Private Fasting Building Update


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Private Fasting

Building Update There's a joke that goes, "What do you call a guy who speaks three languages?" Trilingual. "What do you call a guy who speaks two languages?" Bilingual. "What do you call a guy who speaks one language?" An American.

Well that's me. So a lot of you guys know that Nate grew up in France and so he speaks French of course. And in college I was envious of the fact that he could speak French. But what was I to do. There's no way I could just catch up. Well one day him and his sister were talking about this game they used to play in French and I still have no idea what the point of the game was but I had this idea in my head to

memorize this one line of the game they used to play in French. And I did it. I got it down smooth. So the extent of my French is that one line. But that doesn't stop me from using it. so now what I do is I try to find the perfect point in conversations where I can lay down as casually as I can muster a line like this, "Yeah, I studied a bit of Spanish in high school, Greek and Hebrew in college and seminary and I even picked up a bit of French. Do you speak French? " Je sue le petit la pan plan de powl son de dash. And everyone just sounds impressed. Now here's the translation. "I am the little bunny without any friends and without any fur and I'm calling..." So it's perfect. It makes no sense. It's part of some game I know nothing about. I say it fast with confidence. And even if you know a little bit of French, your intimidated because you thought you heard the word bunny and fur but your probably mistaken because why would he be talking about that? So I look like a French guy. And I can project an image of myself out there. Or another thing similar to this that I did, was memorize pi out to 50 places. Now this came in super handy a couple years ago. Now for fellow nerds out there you know that there is national pi day which of cours is March 14th. 3/14. Well a few years ago I was driving down fairview with a guy and on the flying pi sign out front it said, get a free pizza if you can recite pi out to 50 digits. And he said, man who in the world knows pi out to 50 places. And so I said as casually as I could, "I do. 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716933937510. Is that right? You might have to check me on those last three digits." And so he was just super impressed. It's just the little effort to memorize a worthless random number and then people think your really smart.

Now in both those examples, I'm playing the part of the hypocrite. I say one little line with confidence and authority and attempt to garner the respect of a fluent French speaker and a mathmetician. Just don't ask me any follow up questions. On the surface I'm pretending to be one thing but in reality I am something quite different. I am projecting an image of myself out there that makes everyone think I'm smart and intelligent and wellread and schooled when in fact I am not. Now of course, everyone does this to one degree or another. You have guests over to your house, and the house is spotless and clean. And you play it off like you always have doors free of fingerprints and toilets that are glistening clean. Yeah it's not big deal. We do it on Facebook. We do it on Sunday morning. We do it at work. We do it at home. Last week we finished the Lord's prayer. Well today return to the larger setting of the Sermon on the Mount which is about this very topic of hypocrisy. Jesus says,

If you were to boil down the point of the entire first 16 verses of Mt. 6 Jesus is quite simply saying. I hate hypocrisy. That is theme you will find over and over and over again in both the New and Old Testament. Jesus hates it when we pretend before other people and when we pretend before ourselves. And in this section he gives us three examples the kind of hypocrisy he hates. He first mentions giving. He says don't give ostentatiously. Then he talks about praying. Don't pray so that everyone can hear you and develop this really flowery language and these long eloquent prayers that awe the ears of the listeners. He says, go into a room, shut the door and pray in secret. And then gave us a model of how to pray and we've been looking at that over the past six weeks - the Lords prayer. He tells us to acknowledge who God is, to confess him as holy. To pray for his kingdom, his will. To pray for daily bread.

To pray for the spirit of forgiveness. To be spared from temptation we cannot handle and be saved from the evil within ourselves.

I've loved that study. Bottomless wisdom in those short lines. But now he's on to the third example of what he means by not practicing your righteousness before men. Don't give so that men can see you. Don't pray so men can see you. He's now going to say, don't fast so men can see you. I'll read for you Mt. 6:16-18

So in the same way that we are not supposed to give for the praises of men, or pray for the praises of men, we are not supposed to fast for the praises of men. Now, I don't know about you, but the first two connect better with me than this third one. Our culture does not fast very often. Many of you I know participated in the fast we had a few weeks ago and I am guessing for the vast majority of you the most recent fast prior to that could have been measured in years. It's not something we do often. It's a pretty rare thing in our culture to fast for 24 hours much less days at a time. And if people do fast it's almost never for religious reasons. Maybe they do it as part of a cleanse. They saw something online that inspired them. Maybe they do it as an exercise of discipline. The discipline itself is the thing they are after. They like the idea of being masters of their own bodies. It's a control issue. Or maybe they do it because they like experiences. They want to know what it's like to go 4 days without food, so they try it.

Or maybe they fast to loose weight; they feel it has some health benefits. I was reading an article the other day about the longest recorded fast. A gentleman who is only known as Mr. A.B. was 27 y/o and started out at 456 pounds and lost 276 lbs in 382 days. You might marvel at his self-discipline but clearly this wasn't a religious fast.

So in our culture we have all these non-religious reasons for fasting. Well in Jesus' day there was another non-religious reason for fasting - people would fast as a way to gain respect. People would fast under the name of religion but God wasn't anywhere to be seen. They would fast because they wanted the praises of men. You can almost envision the young disciple of Rabbi Gamaliel listening to the street talk. "Man do you know Rabbi Gamaliel? Man he really is hardcore. He's always fasting. He really is disciplined. If anyone knows God, it certainly is him. Look at how skinny he is! He must have had a real serious encounter with God." You can imagine how these stories were circulated about and how it just made a guy jealous. People hung on this guys words. I want to be like him. And so the next line of reasoning goes like this: I want respect. Rabbi Gamalial is respected Rabbit Gamalial fasts I will fast I will be respected like Rabbi Gamalial.

And so fasting for some was tool just like a lever or a crowbar that was used to pry respect out of people. By the way, have you ever wondered why the Hassidic Jews dress the way they do? They wear those black hats and the long sideburn curls. Even when it's baking hot in Israel they are in black suits with all their religious attire that

totally and completely misses the 21st century. The answer is exactly this. They are copying the Polish-lithuianin nobility. If you want to be serious you need to look serious. And Jesus condemns that so harshly. He called these people hypocrites. And the reason he condemns it so harshly is that it's one of the greatest evidences that you've missed the point entirely. You've lost focus entirely. Your serving a different Lord entirely. Backing away just a little bit and it becomes patently obvious. This is like spending 6k to paint a car with a blown engine. It's like cleaning the outside of clogged toilet happy that you've made it look beautiful. It's like purchasing thousands of dollars of clothes, a shiny car, and a designer watch to make you look wealthy, when your threads away from bankruptcy.

It's right and fair to say that Jesus hated hypocrites. The harshes words out of Jesus' mouth - by far - are reserved for hypocrites. He doesn't want you to act like a beautiful person. He wants you to be a beautiful person. He doesn't want you to act like a humble person. He wants you to be a humble person. he doesn't want you to act like your worshiping. He wants you to worship. he doesn't want you to talk like your walking with the Lord. He wants you to actually walk with the Lord.

What Jesus is fundamentally doing here is saying, "Don't take the shortcut. The root condemnation of a hypocrite is that he is trying to find a way to get the glory that is associated with true character without actually having the character. " A hypocrite is someone who wants the fruits of the labor without the labor.

He's always looking for the external indicators that will tip people off to the fact that he's really got it going on. He wants to make everyone believe that he's putting foreign armies to flight and shutting the mouths of lions. Man look at how God is using me. He does one small thing and publishes it to Facebook and Instagram and then plays it off like it's no big deal. And so the goal of the hypocrite is to make it look like he is doing all these things. He's got pi memorized out to 50 places. He's got one impressive line of French memorized. What that ends up producing is fake. I remember when I was in high school, for some reason my dad didn't really like the idea of me wearing sunglasses. I think he wanted to be able to see my eyes and he felt like I was hiding or trying to be too cool or whatever. So I never really had a pair of sunglasses growing up and I really wanted a pair. And of course the really cool sunglasses were Oakleys. Well, one day I was riding my bike and I saw a pair of sunglasses on the road and sure enough they were Oakleys. I was absolutely thrilled. And so I slipped them on and wore them with pride for a couple days. I felt like I grew 6 inches and gained 30 pounds of muscle just putting those things on. But then I started noticing a few things about them that just didn't seem right. The plastic finish seemed so dull. The edges had little burrs on them like it came out of the mold poorly. The hinges didn't fold down quite as cleanly as I would have expected from a $200 pair of shades. The lenses just felt cheap to me and then I looked at the logo and it was just a sticker that was peeling off.

And I showed them to a friend and he said, "Oh, those aren't even real. Those are the fake ones they make in Mexico." I felt so ripped off. What a farse. I had never even heard of knockoff products at this point. I couldn't believe someone would make a business by trying to make something appear like the real thing by sticking a fake label on it. Isn't that illegal? You see the sunglassess manufacturer was doing on a physical level what the hypocrite does on a spiritual level. You see, it's hard to build a sunglasses company from scratch. You have to do market research? You have to build up a solid customer service department. You have hire engineers and R&D teams for material research. You have to get the manufacturing setup. You have to spend tons of money in advertising and marketing to get brand recognition.

It's not easy. But what is easy is slapping the sticker of the guy who has done all that hard work on your cheap product. That's easy. But it's not real. That's exactly what a hypocrite does. He slaps a label on his unrefined, weedy character and says, "Look at me. I'm just like the guy you respect. Look guys, respect me like you respect him!" Just like it's not easy to build a sunglasses factory... it's also not easy to be a true man of character, integrity. It's not easy to wean your heart of the things of this world. It's not easy to pursue Christ hard for years.

This by the way, is one of the greatest values of reading Christian biography. Every time I read a Christian biography, I walk away with the same two basic thoughts. Wow, that guy is awesome. Wow, there is no shortcut to being him. He put in the time. It's not easy to learn how to be patience when you are getting annoyed at the sounds your kids are making. It's not easy to wake up early when you day is slammed and read your Bible. It's not easy to be a servant leader when you are tired and you have given your all and thera are still more needs out there. It's not easy to lead your family in devotions when you feel like a hypocrite and nobody wants to listen to you because their all nursed suckling youtube syrup. It's not easy to (from the heart) constantly serve others as more important than yourself, especially when nobody sees what you are doing. It's not easy to be engaged in long-term, others-oriented ministry. It's not easy to learn to say no when everyone else is saying yes. It's not easy to memorize Scripture It's not easy to learn what it means to be patient and wait on the Lord. It's not easy to lean in to him in suffering. It's not easy to learn to listen before you speak and distrust yourself.

That's hard. But if you do all that over the course of you life, you end up with character. But it's not easy. What is easy is to peel off a cheesy label and slap it on the phoney and say, "See, I'm just like that guy." In reality your nothing like him. You lack all the true substance. It's the facade on the outside. It's a ruze. All your fasting, all your religious pomp, all your gesturing and vying and jocking for positions of recognition - your just slapping a label on your piece of junk product and bragging like you're the real

deal. You are nothing. That's the point of Romans 12:9 which says, "Let love be without hypocrisy." Don't act like you love. Actually love. We always try to be a welcoming church here. If you are a newcomer this morning welcome. I truly want to welcome you! So right now you guys who are new, you need to plug your ears for a minute or two cause I want to address everyone who is not new. There are all sorts of things we can do that appear loving. We can shake a hand. We can direct them to the right places to get information. We can find out information about them and ask them questions. But there is a difference between doing the things a loving person does and actually being a loving person. If you are shaking the hand of a person and finding out information about them because you ACTUALLY care and really do want to love them that will be interpreted so differently than a person who does all those things but is just trying to act like a loving person. It will come across in all the subtle non verbal. It mostly looks right, but the subtle differences are detected, just like the burs of plastic and cheap lenses of my Oakleys. And this is true across the board. Men, you all know what a loving husband and father is supposed to do. Women you all know what a loving wife and mother is supposed to do. And so you try to imitate the behavior. Don't get me wrong. It's good to start moving in the right direction, to do something even when you don't feel like it. But ask any wife. Would you rather have a husband that acts like he's loving or actually is loving? Ask any child, would you rather have a mother who acts like they care or actually cars.

Don't ever forget that real spiritual fruit needs to come from a real tree with real root. Hypocrisy is what Paul Tripp calls fruit stapling. Rather than actually having the fruit come from the root, you take a bucket of apples and a stapler to the orchard and you start stapling apples onto a tree to make it look like it's a real apple tree. It's absurd. Last week I told a story about how I found this gold bar in an auction of stuff I purchased and of course wanted to know if it was real. And the only way to tell was to put this acid on it. And since it wasn't real, it just ate away the varnish on the outside and revealed the inferior metal beneath. That gold bar is just like hyporcisy isn't it. It's not the real thing. In many, many ways it looks similar but there is a compositional difference. So how do you fix it? How do you fix the fake gold bar? How do you fix the guy who pretends like he knows french and math? How do you fix the fake Oakley sunglasses. How do you fix the apple tree now decorated with stapled apples?

Something materially has to change, something fundamentally has to be remade doesn't it. Let me get at this from a slightly different angle. Why does Jesus pick on hypocrites? Why does he hate hypocrisy so bad? You know if you had a list of sins, prostitution, greed, swearing, homosexuality is there one that rises to the very top. Well in that list I gave you those are all things you do. Those are all fruits that come out of a root. But hypocrisy fundamentally is not something you do as much as it is an attitude you possess that drives a whole host of behavior.

The reason Jesus hates hypocrisy so much is because it represents a posture to God that is absolutely antithetical to the gospel. It is truly impossible to penetrate the heart of the hypocrite. It is the opposite of a gospel posture. You may remember a few weeks ago we talked about this idea of adopting a gospel posture. Get into that posture you were in when you were first saved. You came to the end of yourself. You realized your need. You stared at yourself without the makeup and the playacting and the charades. You were just naked before the Lord and you didn't try to cover it up. You were like Isaiah, Whoa is me for I am ruined. You realized there was no way you could possibly do it on your own. And you simply cried out for help.

The hypocrite is the stiff chinned opposite of that. It's a refusal to admit need. I don't need help. Look at me. Why would I need help? Can't you see my pretty clothes? Can't you see my beautiful religious dress? I just got done telling you how godly I am. Clearly you heard my prayer? Clearly you see my put together family. Clearly you saw me give? Clearly you observed my discipline? Clearly you noticed my fasting.

Why would I need help? You insult me. Jesus can do nothing with that. So what is the cure to hypocrisy? It's quite simple. Adopting that

gospel posture. Lord, I need help. Look at me. I admit who I am. I’m not going to to try and cover up who I am. I'm going to accept forgiveness for who I am. I'm going to ask for your grace. I'm going to ask for forgiveness when I sin against you. And I'm going to extend forgiveness when I'm sinned against. Maybe you have never done that. Maybe you've never gotten to that point where you admit you have a need for Jesus Christ. If you have never given your life to Jesus Christ, I invite you to do that right now. Confess your sins to him. Confess the fact that you have been a hypocrite, putting on a show. And ask him to forgive you and change you. Say, "God I want you to be Lord of my life and lead me and direct me. I want to submit to you as my God." Listen, talk to me after the service if you want to go further into what I mean by this. You know what that attitude does? It changes fools gold into real gold. It's the long route. It's not the shortcut. But it does actually transform. Every time I'm around godly people I feel the same way. There's no shortcut. There's no easy quick trick. You have to just continue to press into God every day. Take the same old dirty laundry to the Lord every day and ask him to wash it. Take your need to the Lord every day. Take your sin to the Lord every day. And over time, he will change you. So that's the attitude.

Some Modern Application of Fasting. Now I just want to spend the briefest of minutes discussing the actual practice of fasting. Is there any purpose in it for us today? Is

there a right way to fast? Is there a secret hidden way of fasting that would have benefit to us, even though this is not practiced in our culture much? I think this is an important question. If we want to be genuine, maybe there is a place for genuine fasting, even in our modern age. How might fasting be an expression of my genuine need for Jesus Christ? When I started thinking about this this week, I said to myself, "Well, let me look at a few of these smart guys who have lived before me. What did they have to say about fasting?

So Luther says it's a good idea to fast as a way to control the body, the flesh. And I think this idea has merit. I know from me, sometimes I get to craving sweets badly. And I overeat on sweets. And then I say, "I need to take a sugar fast." And that has a way of telling my mind, "You've gone too far. It reigns back my appetite." And then after the fast is over, the smallest little chocolate is a delight. So

fasting can be a way of controlling the appetites. Paul says this same basic thing.

John Calvin echos this point and adds a couple more points.

So in addition to subduing the flesh, Calvin adds that fasting can help prepare us to hear from the Lord and recognize our absolute dependence on him. By way of analogy, if you were ready to take a really serious test (maybe the BAR exam or the CCNA test if your in networking or CPA test or the SAT or ACT test) the best way to prepare in the last 30 minutes would not be to stuff yourself with chocolate and watch Lord of the Rings. You would probably be thinking about the best possible diet, you would probably try to calm yourself, get plenty of rest so you could do your best. Well, in a similar sense, there are things we can do which really help us to hear from the Lord. You don't fill up your day with media and Facebook and consume a bunch of junk food. Saying no to all of that creates hunger in your soul for real fulfillment. You say, "Lord I'm not interested in these cheap substitutes. I'm interested in the real thing. I want to hear from you. I'm devoting myself to hearing from you right now." Fasting can get us into a state of mind where

we are really ready to listen and receive from God. So maybe you feel like you've fallen away from the Lord or maybe you have a big decision or maybe there is a point of conflict and tension that seems unresolveable. Use fasting and meditation as way of slowing down, concentrating and trying to hear from the Lord. Probably my favorite quote as it relates to fasting, really is a quote that has nothing to do with fasting.

Food definitely falls into that category doesn't it. Does food control you or do you control food? If food controls you that means you are somewhere on the spectrum of worship. Do you use food to give you energy so that you can pursue the all satisfying of Jesus Christ. Or do you do abandon the all-satisfying person of Jesus Christ to pursue the experience of food?

I will eat unhealthy because I love how it makes me feel. I will eat too much because I love how it makes me feel. Thinking and dreaming about food is not healthy. It's idolatry. Food is a tool to be put into service for the sake of the gospel just like sleep, just like relaxation, just like any of the other gifts God gives us. Food can become a god. Just ask the Israelites who complained against their Redeemer for lack of food (Numbers 11), or the Philippians who were told about some who set their minds on earthly things and worship their bellies (3:19). All sorts of things can become idols in this way. Exercise (a good thing) can become a god. Making money and providing for your family can become a god. An iPhone can become a god. Just leave it at home on accident and listen to your inner response. Recreation can become a god.

Fasting is intended to remind us of the real point. It tends to remove those things which we typically and often subconsciously use to numb our lives to the weight and reality of the surpassing worth and glory of our Lord. Fasting is a way to slow down and listen. Sound travels best when there is not much to dampen it. This particular discipline is a way to clear the clutter of our consumption so that the echo of the gospel will reverberate with a little more clarity.