.
It's exceptional. Fasting is abstinence from food for a specific purpose and under special circumstances. Let me read that again. That's our working definition. Fasting is abstinence from food for a specific purpose and under special circumstances. The New Testament never suggests that fasting is a regularly recurring thing. We're told to pray without ceasing. That's regular.
We're told to give thanks in all things. That's regular. We're told to meditate on the Word of God day and night. That's certainly regular. We're told to exhort one another every day.
That's regular. But we're never told to fast on a schedule. Fasting as a spiritual practice seems to be reserved for special situations, extraordinary circumstances, and is never mandated as a regularly recurring practice. Now, does this mean it's wrong to, say, fast once a week?
No, it's not a sin to fast regularly, but Scripture doesn't require it. Secondly, we need to realize that biblical fasting is not a method of dieting for physical benefits. There are numerous physical benefits that may accompany fasting.
More energy, a better rest, improved health, clarity of thinking. And some people abstain from food or from certain types of food because of these physical benefits. And that's perfectly fine, but that's not what Christian fasting as a spiritual discipline is about. Any atheist can experience these same physical benefits from fasting without being any better off in his relationship to God because of it. Again, 1 Corinthians 8 says, food will not commend us to God.
We're no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do. So Christian fasting is not about trying to improve our physical bodies alone. We need to be careful not to confuse the physical benefits of fasting with the spiritual ones.
Now, I think those first two misunderstandings are fairly straightforward, easily recognizable. But now I want to address what is perhaps the most subtle misconception regarding fasting, and that is that fasting somehow earns favor with God. We need to realize that fasting is not a means of meriting God's blessing.
This is a particular danger of any practice that requires self-denial on our part. We often feel like I think that if it costs me something, then God is somehow obligated to pay me back. If I give up food, God is going to give me blessing in return. This was really the attitude of the Pharisee in Luke 18, wasn't it? You'll remember two men went to the temple to pray, a Pharisee and a tax collector. The Pharisee boastfully prayed like this.
He said, I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get, as if this somehow made his prayer more acceptable to God than the prayer of the broken tax collector. Someone once described this as vending machine religion.
You put your penny in and you get a blessing out. But folks, nothing that Christians do or abstain from doing is able to merit the grace of God. Nothing we do or abstain from doing earns God's merit. If it is God who works in us, both to will and to do his good pleasure, if all things are from him and through him and to him, then God is the one who gives us the desire and the ability to seek him intently through times of fasting so that he can get the glory through the blessing we receive when we diligently seek him. We don't go without food in order to show something that God doesn't already know about our commitment level.
We don't go without food in order to obligate God to love us more. Genuine fasting that pleases God and receives his reward is itself a gift from God. So fasting is never a way of earning kudos from God.
I spent a summer during high school in a very legalistic environment. I was working for a Christian organization that required, or at least strongly encouraged, a weekly fast on Sundays. They even provided slips of paper that we could fill out and check the box if we had fasted. But you see, folks, God isn't impressed with the boxes we check, and if our approach to fasting is all about getting in good with God, we're going to be frustrated and disappointed because fasting is not a means of securing God's blessing or earning his favor.
Well, what is it then? I love the way one pastor describes fasting. He refers to it as homesickness for God. Homesickness for God.
We want God so much that we forego the normal pleasures and even necessities of life in order to pursue him. A while back, my family and I visited an alpaca farm on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and we learned that alpacas are very social animals. In fact, they're so intensely social that they cannot thrive without the companionship of another alpaca.
If an alpaca finds itself alone, it won't be long before that animal is pacing and whimpering and refusing to eat because it so longs for the company of another. Those of you who are married, think back to your engagement period. Was that not a time of homesickness for your future spouse? You were committed to each other. You were anticipating the joy of marriage, but you had to wait for the wedding day.
I remember being separated from Lara for several weeks before our wedding day, and I didn't want to do anything fun because she wasn't there to enjoy it with me. I wanted us to be together. I wanted to be with her.
I longed for her. I was homesick for the one I love. I think these are very appropriate analogies to help us understand what fasting is all about. It's homesickness for God. But there's more to it than just being unable to enjoy life's pleasures because you want God so much. You see, sometimes, if we're honest, it's the case that life's pleasures are enjoyed so much that we begin to realize that our love for God is deficient, and we feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit in our conscience. We recognize we don't desire God enough.
In these cases, we fast because we want to want Him more. In fact, I suspect that this is more often than not the driving motive in fasting. Our desire for God is so weak, and we grieve over our own indulgences and idolatries, and we say with Paul, Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? Fasting in Scripture is often associated with times of humiliation and sorrow over sin.
Bereavement, defeat, lamentation over difficulties are often the things that drive people to forego the normal pleasures of life, like food. Calvin lists some of the biblical motives for fasting. He says we fast in order to train ourselves to abstinence, in order to subdue the lust of the flesh, in order to excite us to earnest prayer, and in order to testify to the sincerity of our repentance before a holy God. So there are times when we fast because we can't help it, we desire God so much, but other times we fast because we recognize we don't desire God enough. In this latter sense, fasting is a test to see which desires control us. And in this sense, fasting I think can include more than just abstinence from food.
It may involve abstinence from any number of things, like food, sleep, marital intimacy, talking, music, the phone. Jesus said in his parable of the four soils that there are those for whom the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desire for other things enter in and choke the word and it proves unfruitful. Fasting then is abstinence from those things which you desire so much that they're choking out your desire for God, your appetite for God. It's a battle against God distracting desires. Now, desire is a tricky thing. Sometimes it's difficult to even know if a particular desire is distracting us from God. Sometimes the desires that are the most damaging are perfectly innocent and even good desires at first. I want to read a quote that has lodged itself in my mind for several days now because it just throws open the curtain on how idolatry sneaks into our hearts, oftentimes masquerading as something good and virtuous and noble when it's really a sort of cancer.
Listen to this. The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven but endless nibbling at the table of the world.
It is not the X-rated video but the primetime dribble of triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife in Luke 14. The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable and almost incurable. You see, fasting is not abstaining from the evil things that keep us from God. It's abstaining from the good things that keep us from God. We are so prone to take things that are good and spiritually beneficial and twist them into things that aren't at all helpful.
In fact, the very act of fasting can become one of those good things that we turn into an idol. If we're not careful, we end up indulging self through self-denial. This happens when we successfully deny ourselves some pleasure or delight and then we begin to develop a bit of a spiritual swagger and we think, yeah, I've got this self-denial thing down. And we end up feeding self by taking pride in our ability to deny ourselves outward comforts and pleasures. This is exactly what the Pharisees of Jesus' day were guilty of. They were conceited over their ability to rein in their physical and external passions.
Someone called this self-indulgent fasting. The point is that the Christian walk is a very narrow path and we are so easily lured to the left and to the right, to this extreme or to that extreme. This tendency is illustrated in Luke 7, 33, which says, John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine and you say he has a demon.
The Son of Man has come eating and drinking and you say, look at him, a glutton and a drunkard. And isn't this exactly what we tend to do? We take some good thing that God gives us and then indulge ourselves in it and make an idol out of it. And we see others restraining themselves in the area where we're out of control and we call that legalism. Or we take some good gift from God and learn some measure of self-restraint with it, but then we notice the Christian at the other end of the pew enjoying that gift and we think to ourselves, that is just shameful.
That person has no self-control. The Christian walk is a narrow path, but between the dangers of self-denial and self-indulgence, as one preacher put it, there is a path of pleasant pain. So Christians, don't be so naive as to think that when you make an all-out assault on self with the weapon of biblical fasting that somehow it won't be fraught with difficulty and resistance.
Self never dies easily. So we've considered fasting in general and hopefully we've established that fasting indeed has a place in the Christian walk, but there are certainly some dangers we need to be aware of. Hopefully we've addressed some of the questions and objections and misconceptions that might cause us to miss the mark when it comes to this spiritual discipline. But let's look now at Matthew 6 and consider fasting in the Sermon on the Mount.
I want you to take notice first of the logical progression that's going on in Matthew 6. Jesus is talking about sincerity in our Christian lives and he applies his teaching, as we've already seen, to three areas, to giving, prayer, and now fasting. Giving concerns how we relate to others. Prayer concerns how we relate to God.
And fasting concerns how we relate to ourselves. Sincerity in our Christian walk then is not just an individual matter. It's not something that's of concern just between you and God.
It affects every aspect of your life, every relationship, every activity, every attitude. We have the potential of being hypocritical before men in how we give. We have the potential of being hypocritical before God in how we pray. We even have the potential of being self-deceptively hypocritical towards ourselves in how we practice spiritual disciplines such as fasting.
But Jesus desires sincerity in all of these areas. Well, in our text, as Christ did with both giving and prayer, he tells us the wrong way to fast and the right way to fast. The wrong way to fast is found in verse 16.
Let's read it again. Jesus says, 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. Throughout these verses in Matthew 6, the hypocrite is always concerned with how he's perceived by other people to the neglect of how he's perceived by God. Now, I want you to notice something in this description of the hypocrite. When the text says they disfigure their faces, the word disfigure could also be translated as hide. So the verse could read, They hide their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.
Let's just pause and enjoy the irony of that. They hide in order to be seen. Jesus says this is the wrong way to fast, and truly it is. It's the height of hypocrisy, hiding in order to be seen.
It's hypocritical, it's self-exalting, it's fake, and its only reward is the fact that other people take notice. Well, Jesus goes on then to tell us what right fasting looks like. Look with me again at verses 17 and 18. 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. Jesus is concerned that our focus be on God in heaven when we fast, and the degree to which we're thinking about man's opinion of us is the degree to which we're not thinking about God. You see, fasting is about seeking the face of God, not seeking the face of man. In fact, John Piper pointed out, Perhaps this is the explanation for the demise of fasting in our day, when the sense of God diminishes, fasting disappears.
Church, if we have become disinterested in God's assessment of us, if we've dismissed the fear of God in our lives, if God doesn't matter, then what motive do we have to give up the pleasures of this life, much less the basic necessities of this life in order to experience more of Him? The reason we don't fast is because either we have all of God that we want, or we don't want God at all. Jesus, in reordering our perspective, gives us some very practical counsel on how to avoid this man-focus when we fast. He says, Anoint your head and wash your face. Now, I've been taught for most of my life that this means we're to keep it a secret whenever we fast.
Don't let anyone know. Hide the fact that you're fasting. I've come to believe that that's not what Christ is communicating at all. His whole point in these verses is to do away with hypocrisy, and if we're hiding the fact that we're fasting, isn't that just another form of hypocrisy?
John Calvin said, When Christ bids them anoint their head and wash their face, his language is hyperbolical, for Christ does not withdraw us from one kind of hypocrisy only to lead us into another. Fastings should make no change in our accustomed way of living. So the point Christ seems to be making here is that when you fast, just fast. Don't change your normal routine, your custom, in order to broadcast to everyone, Hey, I'm fasting.
Just go about your business as usual. There was nothing exceptional in Christ's day about anointing the head and washing the face. Jesus is just saying, Be natural when you fast. I thought Martin Lloyd-Jones' comments on this were kind of humorous, but very true. He said, There are some people who are so afraid of being regarded as miserable because they are Christians that they tend to go to the other extreme. They say that we must give the impression that to be a Christian is to be bright and happy, and so far from being dowdy and dressed, we must go to the opposite extreme.
So they go out of their way not to be drab, and the result is they are quite as bad as those who are guilty of doubtiness. Our Lord's principle is always this. Forget other people altogether. In order to avoid looking sad, don't put a grin on your face. Forget your face. Forget yourself. Forget other people altogether.
It is this interest in the opinions of other people that is so wrong. Don't worry about the impression you are making. Just forget yourself and give yourself entirely to God. Be concerned only about God and about pleasing Him.
Be concerned only about His honor and His glory. Our focus, then, is not to be on other people. It's not to be on ourselves. It's to be on God. Finally, we're told that there is a reward for fasting.
Look at the last part of verse 18. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. What kind of reward does fasting bring? Perhaps we're tempted to think that the reward is the approval of God. We're not supposed to seek man's approval, and the opposite of man's approval must be God's approval. So when we fast, we're rewarded, we assume, with a divine pat on the back.
Good job, Christian. You're fasting. Brothers and sisters, as we've already said, we don't fast in order to earn God's approval. In fact, nothing we do is able to impress God. We fast because we want God. We want to delight in Him more.
We want to know more of Him and His attributes and His truth. We want to kill our taste for the little snacks that spoil our appetite for God. The reward for fasting, then, is God.
We get Him. We learn to love Him more. We learn to love those things that compete for our affections, and when we fight against those, we get God.
That is the reward. That's the prize given to those who engage in quiet, pride-killing, God-absorbed fasting. In his book, A Hunger for God, John Piper said, What we hunger for most, we worship. What we hunger for the most, we worship.
When God is the supreme hunger of our hearts, He will be supreme in everything. And beloved, I wonder what joys we have forfeited by neglecting the spiritual discipline of biblical fasting. And as we close this morning, I want to read several verses from Isaiah 58.
This is one of the key passages in Scripture on this subject, and it lists just some of the rewards poured out on those who seek the face of God through fasting. Isaiah 58. It says, Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily. Your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer.
You shall cry, and He will say, Here I am. Then shall your light rise in the darkness, and your gloom be as the noon day. Then the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations. Then you shall take delight in the Lord that will make you ride on the heights of the earth. I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Let's pray. Lord, right now at this moment we want you. We're at church. We're gathered as your people. But tomorrow morning when we wake up and our bellies are hungry for food, our pride is hungry for praise, our bodies are hungry for comfort, our emotions are hungry for happiness, Lord, then we tend to forget that we need you. And we look to all sorts of other things, things that could ultimately choke out the life-giving seed of your word in our lives. So, God, help us to want you more. May you be the chief delight of our existence. May we be able to say with Paul that we count everything else, food, leisure, money, our reputation, our education, our social status, all of it, we count it loss for the excellence of knowing Christ. I pray this for the sake of your glory in us. Amen.
