Saying No to Self to Say Yes to God

If you were shopping in one of the malls over on MacArthur Road, and you became hungry, here are the choices you would have on where to eat within a one mile radius:

Arby’s

Boardwalk Fries

Burger King

Chi Chi’s

Chili’s

Chuck E. Cheese’s

Cinnabon

City View Diner

Cosimo’s Pizza

Friendlys

Haagen Dasz

Heavenly Ham

J’s Steaks & Subs

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Lone Star Steakhouse

McDonalds

Olive Garden

Orange Julius

Oriental Palace

Pasta Bella

Perkins

Pizza Hut

Ponderosa Steak House

Pretzel Gourmet

Red Lobster

Stacy’s Buffet

Swensen’s

Taco Bell

Uni-Wok

Wendy’s

There are over 30 restaurants within a one mile radius!

We really love to eat! Thoughts of our next meal are never very far from our minds, and the choices of what to eat, and where to eat are simply staggering.

In this culture of food, how much to eat can sometimes become a problem for some of us. There are major multi-million dollar businesses like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig dedicated to helping people to get a handle on their food intake. The Lehigh Valley Yellow Pages lists no less than 20 personal weight control services in our area alone.

Back in December, Newsweek magazine devoted a cover article to the Truth about Fat. There was a big slice of pizza on the cover. Major newspapers such as USA Today run regular food and nutrition features.

Walk into any bookstore in America and you’ll find that one of the largest and most prominent sections will be the cook-book section. A host of television programs, from Julia Child to the Frugal Gourmet, are devoted to the preparation and enjoyment of food.

And it’s in the midst of this culture—a culture of eating—that we come today to a passage of Scripture that deals with NOT eating. Turn in your Bibles to Matthew 6:16–18.

Matthew 6:16-18 When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Jesus has been teaching us what it means to be a Christian. In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, he warns us against a very insidious danger—the danger that we might become hypocrites. A hypocrite is a role player—someone who is not the same inside as he appears to be on the outside.

You become a hypocrite when you start to practice the disciplines of the Christian life—not in order to please God—but in order to gain the approval of men. In order to draw attention to yourself. In order to impress people with how spiritual you are.

And Jesus shows us how that can happen in three important areas of the spiritual life, in the area of giving, in the area of praying, and in the area of fasting.

Now everyone agrees that giving is an important part of the Christian life. And everyone agrees that praying is an important part of the Christian life. But hardly anyone today gives even a passing thought to the idea that the regular practice of biblical fasting might also be an important part of the Christian life.

You can walk into Hackmans Book Store and find hundreds of books written on the subject of how to improve your spiritual life—how to pray better, how to worship better, how to manage your finances better, how to practice biblical giving, how to share your faith, how to keep a spiritual journal. There are even lots of Christian books on how to eat properly and how to take care of your body. But you will be hard pressed to find even one Christian book on the spiritual discipline of fasting.

And that’s no indictment of Joe Hackman—his inventory is only a reflection of what the Christian public wants to read.

Theologian Richard Foster said that in his research on fasting, he found that between the years 1861 and 1954—a period of almost a hundred years during which thousands upon thousands of books were written by Christians on every aspect of the spiritual life—not a single book was written by a Christian author on the subject of fasting. Not one book in almost a hundred years!

And yet we find, when we look at the Bible, that many of the major characters fasted. Moses fasted. David fasted. Elijah fasted. Esther fasted. Daniel fasted. Anna the prophetess fasted. The apostle Paul fasted. And Jesus our Savior fasted.

Many of the leading characters of church history fasted. Martin Luther fasted. John Calvin fasted. John Knox fasted. John Wesley fasted. Jonathan Edwards fasted. David Brainerd fasted. Charles Finney fasted. And the list goes on and on.

And even in our own nation’s history, there have been times in the past when even our elected officials have called us to fasting and prayer.

Abraham Lincoln made a presidential proclamation that April 30, 1863 be set apart as a day of national fasting and prayer. He wrote “It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.

“The awful calamity of Civil War which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity, and too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us then to humble ourselves before God, to confess our national sins, and to pray for forgiveness.”

Why has fasting become such a forgotten practice? Because, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity, and too proud to pray to the God that made us.”

Let’s take a closer look at fasting. I want to talk today about the definition of fasting, the discipline of fasting, and finally the danger in fasting.

1. Definition of fasting

The Bible teaches that fasting is when you abstain from eating in order to seek God. The Bible doesn’t say anything about fasting for health reasons, or fasting in order to lose weight. The practice of fasting is so that you can center your attention on God.

And fasting is not a kind of spiritual hunger strike, where you’re trying to back God into a corner and make him do something for you. Fasting is merely a way of drawing closer to God.

In Matthew ch.4, Jesus was about to begin his public ministry. But first, he went out into the wilderness to pray and seek God’s face. And during the forty days that he was out there, he fasted.

And then, at the end of the forty days, the tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” He was playing on the fact that Jesus was very hungry and physically weak.

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

And that is the Biblical rationale for fasting. When we fast, we are reminding ourselves that it is not food that sustains us, it is God who sustains us. When we forego food, it helps us to get back to the realization that our life is dependent upon God, and God alone.

You see, it is so easy for us to become self-sufficient; to begin to think that because we have a roof over our head and three square meals a day, and money in our pocket, that we don’t really need God.

Fasting helps us to break that mindset. It teaches us that the fulfilling of our physical appetites is not what life is all about. We are creatures who are in need of spiritual sustenance from God, not just physical sustenance from food. And going without food for a time in order to seek God teaches us that.

2. Discipline of fasting

That’s why fasting is an important spiritual discipline and was a regular spiritual discipline up until recently. Look again at Matthew 6:16. Jesus said “When you fast…” not “If you fast…” In other words, he assumed that his disciples would fast.

Now there was a time when the disciples of John the Baptist came to Jesus with a question. They said “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.”

In other words, “my disciples don’t need to fast now while I’m right here with them. But when I’ve gone back to heaven, that’s when they will fast.” He assumed that they would, and that’s what they did.

But Jesus never gave us a command to fast. The reason for that, I believe, is that it is simply impossible for some people to fast. For example, diabetics, people with heart disease, pregnant women, cannot fast.

So Jesus never gave us a command to fast, but he assumed that, under normal circumstances, we would. Just because He didn’t explicitly command us to do it doesn’t mean that he didn’t expect us to do it.

Jesus’ disciples began to fast after Jesus had ascended into heaven. We read of them fasting in Acts 13. Paul mentions it in 2 Cor.11:27 as being a regular part of his life. And the disciples fasted in order to find a deeper level of communion with God.

The discipline of fasting helps us to “clear the decks” so to speak; to put aside the routine issues of life—even something as mundane as sitting down to eat a meal—in order that we might focus more intently on God in prayer and in the study of His Word.

There is a discipline in fasting that we cannot gain any other way. Robert Benson, in his book “He Speaks Softly” says:

“In any discussion of spiritual progress, “discipline” nearly always emerges. We must build some patterns and habits that will, through their regular repetition, slowly but surely free us from living on the surface and turn us deeply inward to the peace and strength that he alone can bring.”

That’s why fasting is a valid discipline of the Christian life. Because it can keep us from going through life with full stomachs but empty hearts.

In John 4, Jesus and his disciples had been walking back to Galilee from Judea. It was a long and exhausting journey and they stopped for a rest in a little town named Sychar in the region of Samaria.

It was about noon hour, and the disciples went into town to buy some lunch. But Jesus sat down at Jacob’s well on the outskirts of town. Along came a Samaritan woman, and Jesus struck up a conversation with her.

To make a long story short, the woman became a follower of Jesus. But in the meantime, while all this was going on, the disciples came back from town with some lunch for Jesus. They figured he must be really hungry by now, so they urged him to eat.

But he refused. He said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” But Jesus replied “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

The discipline of fasting helps us to gain the perspective that Jesus had on life.

3. Danger of fasting:

Now we’ve spent a lot of time on the definition of fasting and the discipline of fasting because we live in a day when fasting is very rarely practiced. But Jesus spoke to his disciples in a day when fasting was regularly observed. In the first century, the Jewish calendar had twenty fast days on it. Everybody knew what it was to fast.

So Jesus didn’t have to teach his disciples about fasting as much as he had to warn them that there can be a subtle danger in the practice of fasting, just as there is in the practice of any of the spiritual disciplines.

He said: “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting.”

The Pharisees practiced fasting twice a week: on Mondays and Thursdays. Those just happened to be the market days when everyone was at the marketplace, so that if the Pharisees were out and about, a lot of people would see them.

And they began to practice a sort of spiritual showmanship on those fast days. They wore old clothes, they looked disheveled, they didn’t comb their hair or their beards. Some of them even went as far as to rub ashes on their face to make themselves look pale and haggard.

The point they were trying to make was “Look at me! Look at how spiritual I am! I am fasting—I am humbling myself before God in sackcloth and ashes.” They made a big show of it.

I used to work for Sears when I went to Denver Seminary. I worked in the hardware department. Every so often, Sears would have a special sale on power tools.

In preparation for the sale, they would send us a display which featured a sample of that particular tool on a colorful background. But when you looked closely at that sample tool, you’d see the words “Do Not Sell - For Display Purposes Only”, because that tool wouldn’t have a motor in it.

That’s the way it can be with our spiritual life. If we’re living the Christian life for display purposes only, then we have no spiritual power within us.

Jesus said that there is always a danger that our spirituality can really become an exercise in self-promotion if we’re not careful. That’s why he says “When you fast, do it discretely. Do it in such a way that nobody notices you’re fasting. Wash your face. Comb your hair. Don’t make a big production of the fact that you’re fasting.”

And God, who knows what you are doing and why you are doing it, will reward you. There is reward in fasting, but not if you do it to show off. The only reward you’ll get then is the applause of men.

In 1996, the Olympic games will be held in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the most memorable events of those games will be the Olympic marathon. 26 miles of pain and agony, with glory and a gold medal waiting at the finish line.

Right now, there are athletes all over the world who are training for that race. They are running in the highlands of Kenya and streets of Mexico and the back country of Korea—running in obscurity, some of them doing 80, 90, 100 miles a week—just to get themselves ready for that race in Atlanta.

They know all about discipline. They know all about training. They know all about undergoing hardship for the sake of a greater reward.

In 1 Timothy 4:7, Paul says to Timothy “train yourself to be godly.” And one of the aspects of that training regimen is the discipline of biblical fasting. It’s a forgotten discipline—forgotten because we’ve grown up in a culture that teaches us to indulge our appetites.

But perhaps that is why we’re seeing so many Christians being defeated today in the area of our fleshly appetites—Christians who are addicted to food, or alcohol, or prescription drugs, or sex. We’ve never learned how to say No to our physical desires.

I believe that God is challenging us to recover the spiritual discipline of fasting. He’s challenging us to say No to ourselves and our appetites in order to say Yes to Him.