Introduction:
What is fasting? – Abstaining from food (and/or other things) for measured periods of time in order to heighten my hunger for the things of God.
What Am I Really Hungry For? (Matthew 6:16–18)
-
Am I hungry for ATTENTION ... (Matt 6:16)
-
...or am I hungry for GOD? (Matt 6:17–18)
Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANK
Hint: Highlight blanks above for answers!
Small Group Discussion
Read Matthew 6:16-18
What was your big take-away from this passage / message?
What is the purpose of fasting? Why do you think that fasting isn’t more common in the American church?
How would you describe the spiritual benefit of fasting to a believer who has never done it?
How would you respond to someone who says “Due to my health issues, not eating is impossible for me.”?
Breakout
Pray for one another.
-
Open your bibles to Matthew chapter 6.
Are you there?
Look, verse 1, "This is the greatest sermon ever preached,
and here Jesus is talking about the heart of religion."
And this is how this whole section starts.
"Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people.
In order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven."
Jesus says, "Beware of trying to impress people with your religious acts.
Beware of doing your church stuff in a way that you want people's attention."
And specifically, Jesus goes after three things here.
He goes after giving and praying and fasting.
And you know, anytime that I teach or preach about fasting,
I always feel like I'm playing from behind.
What I mean is people recognize giving and praying
as normal religious things that God's people do.
Those are kind of no-brainers.
But fasting?
Well, look at verse 16.
Look at the first phrase. Jesus says, "And when you fast..."
Stop there. "When you fast..."
You know what that phrase tells me?
That phrase tells me that fasting is just as expected as giving.
Fasting is just as expected as praying.
Let's bow our heads. I'm going to ask that you would please pray for me to be faithful, to communicate.
A passage and a concept that's very simple and very hard at the same time.
Pray for me and I will pray for you that our hearts would be open to receive what God wants to tell us today.
Transform us, Father, by the power of Your Word.
We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Let's talk about fasting, shall we?
Our culture is obsessed with food, have you noticed?
Turn on the TV.
If the commercial is not about a pharmaceutical, what's the commercial about?
Food, right?
Food. Get on social media.
You'll find somebody took a picture of their hamburger.
Right? We're obsessed with it.
You know the thing that always fascinates me though?
These eating contests. Have you ever seen those eating contests?
You know the most famous one?
Like the hot dog eating contests.
How many people here show of hands have been in a hot dog eating contests?
Nobody.
They're like, "Well, Pastor Jeff, have you ever been in an eating contest?"
Yeah.
And I won.
It was eating a pie as fast as you can, hands free.
And I won.
I won a shop vac.
That is a true story.
And I needed that shop vac to clean up when I got sick
after eating a pie that fast without my hands.
There's all kinds of eating contests.
A taco eating contest. I think I could win that too.
Wings. How about this one?
An oyster eating contest.
How many people would be up for that?
A couple of you would.
All right, Pastor Taylor, game on.
Or here's an eating contest.
I have no idea what this even is.
Slug burger. A slug burger eating contest.
Does anybody know what a slug burger is?
Anybody?
All right.
We'll have to Google that one later. Not now, later.
But I'm always fascinated by these eating contests.
This one caught my eye.
There was one eating contest.
It was eating a 72-ounce steak.
Do you know how much a 72-ounce steak is?
That's 4.5 pounds of steak.
And I read of this woman.
A 120-pound woman ate the 72-ounce steak.
And then she ate another one.
And then she ate a third in 20 minutes.
And with that, she also ate three baked potatoes,
three shrimp cocktails, three salads,
and three buttered rolls in 20 minutes.
I read that.
I'm like, you put butter on the rolls?
Doesn't that seem excessive?
But there's TV shows all about food.
Like, you see these shows.
They have all these shows about cake.
Have you seen this?
And it's not just like, what's the best tasting cake?
It's like, well, I made a cake that looks like a football
or whatever.
And then there's these shows where they travel all over the
world and they eat these exotic foods from all over the world.
And we're sitting in our TVs watching people eat.
And then you turn the channel.
And on the other channel is a show called My 600-Pound Life.
We're obsessed with food.
And we live in a culture where we are constantly, constantly
taught that life is about consuming.
But how much talk is there really about refusing consumption?
So with that horrible backdrop, we're going to talk about fasting
because this is what the Word of God addresses.
So what is fasting?
We have a definition here.
What is fasting?
Fasting is abstaining from food and/or other things.
We'll explain that in a minute.
Extaining from food and/or other things for measured periods of
time in order to heighten my hunger for the things of God.
That's fasting.
Fasting measured periods of time in order to heighten my hunger for the things of God.
You see, Jesus, when He talks about giving, praying, and fasting, that's really
three categories of things.
Giving has to do with what you do with others.
And praying is what you do with God.
And fasting is what you do with yourself.
Right?
So there's different kinds of fasting.
There's a normal fast that's just no food.
Right?
There's a partial fast where you only have maybe vegetables and juice.
And there's an absolute fast where you have absolutely nothing.
But you can and should also fast from other things.
And we'll talk about that in a moment.
But primarily, primarily, biblically, fasting is about food.
Well, speaking of biblically, fasting is mentioned more than 77 times in the Old Testament
and the New Testament.
It is almost always connected with prayer.
You see fasting throughout the Bible, different occasions, like for example, repentance.
I'm guilty of this sin.
I need to turn from this sin.
I'm going to fast and I'm going to pray in my repentance.
In the same line of thinking, fasting accompanies mourning over sin.
My personal sin, the sins of our culture, our country, we should be mourning.
And part of mourning is fasting and praying.
You see fasting in the Bible is seeking God at critical times.
We need to fast because I really need to seek the Lord right now.
Think Jesus in the wilderness.
Right?
Think the early church in the book of Acts.
Now when you talk about fasting, you always have the person that comes along and says,
"Well, you know, Pastor Jeff, fasting isn't explicitly commanded in the New Testament."
And that's absolutely true.
But something we can't get around is this.
Jesus obviously assumed that we would fast.
I mean right here, you're going to see in this passage today, twice He says, "When you fast."
He says it again in Matthew chapter 9 and verse 15.
He's assuming that His people would fast.
Oh, and then as I said, by the way, the early church did.
They fasted.
Fasting though, to clarify our definition here, we're going to make sure we understand
what it's not.
Fasting is not self-punishment.
Okay?
It's not self-punishment.
Fasting isn't like, "I've sinned.
I've messed up."
You know what?
I'm not going to eat because I don't deserve to eat.
And like you're sort of punishing yourself.
That's not what fasting is about.
It's not self-punishment.
But fasting also is not self-serving.
Meaning somebody could walk away from this service going, "Oh, you know, Pastor Jeff was
talking about fasting and I could stand to lose a couple of pounds.
So I'll fast."
That's not what it's about.
Fasting also is not a bargaining chip.
Like I need something from God.
Oh, okay.
I'll fast and then God will have to give me what I want.
Talk more about that in a minute.
Fasting is not something that makes you holy.
All right?
Listen, fasting is not even about getting God's attention.
Understand that.
Fasting is not, "Look!
Look at me, God!
I haven't eaten!
Look at me!
Look at me!"
No, that's not what it's about.
Fasting isn't about me trying to get God's attention.
God noticed me.
Fasting is about me noticing God.
You see the difference?
Fasting doesn't make your prayer more powerful.
Fasting makes you more focused.
Fasting is what I do when I need my entire concentration, all of my being.
Every cell in my body focused on God.
That's what fasting is.
Because Christ's follower, listen, I know, I know, you want to focus on God.
You do.
But the problem is sometimes, if we're honest, and we should be, we want to focus on God,
but sometimes we want other things more.
You're like, "What do I do when what I know I should want is not the thing that I'm going
after?
What do I do?"
You fast.
Fasting is stopping the feeding of ourselves with other things to focus only on our relationship
with God.
Because here's the reality.
Every day, every day of your life, you have the capacity to only consume so much.
The capacity that you have to satisfy yourself is limited.
Here's what I mean.
Let's let this table here, this tabletop, let's let this represent you.
Let this table represent you, your heart, your spirit.
You realize every day of your life, you are filling yourself up with stuff.
Now obviously as we talk about fasting, one of the things that we fill up, we satisfy ourselves
with is food, right?
This isn't just life.
This is mighty life, cereal.
That's how we roll in our house.
We fill ourselves up with food.
I need to tell Aaron we need to get more pretzels.
But we fill ourselves up.
We're filling ourselves up.
But it's not even just food, right?
Think of how much stuff we fill ourselves with every day.
For some of us, maybe it's sports.
Like I'm on the church softball team, right?
That's one of the things that I'm filling myself up with.
I'm consuming myself with every day.
Maybe it's not even just eating the food.
Maybe it's preparing the food.
So we have our magazine with the latest recipes and we're filling ourselves up with this stuff.
Maybe some of us, we like to grow our food in the garden.
We have our seeds here, right?
But maybe we're filling ourselves up with that.
What else are we filling our hearts, our minds, our souls with?
For some of us, we're like, "Well, I've got to do my recreational reading, right?
So I've got to make sure I get that into me."
And oh, here's more seeds.
And for some of us, it's like, "Well, I like to paint, so I've got to take time out."
That's something that I fill myself up with, a hobby that I do.
For some of us, it's exercise.
You've got to make sure you get your reps in, right?
Right, Dr. Andrew?
We've got to make sure that we get our exercise in.
That's something else.
This is 6.6 pounds.
That's why I'm so ripped.
The first service last one, I said that.
Can you believe those jerks?
For some of us, you're on the golf course, right?
That's something that we fill ourselves with, right?
For some of us, maybe you're a gamer.
You spend time during the day playing your video games.
It's something you're consuming.
I don't mean to show off, but this is Pac-Man from PlayStation 2.
Not the old PlayStation.
This is PlayStation 2.
That's cutting edge, right?
We fill ourselves up.
Do you see where we're going with this?
We're constantly filling ourselves.
Oh, and it's not even just that, because we've got to make sure we entertain ourselves, right?
With movies.
This is a DVD.
I had to explain to the first service what a DVD was.
Before streaming, this is a shiny circle that you stick in a machine that plays a movie.
This particular one was a gift.
It's called The Masked Saint.
It's about a pastor who becomes a pro wrestler.
Have you ever heard such a stupid thing?
But we've got to get our intake of entertainment, right?
Do you see how much stuff we're taking in?
Do you see?
That's not it.
How much time do we spend on our computers?
We've got to get that in, don't we?
Am I forgetting anything?
Oh, yeah.
How about this little guy?
How much time a day do we spend filling ourselves with content from this?
Do you see the point over the course of a day how much are you filling yourself with?
Your body, your mind, your belly, your spirit, you're constantly, constantly, constantly,
constantly consuming.
Now, we're going to let this glass cross represent our walk with Jesus.
This represents your relationship with Jesus Christ, your personal walk with Him.
Now, do you see a problem?
We have to...
Well, that's...
You see a problem?
Now we're so full of stuff that we don't have any room left for the thing that really matters.
And that's our walk with the Lord.
So do you see the purpose of fasting?
You know, if fasting does...
Fasting just...
Fasting takes everything off the table and says the only thing that I'm going to focus
on is my walk with Christ.
The only thing that my heart, my mind, my attention is getting is my personal walk with
the Lord.
That's the purpose of fasting.
So on your outline, I want you to draw a couple of things down here.
The question is, what am I really hungry for?
What am I really hungry for?
Number one, am I hungry for attention?
Am I hungry for attention?
Right?
Look at verse 16.
Jesus says, "And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they just figure
their faces that they're fasting may be seen by others.
Truly I say to you, they have received their reward."
Am I hungry for attention?
Jesus calls out to Pharisees.
He says, "When they fast, they look gloomy.
They disfigure their faces."
You know the Pharisees in Jesus, they fasted twice a week.
Like, why did they do that?
Well, that wasn't commanded in the Old Testament.
Like, well, why did they do that?
Jesus tells us why they did that.
They were putting on a show.
That's why.
He tells us that they may be seen by others.
Actually, the Pharisees in Jesus, they would literally put ashes over their eyes because
they were all in on the performance.
They wanted to make sure that people knew.
And when people knew that they were fasting, they were like, "Oh, you don't look so good.
What's going on?
Well, I'm fasting."
You're fasting?
Wow.
Wow, you are really, you're a really devoted believer.
You're a really religious person.
Wow.
Wow.
And that little pat on the back there, that little, as Pastor Taylor calls it, the atta
boy, that little thing, Jesus goes, "There's your reward."
Have fun with that.
It's like giving.
It's like praying.
We can become tempted to fast with the wrong motive.
See, the fasting is supposed to be about seeking God, not human applause.
And look, let's just be real.
We love the attention.
There is something deep down in every one of us that loves the attention, and that's
the problem with hypocrisy.
The problem with hypocrisy is it works.
I mean, we've all been there.
Someone makes a comment about how devoted we are.
Someone sees how religious we must be, and we start to feel pretty good about ourselves.
Jesus says, "Beware."
Beware.
Like, well, what about corporate fasting?
I mean, others have to know about that, right?
Well, yeah, there's New Testament examples of corporate fasting, Acts chapter 13, Acts
chapter 14.
Now look, here's the thing with that.
It's not about whether or not other people know.
It's about whether or not you want them to know.
See the difference?
There's a difference between being seen fasting and fasting in order to be seen.
That's how it is with corporate fasting.
That's how it is with private fasting.
When I fast, I tell Aaron, "Why?"
Not because I want her applause, but because she feeds us, right?
Oh, and by the way, it'd be a pretty impossible thing for me to hide from her, right?
She's going to notice if I go days without eating.
The point Jesus is driving us to is the motives.
The motives.
It's a hard issue.
It's the same as giving, and it's the same as praying.
It's the same point if you're looking for praises from man, don't look for anything from God.
So what am I really hungry for?
Am I hungry for attention?
Or am I hungry for God?
According to verses 17 and 18, Jesus said, "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."
So here Jesus is saying, "Look, on the other hand, instead of making yourself look like
you're dying, anoint your head and wash your face."
Oh, by the way, it goes without saying, right?
You don't make that a show, right?
Like I shouldn't come to church and catch you in the men's room at the sink washing your
face.
Like, "Joe, why are you washing your face?"
Oh, I'm fasting and being obedient to our Lord.
Like you could make that a show.
Obvious point, right?
Jesus says don't leave any physical clues that you're fasting.
It's like giving, it's like praying, make it a secret, make it between you and God.
And He sees and He rewards according to Jesus.
He rewards.
Listen, reward does not mean, reward does not mean that God owes you one now.
Like look, God, I starved myself for you.
I sacrificed eating for you, God.
No, you have to do what I want.
Look, God never works like that.
Do you realize anything at all that we have from God is grace?
It's all grace.
Your salvation in Christ, believing that Jesus died for your sins, believing He rose to give
you eternal life.
If you've received Him, if you are saved, it is only by the grace of God that you are
saved.
The gift of the Holy Spirit, God indwelling His people.
It's a gift.
It's grace.
You know, God does not run a swap meet.
To say, you do for me, then I do for you.
That's not how it works.
And that's not how it works with fasting.
So like, what is the reward?
The reward is connecting with God.
The reward is connecting with God because you're seeking Him in a very deliberate way.
You have taken off anything else that could distract you because you want to focus solely
on your relationship with Him.
And someone would say, "Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, time out."
You're telling me that if I choose not to eat or I choose to abstain from other things
and instead use that appetite and use that time to seek the Lord, you're telling me that
if I do that, that something spiritual will happen.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
Look, I know I could never fully explain it.
And it's hard to understand, but you will understand it if you do it.
If you do it for the right reason.
That's what I want to encourage you.
I'm sure there are people here that have never fasted for spiritual reasons in their lives.
I want to encourage you to try it.
Can you just, as a simple act of obedience, as a simple God, this is what your Word said,
so I want to respond in obedience.
Can you do that?
Now look, you can modify.
Like maybe you say, "You know what, I've never done this before, but this week I'm going
to take a few days and I'm going to skip lunch."
And instead of eating at lunchtime, I'm going to spend that time reading a passage from
God's Word and praying to God.
I'm going to do that instead this week.
Can you do that?
You can do that.
Or maybe you say, "You know what, I've never had an extended fast, but this week I'm going
to spend one day.
I'm going to spend just two days with nothing but water, and instead I'm going to seek the
Lord over something very specific."
You can do that.
Because look, if you're sitting here going, "Oh, I hear what He's saying, but you know
what, I don't know if I could skip a meal.
Like I don't know.
I don't know if I could go without eating."
Well, that might be a commentary on which appetite really controls you.
Are you hungry enough for God that you're willing to forego consuming food and/or other
things to focus solely on seeking Him?
Because if you're finding that focusing on your walk with Christ has been difficult.
If you're finding that lately you really haven't had much of an appetite for prayer that you
know you should.
If you're finding like, "In this chapter of my life right now, this season of my life
that I'm in, I haven't really been seeking the Lord as I know He calls me to."
If any of these describe you, I want to encourage you to use this gift that God has given and
redirect your appetite.
This is the heart of religion.
God wants your heart.
And true religion comes from a heart that wants God.
I'm sure some of you have picked up on this, which you realized for the last three weeks
between Pastor Taylor and I.
We've basically preached the exact same sermon three times.
Why?
Because our goal is to represent the text and really it's the exact same formula in
all three things that the Lord calls us to.
It's the same sermon.
Here it is.
If you give, pray, or fast in order to be seen by others, you're going to miss God's reward.
But if you do them in secret, God sees in secret and He will reward you.
Oh, and there are rewards for a faith that says, "I'm not looking for man's applause.
All I'm looking for is God's reward."
And with fasting, God is the reward.
Let's pray.
Father in heaven, we confess before you as a church that we don't seek you as we should
too often.
The Father, we've allowed other things to crowd our hearts and our minds and our bellies.
We very diligently distract ourselves from what's most important.
So Father, I pray that we would be hit with, for some of us it's an old concept that we
need renewed.
And for some I'm sure this is a brand new concept.
Father, let us take a serious and honest and hard look at your word and that we would fast
as our Lord assumed that we would, but with motives that honor you.
Father put it in our hearts and minds.
Make us feel how desperately we need you.
Let us match that desperation with how hard we seek after you.
We pray in Jesus' name.