No To Cheaper Desires

As we begin our fasting practice, we must first come to terms with the reality that most of us have a low view of our bodies and how they relate to our spirituality. Like the rest of the western world, followers of Jesus tend to either worship their bodies or treat them like an evil with desires that need to be controlled. And there’s some truth to this. Our bodies are both broken and redeemed. But rather than worship our bodies, punish them, or ignore them, the way of Jesus offers us an alternative. To help us reconnect our spirituality to our bodies, and to help us learn to say “no” to our cheap desires, we practice fasting.

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 If you have a Bible, you are welcome to open to Psalm 119 verses 33 through 40 is what we’re going to talk about this morning. Psalm 119 verse 33 says, teach me Lord, the meaning of your statutes and I will always keep them. Help me understand your instruction and I will obey it and follow it with all my heart.

Help me stay on the path of your commands for I take pleasure in it. Turn my heart to your decrees and not to dishonest profit. Turn my eyes from looking at what is worthless. Give me life in your ways. Confirm what you said to your servant, for it produces reverence for you. Turn away the disgrace that I dread.

Indeed, your judgments are good. How I long for your precepts. Give me life through your righteousness.

So God, we, we, we ask for that now. God, we pray over these next few minutes that you would, uh, that you would do that. That you would help us to, to find a light in your ways.

We ask God over these next moments that you would help us to remove any distractions. Any worries or anxieties, um, anything that might block us from, from receiving your word, the good seed. Father, we pray that you would, uh, help us to be receptive, that we would take what we hear today, and that you would give us the willingness to put it into practice this week.

So Father, we give you this time, and we love you, and we pray all this in your name. Amen.

The first time I fasted, uh, I was 16 years old. Uh, I was in the 11th grade, uh, and it was a two day fast, uh, combined with, uh, a youth lock in. Which, I, I, has anyone done a youth lock in? Oof, okay. Uh, I don’t know why they do, do these things. Um, and I don’t know why they combine this one with fasting. And the goal was, so if you don’t know what a lock in is, basically you take a bunch of hormonal teenagers and you lock them in a, in the church.

You put them in the church building for at least a day, overnight, and you give them food and candy and they play games and sometimes maybe there’s a message or something. Sometimes not. I don’t really know what the point is, but for this one, uh, they did that, but it was a two day thing and there was no food, so we were fasting.

for for two days. And the idea was the goal was to to help us to sort of close that gap between our sort of knowledge and awareness of foodlessness and other parts of the world. Uh, and our experience of excess here in the U. S. So we all knew that there is Uh, food crisis on the other side of the globe, but we also knew that in America we had an indulgence of food, and the fast was supposed to help, like, stir our hearts for compassion, so that we would go and do some I don’t know what we were supposed to do, but it was a miserable two days.

All it really did was make a bunch of hormonal teenagers even more hungry and more hormonal. Now, I was actually really excited for the fast. At this stage of my life, I was 16 and I was really hungry for God. I wanted more of God in my life. I wanted clarity and direction on whatever God wanted to do in my life and wherever God wanted my life to go.

So I’ll never forget that weekend. Specifically, I’ll never forget the disappointment of that weekend. How I felt, I wasn’t closer to God after those two days. I wasn’t more compassionate for others or more likely to give my time or resources to helping solve the food injustice and crises plaguing other parts of the world.

I just wanted some pizza. And I left that weekend wondering, why fast? Like really, honestly, you think about it, why, like what is me not eating? have to do with another person across the world’s ability to eat. Like, how is that helping anything? Why not take that time and energy for two days and actually go and do something to help and serve these people or steward, pool our resources together, do something like that.

What does me not eating food have to do with following Jesus well? Uh, today is the first week of our first practice series of the year, which is fasting. And so if you’re new to our community, if you’re new to our church, basically what we, what we do is every few months or so we Uh, we, we pick a practice, uh, we call a practice from the way of Jesus.

It’s, uh, maybe you’ve heard referred to as a spiritual discipline, but it’s some kind of habit that we see, uh, Jesus doing in his life and in the life of others. We see followers of Jesus doing that allow us to be shaped and, and, and formed into people who look and act and think more like Jesus. We call these the practices.

And the goal of the practice is, is not to become more spiritual people, high and mighty people, or to become people who have better control over our appetites or anything like that at all. The goal of the practice, uh, is to orient ourselves back towards God, to yield part of ourselves towards God. And so today And for the next four weeks, we’re going to be talking about the practice of fasting.

Now, I know a lot of us have that same experience when it comes to fasting as I did. Maybe if you think about fasting, maybe there’s some initial excitement mixed with a little bit of apprehension. But if you’ve ever tried it before, that’s usually quickly followed by frustration, disappointment. And if we’re honest, regret.

Or maybe you don’t really have a category for fasting in your discipleship framework. Maybe something like scripture reading or, or prayer makes sense to you, but something like fasting, you don’t really see how that would fit into your daily quiet time. Or fasting is confusing. Or fasting is only something that we do when we have ever needed something or when the church is doing it.

For most of us, a regular routine rhythm of fasting is only for like pastors and monks or something like that. I’ve been fasting somewhat regularly since 2018, and I haven’t been, and I say somewhat regularly because I want to be honest, I, this is not, I’m not perfect at this. When we do these practice series, we’re not trying to, to like talk down to you or anything like that.

We’re not trying to pretend that we’re doing something or we’re not doing something we’re asking you to do. We’re trying to be honest about this reality that Pastor Trey and I, we’ve tried some of these things before and we found benefit in life from and we’re inviting you to participate in this thing with us.

So let me just be the first to confess and admit that there are days when I fast and I eat earlier than I’m supposed to. I break my fast before I’m supposed to. And that’s okay. I want to just name that and kind of. uh, alleviate maybe some of the tension there. I don’t want to create this perception that we’re doing something high in spiritual and we’re trying to bring you, like, we’re all trying to do this together.

But I’ve been doing this somewhat regularly since 2018, on and off, integrating fasting into my weekly rhythms. And I can honestly say that it has been the most revealing and impactful practice, at least one of the most revealing and impactful practices in my own discipleship to Jesus. But before we recapture this ancient practice of fasting and before we get back to our main teaching text in Psalms this morning, I want us to answer a simple question, same question I asked when I was 16 years old, locked in my youth room, praying for beans and rice or something to alleviate my hunger.

Why am I doing this? Why fast? What’s the point of this? And when most of us think of discipleship, again, we think of all the stuff that happens in our minds. Uh, one pastor put it this way, we can’t fathom a mode of formation that comes through our stomach, not through our prefrontal cortex, meaning our brains.

And so when we think about growing in our spiritual maturity or growing in our relationship with Christ, we tend to think of all the brain stuff. If I tell you to listen to a sermon or listen to this podcast or go and read this book that clicks like that makes sense to you. You would get that. You’d be like, Yeah, that makes sense.

I need to learn more, gain more knowledge so that I can become more and more like Jesus. All knowledge and none of that is bad. By the way, we’re advocates of all of we love all of that stuff. Listen to the podcasts and read the books. But that’s incomplete. See, most of us have no theological framework for how our bodies fit into our spiritual lives.

Or to put it more bluntly, Christians tend to have, along with the rest of the Western world around us, we tend to have such a low view of our bodies. Author and historian Scott McKnight gives a helpful paradigm for how most of us tend to view our bodies. Here’s my paraphrase of McKnight’s work. Some of us view our bodies as nothing more than a god to be worshipped.

And so what we do, if we’re in this category, we aim our lives at either physical pleasures, or material desires, or bodily health as a means to make ourselves happy. And the lie that we tend to believe about our bodies is that our deepest satisfaction, our deepest satisfaction happens within them. And it’s either by increasing our beauty and our attractiveness, indulging in sensual desires or increasing our longevity and health that we will be happy.

And for those of us in this camp, we will sacrifice a lot for our bodies. So make sure that it stays happy, satisfied, and fulfilled. We’ll rearrange our schedules. We’ll aim our resources. We’ll make our lives revolve around our bodies. All body, no soul. But if I’m being honest, I think most of us, at least within the church, uh, tend to fall on the other side, the opposite end of the spectrum.

Our body isn’t a god to be worshipped. It’s an evil to be rejected. So some of us view our bodies as a monster, as an evil and wicked beast that we have to fight to keep in check. Physical pleasures, beauty and desires, bad. Spiritual stuff, sermons, podcasts, good. Junk food, bad. Prayer, good. And there’s some mixture of truth here, but most of us in this camp view the goal of the Christian life.

Uh, to be about making it to heaven where we will escape our bodies and live together as disembodied spirits while the world is done away with beneath us. And for us in this camp, the body is really just meant to be ignored, taking care of enough to keep alive and to get us to eternity. But ultimately it’s arbitrary.

It’s just a shell that’s wasting away until we get to our afterlife. In other words, all soul, no body.

But the way of Jesus, I think, gives us a better alternative. See, in the opening pages of the Bible’s story, God creates a physical world, and he calls it good. Now, the culmination of God’s creation in the Genesis account isn’t the beauty and the goodness of the natural world, or the incredible living plants and animals that fill it.

It’s his Selem, Hebrew for image. And so God creates a physical, natural, good, and beautiful world, and he places physical, bodily representations of himself in the middle of creation, and he calls it very good. See, Adam and Eve are these physical, created beings whose one job is to image or reflect or represent God’s presence and God’s goodness to the rest of the created world with their bodies.

Now, throughout the rest of the scriptures, all sorts of words are used to describe humans starting in Genesis. Soul, flesh, spirit, heart, body, mind, will, all meaning human beings. One thing. See, what Western culture has done is it’s tended, it’s divided the body from the soul. So we’re the Western world outside of us, the secular world tends to have a high view of the body and a low view of the soul.

I think in the church we’ve done the same. We’ve elevated the soul and degraded the body, but we’ve still separated and distinguished between the two. But for the authors of scripture, writing the scriptures inspired by the Holy Spirit, the soul is not this immaterial, immortal thing within us. It is all of us.

Spirit, heart, will, and body included. All of these things, our minds, our desires, our wills, that spirit within us, the emotional center, the deep inner life, as some theologians put it, including our bodies, are what scholars often call an organic unity that defines humans according to the scriptures. The Bible has no category for the distinguishing between your body and your soul.

The two are cohesive and related, one thing. Now, to put it more bluntly, you don’t have a body. You are a body. Dallas Willard puts it this way. The new life in Christ simply is not an inner life of belief and imagination. Even if spirituality, even if spiritually inspired, it is a life of whole embodied person in the social context.

Now notice what he says there. It’s not just an inner life of belief and imagination. Which is what I think a lot of us tend to view the Christian life as, right thinking is what matters, right belief and right doctrine. But that’s only half the story. What Willard is saying is, the life that we have in Christ, the new life in Christ that we receive on this side of the cross, when we say yes to Jesus and give our lives to him, is an embodied life.

In a social context, meaning we live and we receive and we extend the life and the grace of God to others in our bodies, to others that also have bodies, it’s a physical reality. Now, you might point to something like the fall and say, yeah, I agree. Our bodies used to be good, but now they’re affected and warped and broken by sin.

And when we die, our bodies are going to be done away with. And I would say, yeah, that’s partially true. But look at the gospels, specifically Luke’s gospel and the gospel author Luke’s account of Jesus’s resurrection. He includes this peculiar little story. What happens is Jesus walks into a room, so he’s, he’s been crucified and he’s been resurrected in his glorified, resurrected physical body, walks into a room, appears in this room to his disciples, asks for some fish, and then he just eats in front of everyone.

That’s a really weird story, and the point isn’t really just to show that coming back from the dead is hard work. Though I imagine it’s gotta be, right? No, the point is to show that Jesus came back in a body. The gospel authors go out of their way to show that people could touch Jesus’s new resurrected body.

If the body wasn’t part of our redemption story, a part of salvation, then Jesus would have come back just in spiritual form only as a way to show that the ultimate goal of salvation was to get rid of our bodily shells. And this is actually a heresy in the second century early church called docetism.

One of the earliest heresies the church had to fight against was this false belief that Jesus couldn’t have come back in a body after his resurrection because the body’s bad, physical world, bad, spiritual world, good. Jesus only appeared in a body. It was not a real body. The church said, that’s a heresy.

The gospel authors are clearly talking about something physical and real and tangible. Jesus ate with his disciples. In 1 Corinthians 15, after the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus, the Apostle Paul writes to a church in Corinth, which is a church riddled with sin involving their bodies. And he reminds them that on this side of the cross, on this side of salvation, they not only host the personal power and presence of God as a collective church community, but also as individuals with a body inside their bodies.

You house, if you’re a follower of Jesus, the personal power and presence of the spirit of God in your body. And then writing his letter to the Roman churches and Romans chapter 12, he says, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

Notice, not offer your minds, not offer your hearts, offer your bodies, all of our bodies, all of ourselves, our hearts and minds, soul, desires, and body, all included. One organic unity, a human being. Offer yourselves to Jesus. All the way at the end of the biblical story in Revelation, you could read this Revelation 21 and 22, Jesus doesn’t come back to grab our souls and bring us out of this physical world into some disembodied heaven.

That’s not how the story ends. The story ends with Jesus coming back in the flesh to recreate the physical world as it was meant to be heaven and earth united like the garden, but better. We, with glorified, meaning perfected, resurrected, physical bodies, live forever in the new creation together with Jesus.

All of this to say, what you do with your body matters. Not just in eternity, but here and now, today. But we’re not at the end of the story. We’re in the middle of it. And though our bodies are redeemed, they are also still broken. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul illustrates earlier in his letter to the Roman Church, chapter 7.

He says, We know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave under sin. For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it’s good, so now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me.

For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I don’t want to do. Now if I do what I do not want I am no longer the one who does it, but it is the sin that lives in me.

And so I discover this law. When I want to do what is good, evil is present within me. For in my inner self, I delight in God’s law. But I see a different law in the parts of my body. Waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in parts of my body. What a wretched man I am.

Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh the law of sin. And notice what Paul is naming here. There’s a combination and mixture and conflict of desires within all of us. We experience life in the middle of the story.

There’s inner turmoil that we all experience and must acknowledge as we strive to become more like Jesus. The problem, according to Paul, isn’t our bodies. It’s the deep rooted sin within our bodies. What Paul calls the flesh in this passage. Now, theologians and scholars maintain that these are different words.

Your body is good and redeemed, but there is a part of your body that isn’t fully redeemed. There’s something in you. It’s what the biblical authors call sin. Bible describes this as part, it’s like an infection. It affects every part of your body, keeping you enslaved to your inner evil desires. This is what James, the brother of Jesus, names in his writings, James chapter one, but each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire.

Or later in his writings, chapter four, what is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder and covet, but you cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

What’s being named here is that conflict that happens within our bodies. Our bodies are redeemed and destined for resurrection. Yes, but on this side of eternity, they’re broken. So back to our main teaching text for this morning. Psalm 119. It’s a psalm primarily about desire. I imagine this is the psalm that Paul has in mind as he’s writing Romans 7, I want to follow the law of God.

The law of God is what I delight in. I know and I recognize and acknowledge that the way of God is good. That’s exactly what the psalmist is naming here in Psalm 119. The desire and the delight that he has for the way of God, revealed through his law. Verse 33, teach me the meaning of your statutes. In other words, I want to follow your ways.

I want to live life the way that you, God, say that it should be lived. But I want to know why. I don’t want to just blindly obey. I want to obey and experience the fullness of the goodness of life that is in your ways. Verse 35, help me stay on the path of your commands, for I take pleasure in it. I take pleasure in following your ways.

And verse 40 at the very end, how I long for your precepts. I love the way the message paraphrases it, see how hungry I am for your counsel. And the very middle of this Psalm is the main point, verses 36 and 37, turn my heart to your decrees and not to dishonest prophets. Turn my eyes from looking at what is worthless.

Give me life in your ways. Notice the two competing desires in contrast here. God’s decrees versus dishonest prophet. The ways of God. What is worthless? So on one hand, the psalmist deeply desires to follow the way of God. Again, this is what Paul is naming in Romans seven. I want to do good. He knows that this way of life, this deep joy and long lasting satisfaction can only be found by receiving the good word, letting it take root and then living it out.

But on the other hand, he has desires that he knows and is praying against. Dishonest prophet, the temptation to make profit, to accumulate more for himself, no matter the cost to himself or to others or to waste his time, his energy and his attention on worthless things. Notice, not sinful things, worthless things, things that drain him, things that take him away, that capture his heart and move him away from God, things that just waste time.

How does the psalmist wrestle with these conflicting desires? Well, notice the pairing heart and eyes. Turn my heart and turn my eyes. Will and body. Internal desire, external expression. See, what our hearts desire is ultimately what our bodies will naturally just automatically be aimed at. Show me how you live.

Show me where you spend your time. Show me your calendar. Show me your bank statements. And I’ll show you the desires of your heart. But the inverse is also true. What our bodies are aimed at will dictate the desires of our hearts. You want to change your heart? Change the posture of your body. This is why sin is a cycle and why it’s so hard for some of us to break out of these cycles of deep rooted, habitual, physical sins, because our bodies are naturally aimed at them.

Our bodies receive those things and our hearts then long for those things, and because our hearts long for those things, then our bodies are naturally aimed at those things. Wretched man that I am, who’s going to save me? That’s what Paul’s naming in Romans 7. So what does a psalmist do to wrestle with this?

He forces his body into restraint. Turn my eyes and my heart will follow. Turn my eyes away from its sinful desires. Turn my heart, that’s what I ultimately want, but in order to get there, I need to turn my eyes away from these things and towards you, God. How do we do this today?

Fasting.

Our invitation is to consider the practice of fasting, internal desire, external expression. There’s actually a rich history of fasting throughout the scriptures and throughout church history. The very first mention of fasting that we have in the Bible is in Exodus, when Moses meets with God on Mount Sinai and doesn’t eat anything for 40 days and 40 nights.

And then after that, when he goes back down, the Israelites are told to fast for the Day of Atonement, which is what’s called today Yom Kippur. Jesus fasts. He assumes his disciples will fast. Fasting has just been a regular practice of the early church for centuries, alongside the normal practices like prayer and scripture reading and community, as a way to control the early church’s appetites, turn their whole selves to God, and shape their inner desires.

One of the earliest manuscripts of the early church that we have is called the Deiticus from the first or second century. It actually predates some, uh, New Testament manuscripts that we have. It gives a glimpse into the life of the early church, how they lived their rhythms. It talks about how to take communion, what baptism means, and how to fast.

And according to that document, the early church committed collectively to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. And that’s continued for the centuries, but it’s a lost practice today. Something reserved only for those, uh, overly concerned with their health. Or maybe normally, maybe we should. There are actually a ton of health benefits for fasting.

I won’t share, we did a lot of research for this. I’ll let Trey deal with all that stuff next week. Or for like monks and ascetics and weird people who are like hyper Christians or something like that. Now our goal at Passion Creek is to recapture that ancient practice of fasting, but our goal is to do that as a way to turn our bodies and our affections back towards God.

And so here’s our definition of fasting. Fasting is the practice. And notice we call it a practice for a reason. These aren’t discipline, these aren’t discipline, it requires discipline. But the end goal is practice. This is something we want to get better at and that we’re trying at. We’re never gonna be perfect at this.

We want to put this into practice is what Jesus says at the end of the Sermon on the Mound. Whoever hears my words and puts them into practice. So it is the practice of abstaining from food. For a set period of time to say no to cheaper desires, to say yes to deep reunion, to confess your need and to contend for your neighbor.

Now there are tons of reasons to fast, great reasons to fast. Those are the four that we’re going to focus on this month. No. To cheaper desires, yes, to deeper union to confess. Your need to contend for your neighbor for today, saying no to cheap desires. Right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Uh, Jesus, uh, has a.

This is a regular teaching on fasting, and there’s a lot of debate about what the Sermon on the Mount is really for. Most scholars agree that this is maybe a collection of teachings, or one teaching that Jesus would give at different spots and it was just recorded here on this specific mount. These were regular teachings.

This is something that Jesus would often say, and in one of those teachings he talks about fasting. Matthew 6, verse 16 says, Whenever you fast, don’t be gloomy like the hypocrites. For they make their faces unattractive so that their fasting is obvious to people. Now truly, I tell you, they have their reward.

But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face so that your fasting isn’t obvious to others, but to your father who is in secret. And your father who sees in secret will reward you. There’s a lot to unpack in that passage that we don’t have time for. You’re going to look at that more in your groups this week, but a few things to note.

First, don’t be like the hypocrites. The goal of fasting is not to get good at fasting. The goal of fasting is not to make other people know and like you because you’re fasting or maybe not like you because you’re fasting. The goal is to fast for Jesus. And notice that if, if all you want out of fasting is attention, Jesus says that’s, they have the reward.

You’ll get that. If that’s what you want, that’s, you’ll get that, but that’s all you’re going to get. There’s a deeper reward on offer for you. If you engage in the practice of fasting by orienting your heart towards God. Notice also Jesus seemed to assume that his disciples would fast. He doesn’t say, if you decide to fast, if you decide to try and integrate this into your life, or if you decide to try it once or twice, he says the same thing about prayer.

If you, if you want to try praying, here’s how I would recommend doing it. He says, when you fast, you’re gonna fast. When you do it, here’s how to do it. When you pray, of course you’re gonna pray. When you pray, here’s how you do it. Why does Jesus assume that his disciples would fast?

If the life that Jesus called us to live is a life of cross carrying and self denial, And I would argue fasting is one of the surest ways to cultivate a mind, a heart, and a desire into a posture of self denial.

See, by fasting, we learn to curate the appetites of our physical bodies and the appetites of our spirits. We forego food so we can feast on God. And when we fast, we aren’t crucifying or punishing our bodies. A lot of people throughout church history, especially in the monastic movement, the desert fathers and mothers maybe loved fasting a little too much.

They would, like, self flagellate themselves and just put themselves in anguish so they could participate in the sufferings of Christ. That’s not our end goal here. We’re not doing that. But we are fighting. We are fighting for our bodies by bringing our whole selves. We are fighting for our whole selves.

Our desires, our impulses, our appetites under the authority and will of God. We are fighting to bring ourselves under the authority and the will of God. Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Cornelius Plantinga Jr. says this. Self indulgence is the enemy of gratitude and self discipline usually its friend and generator.

That is why gluttony is a deadly sin. The early desert fathers believed that a person’s appetites are linked. Full stomachs and jaded palates take the edge from our hunger and thirst for righteousness. They spoil the appetite for God. Thomas A Kempis writes refrain from gluttony and now shout the more easily restrain all the inclinations of the flesh or St.

Augustine when asked why fasting is important responded because it’s sometimes necessary to check the delight of the flesh in respect to licit pleasures in order to keep it from yielding to elicit joy.

See, theologians throughout church history have noticed the connection between our bodies, our appetites for food, and our bodies and appetites for other physical pleasures and sins and indulgences like sex. Indulging in one tends to affect indulgence in the other. And for those struggling to find freedom from addiction and repeated sin, one of the best things that you can do is practice submitting your physical body to God through the practice of fasting.

And Romans seven, Paul names this. I have desires. I want to be free from this, but there’s a part of me that isn’t brought under the will of God. I cannot contain it. Sin is waging war within me, passions and mixed desires within me that are then spreading out into the community is what James says. How does Paul end that in Romans seven, wretched man that I am, who’s going to save me fasting?

No Jesus. But how do we submit our bodies to Jesus to save? Through the practice of fasting. See, fasting cultivates our ability to say no to the cheap, quick, simple indulgences. It’s like a muscle that is severely underdeveloped for us in the West today. Our culture is one of excess and indulgence. That thing that’s within you that Paul named thousands of years ago, that’s waging war, what he called the flesh, these things that the psalmist, likely David, is writing about, I delight in the law of God, but I have a desire for dishonest profit, those desires, those impulses, is what the culture is preying on to make money off of you.

From fast food, candy, and snacks to instant media, information, and even pornography, we live in an age where the answer to our impulses is just a walk, drive, or click away. But as we strengthen our ability to say no to our appetites, our surface level appetites for food, we strengthen our ability to say no to other cheaper, disordered desires and impulses.

And this is why we would argue fasting as an ancient practice has always referred to the practice of not eating food. A lot of people say things like, I’m fasting from social media or I’m giving up TV or something like that, which is a great thing. I want to bless that and say that’s great. That’s actually another practice.

It’s actually, it’s a real ancient practice called abstinence. You abstain from something, a behavior or an activity for a set period of time. to, to orient yourself and give your, your attention to God. And, and, and there’s a, a place for that, certainly in our fasting guide. Actually, if there’s, there’s a little note in there, we say, if you’re, if you, if fasting is medically unsafe for you, if you aren’t in a position medically or health wise to fast, there are other ways to participate in this practice.

And one of them is abstaining. But at the end of the day, saying no to food, such a primal physical desire does something to you. See, it slowly weans us off that impulse that we all carry in our bodies. Paul says, who’s going to save me from this evil body? Not that the whole body is evil, but the whole body is infected by evil.

Who’s going to save me from it? Fasting slowly weans us off that impulse that we all carry in our bodies to immediately satisfy any craving for quick and cheap pleasure. It makes us holy. Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Holy meaning not judgmental or high and mighty or self righteous, but holy in the biblical sense just means set apart, consecrated, made for something special, oriented and aimed at the things God wants us to be oriented and aimed at, which is himself.

Fasting purifies us from the things that we impulsively go to for comfort, escape, and satisfaction. You ever get hangry? Yes. You know what that is? I mean, it’s funny. We joke about it. It’s like a commercial now, but it’s a real thing. That’s who, that’s the flesh. I don’t want to get weird about stuff like that, but that, like, there’s a part of you.

Fasting reveals that fleshy part of you. It reveals the impulses. When I fast, you’ll notice, when you, if you try fasting with us and you do this, when you’re not eating, you will do all sorts of things to alleviate and comfort yourselves. I reach for my phone more when I’m fasting. I turn on the TV more for mindless media when I’m fasting.

It brings those things to the surface and it purifies us. But then slowly, over time, through habit and the work of the Holy Spirit, not just fasting on its own, but fasting as a means to open ourselves, through our habits, to the work of the Holy Spirit. By doing that, slowly, regularly, routinely, over time, we change.

We develop our muscles. Internal desire, external expression. Scott McKnight, again, author and historian, says this. Fasting is the body talking what the spirit yearns, what the soul longs for, and what the mind knows to be true. It is body talk. Not the body is simply talking for the spirit, for the mind, or for the soul in some symbolic way, but for the person, the whole person to express herself or himself completely.

Fasting is one way you and I bring our entire selves into complete expression. The Bible, because it advocates clearly that the person, heart, soul, mind, spirit, and body, is embodied as a unity. Assumes that fasting as body talk is inevitable. And so, the practice this week is simple. Just try it. Fast at least one time this week.

Just practice saying no to the impulse for food. On your way out, uh, we have, we wrote these little fasting guides. It’s a physical little book you can take that’ll break down week by week how to actually do that. Uh, so this is what our groups are going to be going through together. If you’re part of a together group, you’ll talk about this in your groups.

Uh, it’ll, it’ll, it’ll talk about that. How do I actually just, what does it mean? How do I do this to say no to something? How do I fast? But our end goal here at Passion Creek isn’t to become people who just fast for the sake of fasting. Our goal is not to recapture the ancient rhythm or adopting some questionable ascetic practices.

No, our end goal is to become disciples. Who reorient, recenter, refocus, aim our lives at becoming more and more like Jesus. Gracious and loving towards those around us. Self controlled over our impulses. Victorious over what James calls the passions that wage war within us and what St. Augustine famously called our disordered desires.

People wholly capable of loving God and loving others.

So why don’t we stand and respond?