Nobody Told You What It Was For

The email came round on the Tuesday and it had everything in it except the one thing he wanted to know.

The dates. A reminder about the prayer room being open. A cheerful line about believing for a breakthrough as a church family. And then a picture of a sunrise, which he thought about for slightly longer than he meant to.

What it did not say, anywhere, was what the thing is for.

He has been coming eleven years. Eleven years, and he has never once asked, because there was a window early on where asking would have been fine and he missed it, and now asking would mean admitting that he has nodded through four of these already without knowing what he was nodding at.

So he will do it. He will be careful and sensible about it and he will get through, and at the end somebody will ask him how he found it, and he will say it was good, and that will be true in the way that things are true when you have no idea what you were measuring.

If you have got an email like that sitting in your inbox, come and sit down. Nobody is going to ask you what you already know.

Jesus assumed it and then spent His teaching removing the audience

Here is the strangest thing about the main passage on this, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Jesus never argues for fasting. He does not make a case, He does not command it, He does not set a length or a kind. He says when, not if, and then He spends the whole of His actual teaching on it dismantling the audience.

But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:17 and 18

Wash your face. Do your hair. Look like a man having an ordinary Thursday.

That is the instruction, and notice what it makes impossible. It makes it impossible for this to be a performance, because the one visible sign has been deliberately removed. What is left, when you take the audience out, is a person and their Father and nothing else in the room.

You are seen by your Father, and He is the whole audience, and He has been the whole audience the entire time. That is not my reassurance to you, it is what the passage itself says twice over (Matthew 6:18), and the Holy Spirit is what makes that land in a man who has been quietly hoping he was doing it right for eleven years.

So what is it actually for

Now the plain answer, and it is smaller and better than the mystery.

Fasting is a way of praying. That is all it is. It is not a way of getting, it is not a lever, it is not a payment, and it does not make God more willing than He already is. It is prayer with your body in it, so that the part of you that gets hungry and tired and reaches for something at eleven o'clock is turned the same way as the rest of you.

Most prayer happens in the part of you that thinks. This is the whole of you turning at once. That is the entire difference, and it is a real difference, and it is not a bigger or a holier thing than praying with words.

You are not embarking on an advanced course, and there is no rank here. The written word says that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), which is a sentence about God not grading the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that steady in somebody who has spent four of these quietly comparing themselves with the people who seem to know.

Before anything else, the part that outranks the rest

I am going to stop the teaching and say this plainly, because a page about fasting that does not say it is a page that can do harm.

Some people must not go without food, and it takes nothing at all away from them. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you simply are not sure, then speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no version of this in which your body's limits put you further from God. The written word says God accepts according to that a man hath (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Holy Spirit is given without reference to what anybody is allowed to eat.

There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there never will be. If you came here for a number, I have not got one, and the not having one is on purpose.

And one more thing that matters, because of what we have just read about secrecy. The privacy Jesus is talking about is about audience, never about concealment. Telling your doctor is always right. Telling your husband or your wife is always right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is always right and it is basic good manners. None of that is a failure of Matthew 6, and anybody who tells you otherwise has read the passage as a rule about hiding rather than a rule about who you are doing it for. You have always been free to tell the people who look after you, and you were free from the first day. The written word puts the whole weight on a Father who sees in secret (Matthew 6:18), and His Spirit is not asking you to keep anything from the people who look after you.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.