SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/10/2020 10:38 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Into to “Fasting
Without Hypocrisy”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matt.
6:16-18
Message of the verses: “16 "Moreover,
when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they
disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I
say to you, they have their reward. 17 “But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash
your face, 18 “so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your
Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in
secret will reward you openly.”
I
was listening to a sermon that goes along with this section yesterday and found
out that when John MacArthur was preaching through Matthew chapters five and
six that he skipped the “Lord’s Prayer” and went from the section about giving
and praying right to this third area which is fasting. In these section we find that Jesus gives a
corrective to the hypocritical religious practices that typified what the
scribes and the Pharisees practices typified at that time. MacArthur writes “In each case the perversion
of God’s standard was caused by the overriding desire to be seen and praised by
men (v. 1).
Fasting
is something that I have studied for some time now going back to when I retired
from my regular job at a foundry that I worked for 34 years. I was wanting to find out what the Lord’s
desire for me after I retired and so I fasted for a week or so trying to find
out what God wanted me to do.
Fasting
has been practiced for various reasons throughout history for different reasons;
many of those reasons were either religious or health reasons. In my study I read about a man who actually
fasted for 90 days and only had water to drink for that time period. Needless to say he must have been a lot
overweight in order to live off the fat that was in his body to fast that long.
As
I listened to MacArthur’s sermon yesterday I had some thoughts that perhaps he
did not go into about fasting, and one of them was that even if a person is
fasting for a Biblical reason, and we will go into those reasons later on, if a
person fasts and only has water for an extended period of time they will
benefit in their health too, so not only in their spiritual reason for fasting
but in their health too. When a person
fasts they will get rid of many toxins in their body and perhaps a person is
fasting to ask God to help them get rid of a sinful problem, so I think you can
see that these two go along.
MacArthur
writes “The Bible records no teaching or practice of fasting for practical
reasons. Legitimate fasting always had a
spiritual purpose ad is never presented as having any value in and of itself.” Here is where I have to disagree with what
MacArthur is saying. I’m sure that what
he is saying about the Bible not stating that fasting is good for physical
reasons, there has been much documented evidence in people who have studied
fasting to show that it is good for a person physically.
When
I was getting ready to do my first fast I was reading in the books of Ezra and
Nehemiah who talked about their fasts and this seemed to show me that this was
what God wanted me to do. There are more
people in both the Old and New Testaments who have talked about how they fasted
including our Lord Jesus Christ.
I
will do as I normally do and that is quote the last paragraph from MacArthur’s
commentary to help us see the direction that we will be going in.
“Because
it is not elsewhere commanded by God, fasting is unlike giving and praying, for
which there are many commands in both testaments. Both the Old and New Testaments speak
favorably of fasting and record many instances of fasting by believers. But except for the yearly fast just mentioned”
(Day of Atonement) “it is nowhere required.
Beyond that, fasting is shown to be an entirely noncompulsory, voluntary
act, not a spiritual duty to be regularly observed.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I truly see nothing wrong with something
spiritual helping my physical being, and I believe that is the way that God
designed it to be.
My Steps of Faith for Today: I trust that the Lord was the One who
provided wisdom for those men who wrote the constitution of the United States,
and I have to believe that the things that are going on in our country at this
time were one of the reasons that God led those brilliant men to write what
they wrote. I trust that the Lord will
work this out for our good and for His glory.
12/10/2020 11:30 AM
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