We are going to continue our series this morning on the spiritual disciplines called Beholding Disciplines for Imagers. We are thinking together in this series about how we become what we behold. That was the whole thesis of our IDOL series for Lent this year — that we become what we behold. We begin to resemble that which we revere. We are shaped by what we choose to serve. So if we want to resemble Jesus, if we want to be the imagers that God has made us to be, we need to put ourselves into the place and the posture and the position that allows us to receive God's glory and goodness and then reflect it back out rightly.
Last week we looked at the discipline of confession, and it is a beautiful gift. Confession is what helps us deal not only with the guilt of our sin, but with the sickness that that sin brings to us. Confession is this beautiful gift that allows us to stop hiding, to stop trying to cover up our sin on our own, but rather to lift it up to God that He might cover it. It is a beautiful, beautiful gift. I want to continue that thought this morning, and I want us to talk about the discipline of fasting. And I know you look at me and say, that's a guy that knows a lot about fasting. Mercy, thank you. We're not talking about the discipline of dieting.
Our culture has a pretty big fascination with fasting right now — intermittent fasting, and fasting to get to autophagy and cleanse your body and do all that. And that is all good stuff. I am not against that in any way, but that is not what I want to consider this morning. We want to think about biblical fasting, spiritual fasting, fasting with a greater purpose. I have titled this sermon "Loosening the Grip," picking up on last week's illustrations. We hold on to our sin, and confession is that act of opening up our hands and lifting it up to God. It is such an important process for us to go through.
When we grab hold of something — anything — and look for it to do what only God can truly do for us, we call that sin, we call that idolatry. And what I have been trying to unpack consistently over the last several weeks is that when we do that, it is not just that we commit a sin. It is that sin then begins to do something to us. It begins to shape us, and we are not only guilty from it, we are corrupted by it, and very often we become enslaved to it. So sin is a sentence of guilt — it condemns us. Sin is a sickness — it corrupts us. But sin is also a slavery. It controls us. It is a power.
This broader understanding of sin helps us understand something that we all experience on a regular basis. It goes something like this: we sin, we are convicted, we repent and confess, we ask God for forgiveness, He forgives us, and we run back to the sin. Sometimes I will throw out a little joke and say something like, none of us here would ever do that. But I do not want to play any games like that this morning. Let us be clear about what is happening right now. I am a broken sinner talking to a bunch of broken sinners. If we are not going to start there, nothing we are going to do for however long I choose to preach this morning is going to matter. We have just got to come to this reality — we have all got a sin problem.
And sometimes we just flatten that out and we treat all sins as if they are equal. And there is a level at which, yes, all sin is sin, of course. But there is a reality that each one of us in this room struggles with some sins more than we struggle with others. And that is a reality that I do not think we talk about very often. What it does is it creates a sense of guilt and shame. It forces us to want to hide even more. So the longer we are in church, the longer we are following Jesus, and the more we continue to struggle with a certain sin or a pattern of sin, the worse we feel about it, and the more likely we are to try to hide it and cover it on our own. Is anybody with me this morning? This is a reality.
So we say, yes, confession is a great gift, and I want to lift it up. I want to open my hand, but my hand is cramped. I want to let it go, and I do not want to let it go. I think we have got to have that level of honesty when we talk about our sin, or we are never going to be able to deal with it. If we do not admit that we continue some of our sin patterns because we have grown to love them, because we have grown to depend on them, then we can talk all day long about confession. We can talk all day long about grace. We can talk all day long about the freedom that Jesus offers us — and all those things are true — but if we are unwilling to unclench the fist, we are never going to walk in or experience the freedom that Jesus has offered.
That is where I think fasting comes in. That is what I believe fasting is. God has designed it for us. He has given us the gift of fasting to help us loosen the grip, to find some freedom. So I thought it might be good to start in Genesis again, because we look to creation to help us understand these things.
The disciplines are designed to help us be who God made us to be and do what He designed us to do, to be His imagers. The disciplines are not boxes to check. They are God's gift to us that we might grow in grace and become who we were designed to be in the beginning and who Jesus has enabled and empowered us to become in Christ. This is why creation becomes so important.
In Genesis chapter 3, in the fall, we have Eve being tempted by the serpent, the נָחָשׁ - nā·ḥāš, and her temptation is to look for life in something other than God. It is the essence of all sin. It is the essence of every temptation, to exchange the glory of the Creator for the lesser glory of the created. And so the serpent tempts her. Genesis 3 says this:
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
This pattern has been pointed out before. She saw that it was good, she desired it, and then she took it. This is the pattern that begins in the garden and is then repeated throughout the Scriptures over and over and over again, sometimes using the exact same Hebrew vocabulary and words, sometimes more of a pattern of action, but we see it over and over and over again. We see it, we want it, we take it. The result? Death. Death begins to work. Confinement, enslavement. Sin begins to have a hold and a power. It destroys and separates. It infects and corrupts. When we reach for life in something other than God, we are giving power to sin, and sin begins to have a power within us.
Genesis 3 is not a story about a piece of fruit and a talking snake. It is a story about the anatomy of disordered desire, of a disordered appetite. It is the story of what happens when a creature who is designed, formed to function in a certain way — when a creature that is designed to find life in God, to be hungry for God — disorders its appetites and puts its hunger in something else. The problem is not in desire in and of itself. The problem is in the disordering of the desire, the misdirection of that desire. There is nothing wrong with the fruit. The fruit was good. It was beautiful. It did offer something. The problem was that Eve and Adam looked to that fruit to give them something that God had not yet chosen to give them. The problem is not in the thing itself, often. It is not even in the desire. It is in the misdirected, disorganized desire.
This pattern repeats itself over and over again. Three more chapters along, in Genesis chapter 6, you get this on a cosmic scale. The Bene Elohim, the sons of God, see that the daughters of women are beautiful, and they come and they take them for their wives. It is the exact same pattern. Saw, desired, took. And the result of that is the dramatic increase of evil. We have boundaries broken, we have domain disobedience, and we have cosmic chaos resulting in the exponential spread of sin. They saw, they desired, they took. This is the pattern of sin, the pattern of disordered appetite. It is not accidental. The biblical writers are telling us something. Every time this pattern gets replayed, it is a deliberate echo of the garden. This is what disordered appetite looks like. This is what it costs, and this is what it produces. Bondage. Not just guilt, not just moral failure, but bondage. Because the appetite that takes what God has not given does not find satisfaction. It finds escalation. The grip tightens. It tightens.
The Apostle Paul thought about this a great deal. He understood the reality and the power of sin. In Romans, he says this as straightforwardly as I think it can be said:
18b …I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
It is all there. Sin as a sentence — the deliberate choice against God that makes us guilty. Sin as sickness — the distortion of the image bearer's nature. And sin as slavery — the bondage to what the creature cannot break by willpower alone. Paul is saying, listen, sin is not to be trifled with. Sin is not to be played with. Sin is not to be minimalized. Sin is an active power at work, not just outside of us, but inside of us.
There is a story that comes to mind here. When I first truly surrendered to Jesus, I had a mouth that cursed like it was a competition. It had been going on for a while. There came a sense of conviction — a realization that this was not really honoring. There was a decision made: I am going to stop cussing. I am going to stop swearing.
And then I set my will to it. Like, I'm gonna do it. I did really, really good…for like four hours. Because then I was building some furniture. I don't recommend that to anybody. I mean, it's a hammer, a nail, a thumb. What could go wrong, right? So literally, like four hours after I make this impassioned eighteen-year-old declaration — Jesus, I'm not gonna swear anymore. I'm good. Four hours later, what came out of my mouth didn't care about my willpower. Like, I'm just gonna talk about reality with you this morning. Is that okay? This is how it works.
And see, I think this is what fasting is designed to address. The deep and profound grip of sin on our hearts, on our appetites, the habits that sin has ingrained within us, the patterns of behavior that sin has reinforced over time, don't just go away because we want them to, or because we pray a prayer, or because we set our will against them. God knows that. And He has given us fasting as an appropriate response. This is what sets fasting apart from dieting.
I think many people think of fasting so incorrectly. We think of it primarily as abstaining. What is fasting? Stop eating — which just on the surface sounds terrible, right? No, it does. Because eating is a good thing. Food is a good thing. Just think about it. Food is a gift that God has given us. And what does God give us food for? For energy, for strength, for life, to sustain life. So the primary way that God sustains our life, the normal way that God sustains our life, is through food. And fasting goes, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. So on the surface, you go, that seems odd.
But fasting is not simply subtraction. It's a substitution. We look at it and we just see the one side of the coin — oh, I gotta give something up. But biblical fasting is not just stopping eating. It's replacing that eating with spiritual practices. So when the hunger that food would normally satisfy is deliberately turned towards God — through prayer, through scripture, through encounter — that is fasting. Fasting says, You've given me the gift of food, and that normally gives me life. Right now I'm gonna choose to forgo that, and I'm going to look for life from You directly, God. I'm gonna train myself, discipline myself to live like the idea that God is the source of my life is true.
That's what fasting is. It's creating voluntarily and intentionally this space for God in our life where we look to Him to be what He truly is. It's one thing to say, yeah, God is my life. It's another thing to actually live like God is your life, to find in Him your sustenance, your strength. We create emptiness. We create hunger so that we can bring it to God, that He might fill it and satisfy. That's the practice of fasting.
The Bible records lots of different kinds of fasts. There are full fasts, there are partial fasts, there are one-day fasts, three-day fasts, ten-day fasts, there are forty-day fasts. There are all sorts of different kinds of fasts. There are individual fasts and there are communal fasts. We see fasts as an expression of worship, an expression of love and reverence. We see fasts of grief during times of loss and sorrow. We see fasts of repentance and fasts of intercession. We see fasts around warfare. What binds all these different types of biblical fasts together is actually very simple. There is a profound need in somebody's life that is beyond their ability.
We reach the end. I can't do anything about this. My sorrow is so great, my tears have run dry, I can't grieve this by myself. I'm facing an enemy that is so powerful, so profound, so much bigger than me, that if I go up to fight it on my own, I'm guaranteed defeat. Whatever kind of fast we take, that's the pattern. It's a pattern of our limits. You know you have limits, right? It's a pattern of us reaching our limits and then bringing those limits to God for Him to do what only He can do as the truly unlimited one. Like, this is what fasting is about. It's about humility. It's about saying, Lord, I'm at the end of myself and I need You to help me. I need You to provide.
So fasting is kind of an important thing, which is why Jesus actually expects it of us. I said that out loud. Jesus actually expects us to fast. That's what He says in Matthew 6, right smack dab in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says,
6 "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. 17 But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face."
Jesus didn't say if you fast. He says when you fast. The expectation of Jesus for His followers was that they would engage in a regular practice of fasting. It's assumed. It's expected. It's not if you fast or if you feel like fasting. It's when life hits you in a way that is too much for you to handle on your own.
Jesus says, when you fast, don't do it like the hypocrites do. Don't do it like begging and clamoring for attention. He says, 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. He'll meet you there. I'm pretty sure that if Jesus came back today and was preaching the Sermon on the Mount again, when He got to this spot, He would say something about not posting your fast on social media to virtue signal to everybody about how truly spiritual you are. That would be our modern equivalent of this. We're not fasting to show everybody how great we are. Fasting in and of itself is an admission of how not great we are.
If you want to boast about fasting, you're going, hey everybody, look how weak I am. Look how insufficient I am. Look how incapable I am. Because that's at the heart of what fasting is. Jesus is saying, you don't make a boast about this. You do this because you're coming to God, that He might do for you what you can't do for yourself, that He might give you what you can't gain for yourself. So Jesus says, when you fast — this is an expectation of Jesus for those that are following Him, that we would engage voluntarily and intentionally in the practice of fasting. He's saying that fasting is not a performance. It's a practice that has a purpose, and the end result of all fasting is God Himself. It's the freedom that comes from knowing and being known by God. The Father who sees will reward you.
I want to go next to a well-known story in the Gospels that you've probably never connected to fasting, because it's not really about fasting — and yet it really is about fasting. It's in John chapter 4, the woman at the well. We know this story. Jesus and His disciples cut through Samaria. They stop outside of a Samaritan town at a well. Jesus sends the disciples on a lunch run, and He stays at the well, and then He has a conversation with the woman at the well about worship, and water, and life, and meaning, and everything. She becomes convinced in that conversation that He is the Christ, the long-awaited anointed one, the Messiah. So she leaves her water jars there, and she runs back into the village to tell everybody, hey, the Messiah is here.
Certainly she had to cross paths with the disciples who were coming back with — I mean, it wasn't McDonald's, but it was something. So they're coming back with lunch, and they get back to Jesus, and they're wondering what's going on, because they saw Him talking to the Samaritan woman. They offer Him lunch, and Jesus says, “No, I'm good.” That's what happens. It says:
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”
Listen carefully to what Jesus says here. They come back with food — bread, fish, whatever it is that they got — and they say, here, Jesus, we brought this for you. And Jesus says to them, no, no, I have food to eat that you do not know about.
33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”
Like, who else brought Jesus lunch? We thought that was our job.
34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.
Now, it's easy to read that as a nice little saying of Jesus — an analogy or a metaphor of obedience as food. But I don't think that's what's happening here at all. I think Jesus is making a very literal and profound statement. He's making a statement about reality — that God is the ultimate source of nourishment. God is the ultimate source of life. And as I've already said, He normally does that through food, but God is not limited to that. There are other ways that God can provide actual nourishment, power, and life other than the normal process of eating. Jesus is very, very clear here.
There's an interesting little detail in the Greek. He says, I have food that you do not know about, and then He says, my food is to do the will of the one who sent Me. He uses two different words for food. In verse 32, He says, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." The word He uses here is βρώσις — brōsis, and its primary focus is on the process of eating. Jesus is saying, I have another process of eating, of being nourished, that you're not aware of. That's what He says to them. Then in verse 34, He uses a similar-sounding word, βρώμα — brōma. He says, "My food" — my brōma — which is a word that describes that which is actually being eaten, not the process. So Jesus is literally claiming to find physical nourishment in the act of obedience to God. He's not making a metaphor. He's not saying obedience feels like eating. He's saying the life of the Spirit is a genuinely nourishing reality.
For Jesus in that moment, doing what the Father sent Him to do — to offer the kingdom to the Samaritan woman at the well — generated real sustenance within Him at the level of Him sitting down to eat a meal would have. It's a different kind of food, but it's a food nonetheless. It does what food is designed to do. It nourishes, it strengthens, it sustains.
Look at what just happened. The woman comes to the well to meet a physical need. She leaves her water jar — the vessel that she came to fill is sitting there abandoned because something happened in that conversation that changed her. She came to the well thirsty. She went back to the city talking about streams of water abundantly flowing. The parallels are beautiful. She comes for water from the well. She leaves with living water, and Jesus comes expecting and waiting for lunch and food, and by the time this conversation with her ends and the disciples come back with actual food, He's like, yeah, I'm not hungry anymore. God met that need within Me in a different way. It's a profound and beautiful moment in the life and ministry of Jesus.
And I want to suggest to you that this is what fasting is actually aiming for. This is what it's looking for. Not to need food less, but to need a different kind of food. To practice the posture of the creature who brings its emptiness to God rather than trying to fill it ourselves. Instead of trying to see and desire and take on our own, we bring it to God. The person who fasts is not trying to be less human. They're actually practicing and trying to be more fully and truly human — the image bearer as we were designed. We're asking God to reorder our appetites and desires so that we might once again desire Him above all. Not just as a cliché, not just as a throwaway line — yeah, I desire God more than anything — but as a lived, practical reality. I desire You.
So Jesus shows us this reality at the very beginning of His ministry, and this is a text about fasting. We looked at this just a few weeks ago in our idol series. At the beginning of His ministry, Jesus is baptized. He's publicly, supernaturally acknowledged by God. The Spirit descends like a dove upon Jesus, and then immediately leads Him into the wilderness to be tempted. Matthew 4 tells us:
1 Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.
Here's the thing I've learned about fasting — it makes you hungry. No, it actually makes you hungrier. You get up, you have your coffee, maybe you have your breakfast, you start going throughout the day and you're okay. You're just going through, you're working, you're doing stuff, and then maybe you get a little bit hungry, and maybe you have a little snack or whatever, but you're not really thinking about hunger. The moment you decide that you're going to fast, that changes everything. Like you wake up hungry because you know you're fasting that day. And it's just there. It's constantly gnawing, and everything you do — the moment you intentionally decide to walk down this road, the moment you go up against your disordered appetites — they're going to push back, and they push back hard. The moment you start, it intensifies, demanding your attention. Like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors: feed me, feed me, just over and over.
And here's the thing — if you can resist it for the first eighteen to thirty hours, it actually goes away. No, it really does. It's crazy. Even for me — food is my love language, I love to eat — but when I fast, sometimes it's eighteen hours, sometimes it goes even as much as thirty-six hours, but if I can push through that initial thing, actually the hunger starts to go away. But the longer you go, the hunger eventually begins to come back. The longest fast I've ever personally done was about twenty-one days, and I don't say that so you go, wow, he fasted twenty-one days — because I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I was literally doing it as a young Bible college student to show everybody how spiritual I was and how much better I was following Jesus than they were. Like literally, that was it. Anyway, I'm a sinner talking to a bunch of sinners, so we're going to give each other a lot of grace this morning.
But when you hit like twenty-one days and you start going into that hunger return, I can't even imagine forty days. But that's where Jesus is at. And it's then that the tempter comes and attacks — right at that moment of not just His weakness, but His greatest need, His hunger. He is at His limits physically. And the tempter came and said:
3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
It's a pretty good temptation, with this caveat: Jesus didn't need the suggestion. At any moment in the forty days, He could have commanded the stones to become bread. The tempter's not tempting Him
The problem was not something that was outside of His power. This was available to Jesus as an option at any time. He could have walked out of the wilderness. He could have turned the stones into bread. He could have turned them into a T-bone steak. This was not a question of Jesus's ability. He wasn't not eating because he didn't have the option to eat. He was not eating because the Spirit called him to fast, to not eat. And what Jesus wanted more than anything else was to be obedient to the will of the Father. He didn't do these things not because he wasn't hungry, but because he had an actual greater hunger. He was hungrier to do God's will than he was to fill his stomach.
And so Jesus responds.
4 But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
There's a different kind of nourishment. There's a different kind of life. There's a different kind of strength. He's quoting from Deuteronomy 8, which is recounting Israel's experience in the wilderness — not for 40 days, but for 40 years — where God had to provide them with sustenance, life, food. And how did He do that? Every morning when they woke up, the ground was covered with — what is that? That's what manna literally means. What is it? It's not some deep spiritual name. They came out of the tent one morning like, what is that? And like a good toddler, somebody said, I don't know, eat it. For 40 years in the wilderness, God provided them with sustenance, with life, through this mysterious "what is it" — manna.
So when Jesus is tempted — turn this into bread — Jesus says, no, no, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by the very word that comes from God. God is able to provide and sustain in ways that we can never provide and sustain for ourselves. Deuteronomy 8:3 says this:
3 He humbled you and let you hunger and then fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
For 40 years, God was teaching Israel the lesson: bread doesn't give you life. I give you life. I give you life. Now Jesus, as the new and true Israel, in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights being tempted — when the tempter comes and says take it, Jesus, satisfy your hunger on your own — Jesus does what nobody before him had done. He satisfies himself in God and refuses to see, desire, and take.
The second temptation moves from the physical appetite for food to a deeper psychological appetite for security, for control.
5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple 6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and “‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”
Make God take care of you on your terms. Here is this promise — force God's hand. Again, this is see, desire, and take in a different frame. Don't entrust yourself to God. Push God to take care of you the way that you want and need Him to take care of you.
So Jesus said to him:
7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Jesus says, I'm here to serve God, not the other way around. I want you to sit with that for a minute. How much do you genuinely and truly desire to do God's will, versus how much do you genuinely and truly desire God to do your will? This is what gets us to the heart of fasting, this reality. Are we going to be who God made us to be, or are we going to try to tell God who we're supposed to be? Are we going to willingly and joyously submit and surrender to the One who made us for Himself, or are we going to continually try to go our own way and then bend God's arm to serve us? Jesus refuses.
So the tempter comes back with a final test.
8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
I will give you all the glory of the created world if you simply give glory to me. This is the ultimate temptation — in some ways it is the simplest and the ugliest and the most profound of all three. Exchange the glory of God, not just for one glory of the created world but for all the glory of the created world. Receive what you've actually come here to receive, Jesus. Just do it without the cross. Do it the easy way, do it the safe way, do it the convenient and comfortable way. All you have to do is orient your heart and direct your worship towards me, the devil says, rather than towards God.
10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’”
Jesus won't bend the knee to any other lord than the Father. He won't make the exchange.
11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.
I don't think that's like a throwaway line. I think that's the cap on the story. So Jesus voluntarily submits to the leading of the Spirit. He doesn't eat for 40 days and nights. He's famished, he's exhausted, like physically he has not given his body that food, and yet because he trusted the Father, because he doesn't cave, because he doesn't bend the knee and give in, at the end of it, after the temptation, what happens? God supernaturally sustains him with the life that food normally would have given him. And that's the pattern. That's the pattern.
So I hope you see the connection between Matthew 4, the temptation, and John 4, his conversation with the woman. There is another food, and it genuinely gives life, and it comes when we do the will of the One Who sent us. This is what Jesus is modeling for us. Fasting confronts head-on the appetites of our heart, of our soul, and forces us to not merely examine, but to choose what we will truly desire. Fasting gets to the heart of things.
I've often quoted C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis in maybe his most famous sermon in 1941 at Oxford, a sermon called The Weight of Glory — there's a book with that same name of his — said this: “it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not to be too strong, but too weak.” Lewis says “we are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.” He says “we are far too easily pleased.” That is a great description of reality, and of humanity, of idolatry, of the sins that constantly plague us, the things that we obsess over, the things that we have chosen to believe time after time after time — this will make me happy. This will make me satisfied. This will complete me. This will give me joy. This will give me meaning. This will give me purpose. It's not that we desire too much. It's that we're desiring too little. We're letting ourselves be satisfied in these lesser things when God has offered us so much more, so much more.
So how do we change our desires? You ever tried to do that? How'd that work out for you? I'm gonna stop lusting. I'm gonna stop being greedy. I'm gonna stop wanting people to like me. I'm just gonna stop — like whatever it is, I'm just gonna stop. Well, good luck with that. So how do we change our desires? We can't. I don't think we can. I don't think we do, but I think that God can, and I think this is what fasting is about. It's our participation in that reality.
In the idol series, I quoted Thomas Chalmers. He said “the only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.” You have to confront your lesser desire with a greater desire. Fasting puts us in the position to confront and dispossess our old affections by attuning and revealing to us the glory of Christ, the satisfaction that only God can give us. The power isn't in fasting itself. Fasting's not magical. The power is in the God that fasting connects us to. It doesn't say your fasting will provide for you. Jesus says your Father Who sees you will reward you. It's in our connection to God.
So let me say it as plainly as I can this morning. If — and that's a funny if because it's guaranteed — but if you are struggling with a sin that you just can't seem to beat, you need to fast. This is what God has designed for us. We confront our appetites head-on and we put ourselves in a position to train ourselves to be satisfied by God, in God, rather than through our stomachs. Sin is not a problem to be managed. It is a living power. John Owen, the early Puritan, wrote a whole book on sin, on the mortification of the flesh. It's incredibly boring to read, to be honest, but incredibly profound. But he's got this catchphrase in that book and he says this: be killing sin or it will be killing you. I love that. Be killing your sin. What do you do with your sin? Ignore it, hide it, sweep it under the rug, pretend it's not there, confess it and run back to it, confess it and run back to it, confess it. No, no, no. You have got to kill it. You have got to break that power. Be killing sin or it will be killing you.
So I want to look at one more text with you this morning. It's a little controversial, which means for me it's fun. Matthew 17. So Jesus is coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration. Remember, he took three of his disciples with him. He goes up. He's transformed in front of them. God talks. They have this whole amazing conversation. He and the three disciples are coming down the mountain. Meanwhile, the other disciples — if my math works, that would be nine of them, because they're 12 and nine and three makes 12 — so they come back down, and while they were up at the mountain, the other disciples had been doing what Jesus told them to do. They've been preaching the gospel. They've been healing the sick. They've been
In Matthew 17 it says:
14 And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and, kneeling before him, 15 said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. 16 And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.”
Can you imagine the nine disciples; heads down? Couldn't do it.
17 And Jesus answered, “O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” 18 And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was healed instantly.
Which is a cool moment, especially for the father and that boy — like freedom. Jesus casts it out, brings healing.
The disciples had cast out demons before, but something happened in this one. They weren't able to do it. They came up against that power and it was beyond their limit.
19 Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?”
One of the big takeaways from reading the gospels is you should be really careful what questions you ask Jesus, because you might not like the answer. Be careful what you ask. Why couldn't we do this?
20 He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
Jesus doesn't critique their exorcism techniques. He doesn't say you didn't use enough holy water. It was about them. It was about them. The power they were coming up against was stronger than the power of their faith at that moment. And so He says, this is fundamentally the problem. You haven't trained and grown enough in your experience with God for this to happen. He doesn't critique their technique, He critiques their hearts.
And then this is where it gets interesting. Preaching from the ESV, and most of you likely have ESVs and if you're reading in your Bibles this morning, it goes right from verse 20 here to verse 22, which is interesting. It's not a misprint, it's intentional. If you're reading another translation, you'll have a verse 21 and it will read something like this:
21 But this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.
Someone was talking about this this week and said, you can't preach on this — it's just going to destroy people's faith. They're going to not trust their Bibles anymore. The response to that is, no, this is exactly why we should preach on it. It's an opportunity.
There is a conversation to be had — and it would take a couple of hours — about the process of how we get the Bible, how the manuscripts are read and sorted and how all of that works. That won't happen this morning for two reasons. One, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting to you as it would be to me, and two, I really want you to come back next week. But here is what can be said: our English translations of the scriptures are built off of ancient manuscripts. The ancient manuscripts that we use to put together our English translations are not themselves the originals. We don't have the original letter that Paul wrote to Corinth. We don't have the original copy that was written by Luke of his gospel. We don't have those.
What we do have are hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of copies and references. The amount of copies that we have of the scriptures, especially the New Testament, are unbelievable. But there are some differences. There just are. This manuscript will have this word in this way and this manuscript will have it different. Sometimes, like in this case, this manuscript will have a verse and this manuscript won't. Sometimes it's easy to understand as a simple scribal error. Sometimes it seems like something may have been left out on purpose, or perhaps added on purpose. There are all sorts of reasons why this can be. It shouldn't make you distrust the Bible. In fact, it should actually cause you to stand back in amazement at how God superintended the process and has delivered to us an incredible document that reveals who He is and what His will is in our lives.
So here is the situation. A couple of the most trustworthy manuscripts leave out chapter 17 verse 21. A lot of the really good manuscripts have it. When the ESV committee was sitting down to put together their English translation, they decided they did not think this was original and chose not to include it. Other translators and translations leave it in. The honest reaction to this is that it may not matter as much as it seems. The question of whether Jesus literally said these words — this kind only comes out by prayer and fasting — is something that is a strong possibility, and that is what makes this worth engaging carefully and seriously.
That's seen in some of the manuscripts. It's also a possibility that he didn't, and a later editor came in and put that in, and either way works for me. My faith is not dependent upon that. Now if verse 21 taught something that was not taught anywhere else in scripture, that would be a problem. But it's not. This concept — this kind only comes out through prayer and fasting — is something that we see throughout the entire corpus of the scriptures, because it is the heart of what fasting is all about. There are certain powers, certain needs, certain struggles that are more difficult than others. And so if you find yourselves in that situation where you need greater spiritual power from God to break that which you're struggling with, then this kind only comes out with prayer and fasting.
Does that make sense? This is what it's saying. It's the heart of it — this kind. Literally the Greek word here is γένος – genos, like species. This kind of struggle, this kind of demon, this kind of sickness, this kind of battle. Some battles that you're going to have with sin are going to be relatively easy. God's going to show you something, your wife's going to show you something within you, and you're going to be like, oh yeah, you're right. And you're going to pray about it, and you confess it, and you're going to open it up, and you're going to find freedom. And that's awesome when it happens like that. But there are other sins in your life where you're going to try to unclench and give it to God, and you're going to keep holding on to it. And this is what fasting is for. It comes to break those powers that we can't fight on our own.
I want to be clear — fasting is not a technique for casting out demons. It's the formation practice that develops our faith. Jesus says to them, "Oh you of little faith," and explains why they couldn't drive out the demon: they didn't have enough faith. They hadn't grown their faith in the presence of God through a regular practice of being satisfied in God more than being satisfied in the gifts of God. I want to be clear about this, because I think it's really easy to see fasting as like “the Force” or something, some mystical power. A disciple who fasts regularly is not charging up their spiritual battery. The disciple who fasts regularly is developing a posture — a long, repeated practice of voluntary denial of physical needs for spiritual gain.
The person who has practiced emptying themselves before God, week after week, season after season, has developed a capacity for dependent faith that the person who hasn't practiced it simply doesn't have. It kind of is that simple. It's not virtue or achievement, it's formation. We need to be formed. Our faith needs to be formed. Our faith needs to be stretched and grown. Dallas Willard, one of my favorite authors, now gone to be with the Lord, says this: we don't try harder at holiness, we train for it. It's not willpower, it's practice. It's discipline. It's engagement.
Think of it this way. We've all spent a lot of time — more time than we'd like to admit — training our sin. I know maybe you don't think about it that way, but I want you to think about it that way. We've got a sin and we don't like to admit it, but we love it. It scratches that itch for us. It satisfies. Now, it doesn't ultimately satisfy — it enslaves us and it's ultimately killing us — but we develop in it. There's a difference between being a person who lies once and being a person who lies every time they open their mouth. There's a difference between somebody who looks at pornography once or twice and somebody who has been looking at pornography every day for thirty years. There's a radical difference in the power of that sin in that person's life. And so the longer you train in that sin, the longer you nurture it, the longer you hide it, the longer you hold it, the more it holds you. Doesn't that make sense?
So it's probably going to take time to untrain it. And the way that you untrain it is by confronting the appetites underneath it that drive you to it. And that's what the gift of fasting is for — to break the power of the appetite, the disordered appetite that is finding some satisfaction in something other than God. Fasting is the practice of deliberate reversal. It is the repeated, embodied, formational act of the creature that says, I will not fill this hunger on my own terms. I will bring it to God again and again and again until the posture is not an act of willpower alone but a habit of the whole person.
It may not be what you want to hear. I know it's not what I want to hear. I want a quick fix. I want three easy steps. But Jesus calls us to a long, slow obedience in a pointed direction. He calls us to pick up our cross and follow. So when you fast, Jesus says, expect God to show up. Now, I've been saying each week that the disciplines are not primarily individual, but communal. When Jesus said, "when you fast," it is literally in the plural. It is "when y'all fast," or if you are here from Texas, "when all y'all fast." So Jesus has an expectation not just for individuals to fast — Jesus has an expectation for His people to fast. Fasting is great when it is done alone. It is even better in community. It might just be that misery loves company, but I think it is more than that.
When you look at some of the biblical fasts, God does call an individual fast, like Jesus fasting alone in the wilderness, but the vast majority of the fasts in Scripture are communal fasts. One of my favorites is Joel 2. God says:
12a “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart,
Which is what? Your desires. They had been living with disordered desires. Joel is writing to people who had everything wiped out by locusts. Their whole world had been turned upside down as an act of judgment because of their sin. And so God comes to them and says, "Listen, return to me with all of your heart." How? With fasting. Not because God likes to look at us and see us suffer — no. It is because the problem was their disordered hearts. So He is saying, "Return to me with your hearts." How do you do that?
12 “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
You do that through fasting, through weeping, and through mourning. That is not dramatic effect. That is the honest response of a creature who has realized the grip of sin on their life. It is the only sane response — to feel the weight of it.
So return with fasting, with weeping, with mourning.
Rend your hearts and not your garments.
13a and rend your hearts and not your garments.”
This is not a show. It is not a performance. It must come from the inside out.
13b Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.
He says, "Come to me with fasting. Let me reorder your appetites and your desires and your heart. Return to me." Why? Not because fasting is some sort of magical process. No — it is because of who God is. Because of who He is. It is not the abundance of our tears. It is not the length of our fasting. It is not any of that. Fasting only matters because of the God that we fast towards.
That is where the power is. There is not power in the fasting itself. It is that fasting gets us to the One who is life. When you get to the One who is life, you receive life. Because of who God is — because He is gracious, because He is merciful, because He does not treat us as our sins deserve — we can go to Him even when we have blown it, especially when we have blown it. When our hearts are all out of whack, when our appetites are out of control, when our desires are completely disordered, we come to the gracious, forgiving, loving, generous God and say, "Lord, here is my heart. I have broken it. Put it back together." And God has asked us to do that through the gift of fasting.
Last week I said that confession is the act of opening up your hand and giving something to God. And that is true. Some of you heard that and you did it and there was freedom, release. You had been holding on for a long time, you gave it to God, and there was a sense of, "Oh wow." But some of you walked out of here — and this is my guess — more frustrated. You wanted to let it go, but you could not. That is what fasting is for.
So here is my question this morning. What is happening in your life right now — in your marriage, in your family, in your community, in the culture, in your soul — that is beyond you? You have reached your limit. What is that thing you cannot change, that you cannot let go of, that you need God's help with? Where is the bondage that has outlasted your best intentions? What have you been stuffing yourself with other than God? That is what fasting is for — to break that power, not as a technique, not as a spiritual achievement, but as the embodied declaration: this is beyond me.
Fasting is the act of bringing your hands to God and asking Him to let go of the things that are killing you, so that you might grab hold of the life that He is offering. Maybe it is time for you to do that. Maybe it is time to bring the honest emptiness to God rather than filling it on your own terms. Maybe it is time to practice in your own body, physically, deliberately, repeatedly, the posture of the true image-bearer — the one who looks to God for life. Maybe it is time. No, it is time. Amen.
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