but patches and wineskins? i guess it should've been obvious but again, i'm not the sharpest tool in the box :D the pharisees represents the old traditions and perhaps.. laws that weren't even commanded by god for men to follow. (in my group we went through the old testament and found no example of god commanding people to fast.) jesus represents the new law. it's impossible to mesh the old mosaic rituals to the new covenant that comes with the arrival of christ. simple enough = ]
then.. what part does fasting play in our lives today?
i asked my friend john macarthur.
QUESTION: Okay, in Matthew 6 it talks about giving alms, or when you give alms, and in Matthew...and then further on down it says when you are praying, or when you pray...and then it says when you fast. It looks as though that fasting should be just as regular as praying and giving alms, and I was wondering how should we be applying fasting in today's day and age?
JOHN: Well I think fasting is a very important part of Christian experience. I...he's talking about verse 16 of Matthew 6, "Whenever you fast do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do." A couple of things to say about fasting. First of all, fasting is never commanded. Prayer is. Pray without ceasing, praying always with all prayer and supplication, watch and pray, repeatedly we are called to pray. We are commanded to pray. We are never commanded to fast. In fact, fasting is obviously identified with unique circumstances. And I...the best way to illustrate that is that when the disciples of Jesus were confronted by the Jewish leaders, the Jewish leaders said to Jesus, "Why don't Your disciples fast?"
Now it was typical of devout traditionalist Jews to fast twice a week. And you remember the publican in Luke 18 said, "I fast twice a week," so he was following not the biblical prescription but the traditional prescription that if you wanted to be spiritual you fasted twice a week, you deprived yourself of food twice a week. And to them that was emblematic of holiness. So He...so the Jews came to Jesus and they said, "Your disciples don't fast. Why?"
Well that's very interesting. Jesus' response was, "When the bridegroom is with you, you don't fast." In other words, this is not a time for fasting because this is a time for joy. And Jesus was telling us that fasting is a unique experience that's identified with times of grief and sorrow and pain and isolation, loneliness, fear, those kinds of times that would not exist while you were walking around in the presence of Jesus Christ. So the first thing to remember is that fasting, at least in the teaching of Jesus, was for those times of great concern and great sorrow, great anxiety, great prayer, all of that kind of issues in prayer and fasting is always associated with prayer. It's not isolated from prayer. It is a part and parcel of times of prayer. And so I think that the time to fast is, of course, those times when we are swept up in prayer to the degree that we are so somber, so serious, so engulfed that we have no desire to eat, no desire to satisfy any of the cravings of the flesh. And, in fact, in times like that it may be that the flesh doesn't have such cravings because one is so overwrought with prayerful concerns.
I think that's all that we can really say in the New Testament about fasting. That there are times when it wouldn't be appropriate to fast because you're enjoying the fullness of the presence of God and all of His blessing. There are times when it would be appropriate to fast and that would be associated with times of importunity which means time of relentless prayer and concern about those matters that are on our hearts.
I can give you some personal experiences from my own life when great crises come into my own life, fasting is a somewhat normal response to those kinds of exigencies. I can think back to the...to a...the longest time of fasting that I ever experienced in my life was a nine- or ten-day fast in which I ate nothing. That was a time when I was in great concern and prayer over the fact that my son Mark had been diagnosed as having brain tumor which could be fatal. And immediately, of course, he was in his last year of college at that time, I think it was his last year, and, of course, it was a tremendous amount of concern over that. And there was just a very...sort of a very immediate response to fast and pray on behalf of that kind of serious situation and come before the Lord and God was so...so tremendously gracious during that time. I remember when the doctor told me, the neurosurgeon at Cedar Sinai, that it could be fatal, it was just immediate that I wanted to come into the presence of the Lord and beseech Him. First of all, naturally, you pray for the well being of your son, you ask the Lord...are You sure You've got the right kid, this is a good one, you know, he can...You could use him, you know, down the road. And I prayed and fasted and, of course, Patricia was aware and Mark was not aware of the seriousness of his tumor situation. But during that time I can honestly say I spent nine days taking him back and forth to the clinic while they were doing non-invasive techniques to determine what this tumor was before they drilled a hole in his skull and went in and actually got inside because the implications were so severe because it was near the optic nerve and the piamater gland, and things like that. They didn't want to do any invasive things, and so those were times of intense prayer.
And you could see a flow going from...Lord, you know, spare his life...and so forth and so on, to a sort of a middle ground in a few days where you're saying...Lord, whatever Your will is, whatever Your will. And by the time I got to the end of it I was saying, "You know, this world isn't a fit place for anybody, he belongs to You, take him out." You know, you go through the whole process. And, you know, I conducted his funeral about a hundred times, you know, just going through the process of yielding up to the Lord this young man.
And I remember being up in my office on a Wednesday night, it was the ninth day, the next day the doctor was going to tell me the results of all the tests and they were done at the Frank Norris Clinic over at the USC Medical Center by the finest cancer specialists around and pediatric tumor specialists and all of that. And I was waiting for the next morning. For the first time I was actually hungry. It was the first time I actually felt any hunger pangs. And I actually got hungry sitting up there, it was on a Wednesday night, it was between the end of the kind of the day and the office is closed and Wednesday night services were going to start in an hour or so. And I was up there and everything was locked up and I was just praying and thanking the Lord for the perfect peace, that if He was going to take him to heaven, wonderful, glorious for him and we would rejoice in that.
And there was a knock on my door and I don't even know how anybody got in there because there are four sets of double doors you have to go through and they were all locked. And a lady was knocking on my door and I was so surprised because everything else was closed in the office and I went to the door and opened the door and there was a lady standing there who had been in the church for many years but had never been in my office ever. And I greeted her and said, "Hi, how are you?" And she said, "Well," she said, "Pastor I saw your light on up here as I was going by and I thought you might be hungry and I brought you a sandwich."
And I think I said something like, "Haba...haba...haba...haba." I don't think it was any more coherent than that. It might have been less coherent than that actually. And that woman had never given me a cookie. That woman had never done anything. She had never been in the office. I don't...I didn't even know she knew where my office was, but somehow the Lord had impressed upon her heart to make me a bologna sandwich. And I...I took that sandwich in a little bag and I went back to my desk and I said, "So, Lord, You're that involved in my prayer life that when the fast is over You deliver the sandwich." I mean, that was a pretty profound moment for somebody who is not every mystical. And I just rejoice that God had concluded the fast in a most appropriate and gracious way. I mean, I just couldn't bring myself to going down to In and Out, or something, it sort of seemed too carnal. It needed to be something more (laughter).
So I only say that, give you that little recitation to say that there are great times of fasting that come along with great times of prayer. And the next morning the doctor called me and he said, "We're happy to tell you this is a benign epidermoid, it's a piece of misplaced skin tissue, it is not any problem at all, it is not even anything to worry about. We're just rejoicing down here. We like really like your son and we're so happy for him and we just wanted to let you know that all of the news is good. And we don't think it's a problem and never will be a problem."
I was so thrilled, I went to the college where Mark was and I told him. And then I told him the whole story. And he hadn't known all the behind-the-scene details about the potential fatality that they had told me about. He said to me, "You know, why do you think the Lord put me through that?" And I said, "Put YOU through that. You didn't know what I knew. The question is, why did the Lord put me through that?" And, of course, the answer to that is in order that the Lord might accomplish His purposes in our hearts and draw us to Himself. So God put Himself on display and was gracious in that regard.
Three years ago you know Patricia had a car accident, broke her neck, gave her less than five percent chance to live. That was another time when prayer just kind of takes over your life. You just...you just go into instant communion, unrelenting communion with God and food has no place as other kinds of indulgences and things that entertain us don't.
So I think fasting needs to be associated with times of prayer. And I say that carefully because I think some people think that if you just arbitrarily don't eat that there's some spiritual virtue in that. The fact of the matter is we ought to fast more because we ought to be more concerned to pray more strongly about more things, right? So the real issue, I think, is in the prayer area.
well put.
i think it's interesting that he says the act of fasting is a natural process where you are so overcome with prayerful concerns that you do not even desire the cravings of the flesh. what if this were a more frequent occurence in my life?
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