What is the Purpose of Fasting?

February 23, 2015
|In Blog
|By Joey

When you read the Scriptures you see many spiritual purposes linked to fasting:

  • To strengthen our prayers (Ezra 8:23; Joel 2:13; Acts 13:3)
  • To seek God’s guidance in a particular decision (Judges 20:26; Acts 14:23)
  • To express grief in the midst of tragedy (1 Samuel 31:13; 2 Samuel 1:11-12)
  • To express repentance in the midst of sin (Leviticus 23:27; Jonah 3:6-9)
  • To seek deliverance from evil and protection from God (1 Chronicles 20:3-4)
  • To show concern for the hallowing of God’s name (Nehemiah 1:3-4; Daniel 9:3)
  • To minister to the needs of others by giving something up they need (Isaiah 58:3-7)
  • To reveal the idols of the heart (Psalm 35:13; 69:10)
  • To express love and worship to God (Luke 2:37)
  • To remind us we are completely dependent on and sustained by God (Matthew 4:4)

Notice that none of these are about earning God’s favor. Fasting does not make you acceptable to God. Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone makes us acceptable to God. Fasting has no benefit if we have not first come to God by turning from our sins and placing our trust in the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As one pastor rightly said, “This is the essence of Christian fasting: We ache and yearn – and fast – to know more and more of all that God has for us in Jesus. But only because he has already laid hold of us and is drawing us ever forward and upward into “all the fullness of God.”[1]

So I would sum up the overarching spiritual purpose of fasting to be this: to express humility before God and deepen hunger for God.[2] Fasting must be radically God-centered or it’s not fasting at all.

So putting it all together here’s my answer to “What is Fasting?” Fasting is voluntarily and temporarily abstaining from something which is good in and of itself to express humility before God and deepen hunger for God. Or to say it another simpler way: Fasting is for feasting.

[1] John Piper, A Hunger for God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997), 48.

[2] I get that from the Psalms, where David says, “I humbled myself with fasting” and from Matthew 4 where when Jesus is fasting he says, “Man does not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”